I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Overnight success. The base of 3000. Double right away. There's misinformation. Clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come get up. Trust the experts here. Five. We are founder. Vood. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online. Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Fight.
Cup is W. Team deathmatch. We are expert. Triple blade. Let's just roll. Right. Clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. Marky, clearing order inbound. Five. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Oops.
Let me tell you about Figma.
I pushed the Figma button.
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You're watching TVPN. That's a happy.
Today is Thursday, June 11th, 2026. We're live from the TVP Ultron, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me also tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Got to adjust my microphone over here. Well, Bezos is getting very serious about the AI game. $12 billion raised for Prometheus. It's just been six months since he emerged from stealth with $6.2 billion in funding. The industrial AI startup, as they're calling it, raised another $12 billion in Series B. It's just a thousand times bigger than a normal Series A and a Series B. You used to go from $6 million Series A, $12 million Series B. Now it's $6 billion Series A, $12 billion Series B. Serious dollars, but AI is expensive. The valuation: $41 billion. Back in November, there was very little disclosed about Prometheus. We wrote about it a little. There was some speculation on the timeline.
41 billion. Bigger than—what's a $40 billion company.
And this is a business that is buying existing companies.
What—that's the thing. We don't really know. We don't really know. But it's a lot of money. Could be buying companies and trying to transform them around 30B to 40B. Well, being able to raise that much capital to buy businesses with that little dilution is a pretty remarkable feat that pretty much only Jeff Bezos could pull off. Yeah. So the Wall Street Journal has some more details and mostly it just takes you a little bit more inside the mind of Jeff Bezos and where he's thinking, like how he's thinking about the shape of the AI impact. The headline is very clear: 'Bezos bats down AI job loss fears while launching new venture.' New startup Prometheus seeks to build an artificial general engineer. AGI is the new buzzword. You thought we were running out of them. We got AI, AGI, ASI, RSI.
AI FD, personal super intelligence, meta super intelligence, TBD, continual learning, standard intelligence, irregular intelligence, standard ineffable intelligence, the irregular intelligent, the regular super intelligence company of the dog patch, the dog.
Something like that. But artificial general engineer is the new phrase, the new term. And he wants it to be able to design and manufacture complex physical products. So Jeff Bezos expects artificial intelligence to create a labor shortage in the economy.
Interesting. There's some correlation between like liquid net worth and your projection optimism, employment, right?
Yeah. So he expects a labor shortage, rejecting fears that fast-evolving technology will put humans out of work as he launches a new venture aimed at making engineers more productive. The billionaire founder of Amazon.com and don't forget Blue Origin is co-leading a new AI business called Prometheus, which plans to build an artificial general engineer that can design and manufacture complex physical products such as a jet engine. And we just saw some cool demos. I saw people vibe coding a Boeing 747. Obviously, it's just the outside. It's modeling it. It can pull different reference points from CAD files on the internet. But lots of cool demos, many powered by Fable 5. I've seen some GPT-5 stuff as well where people try and go and see the classic like pelican on a bicycle in SVG. Well, you can see how you can draw a line from pelican on a bicycle in SVG to a functional jet engine in CAD that then we can actually go manufacture with step-by-step instructions for each part. Not that far away, certainly on the trend path, and that's what he's investing against.
He said in an interview that the company's goal is to quote 'empower engineers and make innovation easier and faster so smaller teams can do much bigger things on much shorter time cycles.' That'd be good. It takes forever to build a jet engine. It takes forever to build a plane. We've talked to multiple founders that have been trying to build new plane designs for decades and haven't really been able to scale them up. Although they've made incredible gains in traction and demos, actually getting new planes on the runway safely approved has taken far too long. If AI speeds it up by 10%, that's like years. It's crazy.
The Amazon and Blue Origin co-founder joins a group of longtime technology leaders that have jumped into the AI fray. You got Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev, also Brian Chesky over at Airbnb. These folks are all building new companies around the AI boom, among others. Prometheus, which said it is valued at about $41 billion, has raised $12 billion from investors including Bezos, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock. Went straight to the big banks.
Yeah. Like the VCs are just like, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, there's another world where doing six on $40 billion is just like your IPO.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, that is IPO numbers.
That's—yeah, that's a crazy amount of money. Yeah, you got to go to the banks for this. They've hired 150 people across San Francisco, London, and Zurich. Interesting. Despite Silicon Valley's enthusiasm for AI's promise, the broader population has become very wary, fearing widespread job losses. 'Some of the pessimism about AI among young people is the opposite of reality,' Bezos said. And we've been seeing this in the jobs numbers. Like the economy is running hot, inflation is high, but also unemployment is very low, lower than expected. We're adding a lot of jobs. 'AI will mean fewer workers are needed in jobs that exist today, but it will also create far more opportunities and increase productivity,' he said. That's a very white-pilling statement. We'll see how it plays out.
Bezos argued that if AI makes it cheaper, faster, and easier to invent things, employment will ultimately rise because even though you're shrinking the number of people needed by 10x, the technology will create more than 10x as many opportunities. And you certainly saw that with Amazon. The number of store workers in physical retail stores probably shrunk, but the number of entrepreneurs building products, selling them on Amazon in and around the Amazon ecosystem, not just in the warehouse but in the broader Amazon ecosystem, probably increased.
And we certainly saw that in the broad job numbers in the United States. Like the labor market has grown unequivocally since 1999. We've added jobs all over the place as people have shifted around. There are going to be two-earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool because there's going to be so much productivity.
He said that's an interesting take. He's saying that there's going to be so much more productivity that some people will choose not to work, and of course that won't necessarily show up in the unemployment rate because the unemployment rate only measures people that are actively looking for jobs. So you could have a world where the workforce is shrinking in terms of the number of people that have typical jobs is declining but the unemployment rate is also very low because you have more single-earner households, one person working making more than enough money to support the whole family. Sort of an older-school mindset, back to the maybe apocryphal stories about the mid-20th century, but certainly an optimistic view nonetheless.
Yeah, it's notable. NEET levels have been rising since 2021. Not employed, in education or training. Not in employment. So that trend started well before the current AI paradigm. But wouldn't be surprised if it continues, hopefully for the reasons that Bezos is talking about.
I think there's going to be a lot of focus on his summer plans. John, I think there's going to be more scrutiny than ever. You know, this is a guy that can hardly jet around the Mediterranean on a big boat without being photographed every single day. And this was prior to these back-to-back, you know, multi-billion-dollar rounds. And so going into the summer, I think people are going to be paying extra attention, right? Is he doing back-to-back days at the beach club or is he keeping it to a four-hour window on Saturday, locking back in by Saturday night, getting a good night's sleep, spending his Sunday, you know, preparing for the coming week, right?
He does have a co-CEO. Maybe they've split it up. Most people would think co-CEO is like they're both involved in every decision. Maybe it's more of like he takes the winter and fall quarters and the other co-CEO takes the summer and spring. Like if you divide it up that way. No one's ever tried that with a co-CEO. Just like you run the company for six months, then I run the company for six months and you're completely off on vacation. Maybe.
Yeah. Yeah. The alternative is, you know, Bezos would say like Friday from 7:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. on Saturday, I'm not going to be super available, super online. And then also from 2:00 a.m. till around 11:00 a.m., I'll be fully fully offline. Okay. Then there's about a one-hour window on Saturday where you can take like a lunch break, do whatever you need to do, but then from 1:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. Sunday, I'm going to be offline again.
Maybe if you're co-CEO you should just do—I'm CEO of TVPN on the odd hours and you're on the even hours.
And so if there's a big—is that the secret to non-stop productivity? Interlace them, interlace them. Yeah. So oh, it's 3:00 a.m., call Jordi. Oh, it's 4:00 a.m., call John. Co-CEO is working out.
Bezos is the co-CEO of the new company along with Vic Baj, a Google veteran and former healthcare founder and investor. They started Prometheus in late 2024. So people have sort of pegged this as like an overnight success in the cycle. It's like, oh, it's 2026 and they're jumping in. They've been working on this for two full years. And obviously Jeff Bezos has an incredible amount of AI and robotics experience both in the recommender systems at Amazon and Kiva Robotics, which is probably like the—you could make the argument that it's like the Instagram of the robotics boom. It's like one of the most successful acquisitions. We're talking to the founder of a robotics company at 11:45 today. So his co-CEO is an adjunct professor at Stanford School of Medicine who previously co-founded Google's life sciences division. No big deal. That's a huge accomplishment. And the company's goal is to build AI systems that can assist throughout the entire engineering process. That ranges from designing products and predicting their performance to manufacturing them. We're trying to approach that problem end to end.
They also held talks—this was the big one—they held talks to raise a $100 billion fund, which is a lot of money. We'll talk about SpaceX in a bit, but SpaceX is looking for $70 billion and it's a huge business with so much attention. This is an entirely new thing and they want to put $100 billion to work. But of course, Bezos has plenty of money to backstop it, anchor it, do whatever he needs, and he has massive connections. So the Wall Street Journal reported this and they said the goal was with that fund to acquire manufacturing businesses and deploy AI across their operations. Remember, we did that whole list of like what could they actually buy for $100 billion? What would be a good buy? And there were some very interesting—you could buy like Goodyear, for example, and work on tire manufacturing. And I think I was wrong in all my predictions, but it was an interesting exercise to just take a little tour of American manufacturing. My read on it is some combination of like a foundation model that allows you to generate full products—basically product specs, designs, etc.—to high fidelity.
And then something like a SendCutSend-style infrastructure where you can just make that product on the fly and get it delivered.
Yeah. And that is the moment we're in right now where on your computer you can make at least an image of anything you want in the entire world, but then there hasn't been that much of a speedup on the other side, right? And so closing the loop there is going to be very, very cool.
Wow. This company Prometheus is bigger than AIG, the insurance company. Bigger than Chipotle. Bigger than CBRE, the real estate.
Are you on companiescap.com, John?
I'm not at—bigger than BYU. Wow. That is—that is crazy.
John, do you think that they're going to be punished for their hubris and chained for eternity? With the—
The nominative determinism of Prometheus is sort of crazy, right?
But chained up for eternity. Eagle comes and eats his liver every day.
Isn't Prometheus like the third time an AI company has done this? Because there was the Prometheus data center at Meta and then—
There was a company called Icarus too.
Icarus. Yeah, I got in trouble for that one because I was talking to a New Yorker reporter about that and sort of overstepped a little bit because I was like, they have a great team. I'm rooting for them.
So I think we need another company named Hercules, right? Because Hercules saves Prometheus. He frees him from the chains.
Okay. A company called Hercules. That's a good company name. I like that one.
But yeah, so if raised, it would be the latest in a series of investors buying established companies and using AI to improve productivity and margins. We've seen a couple of these funds roll out, the AI rollups, AI modernization, private equity firms—obviously private equity firms themselves are doing this. But no one's come in with $100 billion. You're in a completely different tier from all the other companies that are doing this. We've had many of them on the show. AI's advances have paved the way for a 'multitude of golden ages, not just one, happening simultaneously,' Bezos said. He said this is the best time to start a company. I love the optimism.
Crazy. You can buy MicroStrategy and Prometheus are roughly the same value—the same as well as—
MicroStrategy is in sort of a rough spot, right? Isn't Bitcoin down? No, it's good—it's an interesting bet, right? What do you want to buy? What do you want to own at $41 billion?
Yeah. MicroStrategy is at $42 technically.
Yeah, you could buy Reddit. That's $33 billion. Anyway, the next story we got to talk about is gamers are rising up. Gamers are rising up. You heard that the government was trying to put gyms in airports. Well, the gamers had something to say. They're pushing back. Airport lounges are catering to gamers. Airport lounges where video games are more important than drinks. Travelers can kill time, play everything from Mario Kart to Minecraft before their flight. We got to do this. Get a little Rust going next time we're flying. Let's do it. The first thing David Yang noticed—
Before we dive into this. Has TSA gotten like better, more consistent?
I have a hot take on this. I think TSA might be goated. I think they're pretty dialed. Amazing. I think it's good. Out of the last maybe 30 flights,
I have not waited more than 30 minutes in a security line.
And that makes—like commercial obviously is still a torture, humiliation ritual. But that being said, being able to plan on a 30-minute security line makes commercial travel pretty—I mean, it was the butt of every comedian's joke because it's so universal. Everyone's been through TSA. It's very slow. Take your shoes off. There's a million little places for comedy gold that's highly related.
You don't have to take your shoes off. Don't have to even take your laptop out.
No, it's getting better. And there's—I mean, I guess it's getting more surveillance because they take a photo of you like 17 times on the way through.
You can refuse that though.
Nick does that. You can just say no.
But then don't they—about—I would say about two years ago they would tell you more frequently like it's optional. Now they're just like, photo, now, and you can read the text and it says like you can opt out.
Okay. Can you opt out of the whole thing? Is it all just like a high-agency test? You can just be like, 'Actually, I just want to go around. I don't even want to go through the metal detector.' And they're like, 'Yeah, right this way, sir.' No one's ever thought to break out of the matrix, but you reached the final level. You reached base reality. Good job. Continue.
No, but truly being able to plan on it's going to take me like 30 minutes to get through. You can comfortably show up 45 minutes before your flight. Reliable. Every time. Which means that you're pushing it even more to the—often times I will be getting through security.
Yeah. Yeah. And John will text and be like, 'Just got in my car. I'll be there. I'll be parking in 45 minutes.' And I'm like, I thought I was cutting it a little bit close. But mandate of heaven, you always make it.
I always make it. And if you're not missing flights at least like 10% of the time, you're not cutting it close enough. Like you have to be taking some level of risk or else you're just wasting time.
No, because often—if you went to an investor and you were like your goal is to never invest in a company that goes down—oh, you're a VC—but if you get a single zero in your portfolio, you can never invest ever again. Would you do that? No way. No way.
I'm not engaging. No way.
So you're going to have some zeros in your portfolio. You're going to miss some flights, but on average your DPI is going to be quite good.
No, but comparing—yeah, yeah. Comparing that. I can just have as much fun at the airport. So, I don't mind showing up five hours early.
No, no, but okay. If you miss your flight and then the next flight is like three hours—then it doesn't math out because like if you just get to your flight 10 minutes, like a little bit earlier, then it'll match. Like I think it makes sense.
So basically like let's say I fly once a week and I save an hour with my strategy. That's 50 hours a year and I only miss one flight. I saved three hours.
And you're not saving the time.
You were probably at your—just like having another coffee at the hotel and or like doing something, having a conversation that you could just have.
No, I was literally—before I go to the airport, I am literally locked in at the clock factory. Okay. I'm locked in at the clock factory. I'm being the most productive I've ever been and making clocks. I'm making clocks clock by clock and you think that that time's useless.
Well, okay. Now you can be gaming at the airport. You should be getting there early.
I should get there. If I want a Prestige on COD, I should get there maybe like 72 hours.
Yeah. John, you're just like, 'Yeah, I got to get up at 2 a.m. this morning. Like I got a super early flight.' They're like, 'Oh, what time is your flight?' 11 a.m. Like, yeah. Oh, is this a coincidence GTA 6 dropped and you're going to the airport 10 hours early?
Well, now you can because airport lounges are starting to cater to gamers. Gamers are the most important constituency. We're going to have a gamer president one day. So the first thing that David Lee and Cassie Yang noticed when they popped into the new lounge in Terminal One at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Friday wasn't a robot bartender, which they have apparently. I believe Ben will be traveling through Minneapolis-St. Paul. We should give him a little gaming challenge. See if he can get to Prestige on COD before he hits his flight.
It was something only parents in this digital device era could appreciate. Unfettered access to their phones. Their kids, eight and 12, were busy playing Mario Kart and Crash Bandicoot at the lounge's video game stations to commandeer their phones for some pre-flight screen time. The Portal Lounge is by design not your grandfather's airport lounge. Yes, there is a small buffet and bartenders, robot and real, that pour that lounge libation staple, an old-fashioned, but the focus is on entertainment—their gaming. It's the latest concept from a husband and wife team on a mission to amp up airport downtime. Emma and Jordan Wallbridge, with backgrounds in hotels and medical device sales respectively, opened their first airport video game lounge at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in 2018 called Gameway. There are now 11 of them at airports across the country and two more due to open this year. Portal in Minneapolis is the latest iteration of a concept with a few more bells and whistles. They zeroed in on video games after regularly visiting lounges on business trips and finding them too staid. 'I always felt like I was in a library,' Emma says, with some guests shushing others and throwing—
This picture makes me feel like I'm a television screen.
What do you mean? Oh, because they're looking at you like you're—
You're the game. Yeah. Interesting. She's played Mario Kart for years. Jordan has played Halo, which is getting a refresh soon with Campaign Evolved. I think this is going to be more successful than the whole airport gyms movement.
Like every once in a while somebody will post online, 'Why don't airports have gyms?'
There's been a few moments where it would have been nice to have a gym, but imagine a world where even just 5% of your flight had just gotten off of an hour on the treadmill. Pretty heavy. Some heavy breathing going on. Golf simulators in airports. I've done that before.
Yeah, you've actually done that. You've actually played simulated golf. Interesting. Racer Martin. What a crazy name for a 19-year-old chef from Arizona. R-A-Y-C. That's a cool name. Racer. He plays Apex Legends at the Gameway Lounge at Chicago's Midway Airport. I plunked down at the gaming station and embarrassed myself playing Mario Kart over a lunch of Diet Coke and Ruffles cheddar and sour cream chips. The patient Gameway manager who used to work at GameStop assured me that it just takes practice and encouraged me to play at home. Another employee did her best to introduce me to Minecraft even though I gave up after five minutes. This Wall Street Journal reporter is clearly learning the ropes of these games. Video gaming is the main attraction at the much bigger Portal Lounge in Minneapolis, which opened over Memorial Day weekend in the D concourse, but it's just one attraction. The food is more lounge-like with build-your-own bowls, slop bowls, buffalo cauliflower salad, a couple desserts. Adding to the futuristic feel, a robot bartender takes the center stage pouring drinks. It's from the same company as the makers of the Bionic Bar on some Royal Caribbean ships. At almost 4,000 square feet, Portal isn't on par with, say, an American Express Centurion Lounge. It's more like one of those smaller Escape Lounges. RC Cola is on tap. There's music, outlets galore, and plenty of seating, but no dedicated bathroom. The gaming lounge is in the back and bright. Gameway. Anyway, you can go check it out.
If we let John keep going here, he would just talk about airport gaming lounges.
No, no, I would talk about Railway because Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers and databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of—
I would like a Railway lounge in every airport.
You joke, but a vibe-coding lounge is coming. Like these gaming PCs, they can do local inference. You can fire up your agents. You can be doing all sorts of stuff.
I like it. I'm surprised. Yeah, I wonder what the cybersecurity stack is like there. It's got to be sort of tricky to have someone, you know, give them free access to a pretty powerful PC. They're going to install some weird stuff.
Unfortunately, the lovable airport lounge is coming. It's like have five minutes,
Build the next hit app. Yes. Yes. Well, I think the next hit app might be Halo Campaign Evolved. Let's watch this video from Blue Thunder. What do you think? Are you a Halo guy? Do you ever play Halo?
Never played Halo. Never captured my heart, but I never got into the whole hardcore multiplayer scenario. But it does look good, doesn't it? Like fully refreshed? Looks very modern. AAA. Blue Thunder says this is what they made—not the best FPS game he's ever seen.
What if they made an airport-sized lounge, sort of like a facility just for 1v1ing on Rust? You could potentially get, you know, 100,000 people all in the same place, LAN party matched up.
That'd be great. Yeah. This could have been a one-shot output of an LLM. And yeah, when I saw this, I wasn't sure if it was AI video or vibe-coded version of Halo. Did you see that thing where someone was trying to build GTA 6, like vibe-code GTA 6? You saw this? It's such a funny demo. I mean, you don't want to hate on it because like the tools are very powerful and you do imagine that over time you'll be able to. But the first effort video was very funny because—
We got an X Halo 3 Pro in the chat. Alex says, 'We'll be a conservative pickup of nostalgic non-PvP gamers. Don't expect it to do numbers.'
Interesting. X Halo 3 Pro. What was that like?
Interesting. Yeah. Day one of building GTA 6. Still feels fake. Time typing that out loud. Upgraded to Claude Pro Max 20x just for this. Spent a couple hours getting the whole project structured and pushed to the repo. Sandbox is up and running. I mean, this is actually where you'd start. Like it's not that unreasonable, but it's funny because it doesn't look anything like any GTA game.
Wait, what? You haven't seen this? You haven't seen this?
So, Matt Schumer, former guest of the show and creator of the viral essay Something Big is Coming, where he predicted that AI would cause 10% unemployment by April and likened it to COVID.
Wait, that was his prediction?
Yeah, he said that it was going to be like a COVID-like takeoff in the economy. He didn't map the economic numbers directly, but we did. We were like, 'Okay, what was COVID actually like in 2020?' And we went from February, which is when he wrote his essay, February 2026, saying AI is real, it's going to change things, it's big—which a lot of people have been saying for a long time. And I was like, I agree, but I don't think in April, May, like the NBA is going to be shutting down because of AI, or I don't think that the unemployment rate is going to spike to 10% overnight. Like there might be little pockets of layoffs related to AI and there might be some—
And if anybody wanted to make AI less popular, shutting down the NBA finals because of how good the models have gotten—
All the NBA players are like, we got to invest, we don't have—
Not even invest, they got to invest their time.
Oh, they got to vibe in the tool. Yeah, maybe they don't want to get left behind. You know, I don't think they'll be left behind, but Matt Schumer said someone should set up a community-funded Fable run with a prompt like 'loop until you've created a GTA 6-caliber open-world game with a quality and scope surpassing what is shown in the initial trailers.' And he says, happy to write the prompt if someone organizes this, which some people were making fun of, but it started—Zwen is doing this. He's 25. He likes Claude and Codex, tech, AI, startups. I'm rooting for this. I think this is going to be very educational for Zwen, although yes, this video is very funny because it doesn't look like GTA yet.
But, you know, if you can get to anything that's at all playable or interesting, even in a month, even in a year, take as long as you want, if you can do it, and if you can get, you know, a million people to pay 10 bucks for this and it only cost you five million in inference and you did it as a solo dev, like that's a $5 million profit. Like that's a great outcome. Like I love indie devs. I love that world. And I like that these tools are opening up more opportunity for people to go mess around and build cool things. It's got to be really entertaining to just think about building like a vibe-coded game. Some of the games look really good already. Of course, like even if you—
Strauss is going to be pretty worried.
Did you hear him talking? Prime had a good reaction video to David Sen talking to Strauss Zelnick and he's like, 'Finally, like a normal AI CEO,' because he basically says like we have a mobile games division, we make billions of dollars from it, we make a lot of money from mobile games and—
And there are direct clones of our games that launch every day. Like the software has been good enough that you can clone our games. They launch every day. The business is much more complicated than that. The IP matters. The distribution matters. The functionality of the game matters. There's so much more to it than just a carbon copy. So, he says, 'Yes, you could just go vibe-code GTA 6. People are still going to play our game because of all the other strengths of the Take-Two business.' And I agree. I thought it was a very good take. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Some big IPOs happening this week, next week. It is IPO season.
But it's also trucking season. The four-year US trucking slump is officially over, says the Wall Street Journal. It's over at last. Truckers who held on through almost four years of slumping freight rates finally have something to celebrate. 'It feels like a breath of fresh air for an industry that maybe felt like they were running out of air,' said Webb Estes, president and chief operating officer of Estes Express Lines, a Richmond, Virginia-based carrier with revenue of about $6 billion. Freight rates are finally climbing. Good news for them. Trucking executives are calling an end to one of the longest freight downturns in carriers' memory. They say rates have risen to more sustainable levels after a period of low earnings coupled with Trump administration crackdowns on immigrant drivers pushed many carriers out of the market. The Logistics Managers Index, a monthly survey of supply chain managers, showed transportation prices increased in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's 10-year history. So if you scroll down, yeah, that chart is crazy. So good news for the truckers. Of course, this is going to push up prices and inflation potentially, but it is good to have a healthy trucking industry, a healthy dry van spot rate, which I'm sure you've been following intently. Dry van spot rates for the week of June were up 5,200 basis points.
52% year-over-year, excluding fuel surcharges, according to a report. So the fuel prices get passed through, but the economy is doing well and so prices for dry van spot rates are increasing. As he said, because of the stronger freight market over the last few months, the nationwide company is increasing its fleet of more than 10,500 trucks and expanding its pool of about 11,000 drivers.
This has been a supply-driven freight recovery as opposed to a demand-driven freight recovery. The turnaround comes after four years in which carriers have been squeezed by a combination of too many trucks on the road and not enough loads. Drivers rushed into the industry during the pandemic. So there was a boom in online ordering, shipping, all the different things that happened during COVID. Consumer demand drove freight rates to record highs. Rates plummeted in 2022, forcing hundreds of thousands of smaller carriers out of business. Many truckers held on, even as costs for drivers, equipment, and insurance rose. The exodus accelerated over the past year. And trucking specialists say the industry has finally found an equilibrium where the supply of trucks is low enough to lift rates, which will of course bring more trucks into the market and rates will adjust, of course. But higher fuel prices due to the war have pushed up trucking company expenses, but operators are largely passing along those costs to their customers.
So anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
We have some breaking news.
What's the breaking news?
Ty Morris says, 'On Saturday, we finished construction of set number—'
Set number two. So Tai had built a set for his interview with Elon Musk.
It sounds like they built it in a place that they were only able to occupy for this week — seven days' notice, one hour's notice.
And that was on June 6th. This is gripping. This was a trending story on X. He says, for the past three months I've been asking myself the simple question: what would Elon do? Elon would build the rocket and put it on the launch stand before he got approval. He would ask what's the biggest bottleneck to achieving my mission, and then go about systematically undoing the bottlenecks until he and his team had made the impossible happen. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. And so he has built yet another set that I think can last a full month, and hopefully he lands the interview. He's incredibly pumped up for this, and the meta story of him building this set has done better than most podcasts. There's more views on...
I want to read, John, the summary of the book about the story of Tai Morse getting Elon on his podcast.
Like 7,500 people — two million people watch the video about the set. And so you do have this dynamic where the meta story is more interesting, or it's by default more interesting because the interview hasn't actually happened. But there are plenty of Elon interviews at this point. He does a lot of interviews that don't go super viral. Like he did this interview with Jamie Dimon, and I think that's fully recorded. I think you can just search it and watch it. But I don't know that that's something that everyone in tech saw and everyone in tech talked about. But this is a story people are talking about — the meta story. And people love to see bold moves. People love to see building and all these crazy things, and risk-taking, and all of that is on display. And so Tai Morse is getting a lot of attention. So good luck to him.
Godspeed, Tai. It is a beautiful set.
It is. It is.
Texas is America's new center of gravity, says The Economist. Exxon's reincorporation: they were in Texas, they left Texas, they went back to Texas. There's one more feather in the state's cowboy hat, says The Economist. Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee, I should have known better than to take him back to Abilene — Abilene, Texas. They were singing about data centers in Ella Langley's 'Choose Texas', a song that has ranked near the top of America's music charts throughout 2026. Some of those listens may be coming from policy makers elsewhere in the country. Much like Miss Langley, they are losing to Texas.
On May 27th, ExxonMobil shareholders approved a plan to cut the oil giant's ties with New Jersey and reincorporate in Texas, where it has long had its headquarters. It's not alone. According to CBRE, a property firm, at least 184 companies shifted their headquarters to Austin, Dallas, or Houston between 2020 and 2025. Among them, Tesla, a car company, and Caterpillar, a maker of construction equipment. Texas is steadily establishing itself as America, Inc.'s new center of gravity. No state receives more business investment or is adding more people to its population. From 2020 to 2025, it created roughly a fifth of all net new jobs in the country.
In the early 2020s, Texas was luring remote workers, fleeing high taxes, exorbitant house prices, and bad policies in America's coastal metropolises, while benefiting from the Biden administration's subsidies for green energy and chipmaking facilities. Now, the state's dominance in energy has made it a major beneficiary of the data center boom. Meanwhile, its technology and finance ecosystems have been deepening. This summer, it will ring its first standalone bell — the Texas Stock Exchange, joining outposts of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ already operating in the state. Donald Trump has called the New York Stock Exchange's new branch an unbelievably bad thing for his hometown of New York, even if his social media venture was the first business to list on it.
So that's a very funny thing. But you know, he was obviously giving that in the context of New York is defined by its exchanges, and in the context of just New York the city losing out to Texas, or New York State losing out to Texas in any way, is bad for that state. I suppose the state's appeal is to yuppies — the state's appeal to yuppies is growing with every stream of a country song. I've been listening to a lot of country songs. Joe Weisenthal plays in a country band. Blues band. Who knows, maybe he'll move to Texas one day.
And I tell them, dream performance.
Joe Weisenthal acoustic set.
What if we set him up with a slat wall set?
We got to get Roger from Kanye Nast. He can jam. Get a couple.
Yeah, but a little slat wall set. Yeah.
And an SM7B podcast microphone on the guitar. That might be the trick.
To understand its ascendancy, start in Houston, heart of the Texan energy industry. Its oil and gas barons have been raking in profits as a result of the Iran war. But over the past years, the state has also become a hub for green energy. This year, it's expected to build two-fifths of all utility-scale solar in America, a technology for which its wide open flatlands are ideal.
Interesting. Well, we got to talk about the Buzz Lightyear GT3 RS. We got to get to that before our first guest arrives. Let's scroll down and find the latest and greatest from Porsche and the Pixar company. They're teaming up for the launch of a custom GT3 RS. The Porsche CEO first said the company will not produce an electric 911, but they will produce the Buzz Lightyear GT3 RS. Can we play sound?
It also says Space Ranger Lightyear. My vents are going to be purple, and Porsche even commissioned Goodyear to make the tires say Lightyear, just like they do in the movie Cars. I get more painted graphics here on my roof. My roof fins are going to be painted, my intakes are going to be painted, my entire wing is painted, and it even has a Space Ranger logo painted on the back. As soon as you walk into the car, I get a plaque that says 'To Infinity and Beyond'. I have Lightyear branded floor mats, I get carbon bucket seats, but this time the carbon is actually purple. I get a Space Ranger logo on my headrest, another one here on my roof, suede on my steering wheel, more on my dash, a one-of-one plaque, and even my key has the Space Ranger logo. There's also a Woody version that's based on the 911 Carrera T. They made the paint look like actual denim.
I get these gorgeous denim and leather seats with a badge embossed on the headrest. I get a one-of-one plaque, wood on my dash, a leather steering wheel, and they should have made it the ST, with the Pixar missed car painted in Jessie white metallic. I get painted match red hair, and instead of saying Target, it says Jessie. In Jessie's car, you get a plaque that says...
I get cow print floor mats, these denim and red leather seats with Jessie's one for the T-Rex.
You got to do the off-road Cayenne Turbo.
So which one would you take? This guy's video, his format really exposes my ADHD.
Oh, really? Because of the editing, or...?
Yeah. I'm like, wow, this video could be like a 10-minute video, but he's condensed it down.
It's crazy how much he's condensed it. He goes through everything, and I think every line is written, and then he says it multiple times.
It's so SEO optimized. Search any car, like this is the most efficient way to figure out...
No, Forest Auto Reviews is really cool. I'd love to have him on the show. He also has incredible access to Chinese vehicles. I'm not exactly sure how that happens. I think he just has good relationships with the Chinese automakers. So if you want to learn about this new Zeekr and stuff, he's the one — he's how I found out about that crazy Chinese SUV that has a gas motor range extender for an otherwise electric car. So the range is like 900 miles. And I think he can actually get over there and tour the cars. He does fantastic work. Would you pick up a regular GT3 RS or the Toy Story GT3 RS if they were the same price? Which one are you going with?
I tried to watch Toy Story with my little guy.
No, no. I was watching it with my little guy and it was too scary. We had to turn it off.
Okay, okay. So right now...
There are some scary parts — that child's head with the pins. Little rough. So, guys, this is not the right car for my household yet. Too scary. But I could see it in the future.
The GT3 RS, too scary. Yeah. Wild. What is the... We got to go back to the Ferrari. Luce.
No, the fact that Image 2 has just fully democratized car designs is pretty incredible.
So what are we looking at here with this post? They had just one job.
This is someone that took — basically they're like, ignore the fact that the Luce was meant to be a daily with more seats.
Yep. And just said, what would an electric Ferrari look like?
This is not an electric Ferrari. It has four tailpipes. This is the naturally aspirated mid-engine V8.
Oh, maybe that's the point of the post. They said they just had one job to do — just make another...
Okay. Like, yeah, I get it. You like V8s, you like gas cars, you like things that are designed differently. Ferrari will sell you one of those. They have them. They have the 296, they have the Testarossa, they have the SF90, they have the California. And there's a new one. They have plenty of options in that category. They don't have an EV. They wanted to do something different. I don't know. This does look cool. It looks cool, but that also already exists. That's not something that's necessarily new.
I don't know. I agree, like this one looks aesthetic. It looks cool, but it doesn't check the box that they wanted to check, which is their first five-seater, first electric car, first something with this battery setup and all this other stuff. They wanted something experimental. Again, it does seem risky and the response has been really negative. But clearly it wasn't like, oh, they were trying to go for this and they wound up in some crazy place. Oops, we put an electric drive.
See if this guy's still posting that after driving through Certino a year from now. Just wall-to-wall traffic, just sitting in a field of Luces, moving one inch every minute.
Well, they did the Buzz Lightyear GT3 RS. Should they do the Shrek Luce? Get some DreamWorks collabs going. Pull up the Shrek green Luce images too. Get it working right now, Jordi.
The Shrek Luce would go unreasonably hard. That might swing you. Shrek's not too scary. You could do Shrek.
That would be acceptable in your household, I think.
What about... while that's pulling up...
Yeah. Make a donkey.
Look at this 944. The legendary 944 from Porsche made this grand return in 2026. This is a cool design.
Looks great. Yeah, that would be interesting, especially given that the CEO of Porsche has said that they will not produce an electric 911. They got to do other things. Maybe the 944 is the trick. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And we have our next guest in the waiting room — David from Neura Robotics here with a fantastic fundraise. Welcome to the show, David. How are you doing?
Well, what's going on? Hi. I'm doing great. I made it to your show. So awesome.
Incredible, with this fundraise.
Incredible. We're honored to have you.
It's crazy. We missed you earlier, but it is your first time on the show. So please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about the company. We'll go through the fundraise, and I have a bunch of questions about robotics because it's always a fascinating topic.
What a day to be announcing a massive round in physical AI, because there's only one person in the world that could raise probably a bigger AI-meets-the-physical-world round, and that's Jeff Bezos. But we're happy to have you here today and excited to hear what you're working on.
Great honor. Yeah. So a little bit about me — I'm David, founder and CEO of Neura Robotics, a company out of Germany, in the southern part. My goal is actually making robots cognitive and bringing them into all areas of our lives. And I do think that robotics will actually take over any physical task in the future. And I think that's also what we're seeing today — big progress having, let's say, physical AI combined with a robot body and doing great things. Mainly focused right now on industrial, but looking also into all other sectors.
There's this big trend right now in the LLM, the frontier AI market, where companies will use the most versatile tool for the job, the frontier model. They'll token max, it'll be really expensive. And then pretty quickly they'll figure out, okay, for this workflow we can actually use an open source model on commodity hardware. We can use a legacy model. We can cut the cost by 85% pretty quickly. And I have this suspicion that that will be the case for humanoid robots. You'll have the humanoid go and put the windshield on the car, and then pretty quickly realize, wait, for one-tenth the cost we could have a KUKA robot arm do that. And there will be this gradation of what is economically productive for each robot, and you will only use the most expensive humanoid for the really unwieldy task. And we won't see a world where everything will be humanoids. But what's your thesis long-term?
So first of all, I think this is also one of the biggest differentiators from us to others — is that we do believe in different embodiment. And what we're using mainly today is mobile manipulators, but always combined with a physical AI brain. And going forward we will see more humanoids, and I think we will see them in all areas of our lives. And the reason for that is more that they have the form factor of a human, and I think the whole world is basically created around the human and ergonomically made for humans. And this is basically also the main reasoning. Where I think the biggest breakthrough we see right now is actually connected to a brain and with more sensing capabilities. So until now we're seeing mainly all these companies coming up with vision-language-action models, but here I need to say that is not enough to bring robots into our fields.
It's a little bit like learning how to swim — you can't learn swimming by just watching a video. It's about the nervous system.
Yeah, you got to learn it from the Reddit data.
Just read enough comments, you can learn how to swim. Yeah, it is interesting. There's something to... learning to do physical things by just watching videos does work to some degree. It's not full. It's not enough. But I remember growing up surfing, snowboarding, hating all these things.
I learned to tie a tie off a video, but I was practicing the whole time while I was watching the video. So I was getting the input and the reaction.
You were combining that. Yeah.
What I mean actually by that is you can't just learn things with your brain in this dynamic world. So it means actually there is more than the brain — that's the nervous system and the reflexes. And this is especially needed if you're looking into all kinds of tasks humans do today. The biggest advantage we have is the flexibility of adjusting things to the environment, in different areas. And this is also what we are doing.
This video is awesome — it's actually the Neura Gym, a place we're building up right now all over the planet, and in every major city you will find them soon. So it's actually a place where you can train robots doing all kinds of tasks in the physical world, and then more than just the brain, basically also the nervous system.
Interesting. What other sources of data?
Why all over the world? Why can't you centralize something like that?
Yeah. So because we want to give everyone access to actually not just buy a robot to have one and then figure out you need to train it. So you have a central place where you can first build trust, and second you can train them already and use that data — with one click you can transfer it to any other robots in your factory or wherever you need them.
So for us it's right now important because the gap we're having right now, and the difference actually to large language models as we know, like ChatGPT or others, is that this data is not existing. So we do need to build first, let's say, the infrastructure for it, that we can actually create the right data to train the physical AI brain behind that. And the easiest way is enabling others to train the robot or to fine-tune the foundation model we built.
What are the biggest opportunities that you guys are working on in Germany? I imagine hopefully helping make some of my favorite cars. But what do you have going on?
Yeah, that's a good one. I'm also a car lover, so I could have also had a lot of input on your talk before.
Would you go Buzz Lightyear Edition GT3 RS or Ferrari Luce Shrek edition?
Shrek guy. I think it's too easy. Yeah, for sure.
Because you might like Shrek and you might like a GT3 RS, you might like Buzz Lightyear and a Luce, but that's not the option. You got to pick one or the other.
No, I'm still the engine guy.
Okay, there you go. Curious.
So yeah, but yes, there are a lot of projects especially in the automotive industries, and also especially on the supplier side, where they have to reduce cost, they have to find ways to be efficient as the others are in Asia or somewhere else on the planet. And the only way for that is finding some more autonomy, or bringing more autonomy in their fields. Because here in Europe, if you're looking into 2030, you will see that we have about 7 million less human labor. So we do need a solution for that. The only way is embodied AI — something which can do things fully autonomously and as capable as a human can do.
How are you thinking about your supply chain? A lot of robotics companies in America are saying we want an American supply chain. Other companies are saying, hey, we got to move as fast as possible. Realistically, is there going to be spyware in a bolt that we buy from China? Like, let's not worry about that. It is maybe a supply chain risk if they cut you off. If you're thinking about supply chain resiliency, what's your approach been? Do you want to source entirely from German supply chains, or European supply chains, Western supply chains, or global supply chains?
At this time, we're focusing right now on the, let's say, European supply chain. So I still believe in a global world, but I do see right now the biggest advantage of converting them, because most of the components are there, but they need to be modified to use them for robots. Here I'm simply talking about even lifetime — through the regulations, the lifetime of the sensors for cars is regulated, so they break, so we have a renewing process going on. And for robots, they're made for 6,000 hours, and the robot needs sensors for 40,000 hours.
And that's also I think for us the most important topic, working with those suppliers around us. We are based in Stuttgart, where all the good stuff comes from, like the stuff you talked about before. There is Bosch, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, everything here around us, and we are using this supply chain, converting it right now into robotics.
Going further, I do think it will not matter so much. It will all come again wherever you produce — we will have production also in the US and at the same time also probably in Asia.
Yeah. Tell us about the round.
Before we get into the round — the silliest question you'll ever get: can you ever imagine a robotic use case that would require an internal combustion engine, let's say like a V6 humanoid?
It would be awesome, but not required yet. So no. But I think the Boston Dynamics guys, they did an awesome thing. I don't know if you saw the quadruped they built some years ago, in the beginning — it was actually an internal combustion engine, as I saw. But yes. No, I'm fully electrified. But the cars I'm still loving, with the V12 or V10. There we go.
There you go. One of us.
Tell us about the round. Hit that gong, Jordi.
Yes. So we raised a $1.4 billion US round.
Another one. Well done. Right in the face. You guys are awesome.
Thank you for taking the time to share this.
Great stuff. Do you have a US office already, or are you setting one up?
Yes, we have one and we are expanding further. As you might have seen, the investors on this round — there are a lot of American players, and very important players, I would say. So I think this is also a sign of where we go.
Yeah, because I mean I think it's important — I think something like that was never built. After automotive, there was nothing really great coming out of Germany, and I think we have to change that. And for that we need partners which know how to scale that, how to do it in this time we're living in. And here I do believe in our partnerships out of the US and Germany.
Very cool. Well, fantastic.
Congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll have you back. Have a good rest of your day.
It was awesome to be on the show.
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Did you see at the NBA game last night a little person, somebody you might know, born in Tennessee, showing up on the camera as they pan around the crowd, finding famous people, finding iconic people, unmistakable people? We got a picture here of a celebrity at the game. You know who that is?
