$2B Allergy Drug, ChatGPT Ads, Mansion Section | Billy Boman, Benjamin Miller, Faris Sbahi, Evan Loomis, Anvisha Pai, Ryan Tseng

12:11Billy Boman:Prince wrote a little summary of this. Anthropic has been testing a new model called Mythos with certain customers. They call it a step change in AI capabilities, including dramatically higher scores in coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity. I want to know how it will do an ArcGIS V3 because all of the models are under 1 % completion on that benchmark. It's the one benchmark that is not saturated. It's very closely guarded. You can't get into the actual test set. You can only see the examples. And it clearly is. I still love the benchmark and the team over at ARK for what they're doing.

12:49Billy Boman:So this is part of a new Capybara series of models, which are larger and more intelligent than Opus. It's more expensive to run. And it's not ready yet for general release, but they are excited about it. mythos pricing bets coming in from 0.005 seconds$100 in 250 out subs reprice to$50 250 and a $1 ,000 plan might be coming who knows what do you think Jordy Tyler any thoughts on the new model

13:22Benjamin Miller:well let's pull up this picture of a capybara just to put just I would love to see some

13:28Billy Boman:context yeah is it a mythical creature no capybara is real so what's the connection between so they're

13:33Benjamin Miller:normally quite docile okay but they can get violent let's look at this picture okay watch out i mean look yeah look at the look at the chomp on that this is something we should

13:46Billy Boman:read into we should say what what do they mean what do they mean by this you know it's clearly some sort of vague post they're telling you they're telling you something that uh you know friendly cute but also potentially the end of the world you never know uh there's another picture here we can pull up are you just sending capybara photos while you pull that up let me tell everyone about turbo puffer serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable and let me also tell you about fin.ai the number one ai agent for customer service if you want ai to handle your customer support go to fin.ai

14:20Benjamin Miller:I mean, these are nightmare fuel. Look at this, John.

14:25Billy Boman:Hmm. It looks like a big hamster or a big guinea pig. How big are these guys?

14:29Benjamin Miller:We'll pull up the next picture and we'll see if you still think so, John.

14:35Billy Boman:Do you think we could contain it? Do you think if we had one in the studio, it would overrun us? Or do you think we could keep it locked up? I think.

14:43Benjamin Miller:That's pretty horrifying. I think four or five of these could take you down. Yeah, median weight is between 60 and 174 pounds.

14:51Billy Boman:174 pounds. That's bigger than my dog. Wow.

14:56Benjamin Miller:That's a big catybara. That's what I'm saying. They have these at the Santa Barbara Zoo.

14:59Billy Boman:So this is the metaphor. You know, like these models are getting incredibly powerful. You need to contain them and think about safety. And you need to think about how do you keep the catybara safe? You need to lock it in a box, in a cage. It cannot be allowed to run free.

15:15Faris Sbahi:Yeah, I think just back on the pricing thing, I think like this is generally right. So basically 0.005 seconds is saying like it's just gonna get 10x more expensive because right now I think it's something like$10 in$25 out people are ready for people are ready to pay more though

15:30Billy Boman:Like they're paying a bunch through the API You can even see like cursor

15:33Faris Sbahi:Maybe we'll talk about this right after but like the the subscription like technically it's the same price But the limits are going down. So it's okay The tokens are getting more expensive. Yeah, and as you see like there's like this insane compute crunch I assume that models are going to get much more expensive as they're getting bigger.

15:48Billy Boman:Yeah, it is interesting. I wasn't expecting to be in the regime of subscriptions as long as we have been. Just talking to Ben on our team about how he sort of bounces around from one subscription to the next. He'll max one out and then move over to the next one and then move over to the different one. He's maybe more price sensitive than model sensitive. I would always assume, I'd always assume that most businesses would just be on an API consumption basis.

16:19Faris Sbahi:And just like, so the reason like I'm not hitting the APIs is because it's, it is like basically 10x more expensive. It's more expensive. Than using the subscription.

16:26Billy Boman:The subscription. So you do most of the work in the subscription, which is just, I mean, that's economically rational. I guess what I'm saying is like, I'm surprised by how many people who are in a business context still make that decision and how much of a price war we're in, how much capital matters here.

16:43Benjamin Miller:Well, let's pull up this video because I'm not sure you guys would be making the same decisions

16:51Anvisha Pai:with the Capybara family of models if you knew that Capybaras were capable of this kind of thing.

16:59Billy Boman:What's going on here? They can swim wait, this is a human is this AI oh my god, that's really attacking her

17:11Benjamin Miller:Wow, this is why they're calling it their most powerful model ever we need to slow down

17:16Billy Boman:We need to slow down with all right. We can turn it off.

17:18Benjamin Miller:It's it's horrifying. It's horrifying

17:20Billy Boman:Yeah, we need to we need to slow down.

17:22Benjamin Miller:I hope they I hope they you know keep this with the safety team Yeah for long

17:26Billy Boman:I think I think we need all countries to come together and and agree to to control the capybara population because that is truly horrifying.

17:35Benjamin Miller:A lot of chatter on the timeline around pricing, but all of this is to be expected somewhat. Definitely feels like all the labs will have to introduce some type of surge pricing over time.

17:54Billy Boman:Take him as a very independent take. he's the biggest nvidia stan and he makes a lot of good points uh but he's he's making the argument that anthropic needs more gpus uh because he's he's sharing some posts here to manage growing demand for claude we're adjusting our five-hour session limits for free pro max subs during peak hours your weekly limits remain unchanged um and take him is coming on the show monday i'm very

18:19Benjamin Miller:excited to talk to him we'll ask him what he thinks about nvidia yes and so a lot of people

18:24Billy Boman:are getting into polyphasic sleep because of this. So Claude has different limits at different times. So when the limits are in effect, that's when you need to be sleeping. Tyler, have you gotten into polyphasic sleep yet?

18:38Faris Sbahi:I'm not there yet, but I mean, the problem is getting worse.

18:41Billy Boman:I told you, I told Tyler, sometimes I indulge in polyphasic sleep after the show. I'll sleep for an hour and then I'll go about my day and then I'll sleep at night. And he said, that's just a nap. It doesn't count. I guess people really are doing the polyphasic sleep thing to monitor their agents. I wonder if that's an aberration for this particular moment in time.

19:06Benjamin Miller:You would think you would know one person that has done that and stuck with it. Because I feel like a bunch of people have tried that over time.

19:15Billy Boman:Yeah.

19:16Benjamin Miller:And then eventually.

19:16Faris Sbahi:I mean, if you're trying to get around the limits like polyphasic sleep doesn't make sense you just need to basically be nocturnal right because you need to be like inverse yeah what like san francisco hours are right yeah so

19:26Billy Boman:the peak san francisco usage you're gonna be like yeah or just move overseas you could do that yeah

19:32Benjamin Miller:but the polyphasic sleep doesn't really help right because no no it seems like it's much better to

19:36Billy Boman:just again uh you know have have a have a compute desk or a or a prompt desk that is geographically distributed evenly across the globe. So when your American employee stops the prompting, goes home for the night, then your European colleague steps up and starts prompting on the same project. And then your colleague in Asia can pick up when Europe goes to bed, something like that. You know what I mean? So you have 24 seven coverage.

20:09Faris Sbahi:Yeah, but that's still like at, at during one of those periods, it's still like the peak hours,

20:13Billy Boman:Yeah, because these peak hours are based around US hours. I was more, so there's actually two things going on. There's one where it's like you're waiting for your agents to respond. And if it's going to take hours for a prompt to return, you should go take a nap because you're better off checking in on a prompt every two hours for the whole day for 24 hours. and, you know, in perpetuity, as opposed to doing, you know, a two-hour prompt, watching TV, come back, do that eight times, and then sleep for eight hours. That's four more two-hour sessions that you could have been letting it cook and, like, interacting with it.

20:55Billy Boman:That's separate from trying to get around these rate limits. Yes, everyone agrees. More GPUs, more CPUs, more chips. We continue to be chip-constrained. Even Anthropic appears to be chip constrained despite incredible fundraising and partnerships with hyperscalers. It really is a vindication of everyone who is saying AI is not a bubble and that the models will get better and that these crazy deals that Sam Altman is doing and Daria is doing and Google is drawing down their cash flow and Meta is drawing down their cash flow, those all look really good in hindsight, correct? Do you disagree? I think in general, yes.

21:44Billy Boman:I mean, last March, like a year ago, people were like,$50 billion,$100 billion,$200 billion. Is this stuff that useful? Is it slop? Is it actually going to be that useful? Are these things toys? Like, yeah, they're reasonable for this thing, but what's the real economic value? Certainly it can't be more than like 20 bucks a month or$200 a month. And now there's like lots of people that are maybe they're only paying a few thousand a month because they're using a bunch of subscriptions. But like they're pretty close to justifying like the Jensen, like 250K a year per engineer thing. Like that doesn't feel that far away from companies just saying like, yes, I give you the permission to spend$250 ,000 a year on AI inference.

22:30Billy Boman:Do be as efficient as possible as you can with that budget. but you have my approval. I believe that with that$250, you will generate more than that in value. Yeah, I think the big thing is like

22:44Anvisha Pai:there's going to be more use cases that have a similar level of product market fit as CodeGen that use tokens on the level that these CodeGen tools do.

23:00Benjamin Miller:And we haven't fully identified those yet. There's some early evidence that general agents will drive that. But like I would say, an example is like, it seems very obvious that models will be very useful for making financial models. But do you need to make 500 financial models per day?

23:24Anvisha Pai:No, right? Yeah, that is interesting. And so there are areas where the models are going to be incredibly, incredibly valuable. incredibly important, used by everybody in any given field, and yet they won't necessarily generate.

23:36Billy Boman:There are some people that would need to make 500 financial models a day. I think Ro Khanna makes hundreds of trades every single day. If you're doing a proper full DCF, pulling every SEC filing for a company, and you're doing that hundreds of times a day because you're trading.

23:53Anvisha Pai:Or he might have hundreds of individual positions who want real-time models.

23:59Billy Boman:Sort of like rebuilding a Bloomberg terminal for yourself. I think Bloomberg exists and maybe should work there. Anyway, since we're speaking of the government, let's move over to the preliminary injunction, read the Pentagon Supply Chain Risk designation. Before we go to Dean Ball, let me tell you about LabelBox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? raised capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So, the news is that Anthropic has been granted a preliminary injunction re the Pentagon supply chain risk designation in California, but is allowing stay for one week.

24:41Billy Boman:I think a lot of people, like the tech community broadly, came away with this prediction that this wouldn't hold, that this was, you know, that whatever you thought about how you work with the government and the Ben Thompson thesis, there was, you know, the supply chain thing wasn't really going to stick. It wouldn't necessarily hold up in court, but we'll see where it goes. Dean Ball says, this is a devastating ruling for the government, finding Anthropic likely to prevail on essentially all of its theories for why the government's actions were unlawful and unconstitutional. One of the things she mentions is the huge range of Amici briefs.

25:17Billy Boman:I don't know how to say Amici. Briefs supporting Anthropic, by the way, zero.

25:22Benjamin Miller:Hey, finally a word that John can't nail instantly. You have an incredible mind that we did find.

25:32Billy Boman:We found my limit. We found my limit. On a personal note, says Dean Ball, some friends and allies of mine on the right who have been angry at me for my own words and actions and all of this. Anyone who thinks I spoke out for personal gain or trivial reasons against an administration I served in is crazy. Yet people forget that Dean Ball served not in the first Trump administration, but the second Trump administration. And he was like, look, I wrote the policy thing. I worked on that. Like, this is not the right path. And so it's always it's a meekie.

25:59Benjamin Miller:And it's the plural of amicus.

26:01Billy Boman:This is brutal for me because I studied Latin and I should be able to nail this because I know it's a Latin word. Anyway, it was a hugely costly decision for Dean Ball. But this judge's ruling shows why I did it. This is a staggeringly illegal act by the government. That is why I'm particularly honored to have been implicitly quoted in the ruling for calling this what it was when Secretary Hegseth made his initial announcement, an attempted act of corporate murder. He's standing with the corporations. This case continues, but Anthropik has scored a very large win here. The real victors, however, are all red-blooded Americans who are, as the founders would have said, jealous of their liberties.

26:42Billy Boman:I love it. Well, congratulations, and hopefully everyone can just go back to building good models. You know, all this all this nonsense in D.C. has been a huge, huge side side show, side project, side quest as as the race for compute is so much more important. The race for capabilities is so much more important. And so the other scoop is coming from Axios. Sam Altman apparently told staff he tried to save Anthropic in the Pentagon clash.

27:14Benjamin Miller:Which he apparently thought was somewhat ironic, given that said competitor openly blasted him on any podcast that they go on.

27:30Billy Boman:Okay, well, last Anthropic story, IPO. So they're trying to go public as early as Q4 with a potential$60 billion raise. They're racing. And so let's go over to Kalshi and see who is likely to announce an IPO this year. Anthropics up at 70 % on this news. They jumped up from 46 % to over 70%. Open AI is at 49%. Jersey Mike's still beating them both, 75%. So you Jersey Mike's heads out there, they do very well in the App Store. I like the sandwiches. SpaceX is in 94.

28:06Benjamin Miller:Discord is also sitting at 63%.

28:10Billy Boman:Oh, Discord. What a crazy story. I love Jason Citrin so much, the founder. But he is out, I think. And he has just a wild, wild founder story. I made a whole video about it. It's a lot of fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Console. console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We got to hit the management section. One last note on AI before we move on to the really important thing, real estate.

28:43Benjamin Miller:OpenAI has surpassed 100 million in annualized run rate from its ads pilot, which launched six weeks ago. It's expanded to 600 advertisers and plans to launch self-serve advertiser access in April. I am close to setting up a new account and or just churning momentarily so that I get to experience the ads. You know I love ads. I mean, the first ad being for the Wall Street Journal

29:08Billy Boman:that we know and love is a very good omen. Clearly, something's going on. They're happy with each other because they're working together. Yeah. I mean, truly, like the alpha for the audience is like new ad platforms often deliver really good results before people figure them out big companies move slower than you if you can be the first person to advertise figure it out you know sean frank at the ridge is thinking about it and maybe you should be too um not to do an ad for ads but we love ads on this show and we love new ad platforms and we also love vibe.co where ddc brands b2b startups and ai companies advertise on streaming tv pick channels target audiences

29:44Benjamin Miller:and measure sales just like on meta so what's this news before we go on okay apple's talking about opening up Siri to rival AI services? Weird. I don't know.

29:56Billy Boman:I don't know. Apple's relationship with OpenAI.

30:00Benjamin Miller:Guess who wrote this story? I'm going to guess the Germinator. That's right. Of course. Apple plans to open Siri to outside AI assistants as part of a Siri overhaul.

30:09Billy Boman:Do we need to give him the golden scoop? Let's give him the golden scoop. Tyler, hold up the golden scoop award for Mark Gurman. The Germinator has received the golden scoop award for... March 27th, 2026. Congratulations, Mark German. It is an honor. Your scoop wins the golden scoop of the day. There we go. The scoop. That's good. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. Scoop. There it is. Scoop. There it is. This headline is incorrect, by the way. The scoop is on fire.

30:43Benjamin Miller:We don't need no water. Apple plans to open Siri to outside AI assistants, so this implies that things like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. could be allowed to effectively take the place of Siri. The company is developing new tools to allow AI chatbots installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri Assistant, enabling users to send queries to services like LLMs. The change is part of an attempt to turn around Apple's fortunes in AI, where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley piers and could allow Apple to generate more money from third-party AI subscriptions through the App Store.

31:20Billy Boman:Oh, yeah, because you upgrade through there. That would be good. I think that's part of it. I think there's also the antitrust angle, which is that they have had to allow you to change the default search engine in Safari for a while, even though they have that relationship with Google. When you go to the Safari search bar and you just type in some random words, it searches Google. You can actually reroute that to ChatGPT. I did it. ChatGPT is like, I don't use it like I use Google. Google I use for like really I want like a five millisecond query so It the time to actually load chat GPT and then give you the full answer was not the best experience But I have wanted for a long time to reroute the Siri button on the side of the phone to Just chat GPT instant fast ultra fast.

32:03Billy Boman:Just get just talk to me, but every time I do it. I say Chat GPT what's the history of the Roman Empire and And it loads and it says working with ChatGPT. And then it like takes a little bit too long. And then you get like a short note and then you can open it. And it just sort of like you're always fighting in the UI between like, are you talking to Apple intelligence? Or are you talking to Siri? Or are you talking to ChatGPT? And you sort of go back and forth. So we will see where this goes. I would be very surprised if people shipped away from the default. Like if Apple iPhones ship with the Siri button just querying their distilled Gemini model or whatever they're going to wind up doing there, that's probably what most people are going to use.

32:45Billy Boman:But it's exciting that at least there will be some competition in the market. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. So Barry Diller just paid$11 million for JFK's favorite New York penthouse. Favorite New York penthouse. Not favorite new because, of course, he has passed away a long time ago. An entity linked to the billionaire purchased Karen Pritzker's co-op at the Carlisle, the same unit where Kennedy famously stayed during his visits to the city.

33:29Billy Boman:In the 50s and 60s, John F. Kennedy stayed in a duplex penthouse at the Carlisle Hotel so often that it became known as the New York White House. After his assassination, his widow and two children, Caroline and John Jr., lived in the Manhattan Hotel for about 10 months. What's the longest amount of time you've ever spent in a hotel? I don't think I've ever done more than like a week or two. 10 months, that's a run.

33:51Benjamin Miller:Yeah, I never went through an era of my young adulthood. That's sort of a crazy move. that I could have afforded to stay in a hotel permanently. But now that I'm a... I was walking in some hotel the other day

34:08Billy Boman:and I was like, I wonder if I could live here. It just doesn't...

34:12Benjamin Miller:It's just like with kids. It would just be that.

34:16Billy Boman:Now, an entity linked to billionaire Barry Diller has purchased Kennedy's favorite penthouse for$11 million. Diller bought the co-op unit from another family of prominent Democrats. Film producer Karen Pritzker, an heiress to the Hyatt Hotel Fortune, bought the apartment for$12 million in 2007. Pritzker put the apartment on the market for$12.9. It sold for$12.5 in 2007. Interesting that the Chicago high-end penthouse market has not moved that much. The Carlisle opened around 1930 on Manhattan's Upper East Side, one of New York's most storied luxury hotels. It's known for iconic venues like Bemalin's Bar, Cafe Carlisle, a cabaret space that has hosted legendary performers.

35:04Billy Boman:A portion of the building was converted to co-op units decades ago. Kennedy stayed at the hotel so often, starting when he was still a senator in the 1950s, that a direct phone line was installed for him in his regular duplex suite. That's cool. After his assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy moved to the hotel but stayed in a different suite. On rainy days, the Kennedy children played in the lobby. The two-bedroom apartment includes a large foyer with an art deco staircase the listing says an expansive corner living and dining room has views over Central Park There's also a bookshelf line breakfast room and a corner solarium with a wet bar.

35:37Billy Boman:Oh speaking of wet bars forget apres ski because homeowners are now building their own bars in Custom spaces where they can relax and get toasty after a day on the slopes This is also from the mansion section of the Wolf Journal today. For Brian Healy, what comes after a day on the mountain sometimes takes precedence over the skiing itself. When he built his Lake Tahoe area vacation home in 2019, he spent about$800 ,000 to build a bar area on the main floor of the house. An absolute dog.

36:13Benjamin Miller:Which he can ski to from the slopes. That's pretty good. Of North Star. That sounds great.

36:20Billy Boman:so maybe not ski in but ski out yeah yeah i like that uh he said i've joked that i designed a bar and built a house around it this is good this is this is this is my dream i'm gonna build a movie theater and then build a house around it that's that's my goal uh what would yours be john john was sending me a listing surfing ability one of those endless waves that's what you need you need an endless wave pool you know what i'm talking about what are those called uh wave wave pool

36:50Benjamin Miller:wave pool yeah there's a wave pool yeah all right wait why are you not excited about this prospect

36:55Billy Boman:of having a house that's built around this endless wave pool is there some drawback i live in oh i guess you just go to the ocean yeah you could just go you could just be be walking distance from the beach anyway it's hard to be uh healy 51 is an ireland narrative uh ireland native let's go that's here for Ireland. He runs an energy company in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is royal flush. I got to meet this guy. After a day on the slopes, Healy and his pals head to the space, dubbed Healy's Bar, leaving their gear in the storage area of the Truckee, California property. And sometimes other skiers end up at Healy's home after getting lost while skiing through the trees.

37:31Billy Boman:It's an open door policy. He says we invite them for beer. This is our inn. We need to head over to North Star and get lost and wind up at his bar. Oops. Uh-oh. We're lost. We're lost. We don't know.

37:46Benjamin Miller:I know some former guests that are neighbors. Oh, yeah? So we'll have to work on connecting.

37:52Billy Boman:Could you spare Guinness for us for two Irish chaps who've gotten lost? I feel like I've read, like, a children's story of, like,

37:58Anvisha Pai:wandering in the forest and then, like, you know, some character offers you something. Sometimes it's, like, bad. Yeah, usually that can send you on kind of a crazy saga.

38:09Billy Boman:This seems good. So, for alpine sports lovers warming up with a few apres ski drinks after a day on the slopes is a time-honored tradition, says the journal. But instead of heading to a crowded bar for cocktails, more and more wealthy homeowners are hosting friends at private bar areas with high-end mountain-inspired finishes. Real estate agents have said this. In addition to providing entertainment spaces, these cozy areas become additional focal points within the house, like a fireplace or a wine room. Look at that. People are having a lot of fun with the bars. They are creating spaces where the party keeps going and where the kids want to come back and hang out.

38:47Billy Boman:These bars have features like specialty ice makers, dishwashers, decorative lighting, and dramatic finishes. That's not that specialty. I was hoping for something really crazy.

38:56Benjamin Miller:Yeah, does he have any... What kind of games does this bar come with? Do we have darts, pool?

39:02Billy Boman:Axe throwing. Axe throwing. Let's get the millennials in there. The old-demanded millennial. We do things a little differently around here.

39:10Benjamin Miller:Honestly, any space can actually be turned into an axe throwing. This sounds good.

39:15Billy Boman:They're coming off the mountain, doing a jacuzzi, and going downstairs for an espresso martini. It's pretty good. Pretty good. It's very nicely designed. I love the finishes. I think this is a fantastic choice. Bruce Johnson, a retired lumber executive, and his wife, wellness coach Peggy Duffy Johnson.

39:31Benjamin Miller:Let's give it up for lumber executives.

39:33Billy Boman:Lumber executives. They keep mahogany flowing through the global economy.

39:38Benjamin Miller:The official wood of business. The fact that we don't have a mahogany sponsor. I think we're looking at Bruce Johnson.

39:45Billy Boman:We got to get connected to this guy. He might be able to send some mahogany our way.

39:51Benjamin Miller:The official lumber partner of TBPN.

39:56Billy Boman:So they wanted a mountain-inspired aesthetic for the bar in their Edwards, Colorado home, which is about 10 minutes from beaver creek resort their daughter-in-law interior designer jackie johnson worked on the 200 000 space which has open wine storage columns and sconces wrapped in brown suede the downstairs space also includes a sauna i gotta i gotta show you after the show

40:17Benjamin Miller:i'll show you a video of me at beaver creek okay around 2016 what are you doing uh i was riding in the double core i was riding in the train park and my buddy was filming another buddy was uh sitting kind of like on the basically next to the jump and so one buddy films me I land catch an edge and end up like entirely on my head sliding on my head like body suspended above and my other friend friend doesn't actually see me like having this horrific crash and so my other friend is just like sitting there like this like thumbs up to the camera and I'm just like chaotically getting thrown across the landing.

40:58Benjamin Miller:Good fun.

40:59Billy Boman:Okay, we got to learn about winter forward fabrics because that's important if you're trying to create this opre ski vibe. Jackie suggests using winter forward fabrics such as alpaca fur, heron hides, and mohair. I like alpaca fur. That sounds lovely. In designing his bar, Healy looked to his Irish heritage for inspiration. She's using green leather bar stools. That's our signature color over here. a green marble countertop and vintage green glassware. It's Irish-influenced and a little L.A. at the same time, calling it a modern but not necessarily nightclub-y vibe. He likes to drive around Martis Camp, the 2000s.

41:40Billy Boman:This isn't giving you a little bit of a nightclub vibe? There's a little bit of a nightclub vibe. It's not necessarily nightclub-y, though. I think it's more Irish-influenced and a little L.A. Anyway, to create an atmosphere of informal fun, Opry ski entertaining spaces are often placed near amenities such as pool tables, golf simulators, hot tubs, and saunas. Developer, I like that we're getting claps for that. Developer Robert Covington put 80s video games like Pac-Man next to the lower level Opry ski bar of a home he recently built in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The roughly 7 ,400 square foot home asking 13 million is located near the base of Mount Wenner.

42:20Billy Boman:Is that how you pronounce that? Wenner? Werner? Werner? And guests can access the basement bar directly from the outside. There's another bar in the living area upstairs. The goal is to provide additional gathering spaces throughout the home. You need a lot more seating for families on a ski vacation. For some homeowners, Opera Ski Entertaining is more of a state of mind. Jewelry designer Jane Berg, 64, and her husband, marketing executive Kevin Berg, 70, built a house next to the slopes of Colorado's Aspen Highlands.

42:47Benjamin Miller:Is it a state of mind or is it just having a drink after skiing?

42:51Billy Boman:It's a state of mind. Okay, Jordy, stop asking questions. Sliding doors in their kitchen face the mountains and open to a terrace with fire pits. So the couple end up using the entire primary level of their home for Opry Ski parties. See, anything's an Opry Ski entertaining space if you're in the Opry Ski mindset. There we go. Often Jane fires a local chef and a bartender to set up the open format kitchen, which has two sinks, one of which gets used as an ice bucket for drinks. People ski in and ski out of here, says Jane. The home has an outdoor ski track near the hot tub where guests leave their skis.

43:27Billy Boman:This seems, this is, this is going to get me more into skiing.

43:30Benjamin Miller:When you see a picture like this of champagne in the snow, does it give you, does it, you have like a primal reaction to that?

43:37Billy Boman:Yes. Yes. And you know what song plays immediately? Cherry Cherry Lady. Have you ever heard this song? Of course. It's such a good song. Let's play it. Let's play just a little bit so we don't get demonetized. But as soon as I see this image, this is exactly what plays.

43:58Billy Boman:This is like that vibe perfectly.

44:06Billy Boman:It's amazing. Anyway, go listen to it. Modern Talking is the artist behind Cherry Cherry Lady. Up next. What do we got? We got Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And you know what else we got? Gemini 3.1 Pro. You thought they were done? They did another model. They trained another model and they released it. The rumor is that they're working on another model. I don't know. I don't want to comment, but it's entirely possible. And with a more capable baseline, Gemini 3.1 Pro is great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

44:47Benjamin Miller:A retired pitcher's home with a gym inspired by Fenway asks$23 million. Okay, where is this? Game James and his wife, photographer Ryan Shields, spent years designing and building the house just north of San Diego. James Shields was a star pitcher in the major leagues for 13 seasons. So when he and his wife decided to build a California home in 2018, they were amused to discover that the lot they selected was shaped like a baseball diamond. We looked at each other and said, I guess it's meant to be. It's meant to be. They bought the Rancho Santa Fe property the next day for$1.8 million. Yeah. The pair spent the next few years designing and building roughly 13 ,500 square foot house with a gym pool, putting green, and bowling alley.

45:30Billy Boman:Bowling alley is underrated. I know some of you folks have seen there will be blood, that bad things can happen in bowling alleys, but great things can happen in bowling alleys. I know Jordy hasn't seen there will be blood. Tyler, have you seen there will be blood?

45:41Anvisha Pai:No.

45:41Billy Boman:You haven't? Wow, Ben. You got a task. Team homework this weekend. Team homework. There will be blood. I drink your milkshake.

45:51Benjamin Miller:You don't know about it. Okay, but first question is what kind of rig are they using in the bowling alley? Because we learned earlier this week that maintaining these bowling alley machines.

46:02Billy Boman:You can't win. You can't win because if you go with the good machines, they're from the 50s. It's going to be a nightmare to maintain. You're not going to be able to get parts, and you're not going to be able to find mechanics because they've all retired. But if you go with the pin setter, everyone's going to be making fun of you.

46:15Benjamin Miller:If you have a$23 million home, how much is a reasonable amount to spend on your bowling? alley maintenance because if you're willing to spend five percent annually i think you have to

46:26Billy Boman:re-industrialize america you have to you have to get a couple of cnc machines and be ready here's a tip here's a tip your own parts here's a tip yes startup focused on bowling alley maintenance

46:39Benjamin Miller:build that then buy this home then you won't have a problem yeah i think that's a good solution

46:45Billy Boman:the pair

46:47Benjamin Miller:now looking to spend more time in Idaho let's give it up for Idaho where they own property and have several horses the Shields' are listing the 2.4 acre California property nicknamed Big Game James by teammates and announcers Shields played for teams including the Kansas City Royals, San Diego Padres and the Chicago White Sox as a lifelong athlete he put a lot of thought into the gym at the Rancho

47:11Billy Boman:I love this massive door that slides open. They have 16 foot tall glass windows and doors with steel latches instead of doorknobs. Wood paneling covers.

47:21Benjamin Miller:Let's pull up this picture of Big Game James getting in a fight on the field.

47:30Benjamin Miller:I wouldn't want to be his contractor on this project. Wait, so I can't tell. So he's on the right. He's swinging for the fences.

47:41Billy Boman:Yeah, because he's a San Diego guy. He's on the Rays. Stingrays.

47:44Benjamin Miller:Okay. Okay. You're acting like I'm a...

47:48Billy Boman:Wait. No, wait. Or is he Red Sox?

47:50Benjamin Miller:No, it's the White Sox. He played for the White Sox, the San Diego Padres, and the Kansas City Royals. Okay. So which one is he? So I think the Padres must be the... No.

48:01Billy Boman:No. Because there's a Rays. Wait. Who is in this image?

48:04Benjamin Miller:They just pulled a random... Okay.

48:05Billy Boman:So the gym has a brick wall to evoke Fenway Park where Shields took a swing at Coco Crisp in 2008. So that's like one of his finest moments. So he rebuilt the house to...

48:17Benjamin Miller:He's like, that swing was a memory I want to cherish forever.

48:21Billy Boman:Honestly, respect. I think I would remember that forever. Well, we should move over to some more heartwarming stories in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal today. The feel-good tearjerker moments. Three real estate agents won't forget. We'll just read one, but prepare to not have dry eyes, Jordy, because it's very heartwarming. So in December, Lauren Toronto, a real estate agent at Coldwell Banker, was at a$12.75 million listing in Naples, Florida. It was a five-bedroom neoclassical home located just one house from the beach. This house has a castle-like feel with rotunda ceilings.

48:59Benjamin Miller:We got Alpha in the chat from Woods Athletics. He played for the Rays, too. There we go.

49:05Billy Boman:Wow. We really know nothing about sports. Well, thank you. Thank you for correcting us. Padres are the San Diego team. Thank you. It's really, it's really bad. Anyway. Uh, so this house has a castle like feel. It has a rotunda ceilings, turrets in the rear. Yes.

49:19Benjamin Miller:It also would like help becoming ball knowers. Yes. Everyone's like, you guys are like ESPN for tech. I'm like, what's ESPN?

49:31Billy Boman:Anyway, it all, this house also has a curved mahogany staircase that serves as a focal point when you enter the home. This real estate agent calls it the wedding staircase, and it lived up to its name that day. So she'd been at the property for an open house, but it started to rain, so she decided to close up early. As she was outside taking the signs down for the open house because it rained, she sees a couple in wedding attire on the beach across the street trying to take photos. They'd just gotten married. The woman was wearing a white dress and holding a bouquet, and the man was in a sports jacket with a white boutonniere.

50:07Billy Boman:She invited them to finish up inside and get out of the rain. They were soaked and the bride's hair was pretty wet. So she dried them off as best she could. And the couple and their friend who was shooting the photos came inside. They climbed the staircase and took a few more photos. The couple were adorable in their 20s and extremely appreciative. I didn't have any champagne in the refrigerator. So we just toasted with water and plastic cups. It was informal, but a darling and magic moment. It made their day in my day too. Tearing up. Yeah, it's cute. Very, very cute. I love it.

50:38Benjamin Miller:well i got we got to change the story i can't keep it together okay we're going we're going

50:43Billy Boman:over to uh drew barrymore she put a westchester home on the market two years after buying it no

50:48Benjamin Miller:no okay no i'm just i'm in disbelief wait about what putting it on which how could she put on

50:54Billy Boman:the how could she relist his home well let's find out maybe the wall street journal did some gumshoot reporting and got to the bottom of why drew barrymore is selling her house just two years after buying it. So she was fed up with her long drive to the Hamptons. So the actress and daytime talk show host, Drew Barrymore, started looking for a weekend home in Westchester County when she saw a circa 1700s mansion for sale. Wow, that is very old. Barrymore said she felt a karmic connection to the Harrison County property. Or Harrison, New York property. I walked in and I was like, I know my family's been here.

51:33Billy Boman:I know that I have to work on this house. I know that I'm supposed to be doing this, said Barrymore, 51 years old. And just immediately flipped it. Flipping this in two years will be my life's work. It was like a strange spiritual calling. She lives in Manhattan with her two daughters primarily. It turned out she actually did have a connection to the area. her great aunt, the late actress Ethel Barrymore, had a home in nearby Mama Ronek, where an enclave known as Barrymore Lane is widely believed to be named for the family. Barrymore bought the roughly 12-acre estate for$4.4 million, according to property records.

52:14Billy Boman:She did an extensive renovation. She has a deep interest in interior design and has considered pursuing it professionally. Between Pinterest, thrifting, and a can of paint, there's nothing you can't do, Barrymore said with a laugh. But roughly two years later, the actress is listing the property for$4.99 million. Remember, she bought it for$4.44 million.

52:33Benjamin Miller:But she put a lot of money into it. The renovation. So she's flipping it at a loss.

52:37Billy Boman:I think so. The renovation took longer than expected, she said, and the family lives have changed in the interim. The estate includes a roughly 5 ,600-square-foot, five-bedroom main house, a pool, a pool house with an additional bedroom. Barrymore said she previously owned a home in Sagaponic, New York. but the distance from the city and the weekend traffic to the Hamptons became untenable as her children's schedule filled up with social and sporting activities. Harrison, by contrast, offered accessibility and charm. The property, located roughly an hour from Manhattan, is a short drive from the picturesque Rye in Bronxville, while nearby Bedford has drawn celebrities.

53:16Billy Boman:The median sales price for a home in Harrison is around$1.1 million. The property's expansive acreage gave Barrymore a sense of being close to nature. It's really like being in your own personal park. There are tons of deer. There are pheasants and ducks. There are rabbits. When she purchased the home, Barrymore said she thought it would only need a cosmetic renovation. Instead, it turned into a complete internal gut with much of the plumbing, heating, and air conditioning replaced. Barrymore also revamped the ground floor to open up the kitchen, which felt dark and boxed in. It took a year of engineering to figure out how to accomplish it.

53:51Benjamin Miller:um well wonderful opportunity for somebody that wants to live in westchester yes you you got a go check it out you got a celebrity to handle your remodel for you yeah you did effectively at at at uh for for less than the dollars that were actually put in well let me tell you about

54:10Billy Boman:public.com investing for those that take it seriously stocks options bonds crypto treasuries and more with great customer service and let me also tell you about mongo db great to have you on What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And our next guest is here with us in the TVP and Altered Home. Here he is. Billy Bowman, good to meet you. How are you doing? I'm really good. Yeah, how's your week been? What is your life like right now? Are you just getting blown up by everyone?

54:42Ryan Tseng:Probably. Yes, I haven't even had time to check all the DMs yet. I'm really doing my best just to take care of everything. Yeah, I was shocked.

54:47Benjamin Miller:We were live on the show. reading about this whole thing because we had seen the ad on the 101. I saw it in person. I drove right by it.

54:57Billy Boman:It's hard to miss.

54:58Benjamin Miller:And then we texted Nick, one of our producers, and he, you seemingly responded within an hour or something like that. It was very fast.

55:06Ryan Tseng:Yeah, I've been perpetually online. I was glued to the screen to not miss anything. Okay, so yeah.

55:11Benjamin Miller:For anybody that missed it, there is a massive Hollywood sign scale.

55:16Ryan Tseng:30 feet tall. 230 feet long. 230 feet wide.

55:21Benjamin Miller:And on a hillside that I haven't seen any out of home advertising on before, so I want to get the whole story. Let's start, I guess, at the beginning. How did this happen?

55:32Ryan Tseng:Were you on Fiverr, very active, or you were friends with the Fiverr team? So actually no, but the creative director, Nir Rufua, so shout out to Nir for making this happen, reached out to me and basically, do you want to do this? And I thought, first of all, you're joking. He was not joking. then secondly right it's just a print like it's a billboard right no no no we're building the sign oh yeah right and then like as they're sending mock-ups and stuff i could see like it's actually someone is this like this sheer scale of it so it's been the work since october last year i don't have full insight into the full production i've just heard kind of the stories from the team so full shout out to the fiverr team and especially ellie pierre who who is the guy doing this he pulled off the impossible together with the entire fiverr team and the family kind of just made it Yeah.

56:19Benjamin Miller:I'm never going to personally, I love ads. I'm never going to look at any hillside the same way ever again, because I'm surprised they were able to pull us off even with the city.

56:28Billy Boman:It's remarkable. Take us back to the beginning. Like what did you, did you study? What did you study in school? How'd you get into your business? And then I want to sort of go through how AI is affecting your work, but just start as far back as you think is relevant.

56:46Ryan Tseng:Right, sure. How the hell did I end up here? I typically start with like, I'm of course like, it's nature and nurture, right? So like creativity is the only thing I'm good at. Like I'm terrible with everything else, like bookkeeping or whatever. And I grew up in a creative family. So my mom and dad run a small advertising agency my entire life. My mom was the, exactly. Shout out to mom and dad.

57:06Benjamin Miller:Dream upbringing. Yeah.

57:08Ryan Tseng:Grab designer and dad was the art director. And I grew up, you know, with like putting little micro machines in Xerox and is kind of making collages and all this stuff. So super creative. My whole family, my sister works as a game designer. My brother has done all kind of web design, runs a Dungeons and Dragons startup. So we're all very creative. That's all I do. I'm classically trained. I studied at Beckmann's College of Design in Stockholm. Probably haven't heard of it, but Stockholm, I mean, it was a pretty good design community. So classically trained. Ended up going into fashion for whatever reason.

57:40Ryan Tseng:Worst decision of my life. But I did. I love clothes and it's like aesthetics and how to bring ideas into garments. I worked at All Saints, H &M, bunch of different brands. No way. We're a designer doing clothes. No way.

57:50Billy Boman:So you would actually decide like where the buttons go on the shirt. Yeah, exactly. At that level.

57:54Ryan Tseng:Drawstring length of the hoodie and all that stuff. Why was it the worst decision?

57:59Billy Boman:Yeah.

58:00Ryan Tseng:Well, so it's like, you know, you've seen Devil Wears Prada, right? Yeah. That's how it actually is. Okay.

58:04Billy Boman:So people have really big, strong opinions.

58:06Ryan Tseng:I mean, it's constant of this, like, you should be happy to be here. Okay. In the worst toxic world. Sure, sure, sure. You can get into the sustainability part of it, blah, blah, blah. But there's no career prospects. You're basically, what do you say, licking ass for 10 years. And maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe you'll be the creative director. With a big maybe. So not something for me. So eventually I pivoted to tech, where it was like, this is back in 2018, 2019. Sounder, no. So back then, that was like job security, all the fun design stuff was kind of going on there, building like branded experiences on web and mobile.

58:40Ryan Tseng:So I worked at PayPal in Sweden and Vodafone, a bunch of different brands until I ended up in an AI startup in 2023.

58:46Billy Boman:There you go. Good timing.

58:48Ryan Tseng:Yes, exactly. This was early. This was a tinkering with me journey since mid-22. That very first one came out and I'm like, I can actually get like a hovering sneaker in the air. And it looks like something. Before then it was a disco diffusion and Dolly and all these kind of weird retro AI now, I guess. Yeah, vintage. Vintage AI, exactly. So from there, we did a bunch of stuff over 2023, which chapter, as they're called, is a German AI startup. And you were in Germany? No, I was working remote from Sweden. So remote, you know, happened as well. So I did that. And eventually they pivoted. We parted ways.

59:24Ryan Tseng:And at that time, like tail end of 2023, I've been posting some spec ads. Just like a little bit more art directed. Maybe I don't want to toot my own horn too much. But maybe for the time, it was like just a couple of levels up. what most people are seeing. And all of a sudden, my DM is like people from like the first AI agencies, monks, the big agencies, like we have to rep you. You have to do AI with us. All organic on LinkedIn.

59:47Billy Boman:Yeah, explain what the workflow was for those first ads. Is that static images that are AI generated, then you're doing text layout and something like Figma, or is it video from start to finish that you're cobbling together? Are you doing like mixed media? We're using some stock footage, some AI video, editing together After Effects. Like what's the workflow?

1:00:05Ryan Tseng:Well, so that's where we are kind of now back then back then back then it's like just getting anything that felt realistic Okay, had a bit of grit and texture to it. That was just like, you know, sheen plastic Me, yeah, me, journey look yeah, yeah, yeah, all it in the industry

1:00:16Billy Boman:So you were able to get away from that with yes with with the correct prompting correct prompting just having an eye for art direction angles lighting

1:00:23Ryan Tseng:Yeah, and then editing yeah and editing. Yeah sure Well on I used to wear where to put the logo and just get get like good pacing and everything into so it feels like an ad because that's, I think, was back then really kind of a bit lame, so to say. So back in 2024, did a bunch of work, did a music video for Hardy and Fred Durst, Ballantyne's Whiskey. Limbiscuit. Yeah. They were leaning into AI so much. Ben over there doesn't know who Limbiscuit is. They've done a ton of AI videos. Yeah. Fred Durst and Limbiscuit. Yeah.

1:00:50Billy Boman:I mean, I remember like the original cover art for their big album was, I think it was Airbrush, but it looks like AI art now.

1:01:00Benjamin Miller:Yeah, we were just asking the founder of Suno yesterday on the show what artist has leaned into AI the most. And he didn't want to name names in part because he actually knows who's using the products.

1:01:15Anvisha Pai:And a lot of them want to be quiet about it. But he didn't have a really clear answer on who's leaning in the most. But that seems like leaning in quite a bit if in 2024 you're like, we're going to use this to make.

1:01:25Ryan Tseng:Yeah, a lot of crazy kind of glam rock video. all kinds of matters.

1:01:29Billy Boman:Yeah, and there's so many times when an album comes out and they have the budget for one classic music video or two or maybe three, and it starts to get low budget. It's like, oh, let's use like a DV camera for this shoot or let's not rent a soundstage for this. We'll do something a little more organic. Maybe do some tour footage for this one and stretch the budget further. But with AI, you can probably just do a video for every single song.

1:01:54Ryan Tseng:Oh, yeah, I mean, that's a real opportunity. I think people are still staying in the live action box, which is a fine box when you're doing live action, but truly, and we can get into that later, how we just scale and the AP test, or just do different specific stuff for different channels, all this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We haven't really gotten there yet on the client side. They don't know what to ask for. They just know they should be experimenting with. Sure, sure. But yeah, so then 2025, we did like -

1:02:17Billy Boman:So you're repped at this point by agencies or they call you -

1:02:20Ryan Tseng:A lot of agency rep at that point. Slowly built. Again, I was nobody on social media. I mean, I'm 30K on LinkedIn. I'm not some huge guy, but I have a huge sign. But not a huge guy. So it's building a following, building attention. And then eventually, that kind of formulated into a huge project over 25. So we did the activation campaign for Taylor Swift. We worked with Lewis Capaldi, with Google and YouTube, Universal Music Group. A bunch, I mean, yes, a lot of real big brands, together with Wonders Studios, and a bunch of people I just got to know over the day. I mean, I worked with Dave Clark back in the day, 2024.

1:02:55Ryan Tseng:I'm sure if you hang out on LinkedIn, you've seen them. And what does your team look like to execute on all this? Great question. It's growing, but the biggest bottleneck for us is actually finding people. Like on the artist side, it's super difficult to find people who have the right circumstances. So I also teach at Sweden's biggest creative school called Berg's School of Communication. They have, at least what we think, the world's only AI program at this point. One year in classroom, government funded, and I'm there for three weeks. So the ones with a little bit of a freelance appetite, they tend to come to me.

1:03:27Ryan Tseng:And getting some really good, yeah. It's a great recruiting strategy. Part of the talent funnel is really good. I mean, like Promise, the AI studio, they bought the Curious Refuge, if you saw that, the AI online education. Cool.

1:03:39Benjamin Miller:Yeah, so many questions. So like on the projects that you mentioned in 2025, what does a team look like for an individual project? How quickly are you completing them?

1:03:51Anvisha Pai:like how would you compare those projects to the same type of production from a decade ago? Sure, sure. Well, it's really different, I would say.

1:04:02Ryan Tseng:I mean, everyone has a different take on this. I think having a lean and mean squad is better than us like, we used 30 artists. Like you can do that, but that creates a kind of a too many chefs problem, I think. We have to have a really strong lead and then delegate that. So structure is also everything in an AR.

1:04:16Benjamin Miller:Yeah, and it's a cost thing. You're running a small business, a creative agency, right? Like every incremental person that you bring on is just eating into that overall project fee.

1:04:26Ryan Tseng:Absolutely. And some are more efficient with prompting and others are not. I mean, the big cost is not necessarily on the credit side. It's hours, the human hours. That's still, and that's the key on, you know, as you know, it's not, what did they say? The LA news channel, I mean, he has pushed a button. I mean, that's the classic trope, right? So it's definitely that. But smaller teams that can do more, I guess, is the short story of it. And it's super different. Like, I wish there was a formula. Always this, always that. Yeah, of course. But having a lean and mean squad of four or five, I think for Lewis Capaldi, we were seven artists in total working under the Wonder Studios umbrella, who facilitated that.

1:05:05Billy Boman:And for those folks who are joining you and working with you, do they have similar paths where maybe they were classically trained in art or design and then they narrowed down at some point to fashion or typesetting or typography or visual design or or video editing and then this sort of allows them to zoom back out and and sort of almost retreat to the more classic train the more aesthetic driven work something like it i mean i

1:05:37Ryan Tseng:think the ai kind of family the global one uh we come from a kind of all walks of life creatively I mean, you know Gossip Goblin or Zack London? He's blowing up right now. He had, I think, a Hollywood Reporter article about him as well. He's an ex-anthropology student. So the beauty of this stuff is that it's not only ex-industry peeps. Of course, you have also live-action directors. I have a weird non-linear design career. People come from documentary. All kinds. But again, what truly matters is what's in here and how you can articulate that.

1:06:07Anvisha Pai:And just an obsession with using the tools.

1:06:10Benjamin Miller:Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, we can, this never ending. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure you've seen it. How has your stack evolved? Like what models were you using in 2024, 2025? I'm assuming you're constantly trying all the new tools.

1:06:26Ryan Tseng:Yeah, I mean, up until 24, I guess mid-journey was king and queen. And it was everything. That was definitely a big model. Then you kind of had Flux and a bunch of other more indie ones coming in and the scene becoming more competitive, which is great. I think that's a man. I think that's also what's happening with Zora. You know, not everyone's gonna make it It's just a testament to a healthy market. Yeah, that's how it should be so Then as Google kind of entered the chat like really Bigly to use a VO3, not a banana. The Google suite has become kind of industry standard for us so Definitely using that and then of course now cling 3 C dance 2 they're kind of king on the hill right now in AI video.

1:07:06Billy Boman:How is your access to C-Dance?

1:07:08Ryan Tseng:Over VO3. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's the stance right now, yes.

1:07:11Billy Boman:How is your access to C-Dance in general? We've heard that there's like long queues, there's rate limits, it's not something that easily scalable. Billy Bowman does not get rate limits.

1:07:22Ryan Tseng:Well, so I was fortunate enough to be in the Dreamina CPP, so creative partnership program, and I've had pre-access for...

1:07:29Benjamin Miller:Told you. A month or so. Don't ever rate limit Billy Bowman. So yeah. The man with his own Hollywood sign.

1:07:36Ryan Tseng:Yeah, yeah. You don't want to. You got to have C-dance. They're rolling it out now, and a fascinating kind of play there, at least from the rumors I've heard, is that U.S. might be kind of the last on the list. I believe so. Because as Europeans, we're kind of. So why is their model better?

1:07:50Benjamin Miller:Because they just downloaded every Hollywood film ever in history. We can only speculate, right?

1:07:56Ryan Tseng:Yeah. I mean, that's the data set and the training that went into it. Sure is, you know.

1:08:01Anvisha Pai:Just basically higher value data than even YouTube, right? because YouTube is like potentially potentially yeah

1:08:08Billy Boman:although it feels like at least trailers for every movie are on YouTube and I would I would assume like every Marvel fight scene gets clipped and is on like the movie clips channel

1:08:18Benjamin Miller:yeah but that almost that'd be like if LLMs were only trained on content above paywalls

1:08:23Ryan Tseng:I guess you're right yeah yeah I mean it's all kind of what you say the inner working sort of this stuff

1:08:28Benjamin Miller:so how is the concept or the like how has prompt engineering evolved

1:08:33Anvisha Pai:because there was a period with just regular LLMs where everyone was obsessed with prompt engineering, and then the models got it much better. And, of course, everyone still has their own prompts and now skills and things like that. But the average user is not even really caring about prompt engineering, at least with text now, because the output is just good enough for so many different use cases.

1:08:57Ryan Tseng:Yeah, I mean, I love that topic because I think prompt engineering was one, and synthography and all these kind of titles around this topic. I don't care if I'm making images, whatever. So it's like, people tend to want to make things more fancy than what they are, because they want to hold on to the old idea that getting good output is technically difficult. And that's just gone.

1:09:16Billy Boman:Yes, and that was the case with like, you're a master of After Effects or Photoshop, and you're a master of the tool, and so even if your ideas are mediocre, it's like, well, you're the only person that can actually instantiate anything, so if I just give you the prompt. We have these technical moats. Yeah, exactly.

1:09:33Ryan Tseng:It used to be that way. So, Stephen Bartlett, the guy who was CEO, wrote this brilliant PDF article on LinkedIn last year that's called Your Mote is Dead. And that just summarizes all of that. But back to your question, prompt engineering has changed a lot in the sense that the models have gotten so much better understanding natural language. Like you don't need to go super fancy. I mean, I do sometimes because the boring answer, it depends on what you're using.

1:09:55Billy Boman:I remember old mid-journey, you'd say like, don't do six fingers. and please, please, please do five fingers. Right, all the negative stuff. Yeah, and you put in the lens and the color grade. Which you can still do. You can still do some of that. Some of that got just abstracted.

1:10:13Ryan Tseng:Yeah, and you can still bring it in. And I think that kind of goes back to everyone that comes into this industry from different walks of life will have a new perspective because they sit on a type of terminology and vocabulary and also taste and craft.

1:10:25Billy Boman:And that goes to the anthropologist, who's going to come with a completely different set of language and get very different results.

1:10:30Ryan Tseng:Or even me. Like, I'm not a live action director at all. Like, again, I'm a weird designer guy. But I have a lifelong passion for movies. I've done my 50 ,000 hours or whatever. Like, I could go, I mean, I'm in the...

1:10:42Benjamin Miller:You should go movie for movie with John.

1:10:44Ryan Tseng:Have you seen Borat?

1:10:45Benjamin Miller:Oh, God, I'm classic.

1:10:47Billy Boman:It's a classic, exactly.

1:10:49Benjamin Miller:Sorry, sorry. It's a running joke.

1:10:51Billy Boman:It's the only movie that he's seen. Which is not true, but...

1:10:54Benjamin Miller:I've seen a lot of movies. I love movies. But we joke about it. But he's a lot. Do you think people are, how good do you think people are at spotting deep fakes today? Because people, I think, would like to think they're good at spotting it.

1:11:08Anvisha Pai:But there's so many videos out there in 2026 that people are like, oh, that's AI or that's not AI. I've gotten caught a few times.

1:11:16Billy Boman:I've noticed these funny vehicles. If it's a funny vehicle and it looks like it's filmed on a older iPhone. It's gotten to the point where people will be debating physics.

1:11:25Benjamin Miller:Yeah. They're like, that is not impossible. And they're like, well, look at this study.

1:11:31Ryan Tseng:But I think Runway put out a pretty funny post a couple of weeks ago about basically an A-B test. It mixed AI and reality. And I think they used real start frames, so like an actual photograph, and then one was just the real video, and then the other one was animated with AI. And anyone can go and take that test right now, but we're there. The New York Times ran a similar thing

1:11:52Billy Boman:with poetry, literature, science fiction. all around AI-generated content versus non. And a lot of the New York Times readers preferred the AI-generated content. What industries...

1:12:04Benjamin Miller:So you're getting hit up by artists. You're getting hit up by companies that want to make ads. What industries are... Is there anyone that's not hitting you up and saying, like, we're never going to do this? Because even... I think people were pretty surprised when Gucci came out. Yeah, sure.

1:12:22Anvisha Pai:Alexander McQueen, all the big fashion. Yeah, they came out and said, like, yeah we're making we're doing and and there was it was they they had an interesting approach where some of the images just looked exactly like normal Gucci photographs and then they had like some GTA-esque images that like clearly were generated and and I thought that was an interesting decision because if they just came out and were like we're using AI but it looks real yeah I think people would have had like less of a negative reaction and then some of the stuff was just like obviously CGI. So it kind of muddied it a little bit.

1:12:54Anvisha Pai:But who is, it seems like everyone is now starting to experiment. But is there anybody left?

1:12:59Ryan Tseng:So I would say overall for us, like being in Stockholm, Sweden, maybe we don't have as much access to the big narrative stuff as you guys have here. Will that change? Maybe. But mostly for us it's been brand and content and commercials. Just because like the ins we have with agencies, just how we position ourselves, that's our bread and butter. I'd love to do more narrative. If I ever had time, I would do more short films. I don't have any time.

1:13:21Billy Boman:Also, it just does feel like in terms of the actual workflow, doing a three-hour, two-hour, three-hour movie from start to finish, it's going to be iffy to say, okay, does the character look exactly the same two hours later?

1:13:37Benjamin Miller:What advantages are companies getting? Is it speed, cost?

1:13:43Anvisha Pai:Flexibility. Not quality, but yeah, flexibility. Can they do scenes that they never would have been able to? It's a good question.

1:13:50Ryan Tseng:I think my kind of favorite soundbite, that anyone can steal this. I'm not going to copyright it, but don't spend less on budget. Spend more on imagination. Don't spend less on budget because that's just like, you're just going to paint yourself into a corner if everything is about like - Cost reduction. Cost reduction, like in this media landscape with everything that's going on on every platform and ever competitive and now ads are going to look better than ever. The rising tide lifts all boats, right? Yeah. So like, I just think that's a completely backward strategy.

1:14:15Benjamin Miller:So rather - But couldn't there be an argument for keeping the budget fixed, but having more variation in the underlying creative?

1:14:23Billy Boman:I think that's exactly what he's saying. He's saying that if you're a brand and you're spending a million dollars on creative assets and you say, great, AI is here, I'm only going to spend 100K, well, your competitor is going to spend the same million, but they're going to get 10 times, maybe 100 times as much content, as many variations, as much creativity, and they're going to smoke you. Or even scroll stopping nature of the content

1:14:43Ryan Tseng:because we can fucking put the camera on an arrow flying through a battlefield and over to the monkey and another squirrel takes it. of like anything. This guy's a director. Anything. Like totally. So I mean, we're waiting for those briefs just to our earlier point. Clients haven't gotten there yet. They don't know. It's just like, oh, we want to do a live action ad. Can we do it with AI instead? It's like, can we fit in this old box while the old box is gone? You can kind of do anything. So that's what's really exciting. I mean, we did a protein bar ad with a Swedish Nix. They did Kim Kardashian as a big face a couple years ago.

1:15:12Ryan Tseng:Anyway, the brief was to like fly down through the clouds. A girl is glamping in like Argentina Argentina and she eats a bar and then feeds it to a capybara that starts twerking. No way.

1:15:24Benjamin Miller:You know capybaras can get violent, right?

1:15:27Ryan Tseng:Yeah, but these were very friendly, the AI capybaras.

1:15:29Benjamin Miller:This is a good use case for AI because capybaras are some of the most docile creatures until they're not. Until they're not. We played a video of a capybara attack earlier on the show.

1:15:40Billy Boman:You might have saved a life by using AI to generate the capybara instead of using a real animal handball.

1:15:44Ryan Tseng:And there you have the sustainability issue as well. like, okay, the carbon footprint of flying to Argentina, doing all this the traditional way, like, yeah, good luck. And, you know, we could measure, like, you'll never win the sustainability argument against AI as well.

1:15:58Billy Boman:That's an interesting take, yeah. I feel like the AI industry has very much been on its back foot playing defense on that, saying, no, no, no, it's not that better.

1:16:07Benjamin Miller:Yeah, the example that I've always used in the film entertainment context is the idea that somebody making a film would fly out 50 people to another continent to get scenes that would ultimately take maybe 60 seconds, two minutes, just to tear it down.

1:16:28Anvisha Pai:Yeah, it's certainly going to be more sustainable to do the right few,

1:16:34Benjamin Miller:hit the keyboard in the right way for enough times to get an output. What advice are you giving to creatives? because what you've done is exactly what we've talked about on the show.

1:16:48Anvisha Pai:And what I think the general point of view, at least from the tech industry, is, yeah, if you want to resist AI, you're going to, you might feel better about yourself for some amount of time. But eventually you're going to get steamrolled by somebody who is, loves doing the same type of thing that you're doing, is just going to use a different tool set. But so, yeah, what advice are you giving to creatives across their kind of career on how to actually lean in? And I think there's a way to lean in and get just as much satisfaction, have just as much intensity of the creative process and just as much joy.

1:17:32Ryan Tseng:And control now. Yeah. We're getting there. And truly, you don't even have to choose anymore. I typically say it's not about AI or it's AI and. Because we also did a recently like a Super Bowl commercial for a big airline. all the talent were shot green screen yeah uh we background and relit them put them in like a beautiful cloud environment and all this stuff so you don't even have to choose anymore you can keep the human talent the human performance and all that stuff but the the choice the advice for creatives well just test it don't say blah until you tested it like and if you have tested it and it's not for you well then wait or stuff but this is not gonna go away yeah i just fully accepted that that like this is not gonna go away yeah i was also scared like i i'm not i've not always been this like happy-go-lucky optimist.

1:18:11Ryan Tseng:So you started absolutely printing. Well, we'll see. We're doing fine. The jury's still out. But to that note, there's more opportunities than ever. The ad world is in kind of flux. We need stuff in two weeks. Good luck with CG and live action. And you can kind of, okay, I don't always want these two-week briefs, but you can help. Your duty is mad.

1:18:37Anvisha Pai:I'll take the six month brief.

1:18:38Ryan Tseng:Yes, yes. Too long for AI, I would say. Keep it about a month, a month and a half, I think, for a couple of ads or 30 seconds.

1:18:44Anvisha Pai:But still, that is dramatically more than just typing into the box what you want. Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:18:50Ryan Tseng:Because it's just going into an AI project. You have to think about casting. Are we doing an AI face, where you can choose all the looks, demographics, everything? Or are we doing like a little?

1:19:02Benjamin Miller:What feedback do you give the various labs on what they're doing badly today? Right.

1:19:09Ryan Tseng:So, I mean, we are in a bunch of these creative partnership programs, and it's great because you do get to feedback, and it can be anything from, like, the, if that's what you mean, like the AI providers.

1:19:17Anvisha Pai:Yeah, like the six-finger thing.

1:19:21Billy Boman:Cheaper, faster, better with a certain style.

1:19:24Ryan Tseng:Sure, sure. I mean, what we're doing is what I call, like, live art-directed realism. If it doesn't look like a movie frame, it's not good enough for us. Like that's where my base level is. So we found a really neat, I mean, you've seen some of the work maybe. I'll send it up if you want to pull it up. But if it's not there, it's not good enough. So like realism, others focus in animation. Other focus in stylized claymation. There's, again, you can kind of do anything. What I want is better, more human focused interfaces. I think that's like making us the tools more human and less. You want more SaaS.

1:19:56Ryan Tseng:Sorry? More software. Like more of a software wrapper. The user experience of using the product. Like, actually, like, I want to queue up fire.

1:20:05Benjamin Miller:You don't just want a chat bot that you can just... No, God, no.

1:20:08Ryan Tseng:No, no, we don't. I mean, I don't generate in OpenAI. Exactly.

1:20:12Billy Boman:Have you thought about getting into, like, the Vibe Coding world, building the tools that you want, or having your team work on that, building a harness around all of the different models? Our site is actually Vibe Coding.

1:20:23Ryan Tseng:To some extent, there's a really neat Webflow plugin that you can use as a bridge to get into, to bring Cloud into there. So there's just no time. Yeah, of course. I hear a lot of people feel the same. Like, just the exhaustion of keeping up, it's insane. I mean, I do my best. And I try to focus branded content ads, that's what we're doing. But I do want to tip my toe. How many Super Bowl ads do you think you'll

1:20:44Benjamin Miller:do for next Super Bowl?

1:20:46Ryan Tseng:We'll see, man.

1:20:48Benjamin Miller:Like, over five?

1:20:49Ryan Tseng:There were AI Super Bowl ads, besides ours as well.

1:20:53Benjamin Miller:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I figure you're going to get at least a few.

1:20:55Billy Boman:Do you think next year there'll be more than half? more than 25%.

1:21:00Benjamin Miller:I would guess that certainly more than half will use AI.

1:21:04Ryan Tseng:Exactly, exactly. It's background replacement, relighting, you know, combining.

1:21:09Billy Boman:Even just like there is a new AI-driven rotoscoping tool that just replaces the background and that's AI, but it's just a replacement for sitting there and cutting out something.

1:21:18Ryan Tseng:Yeah, all these kind of menial tasks that no one loves to do. It's just like a machine is better at that. Can we let the machines do it? Little blemish replacement. Yeah, what I don't want AI to do is like writing the scripts, coming up with the ideas because that's the fun stuff for us. Will we get there? Maybe. But right here, right now, it's trash. That's not at all where it's at.

1:21:35Billy Boman:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

1:21:40Billy Boman:What does the integration with Fiverr actually look like? It doesn't sound like I can get you to make me a Super Bowl ad for$5. No. So is Fiverr just a way to meet you? Is this just more of like a marketing partnership for Fiverr to open up people's minds about the type of people that they could hire?

1:21:59Ryan Tseng:Sure, great question. So besides the name Fiverr, that's kind of stuck over the years, but there's a lot more high-budget stuff on Fiverr DCs. And what we're doing with the hub is that they've curated a really solid selection of some of the best, and with different styles also, that you can go and hire. Because our experience as well, talking to agencies, like, yeah, we found this guy on Instagram and DMed him, and it was terrible. Trying to find people who are vetted and really good industry pros is hard, because there's like a handful of people in the world that does this at a level that is good enough for commercial production.

1:22:32Ryan Tseng:So I think that's the opportunity they're presenting on the hub, like come and work with these people.

1:22:36Benjamin Miller:Here's an interesting question. So I've always felt that at any given point, at least when it comes to kind of startup style design

1:22:47Anvisha Pai:and branding, that there's only maybe like 100 people in the world that actually do great sort of like leading edge work. and I've always thought that was funny because for so long millions of people can make a website can make product design etc and yet there's still this small group of people that actually are pushing the frontier and kind of like leading from a style standpoint and kind of like setting the tone setting the actual tastemakers do you think that that will stay the same with AI? My expectation is that it will to some degree it feels like an iron law almost that at any given point, regardless of the tool set, there will only be a small number of people that are true, true tastemakers.

1:23:31Anvisha Pai:Absolutely.

1:23:31Ryan Tseng:I mean, this is true already today. If you are on socials, a lot of people are asking for work. People are new. People are kind of happy amateurs playing this stuff. Most people might not have a decade.

1:23:42Anvisha Pai:There's still demand for kind of the middle of the pack. Sure, yes. It's just that you're not going to get the... you know, the, like, quickly people identify the 100 or so, and realistically it can get down to, like, 10 or something like that. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:23:59Ryan Tseng:I mean, I think what's happened is that the floor is raised, but so is the ceiling. Yeah. So, like, really standing out is also more difficult because, like, people make awesome stuff. Like, there's so many talented people in the industry. So, Krim will rise to the top, but it's also more competitive because that's the baseline. Anyone can make a cool fight scene now. Okay, what's next? like what's actually makes us tick, so to say.

1:24:20Benjamin Miller:Yeah. How are you building the company? You're here in LA because you have your own Hollywood sign, but you're based in Stockholm.

1:24:30Anvisha Pai:You're building out the team there, or do you remote?

1:24:33Ryan Tseng:So really, really, really kind of, what do you say, step by step, brick by brick, really, really carefully selecting who we bring into the team. So we have two assistants at home now holding the fort. Shout out to you guys for, so we could be here. But like to our earlier point, it's really difficult to find people. So what's been a good funnel for me is working with teaching the stuff as well and identifying some of the leading talent that are kind of AI native that grow up kind of going to school with this stuff. They might need more traditional schooling in terms of tools, art direction, and stuff that they don't have.

1:25:00Ryan Tseng:How to work with clients. That too. Being able to take a brief, all this stuff. So really, really slowly and human at the front and center of everything. But we have a temporary office. I mean, it's literally just been me and my co-founder for the last years doing this. so we're some type of yeah it's yeah i don't know amazing amazing i'm so so fun to talk with you and

1:25:22Benjamin Miller:because like i'm we haven't had we've had plenty of kind of creatives come on the show that are

1:25:28Anvisha Pai:using uh using the the different tools quite effectively but nobody that's just like made it like i am gonna recreate the modern ad agency i think people sort of wrote off how like the models

1:25:40Billy Boman:are so amazing and so it's so magical when you fire off one prompt and you get something that looks real that people just completely wrote off the middle, which is like actually making a product of like a story or something. We had this idea for an AI video that would be me and Jordi on the microphone throughout history, different like big innovations. So the invention of the steam engine, the invention of the telephone, the invention of the, you know, Wilbur Wright launching the first airplane. And we're there like sort of talking about it. and we generated a still frame, tried to animate them between, and it was just like, it was quickly turning into like a multi-week process that should have been like a month that we budgeted, but we were like, let's spend 30 minutes on this and like hopefully we'll make it work and we never quite got it there, so we just never published it.

1:26:27Billy Boman:You know what you should do?

1:26:27Ryan Tseng:You should film it. You have a green screen here. Yeah, I mean, just the background replace it. Oh, that's good. Again, you don't have to choose. It's a and. That's really good.

1:26:37Billy Boman:You have everything here, so we could do it. Okay, last question. Aura recently partnered with Chrome Hearts for a ring. Yes or no? Was this something you'd pick up? Is this something you'd reckon? Is this fake news? Yeah. Okay. Debunked already. I can't tell.

1:26:52Ryan Tseng:For the record, I can't afford Chrome Hearts just yet. Yes. Hey, let's get it. We're working on it.

1:26:57Benjamin Miller:Next Super Bowl season, you might be chromed up.

1:26:59Billy Boman:Might be. Might be. Okay. Okay. Well, it's been fantastic. Likewise. Likewise. Thank you so much for coming down. I'd love to. We should definitely work together on something. Let's figure out something to work on. That'd be amazing. Yeah. Yeah, I'd love it. Awesome. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon Let me tell you about Plaid Plaid powers the apps you use to spend save borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money fight fraud and improve lending now with AI and let me also tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI super computers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands and that brings us into the Lambda lightning round and we are kicking it off with Benjamin Miller from Fundrise.

1:27:40Billy Boman:But first, we will pivot that camera around, show you the entire TBP and Ultradome, and we will show you the Lambda Cloud because we are in the Lambda Lightning round right now. And I believe we have Benjamin Miller from Fundrise in the Restream waiting room, so we will bring him into the TBP and Ultradome. We'll try that again to bring him into the TBP and Ultradome. How you doing?

1:27:59Benjamin Miller:What's going on?

1:28:00Billy Boman:Hey, guys. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is the first time on the show. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company? All right.

1:28:08Evan Loomis:All right. So my name is Ben Miller. I'm co-founder and CEO of Fundrise. We are an alternative investment platform. I think the largest direct-to-investor platform of the country, been around for 15 years. We've democratized investing into real estate. overnight success. Yeah. Real estate, tech, and private credit. We have 2 million customers. We just took our fund VCX public last week on the New York Stock Exchange. It's amazing. Very, very cool.

1:28:35Benjamin Miller:We love NYC.

1:28:35Billy Boman:How is the fun doing?

1:28:38Anvisha Pai:As long as I've been following tech closely. So it's very, very cool to have you on the show.

1:28:47Benjamin Miller:Yeah, let's get into the recent launch because we've obviously seen it all over our timeline. I had a friend of ours messaged John and I yesterday seeing something. He was like pissed off. He was like, did we all miss this?

1:29:05Anvisha Pai:so anyways how long has it been in the works because it's not the kind of thing you can just spin up and you know there's a lot of moving pieces yeah

1:29:14Evan Loomis:I mean it's so funny because when we started out everyone told us a bad idea which was we democratized investing into real estate this is about 2021 2021 everything was hot hot hot hot real estate was hot tech was hot and we were foolish enough to think about like, well, what else could we do that would be really painful and hard and new? And so we came up with the concept of why don't we try to expand into democratizing investing into private tech and venture capital? And we're different than the normal approach. We usually start by going in the front door of the SEC. So we go into the SEC and say, this is what we want to do.

1:29:50Evan Loomis:Can we create a public venture capital fund? And no one had ever done that before. It took us about two years going back and forth with the staff. and we created the first, you know, the first, it's a venture fund, just like any other venture fund, except anyone can invest in it. And we launched, um, at the end of, I think about the end of 2022 and then, and then stock market collapsed, everything in tech became negative. So we were super lucky because we invest, we started investing at the bottom of the cycle.

1:30:20Anvisha Pai:Yeah.

1:30:21Evan Loomis:And so, and so that's how we got access. I mean, you know, when we got access to Andrel and Anthropic and Canva, like people were like very bearish on tech. Yeah. And that's like, so people are like, how did you get these great names? I was like, well, it's, you know, we picked good names, but it was also, there was a lot of luck there. So anyways, I'll give you the story, but I don't want to keep, you know, if you want to ask a follow-up.

1:30:47Benjamin Miller:Yeah, continue, continue because, yeah, so two years working with the SEC,

1:30:56Anvisha Pai:you actually create the fund, but it's not publicly listed at that time. It's just available in your product? To the public.

1:31:03Evan Loomis:Yeah. Yeah, this is something that people in tech weren't familiar with, but you can be public and not be publicly traded. Yeah. And so we were, it's a public venture fund. It was, you know, we were filing, you know, public reporting on the SEC's web, on Edgar. And so we ended up, you know, raising about half a billion dollars across 100 ,000 investors. We have 100 ,000 investors. The fund had a lot of good returns. Like within three years, it had been up like 85 % or something. Especially in the last year, it was up 65 % the last 12 months. And that's NAV.

1:31:41Anvisha Pai:NAV is NAV being up 65%.

1:31:44Evan Loomis:Yeah, well, I mean, it's just the mark of, typically it's just the last round. What was Anthropoc last round? What was Vanta's last round or Canva or whomever. So we typically marked the last round valuation. And we invested in OpenAI and Databricks and all these companies three years ago. So it ended up doing pretty well. And then so then we said, okay, well -

1:32:08Benjamin Miller:You're like, I'm in the wrong business.

1:32:10Evan Loomis:I should have just been a fund manager. I was in the wrong business. Real estate is so much more brutal than tech. Let me tell you, it's a lot nicer to be an investor than a builder.

1:32:19Benjamin Miller:Yeah. But what do you guys look for on the actual asset side?

1:32:25Anvisha Pai:I'm assuming some of the positions are direct. Some are, you know, you've bought into SPVs. Like, how do you qualify on the asset side?

1:32:37Evan Loomis:Yeah, I mean, our check size grew over time. So now it's like it wants to be like 20 to 50 to 100 million. and the way that we did it is that we have Fundrise is 200 people. We have 100 software engineers. We built a fintech platform with millions of customers and payment processing and then we built a real estate AI product called Real AI and so we have a whole AI initiative and so that's how we really got comfortable with the different products that we got to Anthropic I think early is that we were building with it and we're like oh my god this is such a better enterprise product than anything else.

1:33:15Evan Loomis:Going on the list, it was almost 80%. Other than Anderil, which I don't have any killer drones, we were, you know, we really, every time I see a company come to me, like I got, I got sort of saw some flow for deal and replet. And I just said, like, I just don't know. We don't use the software. So I can't, I can underwrite it by paper, like an MBA underwriting. But without being grounded as a true user, like I just, So that's our process, a combination of using it, building with it. And then if we build with it and we love it, we usually hunt it down. We're not reactive, typically. We're like, okay, this is a great company.

1:33:55Evan Loomis:How do we get into this company? How do I harass the CEO and the executives? It's Macrim's worst nightmare. Yeah, well, we're direct with Andrel.

1:34:07Billy Boman:Yeah, that's good. I mean, that's the right way to do it. And I think that that's something that is underrated. And I think a lot of investors don't necessarily know how far you can be away from the cap table.

1:34:21Anvisha Pai:Yeah, what is your pitch to companies? Is it that, hey, we have 100 ,000 people in this fund. They're excited about your company. They want exposure. This is a better way for them to get it than investing in the third or fourth layer of some random SPV. or how do those conversations typically go?

1:34:43Evan Loomis:Yeah, I mean, you know, if you sound, you know, you're around, like, half the time it's just relationship. It's just like, you know somebody, they get to know you, they get comfortable. I mean, at least half the time, it's just pure relationship driven. Sometimes it's like more of a hard pitch. And so like Ramp, for example, which we invested in and it's done really well, that took a couple of like turns of the wheel. but Ramp is sort of very marketing minded if you probably have any sense of Ramp they are very aggressive and thoughtful

1:35:18Benjamin Miller:we know a little bit about

1:35:22Evan Loomis:right so this is like part of their DNA is product marketing so we said to them we have 2 million customers 2 million people why don't we work together and invest in Ramp and see if you guys can, let's see if we can be helpful. And, and we went out to half our customer base to a million people and we were the most successful partnership they've ever done. Hundreds, hundreds of customers.

1:35:48Anvisha Pai:And we, you know, it's free. Because your, your customer base is like, I don't, I don't know. I, I imagine your minimums are quite, quite low, but in general, if people are investing in alternative assets, like business leaders, like they're business people.

1:36:01Evan Loomis:Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, uh, I thought it, we did it with Canva too. And it, and it's just like Canva was so big, it didn't move the needle for them. And I've done it with smaller companies where we were like, we drove 25 % of their revenue growth in a single year.

1:36:13Billy Boman:That's great value add, yeah.

1:36:15Evan Loomis:Yeah, it's a huge value add. I mean, I think it's like, we're one of our products we love is Intercom, which is Fin. Yeah, we love them. We're sponsored by Fin. Okay, well, we're adopter. We adopted Fin like 18 months ago. And we basically, like we invested in Intercom and I think we're investing more. And I think that our customer base is so big. I mean, it's millions of people. We know where they work. We know what their job is. We know where they live. And we have so much data about them. So you said, like, I only want to, we did this with Service Titan also because we invested in Service Titan before they went public.

1:36:50Evan Loomis:So I only want small business owners in the Midwest. Okay, great. You know what? We can target and then we can, like, because they're investors, we're not a marketing platform. So I think that the idea that, I mean, it's true, but it's novel, is that the people are, you can have an army of people driving sales, marketing, brand. I mean, when we listed VCX and when I went public last week, a huge part of the reason it was successful, like very successful, was the massive broad-based investor group who is very excited, supportive. of, we call it network investing. There's social network and then there's actually investor networks.

1:37:34Evan Loomis:We think that people are a value separate from their money.

1:37:43Anvisha Pai:So you become publicly traded quite recently. It immediately trades way, way, way, way, way above NAV. And that creates a problem, which is that I, as an investor, could be very interested in the underlying assets think you have a fantastic portfolio, but maybe I don't want to pay way above NAV, even if I'm bullish on the companies. How do you think this kind of like broad-based exposure to privates can evolve over time? Are you thinking about future products that would kind of solve some of these, you know, clearly there's a massive amount of demand, investors are excited to be invested in VCX, but there's clearly, there maybe is like more evolved solutions to come.

1:38:33Evan Loomis:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so, so funny how these things, like anybody who's ever had any success, like knows that before that, everybody told you it was not going to work. Yeah. And so when we, when we conceived of this, this idea of taking it public listing it, every single expert told us it would trade at a discount in AF. They said, don't, and we put it to a shareholder vote. I had thousands of people telling me not to do it. It's going to trade down. And our view was, every phase of this process, people have a reason to basically be negative. And so originally it was so novel. Should you democratize investing?

1:39:14Evan Loomis:And then it was, can you get access to the companies? and then it was, well, now you have access and you've democratized it, but these investors need liquidity. They can't handle liquidity, which, by the way, even big institutions can't either. I went through 2008 financial crisis and I watched Harvard Endowment have to dump stuff. So anyways, I thought of it as okay, they've had great performance. Average client performance was 40 % a year. So I was like, great. We delivered. so let's just give them like clean liquidity and may trade at a premium i thought it would but i

1:39:53Anvisha Pai:well there was some precedent that it would that it would have that would trade at some premium like destiny uh i i i Remember, at least at times, it's traded way above an av.

1:40:03Evan Loomis:Yeah, but Robinhood's didn't. So it was unclear. My view, I did a whole investor day presentation where I said to people, here's why it might trade up, here's why it might trade down. And why it might trade up is that you can't get shares of Anthropic at par in a liquid wrapper with no carried interest. you can't get and go down your list open AI and Ramp and Databricks the idea that you can get these companies in a perfectly liquid wrapper in a low cost regulated vehicle, that makes sense to me they would trade a premium and that's what could happen, it could also be that sentiment gets negative, there's a war in the Middle East anything could happen and so So it traded a massive premium.

1:40:57Evan Loomis:I mean, massive. It's been blockbuster success, validated all of our aims and hopes. And now I'm getting the other side. Oh, yeah, with trades, too much of a premium. I said, well, it's been eight days, right? It's been eight days. We have more wood to chop, right? We have more things we're doing. We've just announced a partnership with Kraken to tokenize it. Oh, interesting. Tokenization, I think, is going to be really, like part of financial innovations. We've been doing this for financial innovations, key to democratization and key to lowering the cost of intermediation. So, I mean, this is super early days here.

1:41:36Evan Loomis:Yeah.

1:41:37Billy Boman:Have you been processing the private credit stories over the last couple months? Yeah.

1:41:44Evan Loomis:I mean, I've been doing this for 15 years, right? So, like, this is like how it always goes. already happened in real estate where institutional money, they raise a lot of money, it's successful, they raise more money, it's successful, and you just go until it dies. That's just how institutional money works. And so they just did. There's a cycle. Every single sector has a cycle. Basically, if you don't have a lot of restraint before you need to, you just always end up in this problem every single time, every single time. And so that's what's happening with private credit. I don't think it's as bad as everybody says, but the problem is that you end up with this vicious cycle where once you get negative sentiment, it actually becomes self-fulfilling.

1:42:35Billy Boman:Totally, yeah, because there's more people pulling out, less people investing.

1:42:40Anvisha Pai:How big can VCX get? Like if I'm a major platform VC fund, do I see this and think, Like, okay, I'm going to have more competition at Series B, C eventually. Is this something that you think can scale to tens of billions of AUM? Are you a dreamwalker?

1:43:02Evan Loomis:Are you in my dreams? Maybe.

1:43:05Benjamin Miller:Maybe. I can see where you're going. Yeah.

1:43:10Evan Loomis:I mean, the hope and the goal here, I mean, there's sort of two sides to the marketplace. so the next turn of the wheel is I need to convince the best private companies, this is good for them we're one company on their cap table we're a venture fund, to the private companies we're a venture fund just like any other venture fund, there's no differences except for our capital, evergreen forever capital, low cost, passive passive long term capital which to me as a founder and a builder, that's the best money around I'd rather have that than value add I think that we get to a place where structurally an allocation to passive long-term money becomes like the best companies get it.

1:43:57Evan Loomis:The best companies want it. And so like kind of a Jack Bogle Vanguard model would be if we can become sort of a structural bridge, then we get scale. The bigger we get, the lower our fees. The lower our fees, the bigger we get. and at$100 billion, our fees are tens of basis points. It's super disruptive to the venture industry. I mean, it's good and bad because they're going to want us and hate us at the same time.

1:44:30Anvisha Pai:It's very cool. I mean, I think we never give investment advice here, but I think in general for 99 % of people, If you're excited about great private companies, you should take an index approach and an index approach that allows you to have liquidity along the way.

1:44:51Benjamin Miller:Yeah.

1:44:52Anvisha Pai:Makes a lot of sense. And I think there's a lot more to come here in the category. I would expect it to be oligopolistic in the way that even the platform VC funds are. They can all get bigger together. So excited to see more innovation.

1:45:09Billy Boman:It is funny. I, you know, we were tracking like, will VC funds go public? Dan Primack was telling us that that might happen. I never really expected it to go the other way, but it makes so much sense with your strategy where that goes. And the value prop that you've given to founders at a particular stage just makes so much sense. The pitch is fantastic.

1:45:28Anvisha Pai:Are you hiring like new kind of quasi VC like partners? Are you going to try to poach from any of the other funds? That's a good question.

1:45:39Evan Loomis:because it feels like you're building Fundrise,

1:45:42Anvisha Pai:which has millions of investors, and then you're seemingly now basically like, I need to invest in all the products that we love and use, and I imagine you'd like some support.

1:45:54Evan Loomis:Yeah, I mean, this is my takeaway, and I don't know if other people have experienced this, but my takeaway is it's very hard to delegate successfully. Fundrise has been together, founding teams have been together for 15 years, every year maybe we hire 100 people.

1:46:11Billy Boman:Another over 90 ,000.

1:46:14Evan Loomis:Yeah. Like it takes a long time to find people who are just like you can delegate to and they just deliver. I think I've almost never had the experience where you hire somebody. I've hired, I've tried, go hire the fanciest person with crazy good resume. They just don't deliver. I don't know. I mean, I've done it across different industries and finance and real estate. And so I'd be like, maybe there's a mentor person who can just get access and you just pay them. But I sort of doubt that.

1:46:50Anvisha Pai:Yeah, I mean, I think oftentimes the hardest thing is finding undiscovered talent. But the undiscovered talent is what typically ends up actually being like a game changer in an organization. You know, somebody that doesn't necessarily have the pedigree. And that could be for you, like somebody who's just historically been a software engineer. And they're like, oh, I was always interested in investing. And then they come in and bring a new approach to investing that kind of works in the structure that you guys have.

1:47:24Evan Loomis:I guess there's two ways you make money in venture. One is that you discover something before it's the hottest thing ever. You come in early. The other one is that you just get access when they're already hot and you just ride the product market fit train. And so I'm hoping that we can do that.

1:47:41Anvisha Pai:Yeah, and that's been the issue. There's been so many attempts at like democratizing the private market within tech. And a lot of them end up looking like crowdfunding platforms. And then they have this massive negative selection bias where they're getting the worst companies to come on and crowdfund. And then the investors don't end up making money and it creates this vicious cycle and then the companies just go away. over time. And, uh, and this is like, you know, potentially it seems like you're guiding to the opposite of that, which is like, you have a differentiated value add, you have a product that no other platform VC can offer.

1:48:17Anvisha Pai:And then you talked about all the potential, like positive flywheel of like more capital, lower fees, more capital, lower fees, more investors, you know,

1:48:26Benjamin Miller:more value add.

1:48:27Billy Boman:So thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the Success, the overnight success, 15 years in the making. The chat loves to see it, and we appreciate you taking the time.

1:48:37Benjamin Miller:Yeah, great to finally meet. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon, Ben.

1:48:41Billy Boman:Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. And let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with small and medium-sized businesses. We are running over, so we'll bring in our next guest, Ferris, from Normal Computing. Ferris, how are you doing? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for jumping on. Good to see you. Please introduce yourself in the company.

1:49:06Faris Sbahi:Hey, I'm Ferris, founder and CEO of Normal Computing. So Normal is a company that builds AI software with the world's largest semiconductor companies. So right now, more than half of the top 10 by revenue, semiconductor companies use Normal to design custom silicon. And we're also using that same capability right now to bring new kinds of chips and ASICs to market ourselves, mostly focused on energy. So hyper-efficient, ultra-efficient ASICs.

1:49:37Anvisha Pai:Seems somewhat abnormal, given your stage to have this level of traction, but continue.

1:49:42Billy Boman:Yeah, where did the name come from?

1:49:45Faris Sbahi:It's a couple of things. So one is right now the ASICs are targeting different kinds of probabilistic machine learning models, like diffusion models. So normals kind of go to the normal distribution. But also there's this kind of broader view that this is really the way that computing should be. This is the more natural way to process and run AI inference and AI workloads in general. Yeah.

1:50:13Billy Boman:Tell us about the chip landscape where you see the most activity. There's a lot of news from ARM this week around CPUs. Obviously everyone's familiar with the GPU. And then between the TPU and Cerebrus and Grok, there's like a few other ASICs that are sort of popular, but it feels like there's a much longer tail that you're going after. For sure.

1:50:38Faris Sbahi:I mean, so obviously we had GTC last week and Jensen put forward what I think is a really nice equation where he's saying that revenue equals tokens per watt times total available gigawatts. So what that means is there's two main problems that we should be focused on right now from our perspective in chips. One is increasing the amount of energy that's useful and usable by us and for us. But the other is improving the energy efficiency that we have in the silicon that we're using. And so there's a few trends. One of those I would say relates to the news that ARM put forward. They have their own chip, real hardware for the first time in 40 years, historically an IP licensing business.

1:51:24Faris Sbahi:That's part of this broader trend to custom silicon and the data center moving to heterogeneous computing, which means that in the future, not that many years from now, rather than having a very small number of different kinds of chips that are running all of our workloads, we're going to have hundreds, if not thousands of different kinds of chips that are tailored to each workload and application in the data center.

1:51:49Billy Boman:Are thermodynamic computing chips underrated?

1:51:53Faris Sbahi:I think so, yeah. What do you think? I haven't heard that much about them.

1:51:59Billy Boman:I don't know, and it feels like it's very early stage. And so I've seen some demos, but it's very unclear at the demo phase how much is being done on the actual chip, what the value is. And we went through this with Grok and Cerebris where there was very early pushback around, oh, well, like you'll never be able to run this type of model on that chip or you'll need to network a thousand chips together to do anything valuable. And I've been surprised and I think we've seen some narrative violations around Cerebris and Grok. I've used Codex 4.5 Spark on Cerebris and I know it's good. I know it works.

1:52:42Billy Boman:We had a founder come on that baked llama onto a chip and made it available at chatjimmy.ai. And like you can just feel the value. Yeah, you can just feel the value. And I'm wondering, like, should I think about thermodynamic computing just as like another speed versus size or cost tradeoff? Or if it unlocks a different vector of optimization?

1:53:06Faris Sbahi:It is a different vector. So right now, I mean, the two typical vectors that you have, I mean, really, there's three if you include area. But you have speed and energy. Those are typically the tradeoffs that you're making. But we're introducing a new one, which is noise.

1:53:22Billy Boman:Okay.

1:53:23Faris Sbahi:So for these kinds of devices, you can't necessarily run, like you can't run a calculator or something where you need full precision, like deterministic calculations. but let's say that you're trying to run something like a diffusion model which I think is super topical because OpenAI just winded down Sora this week. It was costing them like$15 million a day to run,$2.1 million in revenue. But that's the kind of workload that's a really nice fit for this computing paradigm because you're taking something that's noisy and approximate by definition and mapping it to hardware where the physics maps really nicely between those equations.

1:54:06Billy Boman:You think that's five years away? Ten years away?

1:54:10Faris Sbahi:We think less. We think less right now. I think it has to be. From our perspective, 2030 is a key date that we talk about a lot internally because there's a view that even by 2028, we're going to have a 49 gigawatt shortfall in terms of power. and so something has to change, something has to give it could be energy, it could be that we find new sources or data centers in space or one of these other directions or we have a real breakthrough when it comes to silicon and that's kind of what we're going after.

1:54:47Billy Boman:That'd be amazing. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong.

1:54:50Faris Sbahi:Oh, awesome. I have my own gong behind me too. I don't know if you saw that. No way. It's a$50 million round.

1:54:57Benjamin Miller:We're calling it Accelerator Round. led by led by who sorry i missed it samsung samsung there you go and what were you doing before this

1:55:08Faris Sbahi:uh i was at google i was at google brand and then uh google acts afterwards

1:55:12Anvisha Pai:where i met my founders my co-founders there you go somewhat of a non-traditional

1:55:17Billy Boman:yeah great seems like the perfect perfect team for this well congratulations very excited and yeah come back on the show with this more progress we'll talk to you soon actually

1:55:25Anvisha Pai:multiple times this year. Yeah, have a good one. Goodbye. Take care.

1:55:29Billy Boman:Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. And let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And without further ado, we'll bring in Evan Loomis from Overmatch Ventures. Evan, how are you doing? Good to meet you.

1:55:50Evan Loomis:I'm doing great. It's good to be with you guys.

1:55:53Billy Boman:Kick us off with the news. Just hit us with the number.

1:55:57Evan Loomis:Just hit us with the big number. Oh, man, you're grabbing the gong. I can't wait. Going straight forward. We just closed$250 million. Yes. Congratulations.

1:56:09Benjamin Miller:Thanks so much. We can put it in, Bill. We can just say a quarter bill. Quarter bill.

1:56:13Evan Loomis:It's a quarter bill. There it is. We raised the money in a couple months. I'm so grateful. Very nice. Overnight success. That's another funny little noise, too. I kind of need those for my office here. It's Friday. It's Friday.

1:56:29Billy Boman:It is Friday. All right. Tell us about the investing thesis. I want to know about sector and stage. How much are you saving for follow-on? How concentrated do you want the portfolio to be? Where are you seeing opportunity in the venture landscape?

1:56:44Evan Loomis:Our sweet spot is deep tech, defense, and space. There's a set of technologies that are existentially urgent and important for the United States to lead in. And so that is our sweet spot. We do pre-seed through Series A. I've got an incredible team, Morgan Hitzig, Jordan Blaschek, a bunch of other folks. Typically, at the pre-seed, we're doing two to three. Seed, three to five. Back in my day, a pre-seed was like 500K.

1:57:15Benjamin Miller:500K. Now you're going to come to a mill.

1:57:18Billy Boman:Still, that feels like potentially like 50 companies in this portfolio? That feels broader. Is that intentional? Is that how you think it will pencil out? Or do you think that concentration will build or you'll wind up taking more bets?

1:57:32Anvisha Pai:I'm betting 25 max.

1:57:35Billy Boman:Okay, let's hear it.

1:57:36Anvisha Pai:What do you think? Oh, man, I love it.

1:57:37Evan Loomis:Yeah, you nailed it. You're better. There we go. If I had a gong, I would hit it right now, buddy. Yeah, we're shooting for 25 portfolio companies. We keep about half the fund for reserve. So you guys know this probably better than anybody, But the winners kind of move fast day one. They tend to break out, and you want to make sure you hold enough for reserve for those.

1:58:00Benjamin Miller:Is the United States overmatched right now? What a great question.

1:58:07Anvisha Pai:In a way that's like not, you know, clearly we still have our exquisite systems and aircraft carriers, but it's hard to read into how the war is going. but it certainly hasn't felt like we're in a great spot, given this kind of mismatch in capabilities. And it feels like our adversaries have just been preparing for the last 20 years for a style of conflict with the United States, basically betting that we're going to continue to be one way and that how do we just counteract this threat in a sustainable way? And so far from what I'm seeing, it seems to be like it's been a good strategy. So not fun to say out loud, but it seems like the reality.

1:58:59Evan Loomis:Yeah, it's a great question. It's funny. Our name is The Intent. The goal is that America has overmatched capabilities strategically and technologically, which is the point. You know, we are definitely not overmatched by anybody at all. And I don't think we ever will be. But we're a little bit behind in some areas. I'll say that. and I think one of the things that makes our country so wonderful and is that we're like a free people that can do the impossible. Every technological revolution, historically, we've won. Think about it, like semiconductors, we invented it. Software, we got it. And we're kind of on the end of this software revolution and the next revolution is going to be denominated by artificial intelligence, advanced chips, certain defense and space-based capabilities, hypersonics, space offense, defense, robotics, autonomous systems.

2:00:02Evan Loomis:And so we're going to win. And the reason I'm so confident about that is I get to be on Zoom calls all day in meetings with founders that are actually architecting the future. So I feel really bullish, but I also feel behind. You know what I mean? Yeah.

2:00:20Anvisha Pai:And I'm not overly negative either. I mean, we talk with up to six founders a day, So I feel like we get to see the future where I'm like, OK, if we just let these teams cook for five to 10 years, we're going to have a lot more energy. We're going to have a lot more industrial power locally. We're going to have a lot more, you know, batteries made in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. You could just go down the line. But certainly, like, we got to get into gear and it just feels like we need that. One concern I have right now is that there's great talent out there that looks at a massive category that's not even monopolistic and thinks like, I shouldn't start a business in that category because this other company started like a year ago and they've already raised$100 million.

2:01:04Anvisha Pai:And I just think for some of these categories, we're going to want like a bunch of really talented teams.

2:01:09Billy Boman:Yeah, I have a question about that. Our venture capital wars, like startup capital wars, where there's two companies in a single category and then the VCs are just pouring money in, that's a textbook. Like, you're not getting the power of law winner necessarily. It's not great for the economic outcome. But is that good for America? Of course it's good.

2:01:31Evan Loomis:Yeah, this is great. This is part of, wow, there's the eagle. There we go. didn't know you guys had that one up your sleeve yeah yeah of course it's good and this is how competition works and this is why this is why we're gonna we're gonna win and i'm so bullish about that uh yeah because we don't typically pick winners there's always a battle between

2:01:53Billy Boman:a bunch of private enterprises and smart entrepreneurs that can go and innovate and the best product usually wins that's right yeah i love it i love it uh very cool yeah where are you

2:02:05Benjamin Miller:based by the way?

2:02:06Evan Loomis:I'm based in Austin, Texas. I moved back here about a decade ago to co-found a company called Icon where we 3D printed the first house in the United States in 2018, which was kind of my entree into venture, if you will. Venture was not on the cards at all ever in my life. And we had really good success with that business and it kind of pulled us really close to the national interest. We picked up major contracts with every branch of the military, the intelligence community, and even won the contract for the moon base. So as you guys know, we're going back to the moon as a country and as a species.

2:02:50Evan Loomis:And you can't bring two by four and drywall, unfortunately. So we're going to partner with them to make sure that we've got like a permanent civilization up there.

2:02:57Billy Boman:That's awesome.

2:02:59Anvisha Pai:So you're saying you're going to help make it a state? I like it.

2:03:04Billy Boman:Yeah, I mean, Texas is the greatest state in America, for sure. And I was talking about the moon. Well, the moon, I don't know. Maybe the Texans don't want the moon to be a state.

2:03:14Anvisha Pai:Well, maybe the moon could just be an extension of Texas. That'd be the new frontier.

2:03:19Billy Boman:For the county. We're going to make the moon a county.

2:03:20Evan Loomis:Yeah, if the Texans get there first, they might try to claim it their own. They might.

2:03:26Benjamin Miller:One-star state. But last question, what's that drone behind you?

2:03:31Billy Boman:That's a boring company flamethrower, right? Oh, man. It looks like a drone. That's a flamethrower. Is it working?

2:03:37Benjamin Miller:I don't know if you want to use it.

2:03:39Evan Loomis:I don't have the gas canister on it, mostly because I've got four little kids. Yeah, I can imagine. If they broke in here, it would be really, really bad for everybody. But I keep it back here. What a design.

2:03:52Billy Boman:That is such a good design. I love that thing. We've got to get one of those for the office.

2:03:56Evan Loomis:Yeah. You guys definitely need one for your office, too. Definitely. Definitely.

2:04:00Anvisha Pai:We'll work on it. Great to meet you, Evan. I'm really glad you're doing this. And I'm sure we'll talk to many of your upcoming portfolio companies.

2:04:09Billy Boman:Yeah, we're excited. Awesome. Good to be with you guys. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Find your wallet without exchanges or middlemen. And spend with the Phantom Card. And let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences of new value with Cisco. Up next, we have Moda. Moda, welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's going on? Good to meet you.

2:04:31Evan Loomis:Hi. I'm good. Thanks for having me on.

2:04:34Billy Boman:Thanks for joining.

2:04:35Anvisha Pai:Huge week for you. Yeah. Walk us through the company and the launch. Yes.

2:04:41Evan Loomis:Yes. I'm very sleep deprived right now, so I apologize for that. Yeah. So I'm Anvisha. I'm the founder and CEO of Moda. Moda is an AI design tool for non-designers. people use our AI design agent to create slides, social graphics, like all kinds of landing page mock-ups, everything. The difference between us and other stuff is we've created it on a fully editable canvas. So it's not giving you back like a static image that you can't edit. It's like truly drawing shapes. You can click and edit a text box. You can move things around, et cetera. We just announced our$7.5 million funding round led by General Catalyst.

2:05:24Benjamin Miller:General Catalyst and?

2:05:28Evan Loomis:Pear, the founder of Dropbox. I used to work at Dropbox, so that one's really special to me to have Arash on board.

2:05:35Anvisha Pai:Let's go. Let's go. Okay, so you came out with somewhat of a controversial launch. You're the anti-slop company, giving people control over their outputs. to take. Slop might come out, but then you can change it and adapt it, improve it. Yeah, talk about how the launch has gone. Why are you taking shots at the pigs of the trough?

2:05:56Billy Boman:Some of us like slop.

2:05:58Anvisha Pai:Yeah, some of us do.

2:06:00Evan Loomis:Slop is what you want. You can get it in Moda. You can get it wherever you want.

2:06:06Benjamin Miller:Thank you.

2:06:06Billy Boman:Thank you. The pro slop company. No, obviously makes a lot of sense, but take us through the thesis.

2:06:13Evan Loomis:Yeah, for sure. So, uh, the launch, um, this was unexpected. Like obviously, you know, we put a lot of effort into like putting together this video, this narrative, a shout out to shown media and helped us with the video and things like that. Um, the, um, the unexpected part was like the controversy around it, I guess. I mean, I did put a lot of effort into those like first two sentences. I think I spent like, you know, I don't know, many, many hours writing and rewriting them.

2:06:37Billy Boman:You baited him. Okay, remind everyone what the first two sentences were.

2:06:43Evan Loomis:The first two sentences were, we raised$7.5 million to kill AI slop. Introducing Moda, the world's first AI design agent with taste. Now, I know the world's first is like triggering to people because it's like, you know.

2:07:01Anvisha Pai:You're staking out your territory. Yeah, but it's fine. And yeah, I think part of that is like, I think generally right now, there's been so many companies in every category that people have launch fatigue. And for better or worse, even if something's like cool and a new approach, they will try to find some way to pick it apart. But yeah, I think what you're doing makes a lot of sense. How are you seeing the competitive landscape? You know, making slides and websites are things that basically every company, it seems like almost every company in the world is like converging on having a product to do something like this.

2:07:37Anvisha Pai:You guys are specializing in it. That'll give you some edge. But like, how do you see the space evolving?

2:07:44Evan Loomis:Yeah, so I'll say a few things. First of all, our launch had, I think, like 8 million impressions on Twitter, across my video, other content, LinkedIn. We had an absolute insane amount of signups. Like the market is saying that this problem is not solved yet, which was my thesis when we started this company. And to give a little bit of background about myself, I'm a second time founder. My previous company, Dover, was backed by Founders Fund and YC. And I've been through product market fit. I've scaled a company. When I went out to fundraise for Moda, I was met with a lot of skepticism. People were like, why are you starting another AI design thingy?

2:08:24Evan Loomis:And I think it really comes down to the details here. I don't want to get too much into talking about like competitors right now and like the landscape and like detail. But I will say that everyone is kind of taking this approach of like, let's go with the coding agents. Let's like Claude is really good at writing code. Right. Let's get Claude to like slop up a PowerPoint. Right. Like just like spit out some HTML. Looks like a PowerPoint. Let's go. Those PowerPoints all look the same. They all have like boxes and like, you know, and then you go and try to edit it. Right. And it's like you're stuck in this weird drag and drop kind of world.

2:08:57Evan Loomis:And you don't kind of have that control. So I think that the best AI tools are not the ones that help you save time. They have a place, right? So it's like a lot of AI tools have this pitch like, oh, you're a marketer. You can create a million ad creatives in like 30 seconds. Great, right? They all probably are slop. I think the best AI tools are the ones that let you do things that you never could have done before. and this is the magic of cloud code and things like that and we want to do that for design and I think in order to truly do that you truly need to actually have like this is a little bit technical but like an actual vector canvas where you can put something in one place exactly and move it to another place you can draw things, you can literally create anything in there, right?

2:09:38Evan Loomis:And so we took this very different approach where we built an agent that is not outputting HTML it's not outputting an image like Nano Banana or anything like that it took us like months to build this. They just didn't work for like, we tried like five different approaches, just like didn't work, didn't work, didn't work. Finally, it started working. And it's just very different from what anyone else is doing. And I think this is going to really unlock this kind of like next level of creativity for people, in my opinion, that's going to let them create stuff that they could never do before. So I'm very bullish.

2:10:10Evan Loomis:The people who have been signing up, it's kind of been it's been insane. Like the range is just like, there's like investment bankers, like McKinsey analysts signing up. And then there's like sheepskin farmers in New Zealand, like messaging me, like the craziest shit that they've like done with this product already. And so I'm like, okay, I think we're onto something. Um, and yeah, the competition is going to be fun. Yeah.

2:10:32Billy Boman:We talked to an AI director, Billy Bowman earlier today. And, uh, the, I mean, he was voicing over like the need for tools and like, he doesn't, that was his number one request. does not want to work in a text box. Yeah. And he's done like literal Super Bowl ads, using AI, leaning into AI, being very aggressive about it. Yeah, and the time-saving thing too,

2:10:53Anvisha Pai:he was like, yeah, our average project is like six weeks, something like that. So he's not trying to sell entirely on speeding up timelines. He's trying to sell on how do we do things

2:11:04Billy Boman:that were not possible with traditional shooting.

2:11:08Anvisha Pai:So very, very cool.

2:11:12Evan Loomis:Yeah. One interesting thing, just as like a side note, that might be, uh, it's like an interesting insight. Um, I've been getting so many support requests that I've just started sending people like a Google meet link. And I'm like, can you talk right now? I'm in this Google meet. So today, say it again.

2:11:26Billy Boman:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like an open window into whoever wants to talk. Yeah, it's great.

2:11:30Evan Loomis:It is an open window. Um, I talked to this guy today who's like, who works at this like firm in the UK and he set up this like insane Claude plus Moda thing, where he has these, like, his entire, like, job is, like, in all these claw.md skill files. And he has connected it to all these tools via MCP. And I was like, how did you even do this? Like, yeah, we have an MCP service, like, not even, like, really documented. Like, I don't know how you figured all this out. He did some crazy shit. I don't know how he did it. But I've been astounded by the amount of, like, businesses I've spoken to that are, like, we need your API, we need your MCP.

2:12:06Evan Loomis:Like, luckily, we have all that. but it's just like the way that products are getting used right now is completely different than anything I've ever seen. Everyone wants to chain together these things. They want this level of things talking to each other and automation. I've been building products for many years. For a consumer product like ours, I would never build an API on day one. But now I'm like, oh my God, our API needs to be one of the first party things that we do, basically. So that's been interesting as well.

2:12:35Anvisha Pai:Someone in the chat mentioned, I forgot about this, but Google just launched Stitch last week, which is so funny because the whole idea of Stitch is transform ideas into UI designs for mobile web applications. So it's so funny because 15 years ago, you would have been getting the question, maybe, what if Google does this? And then, of course, they come out with this. But as we've seen with, you know, I expect this market to evolve, like similar to CodeGen where, you know, massive market, tons of opportunities just focus. And, you know, you have an advantage being a nimble startup. How big is the team right now?

2:13:11Evan Loomis:We are five people, like a couple of friends that I've dragged into this helping me out right now. So we are hiring if anyone watching this wants a job. Yeah, no, it's been absolutely insane. I think that in some ways, like the the the hate is kind of interesting as well, because it's like I've been, you know, getting people like retweeting, being like, look at these like people like raising all this venture capital, like doing this. I'm like, you know, we're like a five person team. Like, you don't expect this. Like, we're just like, you've got to keep up right now. And yeah, but it's been really fun.

2:13:48Evan Loomis:And yeah, very excited to sort of see where we go from here.

2:13:51Anvisha Pai:Yeah. Ignore ignore the haters. keep shipping.

2:13:54Billy Boman:Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come. Yeah, it was great.

2:13:59Anvisha Pai:It's great to meet you. Yeah. And congrats on the big week. I'm sure you won't have much of a weekend with all the inbound, but good luck building. We'll talk to you soon.

2:14:09Billy Boman:Thank you. Have a good one. All right. See ya. Let me tell you about app loving, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. I love that sound cue. We don't have our next guest. He will be joining in just a few minutes. I'm just laughing about, obviously, I don't want to diminish a$7.5 million raise. That's a great amount of funding, but it's just so funny to imagine trying to redirect the people.

2:14:44Billy Boman:The type of people that are going to hate on a$7.5 million raise are not going to understand, like, well, no, no, no, look at Google's cashflow. Like they're drawing down tens of billions. Like you should be more focused on them, but they won't. I think that will fall on deaf ears. Well, in the billions is Josh Kushner's new fundraising for Thrive Holdings. They're in talks to raise two plus billion dollars. Is this the Thrive Capital offshoot? Tyler's happy about it.

2:15:10Anvisha Pai:They're saying he's one of the greatest capital raising athletes of all time.

2:15:14Billy Boman:Bringing AI to industries like accounting and IT.

2:15:16Anvisha Pai:I want to pull up this video from Northwestern University researchers developed modular robots using AI that can adapt to damage and navigate Unpredictable terrain is it a scary robot? Or is it like a nice friendly robot? You're not gonna like this robot.

2:15:31Billy Boman:I'm hoping for oh That is terrifying looking. What happened here? Let's get some sound. You gotta go back to the beginning This thing is so wild. Oh Well, I can't hear anything yet. Oh, they're hitting with a stick. Oh, no, you can't be doing that It can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain. Let's play. Let's play some of this video. Let's play more

2:15:53Anvisha Pai:This is only 56 seconds playing playing videos is a lost art form

2:16:00Billy Boman:Back and forth but apparently the leg breaks off and it keeps keeps crawling it keeps going. It's the Terminator. Yeah, the one that you've seen Let's see

2:16:13Anvisha Pai:It's crazy how terrible it looks. It's sending very strong negative signals to my brain.

2:16:22Billy Boman:Even just like painting it blue would probably be an upgrade.

2:16:27Faris Sbahi:I think this is better than when we saw the, I think it was Unitry get down on all fours and crawl around. That was terrible.

2:16:34Anvisha Pai:Yeah, but there's just something about those movements that tells my simple human mind to run.

2:16:41Billy Boman:Yeah, it spikes your cortisol. No. No? No. What else is your fear response?

2:16:47Anvisha Pai:I would never let anything spike my...

2:16:49Billy Boman:You said it stimulates your brain. Well, I've trained my cortisol response.

2:16:56Anvisha Pai:I've trained my mind to be able to...

2:16:59Billy Boman:Well, so has the Luxmaxing streamer, Clavicular, who has been arrested in Florida. He was caught in a TMZ mugshot, so that's important news for those who have been following his story. The video is crazy, and we'll see. It's always weird with these stories from the kick streamers, whether it's all a planted story, whether they got something to go viral and it's engineered, or they did it by accident. I don't know. but I'm sure that there will be more reporting. I believe Taylor Lorenz is on the case. NVIDIA-backed startup seeking to counter Chinese AI is a$25 billion valuation. This is from Reflection, Berber Jin writes in the Wall Street Journal.

2:17:44I wonder, I am so curious what their traction, progress looks like.

2:17:51Benjamin Miller:He's a$25 billion company.

2:17:52Billy Boman:He's running like a$4 trillion company. like can he squeeze the pennies out of the couch cushion? I think he can. No, it's not that. I'm just wondering. They partnered with NVIDIA to do open source.

2:18:04Anvisha Pai:This is a tremendous valuation for a company that I don't believe has released a product yet. So whatever they're cooking must be pretty darn good.

2:18:13Billy Boman:I'm rooting for American open source AI. Play that eagle sound. I'm happy about it. Good luck to the folks over at NVIDIA. Let's bring in Shield AI. Ryan, how are you doing? Doing well. How are you? We're great. It sounds like you're really, really great, though, because you have some big news for us. Tell us what happened.

2:18:33Faris Sbahi:We do have some big news. We just closed our latest financing, raised$2 billion at a$12.7 billion. Hit it again.

2:18:40Benjamin Miller:Hit it again. Hit it again. There we go. Two hits, one for each billion. There.

2:18:47Billy Boman:Wait, did you upsize the round I have on my sheet? 1.5 billion. It seems like the...

2:18:51Faris Sbahi:That is a preferred equity component. Okay. I guess technically you can call it 1.5 billion. And then as part of the round, also completed an acquisition. Really? You know, a company called Echelon Technologies, the leader in physics-based simulation for, you know, high-end aviation training. And something that's integral, I think, to the future of AI pilots and autonomy.

2:19:11Billy Boman:Yeah. So, I mean, with that acquisition, sort of reintroduce the shape of the company. Software, where are the integration points in the hardware? What do you build? What do you partner on? Who are you selling to? Is it all government? Is there some commercial? I imagine the business has grown. What's the shape right now?

2:19:28Faris Sbahi:Yeah, so we sell it to the United States and friends of the United States. It's all government, almost entirely military. If you're not familiar with the company, if your viewers aren't familiar with the company, we have two – the company is focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligence systems. You had my brother on here very early when he started. He's a Navy SEAL. We started the company together. The mission is very near and dear to us. The way that we get after the mission is twofold. Number one, building advanced aircraft. And number two, building AI pilots or advanced autonomy.

2:20:02Benjamin Miller:Yeah. What were you doing while he was serving? Were you on the startup path always?

2:20:10Faris Sbahi:Yeah, I was doing nerdy things, working at Qualcomm. I started a company that did wireless charging. I sold that company to Qualcomm. Cool. And then led the wireless charging efforts at Qualcomm. And then my brother was getting out of the SEAL teams and thinking about what he wanted to do next. And long story short, he came to me and said, I want to bring the best of what's going on in the autonomous driving sector to the mission of protecting service members and civilians. His mission was clearing buildings of threats. It was a mission type that had killed more service members and civilians than any other mission type in the preceding 20 or so years.

2:20:45Faris Sbahi:And he felt like if we could take the best of AI and autonomy, bring it to the mission of protecting service members and civilians, it would be a really impactful thing for the world. I thought it was an inspirational mission. I did think it was a stupid business. But my brother is a persistent person. And he showed me the line. And I'm glad that he did.

2:21:05Billy Boman:Yeah, take me through the state of autonomy in the flying vehicles that the military operates. Because there's so many different vehicles from helicopters to fighter jets to cargo planes. Then if I'm correct, the different branches have different versions of the same airframe sometimes. And so are you selling one piece of software to multiple branches of the military? Are there differences between what you're selling? Are you focused on a particular area within the different airframes that are in service right now? Like where's the biggest opportunity?

2:21:47Faris Sbahi:Good question. So the state of autonomy, I'll say like two components. Number one, from the market side, I think that everybody has reached a point where it's undeniable to the customer base that autonomy is one of the most important things for the future of security and stability. That wasn't the case 10 years ago, but I'd say kind of at this point, everybody's fully bought in on the need for the capability. With communications and GPS degraded, you need systems that are going to be able to see, think, and act at the edge, even if they can't reach back and communicate effectively with a pilot on the ground.

2:22:25Faris Sbahi:The state of the technology is moving incredibly fast. You can build very advanced capabilities. We see, I would say, very advanced autonomy deployed on the battlefield. Certainly, we have very advanced autonomy. What we haven't yet seen is very large-scale deployment of autonomous systems. And the focus of Shield AI when it comes to the software side is fast-forwarding the proliferation of advanced autonomous systems within the United States and friends of the United States to protect service members and civilians at scale. The hard thing about AI and autonomy when it comes to aviation and, frankly, any weapon system is sitting at the intersection of enabling very high performance, achieving very high levels of assurance, and supporting very fast development cycles.

2:23:17Faris Sbahi:Traditionally, in this business, it's been pick maybe one or, if you're lucky, two of those three things. You achieve high performance, but it took you a really long time. Or it might not be something that you can certify as airworthy or certify it in a weapon system because, you know, there's just too many things that could go wrong. Or you get a very high level of assurance, but it's just really stupid autonomy. And it took you a long time to build. So everything that Shield AI has focused on building is basically the industrialization of autonomy to fast forward the proliferation of autonomy by creating basically pipelines that enable developers and countries and companies to deliver high performance, high assurance autonomy at the speed of relevance.

2:23:59Billy Boman:I have a few sort of random scattershot questions to help me understand the state of autonomy in military equipment. Do tanks have lane keep assist? Does cruise control exist on a C-130? Is America taking a walk, crawl, run system, or are we going to jump straight into AI dogfighting? Because that feels like the Mount Everest of the autonomy challenge versus just like you're tired and your tank is rolling down the highway and you don't want to bump into the person in front of you.

2:24:35Faris Sbahi:Yeah, well, one of the amazing things about the U.S. military and militaries in general is the spectrum of capability that's in the inventory. There are literally planes that are 80 years old and still fly. And then you have stuff that's fresh off the line. So you have the full spectrum of stuff that has the equivalent of land keep assist to the stuff that is fully manual. A lot of the focus is on bringing advanced autonomy to the newest systems because that's sort of the easiest to cut in. And with the amount of technological change and the huge step up and volumes of systems being deployed in places around the world, there's just like ample opportunity to cut that software in as new things are coming off the line.

2:25:15Faris Sbahi:We are starting to see some interest in sort of backwards application of advanced autonomy to legacy systems because certainly things are around for a long time. And the more advanced autonomy you can apply kind of throughout your force structure, the more advantage you're going to have. And so certainly we see developments in that area as well.

2:25:34Billy Boman:Talk to me about how your progress tracks with the AI progress in the big labs that we see news from every day. Like the models of the big labs, the LLM companies are getting bigger. They're GPU constrained. They're data constrained. Is that is are the advances in the In the more like consumer focused coding focused AI labs Is that transferring and accelerating your progress either because you're reading research papers like Google put out one about Optimizing kv caches and I could imagine that applies to some companies the transformer paper might apply to your business or Or at least are you getting benefits from, yeah, we're able to use coding models to advance the software that we're writing at Shield AI?

2:26:25Faris Sbahi:The benefits are across the full stack, from development to deployed edge systems. The thing that we do is focus on enabling the intersection of high performance and high assurance at the same time. So with these models that are used throughout the consumer space and the amount of progress, you see very high levels of performance. You see very fast iteration speed. And then you have things like hallucinations that can, you know, can be counterproductive, which is OK if like you're writing, you know, an essay, make some stuff up. But if you're trying to disambiguate between blue force and red force and you're going to make, you know, consequential decisions, those things are tougher to deal with.

2:27:04Faris Sbahi:Or if it's going to result in your airplane flying into the dirt, tougher to deal with. And so we absolutely use those things and we bring it together with frameworks that impose very high levels of assurance. on the decision-making of the algorithms.

2:27:18Anvisha Pai:How are the various, like, Shahed systems, are they primarily, what do we know about them? Are they primarily remote-piloted? Are they using, is there any element that's actually autonomous, or are they just kind of picking a spot on the map and sending it off and kind of just saying, like, hopefully we hit our target, at least we'll create some chaos?

2:27:42Faris Sbahi:yeah yeah good good good question so typically those are gps guided munitions so they pick a spot on the map and um they send it and then it's got you know they can have some terminal guidance that helps it um you know like hit something of value um but terminal what is what is terminal terminal sorry terminal guidance is just to make sure that you know a weapon is tracking toward something of interest. And so if one of those drones goes into an area

2:28:12Anvisha Pai:where there's GPS jamming or denial, then it's just going to still do its best to hit the original target?

2:28:21Faris Sbahi:It depends on how sophisticated it is. I would say that heads by and large are GPS-guided munitions. But some munitions will have cameras so it doesn't fly into blank pavement. It might be able to see like a truck or something else that would look like a valid military target to just make small course corrections that enables like a weapon to hit that instead of an empty parking lot would be the type of corrections that can be made during terminal guidance as opposed to like the long transit portion of the mission. But those types of systems and the same challenge exists in the United States. If you're just picking targets off of maps without good intelligence and good updates and the ability to provide course corrections based on what you're seeing on the edge, you can end up wasting a lot of munitions with little effect.

2:29:18Anvisha Pai:uh what's been your reaction to the news out of barksdale louisiana i've seen a bunch of reporting this week around uh some unknown drones flying around the airbase uh i don't know how much you can share there but like this seems like something where an opportunity to assess some enemy's capability, but it feels like there's drones or like the thing I've been processing is like, it's, it seems like, you know, historically, if you built like an exquisite system, like an F 35 and you have a pilot in it, you can't exactly go and test it in, in an environment, in an enemy environment very easily because you'll, you know, risk starting a conflict or losing the plane, all these different things.

2:30:08Anvisha Pai:Whereas with inexpensive drones, like why would an adversary not just send them out around the world to start testing their capabilities in like a live setting? Because worst case scenario, you lose the asset, but you know, it's not super consequential when you look at these overall budgets. So. Yeah.

2:30:27Faris Sbahi:Well, good question. One, I'm actually not tracking the latest news in Louisiana. I'll go look it up right after the fact. But I can tell you counter UAS is a major problem for governments globally. These things can be hard to deal with, and if you engage them kinetically, the question of collateral damage becomes one that is an important consideration. The small drones that can harass military bases, yes, they're like, you know, other countries can do the same with their largest pieces of hardware, and that's why you see the Chinese running major military exercises around Taiwan. You know, they could stick to quadcopters, but they choose to use the full spectrum of their capabilities to intimidate and shape the environment.

2:31:15Faris Sbahi:But you did call out something that I think is also very important, which it can be hard to fly your capabilities around and understand their true potential. When you think about some of the security challenges in the Pacific, the distances are so vast. And then if you look at the range space in America, it's relatively confined. find. And so how do you rehearse and think through some of the problem sets when your range space is way smaller than the theater? And that's where capabilities like Echelon, the simulation environment, come into play.

2:31:43Anvisha Pai:That's your new acquisition.

2:31:45Faris Sbahi:That's the new acquisition. And so there's a program called the Joint Simulation Environment that started to get after the problem of we can't rehearse the way that we used to because the domains are so large. And once people had this realization, they're like, great, well, maybe we'll try a simulation. And what they found in simulation is that there was stove piping across vendors. Every vendor had their own simulation. Every vehicle platform had its own simulator. And then if you were in space or on the sea or in the air, you had a different simulator. And then, by the way, across countries, you had different simulation systems.

2:32:21Faris Sbahi:And so Echelon became the leader in the joint simulation environment, which is one of the reasons we're so excited about it, because it is the only multinational, multi-domain, multi-vendor, and there's one more multi in there, in the world. And it creates this unbelievable foundation to enable not just what it does today, which is training and rehearsal against high-end threats and complex scenarios, but it creates the opportunity to introduce, well, what do autonomous systems do in that same sort of environment? So the things like collaborative combat aircraft or advanced weapons, those things get pulled into the environment and now you can see well this is how humans and ai are able to work together in these scenarios to inform the designs of those things and if you continue to play that forward and you see you know it's my belief that in every vertical whether it's a and d medicine like pick pick your thing um vertical leaders will show up when they figure out how to close the feedback loops between you know the data aggregation and generation through training, through deployment, and close that loop in their domain.

2:33:27Faris Sbahi:And one of the things we're very excited to do with Echelon and Shield AI together, we're the leader in AI pilots. You might have seen the United States Air Force announcement that Shield is one of the two companies selected to build AI pilots with a collaborative combat aircraft. And so we have some great work on that front. And now by taking the simulation leader across services and domains, means we can start substantially scaling that simulation environment, augmenting all of the real world data and start closing that loop to build extremely high performance AI pilots that we're able to test against the authoritative threat models with the authoritative Blue Force models and also train US and allied forces to fight effectively with those AI pilots.

2:34:21Faris Sbahi:pilots as part of their formation. So we're very excited about it in the short term and on a decadal basis.

2:34:27Billy Boman:Decadal basis. I like that term. Yeah, thinking in decades, literally. I've never heard that before.

2:34:33Anvisha Pai:What does the interface of Echelon look like? Is this like, am I thinking like flight simulator type of thing or is it more, you know, you're just kind of running a simulation and seeing it?

2:34:47Faris Sbahi:Yeah, so you can think Think of it, a very simple view, like a flight simulator. But, you know, with a proper, if you've seen like a flight simulation dome.

2:34:58Anvisha Pai:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:34:59Faris Sbahi:Very realistic physics, very realistic sensor models to include radar, night vision, EOIR, or regular light cameras, appropriate physics, appropriate red forces with like not just like video game style, but these are the actual capabilities across the electromagnetic and visible spectrum that really enables very advanced training and understanding of performance.

2:35:29Anvisha Pai:Fascinating.

2:35:30Billy Boman:Well, thank you so much for taking the time on a busy launch day. Congrats on the progress, and have a great rest of you.

2:35:35Anvisha Pai:I'm really glad you guys are building this company.

2:35:38Billy Boman:Yeah, this feels extremely important.

2:35:38Faris Sbahi:Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. Love the gong, by the way, and thanks to the two gong strikes. Of course, of course.

2:35:45Billy Boman:It's massive progress. Great to have you on, Ryan. We're glad and thankful for everything that you're doing with the rest of the team. So thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context in beta starting today. Go check it out.

2:36:07Anvisha Pai:Bill Ackman is saying he's likely down 20 % year to date now. He was, I believe, took a big position in meta not too long ago. Yeah, he had some contrarian takes.

2:36:19Billy Boman:I don't know. It might pencil out. I don't know.

2:36:21Anvisha Pai:Yeah, I think it's still, I'm still like, it'd be silly to be bearish on meta over the long run. But certainly.

2:36:30Billy Boman:Buko Capital bloke gave some more context on what's happening in the market. He said, the market is just a guy staring at two screens. One has Truth Social. The other is Anthropik's blog. In front of him are five buttons that say software, semis, European defense, energy, and gold. Trump or Anthropic post, and he hits a button to make those stocks move 5 % up or 5 % down. It does feel like that's the nature of the market these days. Signal had a funny screenshot here. Someone built or assumingly vibe-coded an app that turns any TV into a retro flip-flap, split-flap display. These are very cool.

2:37:09Billy Boman:You've seen these, they flip around. You see them in old airport terminals for when the flights are leaving. Wayne chimes in and says, I'm very likely going to build this with Claude Code this afternoon and post a link to a free download to this thread. Because this is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that someone should pay$199 for something that probably took about 18 minutes to make. And Yash, the creator, says, I will look for your post. And exactly one minute later, open source my tool to render your efforts a total waste. Try me. And so there's a little bit of a standoff in the vibe coding world.

2:37:50Billy Boman:I thought that was very, very funny. Is there anything else you want to cover? Lastly, some texts from Q1 of last year.

2:37:58Benjamin Miller:Mark Zuckerberg texts Elon.

2:38:00Anvisha Pai:Looks like Doge is making progress. I've got our teams on alert to take down content doxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. Elon reacted heart.

2:38:10Benjamin Miller:And he says, are you open to the idea of bidding on the open AI IP with me and some others? Zach says, want to discuss live?

2:38:17Billy Boman:Oh, interesting.

2:38:19Anvisha Pai:And Matthew Zeitlin, former guest, says you can tell who is used to antitrust investigations.

2:38:30Billy Boman:Well, stay safe out there. If you're planning on bidding for some IP and you're chatting with the richest man in the world, yeah, maybe stick to a phone call. Who knows? Well, good luck out there.

2:38:43Benjamin Miller:It will be an interesting weekend of news.

2:38:45Billy Boman:The markets are now closed, which means we can go to the beach.

2:38:54Anvisha Pai:Well, I was going to say it means that you want to be refreshing Truth Social. Yes. You want to stay up to date.

2:38:59Billy Boman:And it's red. We closed way down. the S &P closed down 1.67.

2:39:05Benjamin Miller:Good opportunity to touch grass. Yes.

2:39:08Anvisha Pai:But next Monday, we've got Take Him, Logan Bartlett. We got Cody Ko joining. We got Cody Ko going back-to-back with Brett Adcock. Let's go.

2:39:19Benjamin Miller:Never before on a podcast have we had Cody Ko and Brett Adcock back-to-back.

2:39:25Billy Boman:This is uncharted territory. I'm very excited. I've been a huge fan of Cody Ko for a long time. I watched a ton of his YouTube videos. Yeah. It will be very fun. Anyways, we hope you have the best weekend of your life. We will see you Monday. We love you. Bye. Flashbang!