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Talking about investing - Venture Capital & Private Investing
Recorded: Jan. 8, 2026 Duration: 0:54:18Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, the team explored the latest trends in venture capital, including a significant $10 billion fundraising round for AI startup Anthropic, and the implications of XAI's massive investment in supercomputing. The conversation also highlighted the evolving landscape of media in finance with the upcoming launch of a video format for their venture capital show.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Yo, yo, what is up everybody?
A little different host behind this account.
It's Evan Stock Market News here.
I hope you guys are all doing well.
I see we got Jared, we got Kyle, we got the crew joining in here,
talking a little bit VC, private investing.
I'm excited for this chat as always.
It should be an interesting one.
I've actually, I have been a CES for the last too long.
I am not made for a week in Vegas.
We've got to get to see some really interesting and cool tech,
a lot of smaller companies.
I actually went over to a hall where it was a lot of really small companies
and like future tech of what they could maybe be doing in the future. Transparently,
you won't have to tell this there. I wasn't a lot that I was interested in,
but when we went over to the big booths and the companies working on the big and interesting stuff,
there was some really fun stuff going on there. We had some good conversations with people. So
I am excited to hear what they have going on jared and kyle it's always a
fantastic show when they are on here hosting it let me send you over the co-host slot there
but uh but yeah i'm again also apologize for being a couple minutes late here
west coast really kills me but jared how you doing sir i know i know how much you love that
time zone so it's a it's good to hear from you very cool to uh to be so close to jensen
and and uh you know be a handshake uh distance away from him so that was pretty cool i did get
i did get called out i did get called out i should have went for the handshake i mean you don't walk
through the public center where your company is doing the whole thing and not expect someone to
be like oh hey or like you know ask for the So next time, I promise next time I will grow a pair and do that.
But yeah.
No, it was still pretty cool to see and see all the updates
and a lot going on there.
And I was actually at a real estate event Tuesday,
and I was talking to somebody somebody and they mentioned CES and that they were keeping up with all the content on X about CES.
And I was like, oh, yeah, by the way.
And so ran into somebody out in the public who was keeping up with the stock market news and will financial content on X.
content on X. So that was kind of cool to just, you know, come across that organically, but
So that was kind of cool to just come across that organically.
definitely excited to, to get back here on the, the VC show. My, my co-host Kyle is having some
technical glitches with the spaces trying to get in. Always seems to be something here on the
spaces, but on today's show, we've been off for a couple weeks with Christmas and New Year's falling on our normal Thursday time.
But we get on here and just talk venture capital and private equity.
We bring on different guests and sorts like that and talk a wide range of venture capital topics.
Today's show, we're just going to touch on a few current events that have been going on.
touch on a few current events that have been going on and Evan if you're
available to speak if Kyle's not I could ask you some questions here oh here's
Kyle coming on now but so we'll we'll just cover a few current events and then
me and Kyle are gonna share an announcement just about the the future
of the show and where we're going here so um kyle thanks thanks for hopping
on how are you doing today maybe maybe still still connecting there so um hello hello can you hear me
there you go all right and kyle what up what up it feels good to be back running back to show
what's going on, Jared?
Yeah, we were catching up, me and Evan on CES a little bit. He was giving us an update.
He was there hanging out with Jensen and running the NVIDIA numbers for us over there,
pumping everybody's back, so we appreciate that.
But I was just saying, excited to get into the show, cover a few current events,
and then get into kind of our announcement of the future of the show.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I think we're ready for a bigger and better 2026, Jared. I can't wait to talk through that.
But if you already did intros, I can introduce myself really quickly, and then I'll throw it back to you for some headlines.
I'm Kyle Somlin. I have been in the venture capital industry for close to 15 years now, both as an investor,
as an angel investor directly into startups, as well as into other funds as an LP and a GP,
as an investor of other people's money. So I've really sat in all different
seats of this equation, as well as I'm a founder and I've raised close to $10 million for my own
startups in equity structures, as well as I've been a part of over $100 million in transactions
in my career. So I've done a lot in the capital markets. I love this space. I love talking about
it. And I'm just happy to be here almost a year into the show.
So I'll kick it back to you, Jared, to start with your agenda today.
Yeah, so a couple of different wide ranging topics, you know, in the private world, private capital world.
I think the one that I'd like to start on today, and like I mentioned earlier, I was at a
real estate event. I've been diving a lot more into real estate here lately. And so this headline
is definitely something that jumped out to me. It was kind of all over the feed yesterday, but
Trump announcing that he's banning major institution companies from buying single
family homes. And so then we saw some of the public
companies that have been buying, they lost quite a bit of market share. Blackstone, it raised as
much as $17 billion at the peak. So obviously that was a pretty big deal. But these large
institutional funds getting rid of single- family homes. I'm going to
try and pin this tweet here in the space if it'll let me. Not sure it will, but anyways, I'll just
read you guys a few stats behind this, and then Kyle, I'll pass it to you. I'd kind of like to
get your thoughts. I have my thoughts on it.
But maybe I'll just read the stats, let you give your thoughts, and then I'll reply from there.
But the stats, as much as people make the memes about it and talk about, you know, these funds are going to buy every single house and then we're all going to, you know, just comply and we're going to own nothing and be happy about it. It actually comes out to be only around 2 to 3% of single family homes are owned by institutional
funds.
So it's still a relatively large or small percentage and at its peak it was 4.8%.
So that numbers actually came down quite a bit.
And so the idea behind this is if these institutional people who have unlimited
money can't buy single-family homes, even though I saw Wolf Financial offered to sell his place for
40% above the market value before this bill or whatever you want to call it went into law,
into law, these funds, if they can't buy, then maybe that lowers the demand or messes
with supply and demand, which makes housing more affordable for the everyday American.
So that's kind of the idea, I guess, that I have of that.
And that's great for people trying to buy their first home, but maybe for other people
that aren't institutional investors, maybe they you know just small-time investors just getting started
in real estate or they have i don't know they're not an institutional player where they own two to
three percent of the whole market but maybe they own you know 10 doors or 100 doors people like
them if their home prices drop you know that could be a significant play for the investor side of
you know, that could be a significant play for the investor side of people with small funds
or people without funds who are just doing it, you know, for a side income. So that's kind of
my initial thought. Kyle, I'd love to get your thoughts on that and where you see this going.
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I wish that I had a deep expertise in the real estate market to be able to pull up a few interesting stats to back my to back how I feel, because I definitely feel a bit conflicted in the sense that this this definitely seems kind of anti capitalist in a lot of ways.
Right. Like like I'm not sure that the government necessarily needs to to involve itself in the free market with respect to this.
I think I'd probably rather reduce the regulations around building new houses
as opposed to preventing anyone from buying houses.
I feel like in my perspective, creating more supply would be more advantageous.
And I do know that Trump had said last month that, you know,
we don't want to build more houses because then it'll reduce the value of existing homes or
something along those lines. So, I mean, that is a kind of a common talking point that a lot of
homeowners don't want more houses because more houses means their house is worth less. So,
I think I just fall on a different side of this.
That being said, you know, the pain point does exist. And I'd be interested to see
where that actually direct source comes from. Because to your point, Jared, I also saw a
similar metric that looked at the fact that institutionals only owned like two or three percent of the homes. And that's definitely surprised me, given the global or I guess national uprising around
private equity, owning homes, Blackstone owning all the homes down the block.
So I wonder where that comes from then, if that's not the case, because it does seem that
everybody's renting and nobody can afford a home.
My gut goes to supply. I think I'd rather focus on increasing supply of homes as opposed to reducing the people who can buy it. But I think it's at the high level where my gut says.
Yeah, it's probably one of those things, you know, like anything, it's a small minority,
I guess you could say, but it's a very loud minority because people don't like that, you know,
2% to 3% of the big funds of owning their houses.
So probably one of those things, we see a lot of those things in different social circles
of small minority of what's actually going on, but it's very loud, so it seems, you know,
larger than it is.
But Kyle, you touched on
something that ties into another topic, is the defense side, as far as government playing a role
in private companies and telling them basically how to run business. So that's a very hot political
topic, but I do think it does make a difference in markets and private markets. And the most recent example was yesterday with the defense stocks with first Trump came out and had a true social post about any defense companies that are not investing back into America and building their plants in America.
He's going to restrict stock buybacks and dividends for those companies. And my guess was that would also apply
to public or private companies doing that. And then a few hours later, he had a tweet directly
calling out a specific company regarding that topic. So that's another example of you know is that fair play um
you know so that it's kind of a fringy topic i guess do you have any other thoughts on that
on the defense side kyle yeah well i mean look this is like this is horseshoe political theory
in action where um we're not actually on spectrum. We're really at a horseshoe where
the extremes on both sides are much closer than those that are in the middle. You know, the fact
that Trump comes out and wants to, you know, cap CEO pay of defense companies, like as opposed to
allowing the free market to determine what these guys make is very, very similar to the no billionaire should exist type of left political policy,
where they say that CEOs shouldn't make all this money and it should be given to the employees.
They're saying the exact same thing with a slightly different perspective. But at the end
of the day, it's talking about executive pay and mostly high earning and large scale public and private companies.
You know, I don't really want to necessarily comment politically because of the fact that I think that politically it's all the same.
But I personally don't think that we should be interfering with the free market. I think that one of the things that makes the U.S. markets so great is that they are not influenced by politics.
They are purely influenced by the capital markets
themselves, supply and demand, and liquidity. So from my perspective, some of these things I'm not
a huge fan of. I certainly understand defense companies, Trump wanting defense companies to
produce things in America and use America-produced facilities, considering if we were to get into a conflict
and all of your parts are being supplied by a country that could be influenced by an adversarial
nation, that obviously makes a ton of sense to me. So it is a tough one with defense because
kind of what's happened is a lot of our military budget goes into private companies, right?
Investing in companies and government contracts and things like that, where a lot of this
stuff is no longer internal through the Department of Defense or DARPA.
A lot of it is external through a Palantir or through a Palmer Luckey's company, Stax.
And so all these different businesses are private companies. And so
it does blur that line because if it was a in-house government program, they would be able to wield a
lot more governance and authority over those businesses. Whereas in a private company or a
third-party business outside of the government, they now no longer have that same ability aside from leveraging economic pressure. So this one is also a tough one for me because
while I understand the sentiment of especially in defense companies needing to have that stuff
stateside because the whole point of the defense company is to protect your particular regional borders. It does kind of frustrate me to see a lot of free market
trends starting to be influenced by both sides. It feels like that's where we will start to see
some of these permanent infrastructure or supposedly the stalwarts of the American system
start to crumble when both sides attack it and attack its integrity.
So I'm not a huge fan of some of those things, despite the fact that I might understand the intent.
Yeah, I'm very much on the free market side as well.
I think what is slightly different, which you touched on a little bit on the defense side, is the companies basically he's directing and saying,
hey, you're going to do this, this, and this. It's almost like negotiations and the fact that
those companies are making all their money from the government contracts. And so these government
contracts are being sold to these private companies. And that's how those private companies are really,
those are like their biggest
and you could almost say they're only clients
in a lot of cases.
And so it's almost just like,
it's almost like comparing the,
just like any other kind of business negotiations
where, hey, I'm going to sell you this contract and it's going to be for $10.
But if you don't do this, this and this, then I want $12.
And so it's almost just negotiation, the art of the deal, I guess you could say, different things that you can negotiate on.
So it is interesting.
So it is interesting. Now, as far as the companies that already have contracts in place, that's where I think it gets a little gray line with the free market as far as can you tell them they can't do this, this and this with their own company after they already have the contract.
but I'm also not the president. So that's not up to me. One last thing that, as far as a news topic
that resides a little bit on the political side, but maybe the biggest private equity deal we've
ever talked about on the show is today's news, which has been talked about for a while, but
the new idea that the acquisition of Greenland from the U.S. and that President Trump is reportedly
considering paying Greenlanders $10,000 to $100,000 each to succeed from Denmark.
And so that also ties into the defense side. The whole idea behind this acquisition is,
from a national security standpoint, is what they say. I'm sure there's a lot of dollar numbers
behind that as well, which makes that attractive. There's a legacy piece behind that as well.
Thomas Jefferson, not very many people know a ton of things about him. He's a couple hundred years
away from being president, but people still know that he had the Louisiana Purchase. So
there is some value in that. And our president is a real estate
developer background. So I do think there is some appeal from his standpoint on that.
But Kyle, any thoughts on Greenland acquisition for the largest VC deal we've ever talked about
on the show before we move on to maybe a more traditional VC conversation?
before we move on to maybe a more traditional VC conversation.
Yeah, it's a really interesting point that you bring up.
Look, I think there's two geopolitical factors in Greenland
that are only sometimes talked about.
One is that it is, when you look at a map of the globe,
not one that's the, I think it's the Mercator map, which is the
one that we all use, which is the rectangle, but the one that's a circle, right, that's really like
a flattened out globe, you'll see that Greenland actually geographically is basically in between
us and Russia over the North Pole. And so in the event of a missile attack, the easiest way to
intercept a ballistic missile is to basically go from the ground directly up and to hit it at the peak of its arc.
And that would theoretically be Greenland, right?
So if there was a type of warming, it actually is very strategic for that.
I think the bigger one from my perspective, and I'm not a military guy by any means.
This is just purely a speculation thing.
As global warming continues to happen, the ice caps are melting, right?
And so what does that mean?
Well, that means that the actual North Pole has become much more saleable for cargo ships.
And so what I think is much more likely is that you're going to start seeing much more shipping come through the North Pole from China into Europe, because they can go over the North Pole through the Arctic Circle where there's no
land and then just sail right into Europe through Amsterdam or through the Nordic region or
potentially even through Russia. And so with Greenland, excuse me, with Greenland, you're
controlling a bit more of that of that Arctic Circle, a lot more of that shipping territory.
And so for a lot of those reasons, I think it's certainly strategic.
Obviously, everybody loves to throw around the natural resources thing that obviously is a bit more complicated in terms of infrastructure costs.
So just getting those things spun up can take a long, long time
and of those other reasons. But certainly, I also just think that Trump smells it in the water. And
like you said, there could very well be a legacy play there that he's trying to do that and expand.
Not to mention the hottest take of the day is that maybe one of the most likely ways that the U.S. actually
pays off the GDP is by going full Roman Empire and expanding its scale.
Because famously, the Roman Empire grew so big solely because it couldn't actually produce
anything GDP-wise itself.
And so it had to continue to expand to add resources and all these things.
And so I've never seen anybody talk about that.
I'm not necessarily advocating for that
but uh but it is a a fringe concept that who knows maybe one day um could actually be one
of the solutions so uh some crazy things in greenland i still don't think it's going to
happen though to be honest jared that's a super interesting take there kyle because i'm sure all
like the the history buffs and and you know the guys who read the encyclopedias, those super thick books, world history, blah, blah, blah.
Those people probably have it figured out pretty good because the world map has been set pretty much the way it is for quite some time.
So major changes like that, there's probably some repeat in history there
that could be worth taking a look back in.
But next topic that I want to jump to is,
and for some reason today,
it's not letting me pin these posts
in the top of the space.
Normally I would.
So if you're in the audience,
I apologize for that.
But AI startup Anthropic is reportedly in talks to raise $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation.
This would make this the fourth largest private company in the world.
So, Kyle, I want to pass a couple questions to you on this.
So Kyle, I want to pass a couple questions to you on this.
One of the things that we've talked on the show before is these valuations are just so bizarre and just so beyond, you know, the trading at a multiple, you know, just as far as where revenue is.
How do these companies get to a point where they're actually making revenue to justify these valuations? Obviously, the valuations are justified because they're raising money at it. But
when they're trading at such a large multiple, what does that look like at a large scale? Does
that create a bubble? There's a lot of talk about the AI bubble. Everybody says that about the new
tech that always happens. But we've talked about that a little on the show. So I want to start with that side about that. And then also at the scale of, you know, $350 billion, fourth largest private company. Why do you think they choose to remain private versus going public. Obviously, there's a few different reasons for that. And I'm actually,
I just, I'm about done with Peter Thiel's Zero to One book right now. Great read, by the way,
if you haven't read that, definitely a good book to check out. One of my favorite books that I've
read here over the last few books. And one of the things he talks about is companies should probably
try to stay private as long as they can for the simple
fact that they don't have to be focused on trying to meet quarterly expectations for shareholders.
And when companies are public, they're focused on they need to hit revenue numbers by a certain
time for every quarter so that as a CEO, they can keep getting their big salary.
When you're a private company, that doesn't matter. And so instead of being focused on quarter to quarter at a three-month basis, now maybe you're focused on the next three years,
the next five years, the next 10 years, and you have a much bigger, longer outlook where
the long-term success of the company is more set up than just how can we we hide things and get by you know three months at
a time so um want to pass those those thoughts over to you kyle and let you go away with it
yeah well look i think there's a there's a couple things um unfortunately the ipo system is broken
jared you and i have talked about this at length on the show last year. Typically, the public...
He's cutting in pretty bad for me, cutting out for me.
Can you hear me?
Hello?
It's pretty rough. It's pretty rough? Hello? It's pretty rough.
Go for it now, Kyle.
Okay.
Go for it now.
Yeah.
There's two reasons why companies would
raise capital or go public.
One was
raise capital because
there were not
private equity companies that would give capital that would be needed
at scale.
But that dramatically has changed over the last decade.
Now, any company can raise hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
As long as they have the metrics and they're an attractive business, they can raise as
much money as they need.
And so that is the number one reason
why companies would go public.
Now it is no longer even an issue.
And so there's no point in going through the compliance
and the hurdles, as you mentioned, Jared,
as well as having the public scrutiny,
if you don't need the capital.
The other reason why companies would often go public
is shareholder pressure,
because many shareholders didn't want to
be tied up forever. But that also has changed because now you have so many secondary funds,
you have SPVs and secondary sales that this entire market has blown up where now it's actually not
that difficult for a series A investor to get out of their private equity investments as long as the
company is good. And so if you're an early investor in Anthropic
and you want to sell,
at this point there is lack of demand for buy side
on any of these.
There's pretty much no incentive,
private company that has no issues raising capital
to go public, except we have seen one value add.
And we may see OpenAI try to take advantage of it,
but we've definitely seen it taken advantage of by companies.
And that is that regular promotes that get built by being a public company.
If you hit Coinbase, many companies during crown regulatory scrutiny because of the fact that they were a public
company. And so the regulators did not want to tear down the business the way that they tore
down other companies because they knew the public had significant exposure in that particular
business. And so there is an opportunity for some of these companies, perhaps
to secure government financing, government contracts, or any type of leniency with respect
to prosecution due to the nature of being a public company. But if that is not relative to a company's
business model, it does not seem at this time that there's really any perks to being a public
company because of the fact that collateralization, for example,
still now very, very easy to do as a private held company. As long as you're big enough,
you're generating enough revenue and there's enough demand for your shares. So I think that you make really good points here. It's BS from my perspective, like the public investor is
getting screwed. The fact that I personally have not been able to invest in Anthropic, like I've been using
the company and was working on a secondary to try to acquire shares at a 15 billion valuation
last year.
It is up 25 times in their equity valuation since last year when I was trying to get allocation.
And I lose because I can't go on my stock exchange account and buy shares because I
can't get exposure to this.
And so unfortunately, maybe that means less reporting.
Maybe that means less compliance.
And I know that that means that more people might get hurt.
But, you know, Trump's idea of making reporting biannually as opposed to quarterly might be
an example of something that's going to have to happen to make it more attractive for companies
to go public because it is really unfair to the average person. It's really dramatically going to
increase this median wealth gap because the S&P 500, even though that's doing okay on the back
of NVIDIA and others, is missing out on these private capital gains. The public shareholder,
the average person with a pension that's working is not getting any
exposure to these things. The only people that are, are the large scale institutional investors
and venture capitalists, which of course I participate in this industry and even I'm
not able to get access, let alone somebody else. And so I just think that this system's really
not working the way that it was always intended to. Maybe tokenization is the answer. Maybe it's something
else. I'm not sure. But all I do know is that the existing public market system does not work
for these new tech companies. That biannual reporting, I do think that's a critical piece.
I know a couple months ago, we brought that up when that news first hit. But I do think that's
a good point to this equation that we're talking about right now, Kyle.
Now, Kyle, if these companies do go public like this, because there's more liquidity, because it's more accessible, you mentioned kind of missing on that 25x just because you didn't have access to it.
And I'm sure even if it was a 20x, you still would have bought in.
Even if it was a 20X, you still would have bought in.
But the lockup of that and the access of that, not being able to get that, changes that a little bit.
So is there a premium on – where would you say the premium lies?
Does it lie in the scarcity of the private market?
Or does the premium as far as multiple lie in the public market where there's more liquidity and access for other people to invest in these companies?
Cutting out here, Kyle. Can't hear you.
Hey, can you hear me?
Yep, we're good.
Hello? Okay.
Yep, I can hear you.
Yeah, so the question is, as far as a multiple that these companies are trading at, do you think that there's a higher multiple premium on the private side where these companies are the scarcity of being able to get access to invest in these companies?
Do you think there's a higher premium on the private side or do you think there's a higher premium with a multiple on public side for these companies once they go public and they have liquidity and more people can get access to them?
It's a really good question, and I would definitely need to do research to substantiate that.
Yes, he's the first friend.
Ah, ah.
He's the first friend.
He's the first friend.
He's the first friend.
He's the first friend.
He's the first friend.
He's the first friend.
He's the first friend.
He's the first friend.
He's the first friend. He's the first friend. He's the first friend. Thank you. Kyle, I got to cut you off.
Yeah, maybe drop down and come back up and try that.
Your audio is cutting real in and out.
Sniper, it's good to have you on stage.
If you were here about 20 minutes ago, we were talking about some defense stuff.
So it was right up your alley.
Wow.
Yeah. So, Evan, do you have any thoughts on that last question on the public-private side as far as where you see a higher multiple?
Yeah. So I think private companies probably do get a higher multiple.
But I think there might be a scale problem to that where I don't know if OpenAI can handle $500 billion.
I don't know where OpenAI and SpaceX and all these companies that I don't know their profitability is at right now.
You know, growth rates are probably immense, but I don't know if they would at certain scales, they'd be able to still get the same valuations.
Yeah, so my assumption is actually the private markets you could also
hide stuff a little bit better um yeah listen i i i have my companies want to stay private longer
it feels like a majority of the benefits are going that way and if you can have access to capital
which not every single company can um you know there are a couple other things I've seen companies talk about is if you really want to build a cult-like audience, a real kind of
fans behind it, it's a lot more difficult to do that as a private company versus a public one.
But also, it's not impossible anymore. People really do love Andrel,
Andrel, Palmer Luckey's thing, and OpenAI has his people. Maybe on on x not as many of you guys love them but uh so i don't
know i i my assumption though on valuations is i you would be able to get a higher multiple as a
private company and i do think there's an exclusive side of that but i also think there's a liquidity
side uh you know that that makes it different on the public side but maybe that would just be
company to company because there's
a downside to that as well when people have you know more liquidity that also means they're selling
so i guess that can work both ways um another topic sniper if you want to jump in on that
you're welcome to otherwise i got another another news topic that that i would
another, um, news topic that, that I, if I'm going to be honest, you're cutting out a little
bit right now. Um, I missed the first part where the original topic was, uh, introduced. Um,
I did listen to Evan, Evan made some pretty good points, private companies versus public companies. But yeah, no, that's cool. So we'll just move on our next topic here. This was at the recent All In, the All In podcast guys with Chamath and David Sachs and those guys.
They recently had an event and I would pin it. But for some reason today, it's not allowing me to pin these tweets here in the scoreboard but this this tweet was from boring biz and it's
a clip of Orlando Bravo talking about the role of private equity in the US
economy and society and to give you guys the summary of this this video clip
basically he says the role that it plays in the U.S. economy is that capital
is a great change agent. And because capital gives us the access for change and innovation,
but also within different companies. Because as your company grows, the change agent of the money is going to tell the story.
If your company fails, at some point, that capital is going to matter.
And his direct quote here is, it is a business similar to venture, where what matters is the return that you put up.
You have incredible alignment with the sources is the return that you put up. You have incredible
alignment with the sources of capital that give you the money. And if you make the return,
you can stay in business. So basically, he's saying that if you want to continue to make
the change, you have to continue to produce results and to produce returns for your investors.
Because if not, your company is going to go out of business. And if you do produce returns, you'll be able to raise more money. And he also goes on to talk about how it's a great
change agent because it allows staff to move because a lot of these companies, it takes a lot
of effort and not everybody wants to run these companies for 30 years. And so having access to
more capital allows you to hire new people as people leave. And so I just thought it was an interesting take, something we haven't quite got into on the show.
What role does the private markets and the capital actually play in our economy?
So, Kyle, if you're back on, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Or Evan, if you're able to talk on that too, I'd love to hear what you got.
Hey, hey, can you hear me? Yep're good now all right great i've been having some cellular issues but uh glad at least you can hear me now um yeah well look jared i mean to the conversation
that we had earlier private capital markets are clearly having a bigger and bigger effect on our economy. And again,
I think it's an issue because most of the economy doesn't have access to it. So I'd like to see that
change in some way, whether it's offering tax breaks to public companies or maybe it's positive
incentives to be public and to allow for your cap table to be accessed by the broader market.
But it also does force companies to grow up a little bit, right?
It forces them to do audited financials, for example, which I think generally is a good
thing.
And maybe a lot of these companies do that already.
But publishing those things and allowing for global accountability is something that I
think is very relevant and allows for more transparency.
So it does play a very large role.
It also plays a very large role in the collateralization that we mentioned.
So where this frustration around wealth taxes comes from is often because most of the billionaires
of the country are able to take out loans against their company's assets.
And they're able to get tax-free capital because they aren't selling their stock.
They are taking a loan against it.
And taking a loan against stock is non-taxed. There are these private capital markets infrastructure systems that were never intended to be at such a large scale or so prevalent in an investor's portfolio.
And now that they are, the system needs to be restructured a little bit.
And this is coming from a capitalist.
This is coming from somebody that's very bullish on all these technologies and private capital markets.
I love capital markets infrastructure.
But we have built our system assuming that this didn't exist, right? And now that this entire market exists and the market
share of it is only growing, right? You look at how NVIDIA and the Mag 7 is powering the S&P 500.
It's not inconceivable to think that chat GPT's OpenAI may actually already be in the S&P 500
if it was a public company, right?
Anthropic now at $350 billion is getting close as well.
And I don't think that it's crazy to think that there's going to be a variety of these
private companies over the next decade that are likely going to be some of the world's
largest companies.
And we're not going to have any exposure to them through the stock market.
And so that trickles down through everything. It trickles down through
how they're funding these companies. It's trickling down to where they're allocating
capital. It trickles down into access, as I've talked about a lot on this show. It trickles
down into that lending component that I mentioned. Private capital markets are eating the public
capital markets. IPOs are down dramatically.
And so I think that that's a very interesting trend that seems to only be accelerating as
opposed to decelerating.
Hopefully an open AI public offering or a SpaceX public offering can help kind of drive
that public market adoption a little bit more.
I was hopeful that that would happen a little bit more than it did in 25. 26, it feels that there's a lot of different crypto companies that might be
trying to go public. I know Gemini did in 25. We certainly talked a lot about CoreWeave. So it's
not that it's dead, but it's dying for sure. And that's definitely, it's not the capital
market, it's that private capital markets seem to be eating the public capital markets, which we've never seen before.
Kyle, one thing you touched on that really gets my mind thinking there is you talk about some of those crypto companies that may go public in 26.
If these are crypto companies that already have their own native token and now they're going to own stock um obviously there's there's a difference between the token and having equity in the company
but i could see how that could maybe uh throw a little bit of a wrench in things when um and maybe
that's only for like uneducated people who aren't necessarily sure what they're buying but um i think
that would just be an interesting dynamic that maybe we haven't quite seen before just because, you know, we live in a little bit of an echo chamber.
But, you know, crypto is still fairly new and these are all new developments.
So that's interesting.
I have one more news topic that I want to get to that just came out here a few hours ago before we get to our announcement.
So maybe three minutes or so on this.
And Evan, if you're available, I'd love to start with you on this.
I would share the tweet.
I don't know if that's a new feature
that just rolled out,
but what the tweet is,
is XAI is building the world's
largest supercomputer in Mississippi.
XAI is making the largest private investment
in state history,
unveiling an 800,000 square foot data center. It's a $20
billion plus project and will be creating hundreds of direct jobs statewide. So Evan,
as our inside man at XAI with a little bit of connections there, I wonder if you have any
thoughts on this latest topic. I have some thoughts on the energy side of what this means for the energy side of data centers.
But Evan, if you have any thoughts on the XAI side, I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
Yeah, no, they're expanding quick.
They just had a Series E that they closed.
I think it was like a $10 billion or something they raised at a $230-something billion valuation is the numbers I saw.
Strategic investors, including NVIDIA.
There was a lot of people invested in it.
So this is clearly what they were going to spend the money on.
This is not going to be the last one.
There will be, this is their third major data center.
I believe they're calling it Colossus or Macro Harder
or whatever they want to call it.
But yeah, I would expect to see more of this,
every single company going into it.
And, you know, we went at the NVIDIA keynote,
Jensen was kind of talking through
their newest GPUs,
newest kind of AI hardware.
And even just one or two of the things that he said there
really stood out there. Old racks they were
building took two hours to assemble.
Now, for this next generation, they're going to take five
minutes to assemble.
So just there, I'm sure these, not
only will there be more of these, they're going to be
getting up quicker. And I think there's a lot of investment opportunities around it. Obviously,
energy has been a very popular one for people to come in and talk about. How are we going to
fuel all these ones? And that is an important development. Memory chips is one that's kind of
becoming a bottleneck right now that a lot of people have been talking about. And if you look
at some of the stocks, and I'm sure a lot of private companies have been riding valuation waves as well
through that. But memory is going to be one. One of the areas that I've actually been investing,
this is more on the public side of it, and we spent a lot of time talking
about this through stocks on spaces, is actually through the grid.
Yeah, some energy stuff might go into it, but it seems like a pretty stable,
a safe assessment that the grid, which is 20, 30,
40, whatever years old, needs updating. There's a lot of investment opportunities coming in through
that. So I think this should not be a surprising headline to anybody. Maybe the state. Actually,
we really don't know too much. I think it's in Mississippi. I don't know too much about
what the data center environment looks like there um you know uh what the energy how much
you know energy costs there relative to the rest of the us so i don't have that many insights about
location but the fact that they're building the largest data center is a headline that you are
going to see multiple times every single year over the next couple years i truly believe that they're
just going to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger faster and faster and faster and you know
the hope is also that these
companies such as NVIDIA, Broadcom, et cetera, can create more efficient technology that can
maybe to scale up and we use similar amounts of energy. So it should be interesting. I went off
on a little bit of a tangent there, but I don't think this is a headline that you should be
surprised at all. And I would expect to see multiple of this type of headline.
X company build, well, no, sorry, I meant whatever company it is,
Y company builds their biggest data center ever, expands.
And then you're going to hear a headline about whatever is the biggest data center,
full stop, period.
Then someone from China is going to go in and build it.
And then it's going to become a whole US versus China thing.
And I bet you we build even bigger data centers then.
So I do not think that this is a headline that you should not expect to see more.
Yeah, I definitely think it's a common thing.
We've seen more and more of it.
My small town that I'm from, we actually have two.
We have Facebook and Amazon, different centers that went in the last, I don't know, five,
10 years.
And they're massive.
So the good thing is
there's a lot of jobs that are generated from that. You could say the bad thing about that is
with an outdated grid is those companies are pulling power from the grid, which creates some
pressure on supply and demand, making everybody in the area's power more expensive. So power bills
go up for the average people living in those communities.
So the grid needs to be updated. My personal take is nuclear energy is a good option. And you can
deploy those nuclear reactors straight on campus at those facilities. And instead of pulling from
the grid's power, which is the communal power for everybody in the area, you can pull straight from those micro-reactors and power those data centers.
And then in the long run, it's more cost-effective.
There's a bunch of other reasons.
Solar and wind, they work at about 24% and 33% capacity, meaning they're very weather-dependent.
and 33% capacity, meaning they're very weather dependent. So it's very much on the basis of,
you know, depending on how the weather is, that's if the power is generating. Nuclear operates at
about 94% capacity. So it's always on and that 6% is downtime just for maintenance and stuff. So
it's all scheduled. So I definitely think as we see more of these data centers pop up,
I definitely think we'll see a rise in nuclear energy, which we are.
In Illinois today, Governor Pritzker just signed a bill that or an act that allowed them to continue building new nuclear plants, which has been a bill that they've had outlawed for, I think, four decades.
And so that's changing around.
So we'll see more and more of that throughout.
Kyle, a quick 30 seconds on this topic
if you have anything you want to chime in on.
Wow, you guys really cover the map
with respect to the grid and XAI
and everything going on there.
I'm hopeful personally that with Grok5
or whatever the next model is, they can really
develop a specialized product that is demonstrably better for normal day-to-day use cases.
That's going to be my big request to them because what I like about Claude and what
Anthropic has done is they are the go-to coding model, right?
They are the best at coding products. ChatGPT, in my experience, has great interface with respect to creating documents,
doing research, a lot of that kind of stuff. I personally haven't used Grok quite as much in the
actual chat interface, but it has seemed to have some strong market fit as being kind of a social
media integrated AI with respect to being
able to tag it on Twitter and those types of things. I feel like that's used often by people.
So there are, you know, I think carve outs being created by each one of these products,
but it would be really great to see a new level up with respect to day-to-day tasks
that get accomplished here sometime soon. Because I do feel like with ChatGPT, what GPT-4 and then 4.0 and then 5 and then 5.1 and 5.2, they all kind of do the same
thing. Maybe it's slightly better, but I haven't really noticed it in my day-to-day use. I'm not
sure about anybody else. Certainly, Claude has gotten dramatically better with its coding abilities, but it's still not quite at the level of your experienced coder, but they're getting there.
I'd like to see XII create something that really does make a huge impact on my day-to-day level.
Perhaps they're focused more on automated driving and robotics. That could be the angle they're
going for, and we'll maybe see what that hardware looks like in the near future. But that's going to be my big thing that I'm looking forward
to in 2026 is which of these models makes another significant leap in kind of my day-to-day living
of where I'm leveraging these products as an entrepreneur, as an investor. There's a lot to be excited about, but I still
feel like some things are left. I'm left wanting more with a lot of these products, especially with
a lot of the AI tooling that exists, all the applications that use AI. A lot of it doesn't
seem to really actually do that much, you know, like within your day-to-day tasks. I'd like to
see what that looks like in the next generation.
A lot of good takes,
a lot of good conversation today.
We covered a lot of different topics as we get to the top of the hour.
I want to wrap this up
and share an announcement
that myself, Kyle, and Evan
and the Wolf Financial team
want to share about the future of the show.
We're very excited to move
to a little bit different medium, I guess you could
say, here in 2026. And our Venture Capital show will continue, but we're going to shift to video.
So you'll be able to see me and Kyle live. We'll bring on a guest. And first 15 or so minutes of
the show, we'll cover kind of like we do here today and just cover a few different
recent current events and then we'll bring in an expert on a specific niche topic
and change that up every week and have about a 30-minute interview with them and really
dive in deep into into their field of expertise and to get to learn from them so one of the cool
things about this show and for me personally is i have a lot of questions a lot of expertise and to get to learn from them. So one of the cool things about this show,
and for me personally, is I have a lot of questions, a lot of curiosity, and I just like to ask questions and learn from people. And I think there's a lot of great people on this
platform that we can all learn from. And so that's kind of the nature of my brand and also the nature
of this show is to help bring that education straight to you. So I'm excited about it. Kyle, Evan, if you guys want to
want to chime in on anything there, I would love to let you have the floor.
Well, thanks, Evan, for being here. You know, I love that I can immediately see the boost in our
reach and the algorithm with you being here. And I think you offer a lot of great participation as
well. So appreciate your help and
in helping us grow the show um i'm really happy to be back i love talking this stuff and jared
it's always good to be with you and i think video will help us take it to the next level as we grow
and scale this this opportunity so i think it's all fantastic if you're new to the wolf financial
suite of shows they are doing constant X spaces.
Some are on video.
Some are radio shows.
They're going 12, 15 hours a day.
Wolf Financial, Wolf Trading, Wolf Web 3, Wolf Bitcoin, Wolf Sports.
Whatever you want to do, check out the suite of services talking about the public markets and trading, talking about gambling, talking about crypto, which is kind of a little bit of the two combined, obviously.
So check out everything going on Wolf Financial.
Follow Jared, follow Evan and everybody else involved.
And with that, I'll kick it over to him to close out the show.
Thank you so much.
We'll talk to you next week.
Yeah, that was great.
I appreciate you guys.
Shout out Daniel.
For anyone who doesn't know i think i
did a giveaway like five years from the stock market news account and daniel won so shout out
to that he's been a long time listener i appreciate you dan appreciate it oh wait what did i win i
don't remember i've just been a follower for a while you sure i think i get all fine i'll dig
through the dms i think i did something back in other day. Maybe I'm thinking, you know, just take the credit.
I'll take it, man.
Long time follower, though.
That is true.
That's either the way.
But I appreciate you, Dan.
I appreciate Jared and Kyle.
This is an awesome show.
Shout out to Sniper for coming in and hanging out.
I'm excited to see what these guys do in the future.
Shout out to them.
Make sure you're checking them out. If you enjoy live, free content about the stock market and you want to get better as an investor trader whatever it is
that is our goal with the the wolf account here so go in follow this
account and we will catch you all later we have wolf trading that show will be
live all day tomorrow we also will have a couple other pieces of content going
up we saw we we just got a very interesting, exclusive interview coming on Tuesday of next week.
So get excited.
I appreciate you all.
See ya.
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