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. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. 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. Easy. 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 dollars 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. 41 billion. Bigger than what's a 40 billion dollar 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 30 to 40. 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 gives you, 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. AG is the new buzzword. You thought we were at, we thought we were running out of them. We got AI, AGI, ASI, RSI, AIFD, personal super intelligence, meta super intelligence, TBD, continual learning, standard intelligence, yep, 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 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 been 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. Like.
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 job, 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, you know, 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's going to be two, there are going to, there's 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, 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, you know, 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 in employment, education or training. So that trend started well before the current AI paradigm.
Yeah. 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.
True. 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, 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 a, 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 a.m. on Saturday, I'm not going to be super available, super online. And then also from 2 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 a.m. Sunday, I'm going to be offline again. But back, you know, 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 and seven...
Interlace them, interlace them. Yeah. So, oh, it's 3:00 a.m., call Jordi. Oh, it's 4 a.m., call John. Co-CEO is working out. Bezos is the co-CEO of the new company along with Vic Bajaj, 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, 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 in 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, successful acquisitions. We're talking to the founder of a robotics company at 11:45 today. So his co-, 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 hundred billion dollar 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 a hundred 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 a hundred billion dollars? What would be a good buy? And there were some very interesting, like 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 the American manufacturing. My read on it is some combination of like a foundation model that allows you to generate full product, full products basically like 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.
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 speed up 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 companiesmarketcap.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 a...
The nominative determinism of Prometheus is sort of crazy, right? Yeah. But chained up for eternity. Eagle comes, 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. But so I think we need another company named Hercules, right? Because Hercules saves Prometheus.
He frees him from the chains.
But then a company called Hercules. That's a good company name. I like that one.
Yeah, that's chat. 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 a hundred billion dollars. 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, quote, 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 a good, it's, I mean, it's an interesting, it's an interesting bet, right? What do you want to, what do you want to buy? What do you want to own at 41 billion?
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. The 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.
Yeah. And that makes like commercial is obviously still torture.
It's sort of a, it's sort of a punishment 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 like, 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.
You can, you can just say no.
Nick, Nick does that. You can just say no.
Say no. But then don't you just say they don't, they used to about, I would, I will say about two years ago they would tell you more frequently like it's optional. Yeah, 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 like comfortably show up 45 minutes before your flight and reliable.
Every time. Every time. And 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. You always make it.
I always make it. And if you're not missing flights at least like 10% of the time, you're actually setting, you're not cutting it close enough. No. Like you have to be taking some level of risk or else you're just wasting time.
Yes. No, because often times 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. No way.
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, which is...
No, but comparing, yeah, yeah, comparing that.
This is where the argument goes. 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.
It doesn't math out because like if you just get to your flight 10 minutes, like a little bit earlier, then it'll like 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 like saving the time.
You were probably at your, just like having another coffee at the hotel 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. I should get, if I want to 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. 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 1 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 like the whole airport gyms movement.
Like every once in a while somebody will post online, why don't airports have gyms?
And 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. Yeah. Yeah. And was getting on.
Pretty heavy. Some heavy breathing going on.
Golf simulators in airports.
That could be 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, fixes, a couple dessert. 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. Seems...
If we let John keep going here, he would just talk about airport gaming lounge.
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'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 lounge airport lounge is coming. It's like have five minutes, build website, 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 look 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.
This could have been like a one-shot output of an LLM.
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 it is 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 ex-Halo 3 Pro in the chat. Alex, he says, we'll be a conservative pickup of nostalgic non-PvP gamers. Don't expect it to do numbers.
Interesting. Ex-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 just like 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 Schiffer, former guest of the show and creator of the viral essay Something Big is Coming, where he predicted something big is happening, where he predicted that AI would cause 10% unemployment by April and compared, 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, like 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, 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 Schiffer said someone should set up a community-funded Fable run with a prompt like slash 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 there 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 it 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, you know, 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.
What is driving this? This has been a supply-driven freight recovery as opposed to a demand-driven freight recovery.
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 companies' 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. Yes. It sounds like they built it in a place that they weren't โ they were only able to occupy for this week, seven days, next one hour 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, I want to read the summary of the book about the story of Tai Lopez getting Elon on his podcast.
Like 7,500 people โ two million people watch the video about the set. And so you do have this dynamic where the meta story is more interesting, or like it's by default more interesting because the interview hasn't actually happened. But there are plenty of Elon interviews at this point. Like 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 like 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 Lopez 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 โ 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 โ this is a hilarious, hilarious song lyric: 'Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee, I should have known, 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 policymakers 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 like 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 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. You might โ who knows, maybe he'll move to Texas one day.
People ask, dream guest. And I tell them, dream performance. Joe Weisenthal acoustic set. Tiny desk. Tiny desk. What if we set him up with a slat wall set? We got to get Roger from Kanye West. He can jam. Get a couple. Yeah. But a little slat wall set. Yeah. And he can just play. And an SM7B podcast microphone on the guitar. That might be the trick. 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. Um, 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. Porsche CEO first, he 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 pictures of this car and a bullseye on... these gorgeous denim and leather seats, 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. T-Rex. T-Rex, the T-Rex. You got to do the off-road Cayenne Turbo.
So, which one would you take? This guy's video, like his format, really, really exposes my ADHD. Yeah. I'm like, wow, this video โ they really โ this video could be like a 10-minute video, but he's condensed it down. It's so SEO optimized. Search any car, like this is the most efficient way to figure out like... No, Forest Auto Reviews is really cool. I'd love to have him on the show. He also has like 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, like he โ yeah, 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. No, it's too scary. Okay. Okay. We had to turn it off. Yeah. So, right now... there are some scary parts, that child's head with the pins. Yeah. With the... little rough. 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. Um, wild. What is the โ we got to go back to the Ferrari. Luce.
No, the fact that Imagen 2 has just fully democratized like... 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... Okay, the basic... basically they're like, ignore the fact that the Luce was meant to be like a daily with more seats. Yep. And just said, what would an electric Ferrari look like? If you're... This is not an electric Ferrari. It has four tailpipes. This isn't โ this is the natural gas 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. Like Ferrari will sell you one of those. They have them. Like they have the 296. They have the Testarossa. They have the SF90. They have the California. And there's a new one. Like 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 is... This does look cool. It looks cool, but it's like that also already exists. Like that's not something that's necessarily like new.
He says Johnny. Yikes. I don't know. I think it's โ I mean, I agree, like this one looks aesthetic. It looks cool, but like it doesn't check the box that they wanted to check, which is like their first five-seater, first electric car, first something with like, you know, this battery setup and all this other stuff. Like they wanted something experimental. Again, like it does seem risky and the response has been really negative. But like 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. Yeah. Just... moving one inch every minute.
Well, they did the Buzz Lightyear GT3 RS. Should they do the Shrek Luce for โ get some DreamWorks collabs going? Pull it up in 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 a โ 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. I love the 944. 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. Um, 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 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. But I want... 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, so in the southern part. Yeah, my goal is actually making robots cognitive and bring them actually in 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, like big progress having, let's say, physical AI combined basically 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 just the LLM, the frontier AI market, where companies will, you know, 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, you know, put the windshield on the car, and then pretty quickly realize like, 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, 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. So, and what we have today is like what we are using mainly today is like mobile manipulators, but always combined with a physical AI brain. And I think this is also going โ but 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 like that they're having the form factor of a human, and I think the whole world is basically created around the human and ergonomically, let's say, 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 like all these companies coming up with the vision-language-action models, but here I need to say that 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 or so. It's about the nervous system.
You got to go right to r/swim. Yeah, you got to learn it from the Reddit data. Just read enough comments, you can learn how to swim. Um, yeah, it is interesting. There's something to like visual โ 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 like you can't just learn things just with your brain in this dynamic world. So it means actually there is more than brain, that's the nervous system and the reflexes. And this is especially needed in the โ like if you're looking into all kinds of tasks humans do today. It's mainly like the biggest advantage we have is the flexibility of adjusting things like on the environments, on different areas. And this is also what we are doing. It's like this is one โ the video, awesome, it's actually the Neura Gym. It's 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. Um, what other sources of data? Why wait โ why all over the world? Yeah. Why can't you centralize something like that?
Yeah. So because we want to give like 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 and you can actually build first trust, and second actually 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 actually the physical AI brain behind that. And the most easiest way is letting everyone or 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? Would you go Buzz Lightyear Edition RS or Ferrari Luce Shrek edition?
Yeah. 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. So it's like... Shrek guy. I think it's too easy. Yeah, for sure. No, I'm still the engine guy. And... So yeah, but yes, there is 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, let's say, ways to be as efficient as the others are in Asia or somewhere else on the planet. And the only way for that is finding, let's say, some more autonomy or bringing more autonomy in their fields. And especially because like here in Europe, if you're looking, let's say, into 2030, you will see that we have like about 7 million less human labor. So we do need to have like โ we need a little 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. But 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?
So at this time, we're focusing right now on the, let's say, European supply chain. So like I still believe in a global world, but I do see right now the biggest advantage of converting them still because most of the components are there, but they need to be still, let's say, modified to use them for robots. Here I'm simply talking about even lifetime, or I mean through the regulations, the lifetime of the sensors for cars are regulated basically, so they break. So we have like a renewing process going on. So and for robots, like they're made for 6,000 hours and the robot needs sensors for 40,000 hours. So and this is still a difference and gap between โ but and that's also I think for us the most important topic, like 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. And so there is the Bosch, the Porsche, the Audis, the 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. So it will come all again, like wherever you produce. So we will have productions also in the US and same time also probably in Asia.
Yeah. Tell us about the round. Odd, 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 like some years ago, like in the beginning. It was actually a combustion engine as I saw. So, but yes. No, just I'm fully electrified. And I โ but the cars I'm still loving like with the V12 or V10, I think. There we go.
There you go. It's just... There we go. One of us. Tell us about the round. Hit that gong, Jordi. How much did you raise?
Yes. So, we raised a 1.4 billion US round.
Another one. Yeah. Well done. Right in the face. You guys are awesome. Right in the face. Oh, thank you for taking the time to share this. Great stuff. Are you setting up a โ you have a US office already or you're setting one up?
Yeah. Yes, we have one and we are setting further. So like as you might have seen also 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... where we go. Yes. Strategics. Great stuff. Like yeah, because I mean I think it's important or like I think something like that was never built. Like after automotive there was nothing really great coming out of Germany and I think we have to change that or so. And for that we need partners which are, let's say, knowing how to scale that, how to do it in this time we're living in. So and here I do believe in our partnerships also out of US and Germany.
Very cool. Well, fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you โ we'll have you back. Have a good rest of your day. It was awesome to be on the show. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. 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 to 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? Yep. Paul. Paul Tudor Jones, baby, born in Tennessee. They didn't even have to give him a name tag because everyone knows Paul Tudor Jones, of course, fund manager, 8 billion net worth. Zoom in a little bit more. I don't know what else is really going on in the photo, but let's get to the good. I mean, everyone knows Tudor Investment Management. They know the investment โ like the best episode obviously, the Robin Hood Foundation undoubtedly. He predicted Black Monday. I mean, yeah, it's a pretty big deal. Born in Tennessee. But there was someone who people weren't sure who it was, and so they had to give this woman a name tag. So if we scroll down, we'll actually be able to learn who this is. It's Taylor Swift. So you can take that name, type it into anything, look her up, and learn all about her. And maybe one day you'll know as much about her. Maybe Patrick was watching last night and... that's like the best crossover episode. Could be. What if they did a joint interview? That'd be great. PGT. Yeah. PTJ. PTJ. Paul T โ PTJ. Yeah. Meets... Paul Tudor Jones. Taylor Swift. Yes. I like it. It'd be good. Any... Our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring in Mike from Allen Control Systems. How you doing, Mike?
I'm doing all right, guys. How you doing? More than all right. We are having a fantastic, fantastic month around here.
Amazing. Good. Good time to be in the gun-on-a-truck business. Is that the accurate description? Is this all for scaling up Bullfrog? Take us through the product portfolio. Reintroduce the company, reintroduce yourself, and then tell us where you're going.
Yeah, sure. Allen Control Systems. We are a company that specializes in the application of robotics for defense. Think of the Boston Dynamics of defense essentially. We are building an extreme competition robotics... But you guys ship. Yeah. Boston Dynamics, they shipped, but it took a long time. Not as much. Took like 15. Not as much. Yeah. Yeah. So our flagship product is Bullfrog. Bullfrog is essentially a robotic gimbal driven by computer vision and machine learning that solves kind of an age-old mechanical problem, which is that you can usually only have a system that is very fast but relatively inaccurate, or very accurate but relatively slow. In order to shoot down fast maneuvering drones, especially tiny ones like group ones, group twos, you need to be both fast and accurate. And so by using and applying AI to our control system, we're able to create a robot that can be both fast and accurate. And that's what we do that nobody else in the world has been able to achieve so far.
What's Jordi, please? Yeah. Talk about the progress over the last year. What kind of led up to this round and then where you're going from here?
Yeah, I mean, you know, we have been obviously kind of working on this robot for about 18 months now, since we kind of first brought it out to the field, actually a little closer to two years. Bullfrog has been kind of slowly achieving more and more, getting closer and closer to battlefield speeds. In November of last year, we achieved kind of a 100% kill rate against 13 Red Army flown drones. So, drones that are flown by a team of the army that are not telling us where they're coming from or what they're supposed to do or how many they have coming.
Interesting. Wow. Very cool. Was there already a program of record for this? Like you hear a lot about how hard it is to get a new technology fielded because the government often knows that they want more planes or more weapons of a certain kind. And most companies that we talk to are usually saying, well, we fit neatly in this box. So it was easy for them to procure us. This feels both old and new. It's like innovative in all the correct ways and maybe leaning on the shoulders of like what the army can already field, like a truck and a gun.
Yeah. So we are not currently a program of record. You know, our technology kind of lays in a class that you usually call ahead of need. Okay. So requirements that are being built right now will start to address what this system is capable of doing now, but also what it's going to be capable of doing in the future, which is much, much more. Where we are very fortunate, you know, this company is really sitting at like just a perfect storm of tailwinds between the war and the size of the threat and the lack of other solutions that can solve it. You know, the president and the secretary of war created Joint Task Force 401, which is specifically meant for selecting counter-UAS technologies for all services both domestically and abroad. And so we were selected by them to get sent forward after the war started. That is basically a blanket approval for all services, including the Coast Guard and Secret Service, to buy our technology and put it to use.
Is this โ I imagine the sweet spot is like the DJI-size quadrotor drone. We're not talking about shooting down something like a Shahed drone. Is that correct? Is that the focus long term? Do you want to be counter-UAS in all classes over time, or do you just want to be the best at this small-scale counter-UAS? Because they're all problems, and maybe there's some other solution for taking out the enemy's version of like a predator drone that might be a completely different job to be done, a completely different technology.
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. We are currently very focused on being the best at shooting down group one, group two drones, which are absolutely the hardest drones to engage right now. I mean, like, you know, lasers are pretty good at shooting down group three drones, but you have to keep your laser on target for five to 15 seconds in order to do damage to the airframe. So we are perfectly positioned for the group one, group two threat. Now, that said, we can shoot down group one drones very, very far away. And so if I can hit a seven-inch target on a group one drone very, very far away, I can hit very vulnerable parts of a Shahed at the same distances. So while we're not the ideal solution for engaging those larger targets, you know, you have Roadrunners and other things that can go out a little bit farther. You're going to want to hit them 20 to 15 km away. But when they get closer and you need that last line of defense, we are absolutely a great solution for taking those out of the air.
Talk about scaling manufacturing. Like it doesn't look like you manufacture the truck. It doesn't look like you manufacture the actual gun, but there's a whole system that creates the Bullfrog product. What's actually going on that you can share in the manufacturing process? Is it milling different parts to fit things together? Just, you know, integration of different systems. How are you thinking about scaling manufacturing?
You know, when we built Bullfrog, you know, the hardware was not the exquisite part of the system. Mhm. We built Bullfrog incredibly well. We built it so it could be easily maintained and we built it so it'd be easily manufactured and scaled very quickly. And that's one of the other differentiators that we have against the other counter-UAS solutions that are out there is we can get to thousands of units really, really fast. And the way we do that is 90% of Bullfrog is made from basically commercial off-the-shelf components. Sure. Standard things that you see in a robust supply chain with multiple vendors that can quickly get us to the amount of inventory that we need to start pumping out a thousand of these every single month.
Talk a little bit about the compute. I mean, you're doing image recognition. It seems like there's a camera there. Is that all done on device? Is there a need for edge compute, a need for cloud computing? Or because I imagine this is designed to operate in off-grid scenarios effectively, right?
Yeah, 100%. It has to be a completely self-contained compute system in order to do something autonomously. Think about an unmanned ground vehicle or an unmanned surface vessel. Yeah. So having a fully autonomous system like Bullfrog out on those platforms that can be asynchronously tracking targets and just waiting for an operator to say engage that target is a huge advantage when you start talking about operationalizing unmanned payloads. And that is another kind of huge niche that we're going after right now.
Yeah. How big is the team these days?
We are approaching 250 today. Wow. And I don't know where we started the year, but I think it was like 80. Last I heard we were hiring about 50 people a month. You know, we are trying to drag in the absolute best engineering talent possible. You know, one way that we look at kind of differentiating ourselves in the industry is, you know, you have the Andurils and they're doing a great job of finding companies and doing rollups, but I think they're losing a lot of their technical depth. And so we're really focused on building a really, really core engineering team that understands robotics. And robotics is an incredible symphony of detailed, you know, integration between hardware and software to do it well. And we think that we can really differentiate ourselves in the future as we talk about bringing on more products to solve defense needs with robotics.
That makes sense. Little shots fired there from the Bullfrog chief himself. Company that shoots shots. Really, really impressive progress. Tell us another round. Yeah. How much did you raise?
We raised $200 million at a $2 billion pre-money valuation.
Woo. Let's go. Hit that gong. I can say our Series A presentation. He's a part of this. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We should share that presentation at some point. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's crazy. Right before, like pre-TBPN, I had the pleasure of helping you guys kind of position what you're working on, and you guys have executed the strategy to a T. So, it's awesome to see. Going to keep going. It's really exciting. We think you guys will see another big announcement in the next 12 to 18 months. So, congratulations. Looking forward to seeing you again. Cheers, Mike. Congrats to the team. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. 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. People are going, there's a new benchmark. I am a fish and I swim to the worm on a rope. Is it safe? People are asking different models. Gemini nailed it. Apple Foundation Model said yes, it's safe. Bad news if you're a fish. Can't recommend the iPhone 16 Pro Max to the fish in the audience. Okay, this is not Apple. This isn't โ it was Apple. What app is that literally locally by? So what I imagine this is doing is that it's an app that integrates with the iOS API that interfaces with the Apple Foundation Model, but I don't know. I might have taken Ryan in the...
Chat said black suits. Who died? This is a dark gray suit. Okay, let's...
And that's your daily driver.
I've been wearing this a lot. I don't know, I like it. You're in a dark gray suit, too. We're matching. These are the same exact same material.
And also it's not black. It's dark gray.
I know. What does that say about the team's color grading, though?
Oh, yeah. Maybe crush those shadows too much. We'll see.
Bring them up. No, I don't know. Fired. Speaking of colors, did you know that accountants used to wear green eye shades? Did you know this?
Well, I've seen like in cartoons.
Yeah, in cartoons. I had no idea where this came from. There's a real on Instagram that breaks it all down. This blew my mind and I think we should watch it. You want to learn about green eye shades? This is important because I think you care about the quality of light that goes into your eyes and I could see you in the future.
Yeah, it's a lens. Look at this. We'll watch this video. It's three up from the Apple Foundation model one. And right here it's the life professor. He breaks it down.
Cartoons to show that stereotypically someone is an accountant. Well, that is a green eye shade that was stereotypically worn by office workers back in the early days of gas and electric lighting. It came in several versions, including this weird eyehood version that you see here, but the purpose was always the same, which was to reduce the glare from these harsh electric or gas lamps, and to improve contrast on the papers that you would be looking at up to 8 to 10 hours a day. So, this became a very common look for any paperwork-heavy profession back in the day. As lighting became better in offices, the green visor look essentially became obsolete in the actual workforce. However, just like how I talked about locking in at the clock factory, you put on the green visor because you're a white collar worker. Like white collar workers these days don't really have like gear. They don't have accessories. There's nothing that's like, oh yeah, that guy's vibe coding and he has the obvious tells. The new hot accessory is tech neck. From here, you also occasionally hear like politicians described as like a green eye visored budget hawk. There is a journalism award that still mentions the green eye shade. But yeah, so that's what's going on there with that. So real grinders had the eye shade.
