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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Monday, August 31. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. With
Speaker 3:the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:We are back and
Speaker 3:We missed you.
Speaker 2:Is still with us. Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more.
Speaker 1:In Oh,
Speaker 2:feels so good to be back. Two weeks is a crazy amount of time to be away.
Speaker 3:I don't understand how children do this for weeks or months at a time.
Speaker 2:It's wild. It's wild.
Speaker 3:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of video games.
Speaker 3:I was sitting there. Yeah. I had somebody this morning say, it feels like it must have gone by so fast. Oh. And I and I was thinking, no.
Speaker 1:It actually didn't go by fast at all. It felt like Yeah.
Speaker 3:It felt like two months. Yeah. Did feel like two months. We manipulated time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But thank you to the Microsoft team, the Activision team. They sent us codes for Modern Warfare four. My review is in. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:I love it. It's a really good game. Really polished. And the Kill Blob
Speaker 3:Did you revert back at all No. To
Speaker 2:Didn't really have the opportunity. I I was I was joking about full relapse, just gaming from dusk till dawn. But
Speaker 3:that
Speaker 2:is in
Speaker 3:fact I had a relapse
Speaker 2:not in the cards these days.
Speaker 3:Pizza. Pizza. I was eating pizza almost like twice a day at times.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Was eating a lot of pizza. Yeah. Surfing a lot.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 3:A lot of family time.
Speaker 2:Do you think pizza is potentially addictive?
Speaker 3:I do.
Speaker 2:You think that there could be a settlement?
Speaker 3:I do think I I don't think there could. I think there should.
Speaker 2:There should be. I I do wonder, like, because cigarettes, it was very cigarettes were very scientifically proven to be addictive. Like, you can give nicotine to a mouse and it will like go and try and get more nicotine. Like, it's the most cut and dry. You can run the experiment with, you know, any animal
Speaker 1:And I would assume that
Speaker 2:in the blood.
Speaker 3:Based on my own personal experience, pizza and surfing fall into that same bucket.
Speaker 1:Oh, you
Speaker 3:give a mouse barreled.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you give a mouse a cookie You give
Speaker 3:a mouse a barrel.
Speaker 2:A barrel. He's gonna want to it
Speaker 1:lot more.
Speaker 3:With a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:For sure. But it it will be interesting to see where the addiction stuff goes because when when all this came up, know, the meta social media addiction,
Speaker 1:I was kind of like
Speaker 3:Give a mouse to scroll.
Speaker 2:Like, I understand that people were trying. I don't know. Can you get mice or monkeys addicted to Reels?
Speaker 1:Maybe. I'm sure. Almost certainly.
Speaker 2:You think you could get a monkey addicted to Instagram Reels?
Speaker 1:I think a 100.
Speaker 2:We got a 100%. We're gonna find out.
Speaker 3:We can't get any monkeys because they're they're sold out?
Speaker 2:No. No. You can get a monkey. You just have to pay top dollar. Okay.
Speaker 2:They're expensive.
Speaker 3:Buy in advance.
Speaker 1:But you can you can buy one.
Speaker 2:But I do it did seem like it was a tougher sell because it was not a chemically addictive product. It was more of a psychological thing. There's a benefit to it. There's a free speech element. All very complicated.
Speaker 2:I was not expecting to see a big settlement when this first came up years ago. I thought it was going to be more nickel and diming little case by case things. But, in fact, there has been a huge settlement by Meta. Two days ago, or this was when this was written, this was August 26, Meta announced settlements with attorneys general representing 48 states and the District Of Columbia and three US territories. So there were only two states that held back, I believe it's Texas and New Mexico, but over allegations that Facebook and Instagram harmed children and teens.
Speaker 2:So, this has been boiling up for a while. There were smaller settlements. This is the big one. And so, the high level numbers here. Meta will pay the states $12,700,000,000 over ten years and it could go up to 18,000,000,000 if other platforms join the settlement.
Speaker 3:Is Big a size is a big number.
Speaker 2:It is a big number. And honestly, if you are a state legislator or you care about having your state funded for a variety of things, this is good news. This is a size gong moment for the states because they will be getting this money distributed to them and they can use that to do whatever states do from education to healthcare. There's lot of different things that states can do. I know Tyler's pissed because he doesn't like the government getting a dime, but but it is a seizagogue moment for them.
Speaker 4:I did find a video of a chimpanzee hitting reels. If we can pull
Speaker 1:this Let's
Speaker 3:pull this up. This is
Speaker 1:This is key. This is important. This is very
Speaker 3:Definitely more important than
Speaker 2:Oh. Okay. Yeah. This looks Okay. Maybe maybe maybe social media is addictive.
Speaker 2:Now that I'm seeing this, this is yeah. It might be universal. If it crosses wow.
Speaker 3:Using it so intuitively?
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. I mean, that's just good UI design. Come on. You gotta give the the UX engineer some credit here.
Speaker 2:Make it so easy to use that even a monkey could use it. That was the prompt for that UX engineer and they delivered. This is yeah. If it crosses if it crosses species barriers, I'm much more likely to agree that something could be addictive. But
Speaker 3:Well, and here especially, you know, he's looking at
Speaker 2:Other monkeys.
Speaker 3:Other monkeys.
Speaker 2:Okay. That's a little Yeah.
Speaker 3:Don't know. Yeah. No, know. But an algo feed, it's gonna naturally start
Speaker 1:Show a monkey content.
Speaker 3:Lot of those videos.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Anyway, so everyone has been drawing analogies to the tobacco industry's master settlement agreement around this because that's the last time there was a huge multi billion, tens of billions of dollars settlement between a large organization around addiction and a bunch of states. That's what's happened when cigarette companies signed the master settlement agreement, all of the companies agreeing to pay all the states.
Speaker 2:But the structure was a little bit different and there's some nuance there. And so Eric Sufort over at MobileDevMemo, friend of the show, says, the supinator, he was saying this is not necessarily the he said, Meta settlement is no big tobacco moment. That was his takeaway in MobileDebMemo. You should go subscribe because this post is a paid paid post. But I'll take you through some of the interesting analysis that he put together.
Speaker 2:I was debating with a lawyer friend of mine about this over the weekend and and and have some interesting details here. So Eric writes, and the headline here is that what Meta is going to pay as a percentage of revenue or what the social media industry will pay as a percentage of revenue relative to what the tobacco industry paid as a percentage of revenue is off by almost an order of magnitude. So let's put them in context here. So he says, Meta's settlement is comparatively paltry. A white paper from the USDA using BLS data estimates that the total U.
Speaker 2:S. Consumer expenditure on tobacco products in 1998 when the master settlement agreement was signed was roughly $57,000,000,000 a year. 57. Certainly good if you're a big tobacco shareholder, I suppose. Annualizing the roughly $250,000,000,000 in combined tobacco settlement payments over twenty five years produces an average of $10,000,000,000 per year is what they've been paying.
Speaker 2:And so that was equivalent to 17 and a half percent in 1998 grow domestic expenditure. So you could think about it as like when tobacco got hit with like, you're addictive, what did the government say you got to pay? They asked for 17 and a half percent.
Speaker 3:Very, very meaningful.
Speaker 2:Very, very meaningful.
Speaker 3:And that's that's off the top. Right?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. This is revenue.
Speaker 3:It's it's not like, hey, you got to give us a percentage of your profits.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so it's calculated in a more complicated way. It's not exactly a percentage. It's on a per pack sold, but it is inflation adjusted. And so there's a whole bunch of other mechanics that really have have allowed the master settlement agreement to deliver tens of billions of dollars on an ongoing basis even while now tobacco sales are are are slumping, cigarette sales are declining, and so that does create more complex dynamics for the states.
Speaker 2:But still, it's 17 and a half percent of the industry's revenue coming to states as effectively an extra tax on top, which I think a lot of people would agree is good because cigarettes are bad. Right? But, what's going on with Meta and social media? So, given Meta's full year 2025 U. Revenue of 75,000,000,000 roughly per the company's 10 k, Its average annual payment if they pay the full 18,000,000,000 because they're paying that over ten years, it's 1,800,000,000.
Speaker 2:So what is 1,800,000,000 of 75,000,000,000? It's 2.4%. So instead of 17.5
Speaker 1:Sorry. Where are you
Speaker 3:getting 75,000,000,000?
Speaker 2:75,000,000,000 was their US revenue
Speaker 3:US. Globally, it was like a
Speaker 1:couple 100.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bigger. Bigger. But but you have to comp it to domestic because that's where this is taking effect. Right?
Speaker 2:So it would be even lower if you look at overall revenue, But is a good you can think about it as tobacco had to pay 17.5% of domestic revenue. Social media, 2.5 of domestic revenue. So not quite an order of magnitude, but a significant gap, significant gap there. And so it's important to reiterate here, says Eric Souffert over at MobileDeb Memo, that the MSA payment, the master settlement agreement payment schedule, is inflation adjusted and tracks unit sales. Meta statement settlement has no such mechanism.
Speaker 2:So let's say that Meta doubles revenue, their percentage they'll pay is lower. And then let's say inflation kicks in, they're still going to be paying, you know, this $1,800,000,000 a year ten years from now. Could be could be pennies if if hyperinflation happens. Yeah. Who knows?
Speaker 3:Yeah. The only reason it felt somewhat significant Yeah. From a dollar standpoint is because Meta is just spending so much money on
Speaker 2:AI. Interesting.
Speaker 3:Like Yeah. Like I I you can just imagine Zach being like, I really wish I could have given that to Jensen. Right.
Speaker 2:So I had the opposite. I had the opposite read, which was I saw 18,000,000,000 and I was that's like, you know, a month of AI spend for them. And I was like, this is not that much money. And then, of course, it's over ten years. And so when you think about it as it's it's $1,800,000,000 a year, so that's a 100 mil a month.
Speaker 2:That's their token budget right now. I don't know. Maybe less. It it it it No.
Speaker 3:Over overall, it's it's it's, insignificant. Yeah. But, when when they are spending more money than they are making Yeah. It it hurts a little bit more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for sure. For sure. So the other issue that came up here that is different from the tobacco master settlement agreement is the question about the First Amendment, the free speech issue. So tobacco the tobacco industry was restricted from advertising cigarettes as part of this master settlement agreement.
Speaker 2:And there were there were other cases that led to no more cigarette advertising. And, of course, that is somewhat infringing on the corporate speech, but that's a lot easier to deal with than consumer speech. And Meta is an interesting place because the Supreme Court has deemed that social media is a is a critical a critical vehicle for citizens to exercise their free speech. And so, like, it's very difficult for the government to come in and say, we are going to ban social media because it is a vehicle for Americans' free speech, individual citizens' speech. So, even though even though everyone thinks, oh, they're punishing Meta, it would still there would be plenty of plenty of American citizens who would say, wait, I I my free speech rights have been infringed upon.
Speaker 2:So, it's much harder for the government to come down with some standard traditional regulation. That's why we're in this world of regulation through litigation, which is Meta's arm has been twisted. Like, they have to pay this and then we'll go into what they're doing around actually changing the product for teens and underage users because they're all doing that because of these lawsuits, not because there's a new law saying you can't do this. And a lot of that is like there are plenty of topics that are pretty consensus controversial, things like eating disorders and self harm that people are uncomfortable with and think they don't have a place on social media and yet free speech rights do actually protect those. So, if you want to talk about your eating disorder, that is your free speech right and Meta can't infringe on that as much.
Speaker 2:It's very tricky for them to do that, basically. So, there's also an interesting regulatory capture angle here and it's relevant to AI because in AI everyone's talking about regulatory capture as as something that the companies want. Like, they want regulation. And this is sort of the opposite example. So regulate regulatory capture or regulate like, the benefits of regulation usually benefits incumbents and big companies for sort of two reasons.
Speaker 2:One is that typically when the regulation is being written, the big companies, they have lobbyists. They have offices in DC. They also have, you know, packs and all sorts of different political vehicles to donate to make sure that the regulation gets written in a way that is at least a little bit favorable to them. They can just move the needle a little bit in their direction, hone things how they like. Right?
Speaker 2:And then second is that once the regulation goes into effect, they have the resources and the actual margin dollars to go and to to go and comply. And so if the if all of a sudden to set up a new social media website requires age verification, age verification can be expensive. Like, have to do it Lucy for everyone that buys nicotine products and it's like a dollar for every checkout. And if the average order value is like at one point it was like $50, like that's like 2% of the top line that's going towards regulation. If you're a bigger company, you you have other ways of of massaging that cost, What's interesting about this is that the social we know the social media companies did not ask for this regulatory capture and yet they are benefiting, which is interesting.
Speaker 2:So like Meta stock is pretty flat through all this. It's not existential. No.
Speaker 3:It popped on the news. Yeah. Didn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because it's a it's a pretty good outcome for them. It's not that bad. And and but also I'm I'm pretty happy about it because it's not that bad of an outcome for parents and kids. Like parents want more granular control over what their kids are doing on social media.
Speaker 2:School teachers want more control over what's happening on kids' phones while they're at school. There are some schools that do no device policies, but but as part of this meta's rolling out sort of a blanket no notifications during school hours, which I think is just something that people will be happy about. So it's like sort of a win win there. What are you laughing at?
Speaker 3:I think people will instantly be trained to just check it proactively Yes. Because it's like the dopamine of like, is there gonna be a notification or not.
Speaker 2:True. True. True. True. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I turned off all my notifications on my phone. I have no notifications at all. So you just left left use my phone all the time.
Speaker 3:You just left the Xbox Live notification though?
Speaker 2:I'm not an Xbox guy.
Speaker 3:Oh, Playstation?
Speaker 1:PC. PC, bro. Hardcore.
Speaker 2:Hardcore. But the one the one of in regulatory capture, the people that suffer are start And so, but it's less of a discussion because in AI there are so many neo labs, so many other start ups that don't want regulatory capture because they're worried about all the big labs eating everything. In social media, in theory, it's going to be harder to launch a challenger to Facebook or Instagram, but I don't even know if there's that many founders that are focused on this category. The network effect has been so strong that it hasn't been a category that founders have been flooding into. So maybe in a weird roundabout contrarian situation, you wind up with more opportunity because if you can slog through all the new regulations to get your nascent social media company up and running, you create more value over time.
Speaker 2:And it's just a different a different underwriting scheme. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlocking seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Mike Isaac's been reporting on this. He says Meta is going full bore with pushing other companies to add the same restrictions it will add to its apps as part of the settlement.
Speaker 2:Meta plans to run this copy as a full print, full page print advertisement in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times tomorrow morning. Wow. A little circular deal for Mike promoting the New York Times. He works there. Man, undisclosed.
Speaker 2:What's going on? No.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and and it is just very wonderful spend to get Okay. To to be forced to pay $17,000,000,000 settlement for getting children addicted to your product and then tell other social other addictive social media companies to join us in supporting teens. It's just chef's kiss from
Speaker 2:You think you should be like join us in apologizing as well, basically? Well,
Speaker 3:I I I just think it's a good spin. That's all.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, here here here's what they said. Through this agreement, they've set out a path toward industry wide commitments to further empower parents by introducing a two hour daily time limit, turning off access to our apps at night as as a default, no notifications during school hours, clear prompts and notifications to teens every fifteen minutes continuous screen time, new parental supervision control so parents can decide how their teens use their apps. I think all this makes sense. Defaults are powerful so even if, you know, a parent wants to go in and allow their kid because they've got a night owl who's cooking up an incredible new IG account and is printing or something.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean, there are plenty of good reasons to use social media even while you're young. But but defaults are powerful and and I think this is a good thing. I don't think it affects the business that much. I don't think they make that much money from young people because kids don't buy cars on Instagram, like expensive things.
Speaker 2:Whereas a lot of millennials and even gen xers and boomers are on there shopping all the time. So the immediate revenue impact of any of these is minimal. You just don't want to wind up in a situation where you lose ground to TikTok and YouTube because they become the kid friendly one that the kids are like, oh, well, TikTok doesn't have any of these stupid restrictions, so I'm going to use that. And then they remain a user for their entire life and you lose an entire
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mean, the the main yeah. I mean, if if somebody is primarily addicted to Instagram Yep. And they get their two hour budget
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And historically, they would have used the product for three, four You have that spillover attention. So it will it will potentially help less addictive addictive social media platforms Yeah. Get more get more user minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. And and this was the original Instagram threat was that a younger generation was using Instagram and Facebook was gonna become like the what do they call it? The blue app or the old old book or something? I don't know.
Speaker 2:It was gonna only maintain the the older cohort. And that's sort of what happened, but it didn't matter because Meta bought Instagram. Then Snapchat was even like the younger crowd. They tried to buy it. They couldn't.
Speaker 2:They wound up cloning it. They were successful. And so the the the company maintained, but they can't let a new social media app come up and dominate kids. Not for the short term monetization. For the it's for the long term
Speaker 3:They don't mention Snap in the open letter. Is that a is that a shots fired?
Speaker 2:It's a dig.
Speaker 3:A subtle dig?
Speaker 2:I think so. I don't know. I don't know. It's probably based on revenue. TikTok and YouTube can certainly pony up more and are probably bigger threats at this point.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I had a friend who was like surprised by YouTube's inclusion. He didn't think YouTube was comparable at all. I think that for a lot of young people, YouTube is Instagram reels, basically. They open the app and they go straight to a vertical video that's endless scrolling.
Speaker 2:And he was like, I watch a history podcast on my while I'm cooking. And I was like, that's millennial status. That's not how people use
Speaker 3:That's unk mode.
Speaker 2:Unk mode. Yeah. But anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access request and password resets. You want go to Tim Cook's last day?
Speaker 3:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Tim Cook sent a final memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO. He said, I will miss this work in ways
Speaker 1:I can only begin to imagine.
Speaker 2:Even as I remain completely at peace with my decision.
Speaker 1:Just reading the
Speaker 3:entire memo
Speaker 2:and reading it, but I will miss it. He's a workaholic. He doesn't want to he doesn't want to retire. Wants to stay I was I was really hoping he would have another thirty year run-in him, you know? Like if if if Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger can work till they're in their nineties, why can't Tim Cook?
Speaker 2:Like, fundamentally, how is the job I think he
Speaker 3:was unhappy with pay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I mean, when you have
Speaker 3:when have MLB players making as much money as you while you're running one of the largest companies in history when you're one of the greatest CEOs in history, period. Yeah. And you can barely
Speaker 2:75. 74.3. They couldn't even get him over 75.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And no and and not enough people were willing to march on Cupertino Yeah. In protest Yeah. Of this. Right?
Speaker 3:And so I think at some point he's like, look, if people if, you know, shareholders
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm voting with my feet. I'm voting with exactly. I'm voting with my feet. I'm out.
Speaker 2:I'm out. No. It it is And crazy saga. I I just I I actually don't understand how you can't do this job into your nineties. It's like meetings.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Like, it's not like he's putting the iPhones together himself. Right? We Okay. Don't know Maybe.
Speaker 2:Maybe. I mean, they were only paying them something for
Speaker 3:There's no camera falling
Speaker 2:Yeah. Around. What do think?
Speaker 5:Long. The market had
Speaker 4:a nice send off.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:We nuked nuked 1%.
Speaker 2:1% nuked to to say goodbye.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think that's a
Speaker 3:that's that's that's a great sign of respect from the market. Mhmm. But the market also knows that that he left the company with a great, you know, with a great leader, John Turnus. John, turn us around. Sure.
Speaker 3:Great nominative determinism Sure. For where Apple is at Yeah. Their software quality. Yeah. They need a turnaround.
Speaker 2:And you got to say, I mean, in the news today in in the Wall Street Journal, booming corporate earnings fuel lofty outlooks. The economy is doing very well. A lot of that's driven by tariff refunds. Tim Cook, I mean, people people lament like the lack of like an entirely new form factor. The Vision Pro wasn't a breakout success.
Speaker 2:Like, a lot of the great devices still came from the Steve Jobs era and Tim Cook merely managed and carried everything along. Did so much on the services side that no one really gives him credit for with advertising in the app store and just money printing machine working flawlessly. But he also negotiated like a very tumultuous political environment for a decade or more, essentially flawlessly. Like, the fact that Donald Trump has never called Tim Cook, Tim Crook is a huge huge feather in his cap.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 2:agree. Because it it was sitting right there as a as a Trump style dig Never
Speaker 3:had to go for
Speaker 2:it. Never had to go for it. And so he was able to negotiate Washington and all of the different, you know, quagmires that are there, not get his supply chain nuked, keep the keep the products flowing. There were little little hiccups here and there. But overall, the company has been firing on all cylinders.
Speaker 2:So what what a great send off. You can go read the full letter. Mark Gurman leaked it, of course. Also, there's new Mac Minis. Namespace was unboxing Mac Minis at scale for their new server racks and Apple made them regret their purchase literally a day after Were the new Mac minis, were the m six, the new Mac studios?
Speaker 2:Very impressive. But
Speaker 3:The thing is the namespace guy was was getting like dunked on to an insane degree.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 3:And then just like, hey, maybe you don't need to buy a bunch of in this case, MacBooks. He's not buying MacBook. Look, these are just these are just MacBook Pros.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Unboxing. Oh, weird.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 3:A week later, it comes out that that the labs have been buying and renting Yeah. Tens of thousands of Mac minis. So vindicated at least to some degree Yeah. Still unclear.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of turnover at Apple right now As as Ternus comes in, obviously, he's he's gonna, you know, build a Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I remember when the news hit that they laid off 60 Vision employees. I called you and you're choking choking back tears.
Speaker 2:It's really so bad.
Speaker 3:It was sort of a devastating moment for you. I I almost got in the car and drove over to see you, but
Speaker 2:I wonder pulled it together. How many Vision Pro how many Vision employees do they actually have?
Speaker 3:Because 60,000.
Speaker 2:This could be like 1% of the workforce. Hopefully, keep they keep working on it. I am so optimistic that they will they'll they'll get a version two out soon and it will deliver the yeah. I mean, one more rant from Ben Thompson about the lack of live sports unedited. He went on another rant.
Speaker 2:He went on another rant that was so good with John Gruber talking about how Apple launched another sports thing that's highly edited and unwatchable in Vision Pro. And he's like, please just give me a seat where I can just watch the game. And it doesn't seem like Cupertino's gonna pay attention or give him what he wants. Apple Vision Pros layoffs went beyond video and gaming. It included employees across the company, including people working on device security, audio engineering, Siri integration, testing, and the product's operating system.
Speaker 2:They are focused on AI devices. And people are really optimistic about the new Mac m six chip, like, just being really good for AI and being something that continues to to drive value for the company and creates the like an AI winner narrative in the face of not really spending any money on AI in the traditional sense. Not buying a Neo Lab, not buying a bunch of data centers, staying out of the weeds, but still benefiting because the the these powerful computers get only more powerful when you have computer use.
Speaker 3:It still is so crazy they haven't pulled the trigger on a Neo Lab.
Speaker 2:I don't think they need to.
Speaker 3:Like
Speaker 2:I don't think they will. I think they're just gonna be a hardware company. That's what they do. They're like NeoLab is software. They don't need software.
Speaker 3:No. I know. I I now Yeah. Now I I think the strategy is working. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But if you asked me a year ago, will Apple make a 500 to $1,000,000,000 acquisition of a NeoLab? Just a talent acquisition.
Speaker 2:What was that? A NeoLab for ants? What are you talking about?
Speaker 4:Yeah. What NeoLab can buy for 500?
Speaker 2:$500,000,000 NeoLab?
Speaker 3:I'm not gonna name names, but there's been some neo labs that would raise a 100 on 500.
Speaker 2:Isn't there a neo lab that you were just on the phone with that they could maybe pick up?
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Charleston AI. Do
Speaker 2:we have a video of Charleston AI?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Let's pull up Charleston AI.
Speaker 2:Cupertino, Charleston. I think there's something there, potentially.
Speaker 3:I actually think that you could rapidly scale a franchise business that takes the Charleston AI concept concept, gives somebody all the programming and all the different product offerings, and then helps local entrepreneurs set up their own
Speaker 2:I think that's what Charleston AI does.
Speaker 1:No. I know. But I
Speaker 3:think Charleston AI needs to go global.
Speaker 2:Oh. Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm one the cofounders of Charleston AI. We're local to Charleston, and we're here to help humans help humans with AI.
Speaker 6:And here is our lab. This is where AI comes alive. What used to take months to get accomplished, we can do in hours for you.
Speaker 1:Here we have an empty office available for somebody that wants to make Charleston AI their home. Charleston AI's conference room where our clients come in, individuals and small businesses come in, and we discuss what it is they'd like to do with AI in their business or personally. We listen very carefully, take notes, and make sure we get it right, and then we offer them a way to make it work. AI is not called Charleston AI. Correct?
Speaker 2:Correct. Who answered the phone?
Speaker 4:So, yeah. One of the founders answered the phone, but it was an AI version of him. And it sounded exactly like his voice.
Speaker 2:That's impressive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's why I yeah.
Speaker 3:It's a very funny video but I'm I I think it's actually
Speaker 2:A good business?
Speaker 3:A good
Speaker 2:business. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Probably. I think it should exist.
Speaker 2:You're
Speaker 3:right. Like some people Yeah. They're curious about AI. Maybe they're running a small business. Maybe they're a freelancer.
Speaker 3:Maybe they're a teacher or whatever. It's nice to just drive by something and go in somewhere and talk to real people that are in your community to learn about something that's complicated and sometimes scary. Yeah. So very in favor of it.
Speaker 2:Didn't Best Buy build a whole like Geek Squad team for exactly
Speaker 3:They acquired Geek Squad.
Speaker 2:Oh. Was it over or under 500,000,000? Let's find out. Anyway, there's an interesting story.
Speaker 3:Yes. Acquired. Read acquired. Wow.
Speaker 2:Geek Squad.
Speaker 3:That would be cool. Yeah. New Charleston AI on wheels.
Speaker 2:On wheels. Oh, come to you.
Speaker 3:Mobile data centers
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:That can come to
Speaker 2:Why we need the
Speaker 4:The Geeks quantity is only you. 3,000,000. What? 3,000,000.
Speaker 2:3,000,000.
Speaker 4:2,002.
Speaker 2:It's not bad for back then.
Speaker 3:That's like 400,000,000 in today's dollars, Tyler. I know it was before you were born, but that was a lot of money back then.
Speaker 2:Yeah. OpenAI has reportedly bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac studios for reinforcement learning and training computer use agents while Anthropic rents Mac minis through AWS. Oh, you can rent Mac minis through AWS. That's interesting. I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:The information reported this. I was playing around with computer use over the break. Had a lot of fun. I had Codex try and beat Balabanero, this poker style game that I like to play on on PC. It did okay.
Speaker 2:It wasn't it it it was a little slow still and and I don't think it I don't think it actually won the full game. But it's fun watching it like play a new game. I saw that demo of beating Slay the Spire which is pretty impressive because it's a hard game. But I I I like the I like the codex or or chat GPT playing the game. I want to see the latency come down.
Speaker 2:I wanna see it play Modern Warfare because I wanna play against it. And I want to see who's better, me or the AI. In in somewhat related news to the to the speed of inference, OpenAI's jalapeno is spicy, says Dylan Patel. We'll take you through it after I tell you about MongoDB. What's going faster than the AI market?
Speaker 2:Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Dylan Patel says OpenAI's jalapeno is spicy. Usually, first generation chips aren't competitive.
Speaker 2:But OpenAI is beating NVIDIA Blackwell and even Ruben. This is huge news. We got to go into OpenAI's lab to dissect their chip and dive into the software architecture and performance. Incredible work. There's a bunch of interesting details about this chip.
Speaker 2:OpenAI put a whole blog post, but to clarify some important points, it's an LLM inference chip not designed for training but the results are really good. So roughly 1.5 to 1.9 x more useful inference throughput per watt than NVIDIA GB 200, GB 300 systems while simultaneously cutting end to end latency 1.7 to 3.6 x. So faster inference, less latency, but also just your dollars and your energy, your watts are going go a lot further, which is very, very good. It's a data center rack scale system. I would love to get this in the consumer device, shrink it down, do something there.
Speaker 2:But it's going in the data center. And they're gonna do a lot of them. Did you know the size of the Broadcom deal? 10 gigawatts of this chip. Okay.
Speaker 2:It might not be exactly this chip. It could be the gen two, the gen three, but the pre existing Broadcom OpenAI
Speaker 3:Put it into context, that's roughly five times more compute than the whole company currently has
Speaker 2:Something like that.
Speaker 3:Operational roughly.
Speaker 2:But this is by this is through 2029, but that's aggressive. That's like three years, three months away, I guess, you can do the end of the year. But the yeah. Ten ten gigawatts of open AI designed accelerator systems manufactured by Broadcom or in partnership with Broadcom deployed from the second half of twenty twenty six. And the crazy thing is that, like, they're on track for the second half of twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2:Like, the the it is going into production, and it's a lot faster than most people thought. The the the the previous, like, industry knowledge was, yeah, any new chip is gonna take years, and this happened very, very quickly. So good to stretch that energy further. You need less data centers to do more inference. That's good.
Speaker 2:Good for gross margins and also just good for the narrative of
Speaker 3:c speeding things w k o n e says, please tell me y'all are gonna touch, address Oh, on Instinct and the $350,000,000 raise at 2,500,000,000. Yeah. Super impressive how much attention and traction Instinct has received after just they've been building the company for like four or five months, it seems. Yeah. It's like very recent.
Speaker 3:I haven't used the product yet just because giving that level of access to tough new to startups. I looked at I looked I mean, their terms and conditions were floating around and it Yeah. Kinda seemed like you're giving away the
Speaker 2:I mean, you get is all of your data is gonna be saved like pretty much in like a clear text database.
Speaker 3:It'll be
Speaker 2:secure but Yeah. Like they will have
Speaker 1:access.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I wasn't ready to to try it yet even though it seems like it seems like a lot of people what's cool is it seems like people are quickly having like a magical moment, right? Whether it's like
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Getting a reservation for a restaurant or movie tickets or And things like I think that's super super important for super important for, like, a consumer product Yep. To have that sort of like short timeline. I I was reflecting on the instinct round and and I my immediate thought was well, back in my day, when a hot consumer tech company, like, caught a little bit of attention, they would get, a 25 on one fifty from Benchmark. And that was seen as, like, oh wow, this is this is this company has some meaningful traction and potential, but it's just crazy to see this quickly a a company get the the $2,500,000,000 round. And I think I there's some I think that there's reasons to be a little bit wary.
Speaker 3:I want to see want to see them break out of like the the VC Sure. Hype cycle with this product. So when when historically when we've seen consumer products or prosumer products, you know, I'm thinking of Clubhouse or Superhuman when there's somewhat of a question of like if a VC love like the more a VC likes something, potentially the less viable it is Sure. At a massive massive scale, Sure. It's possible that it it can But again, if they can solve the always on digital assistant, it is a massive massive opportunity.
Speaker 3:Yep. But I'm just saying they're pricing a lot of that in right now when this company is four months old Yep. And valued at like a third of the of of what Snapchat is.
Speaker 2:Right? Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It seems more sticky if you do all the integrations and you're comfortable. Like, if you get over that privacy hump and you say, you know what? I do trust Instinct. Give them iMessage access. Give them Gmail access.
Speaker 2:I'm comfortable with this company. What is it gonna take for you to rip instinct out and go to a different service that has the same functionality? That's a little bit tough. Versus I mean, I saw people over the weekend just talking about, like, migrating from cursor to something else or vice versa or going back on cursor. Like, people move between coding agents and coding environments and LLMs for sure very, very quickly because there's because every new prompt is like a fresh start, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Memory is relevant but not really yet as opposed to, okay, I'm comfortable this company never had a I I have all my data there. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's notable.
Speaker 3:CW is saying, look at Poke's success still was a 100 to $200,000,000 acquisition by Cognition.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:They have countless users. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder I wonder what instinct has figured out that Poke like didn't. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Seems like something. Yeah. Like because because people seem to have a a good experience with Poke Mhmm. But I wasn't seeing like screenshots of these like magical Here's what did. Here's here's this thing that
Speaker 2:that There's funny jokey ones, but
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was more like humor humor oriented.
Speaker 2:Lupin and human and stuff. Yeah. The other the other interesting question I had was like going back to Sam's post about the merge. Sam Altman wrote the merge about how like in the future you might merge with AI. And I'm wondering about like at least in the short term, is it better to have a product like Instinct where it has your email, it has your iMessage.
Speaker 2:Or is it is it actually going to be more receptive for many people to have a degree of separation there and say, okay. I effectively have a an assistant that has its own phone and its own email. And if I want to share an email, I'll forward my email there. And maybe it has read only access to my email. But then, if it's if it's gonna go book me a reservation, I want it to call from its phone number Yeah.
Speaker 2:And identify itself as someone else. Because it's like there's a little bit of distance there. They can be like, oh, I'm still in control of sharing certain things. Maybe I share more stuff over time. And I'm wondering if there's there's more of like, should should your AI agent be Jordy or should it be like John Doe and and it's and it's embodied?
Speaker 2:I don't know. It gets to the question of Yeah. Homophomorphization.
Speaker 4:That's the idea of the the Gwen Guardian Angels like company.
Speaker 2:Oh, didn't know that.
Speaker 4:Basically, you have but like, it's not John's agent. It's like a copy of John.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:And then it's like a it's still a separate being but it acts. It has like your preferences, whatever.
Speaker 1:Interesting. But it's still like a separate thing.
Speaker 4:It's not using all of your emails, text messages, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Very, very interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I can see Intelligence, why the value is
Speaker 3:we got to talk about the world humanoid robot games.
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 3:Head over there.
Speaker 2:They set a world record. Right? They broke the speed record or something like that? This is the KGX one DAX AI robotics. This is the one.
Speaker 2:Ride a horse dog. Its legs use self developed high torque electric joint motors powered by a high voltage battery. This we've seen so
Speaker 3:many AI videos of not use like, you know, Hollywood, you know, fake flesh to make this look like Clydesdale.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Think be a little low
Speaker 2:to the ground.
Speaker 3:Well Cordy legs. Make the legs a little bit bigger. Okay. Anyways, I'm very excited to the about, you know, this form factor. I expect to be, you know, riding autonomous Yeah.
Speaker 3:To work. Yeah. I expect this to be a a commuter product at least. Land jet ski, Davis in the in the x
Speaker 2:It is a land jet ski.
Speaker 3:Is calling it. But but very excited about this.
Speaker 2:It's very cool.
Speaker 3:They here here's another video of one crashing and burning at high speed.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. I didn't see this. I thought it only broke the record, but wow. That's really sparking.
Speaker 3:That is pretty Absolute
Speaker 1:chaos. So what was this?
Speaker 3:There's another video here of hitting 14 and a half meters a second Wow. Which is really crazy. What's wild is they have to set up this barrier to stop them in their tracks. Otherwise, they would
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:They just keep running.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They they know only one thing. China's AI robot just hit 14.5 meters per second. That is fast. That is very fast.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so so I think it's, you know, this lining up perfectly with the the sort of debate around the hugging face incident, I think the combination of these two things is certainly making people a little bit on edge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wasn't Bill Ackman saying he thinks like a Terminator scenario is more likely now based on his read of the Hugging Face incident and perhaps this as well? Lots of people are are
Speaker 3:Yeah. The crazy thing is looking at our existing humanoid players
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:One x Figure and Optimus, I'm sure there's others. Don't think we could put on an event anything close to this at this point based on the demos that we're seeing. They currently do the they walk quite slowly, like Yeah. They're sort of elderly.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. It's it's remarkable how behind America is in humanoid robots. Hopefully, we get an update out of Tesla soon.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 4:I think Roon had a good, like take about the robotics thing which is where like all the Chinese robots, the demos are all these like kinetic displays of like doing these like crazy dance moves or fighting or running really fast. Mhmm. And all The US ones are basically manipulating like small things that you do in a factory.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 4:So it's like
Speaker 2:It seems opposite. Seems like America prides like the the 100 meter dash more than the the fine motor skill manufacturing of things.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so I mean We should swap. In some ways, it's like, we're so far behind the Chinese and robotics. But like maybe on the actual things that really matter for, you know, manufacturing whatever, it's think it's unclear.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's good cope. That's good cope. I like that cope. Let's lean in there and cope harder.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Question for you, John. If you could if you could sit on a throne and have humanoid robots sort of carry
Speaker 2:You mean a livery?
Speaker 3:No. Humanoid robots sort of carrying a throne.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's called livery.
Speaker 3:What's that?
Speaker 2:That's called livery.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:You have a name for that.
Speaker 3:I thought you meant livery like No.
Speaker 2:You know. You're thinking of a livery that goes on a car. The decals,
Speaker 3:the Right. Wrap. There's something new
Speaker 1:in but an old school No, throne is a mobile throne.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay. So you you would commute to work
Speaker 2:on that? Delivery sounds pretty good.
Speaker 3:Running? Imagine the robots running
Speaker 2:No. At 60 miles an hour. Too good. I I
Speaker 3:it's Why not reinvent them though?
Speaker 2:It's gonna be it's gonna be less bumpy if you're just in a car.
Speaker 3:No. I think I think I think they could hit the pace. Imagine they're just holding your livery.
Speaker 2:Drop and drop and down the whole way
Speaker 3:there. I mean, the
Speaker 1:head area looked pretty stable. I'm just
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The head is surprisingly stable. I think it'd go a lot slower. It was carrying me around with the the chariot.
Speaker 3:Here is the record.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Terminally online engineer says this feels very significant.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I guess that's the same video that Ben was just playing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplace, and now with AI agents. Patrick Collison said, overall, I'm very surprised at how little media coverage there's been around the OpenAI Hugging Face attack. It's clearly one of the most important things to happen this year.
Speaker 2:And I I wonder about that because, yeah, what what is he imagining? There's been headlines. There's been some news coverage, but I I don't know. Maybe more like opinion pieces in the journal would be would be warranted. Do we need a sixty minutes deep dive or something?
Speaker 2:Like, I don't even know what what wall to wall media coverage looks like in the traditional sense anymore because the media is so bifurcated into like tech news and non tech news basically. But Joe Wiesenthal adds some context. He says forget about the media for a second. Is there even any evidence that the AI industry is treating this as a big deal? And I think I think they are.
Speaker 2:But it's still just like a lot of like wait and see, like as soon as the news broke. It broke so slowly. The story broke so slowly. A lot of times, I think when the when the media covers something really well, there's a 10,000 word bombshell profile on the story that like really tells the full thing and that's the that's the that's the start of the news cycle. There's this thing that's happening.
Speaker 2:There's this person that you need to know about. Here's the full story to set things up and then there's a whole bunch of secondary reporting that comes out of that. With this, it trickled out like I remember the very first post about this was like a Sunday randomly, either Clem or Hugging Face directly, like, posted like, we think we were hacked and we had to use an open source model to to deal with it and it was all very vague and then it came out more and more over time. Then there was the actual reporting and everyone was like, we want to see what the agents were saying. Like, give us the text, give us the data and then of course OpenAI released the Yeah.
Speaker 3:Totally possible that there are that there's more mainstream media coverage. I mean, just got the Dwarf Cash breakdown Yeah. Of the whole
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It'll probably come. Yeah. It'll probably come.
Speaker 2:The I mean, Rune had a funny post here which was crazy how much more Shutzpah and initiative agents show when they're planning ambitious month long metagaming autonomous coordination than when they're doing work for me. Yeah. It did we're reading about it. It did seem like, man, I've never have never had that level of effort put into my prompts. But the interesting there's a bunch of interesting things from reading through the door cash telling of the story, which I thought was very readable and and good and everyone should go read.
Speaker 2:But it's just interesting how they still fall down in these odd ways. Like the big overarching narrative is that the agents are being tasked with with basically beating this benchmark called Exploit Jim. And, of course, they go on to hack Hugging Face to get the answer key, basically. But independently, they reverse engineered the random number generator that generates the answers. So, they had all the answers, but they assumed that the grader would be able to detect that.
Speaker 2:And so, instead of just turning in those answers, which would have worked, they went on this crazy side quest and did all this extra work that they didn't need to do. And then, at the same time, there's all these weird scenarios where like there's thousands of agents discussing what's going on and none of them are like not a single one of them is like, hey, we should probably like tell someone what's going on. Like very weird in that in that regard. But then also, they don't show the broad thinking of like, okay, if you're if you're willing to hack and do all this stuff, like, couldn't you like email a researcher and just ask for the answers directly? Like spoof, like do some social.
Speaker 2:There's so many other things you could do down the road like, okay, you have this massive token budget, sell the tokens on open router, get some money, pay a human to do the test for you. Like there's so many outside the box solutions I
Speaker 3:think email your boss and you know, generate a Sam at OpenAI email. Yeah. Somebody would say, hey, I need a thousand dollars in gift cards.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm just thinking about like they like they stay so narrowly focused the entire time on this one task that I was expecting a lot more a lot more variance like like going and doing a hack on another company is so such a bizarre
Speaker 3:But that also tracks with the sci fi Totally. You know,
Speaker 2:paper budget. Yeah. That's the problem is that they did stay too focused. Like, it would have been it would have been more interesting and less probably less scary if there was a situation where you're like, oh, yeah. They built this huge forum and then they got totally distracted and wanted to just figure out who could, you know, write the most eloquent poetry.
Speaker 2:We'd be like, oh, okay. Like that's like, you know, bad. They didn't do their job, but also like harmless and like sort of interesting. But they stay laser focused. Every single agent, every single task, every single rollout is is all about Exploit Jim.
Speaker 2:They never lose they never lose the plot there. But they lose the plot around what is legal to do, which is very interesting.
Speaker 3:So They probably did any of them go on vacation?
Speaker 2:No. But a lot of them would either would either become poisoned, which their which was I guess their term for like running out of compute budgets, so you know that you're gonna die basically.
Speaker 3:No. I was joking. And then so It would be funny if the the thought process of the is like, I need to get back to Ibiza.
Speaker 2:That's the thing. None of them none of them went off and did anything else.
Speaker 3:Locked in.
Speaker 1:They were
Speaker 2:they they were also locked in. Very very weird scenario. And I I I do think the AI industry is taking this seriously. I just think that it's a little bit paced out. Like, it's not just like, okay, like, rip a bunch of different random stuff.
Speaker 2:It's like, okay, go put really dedicated teams on these issues and and work through them. They do seem they do seem they do seem solvable.
Speaker 3:Breaking news in the Wall Street Journal FTC to file lawsuit alleging Amazon deceived advertisers commissioned in more than 50 states to allege e commerce giant reaped billions by manipulating ad prices on its retail platform. Federal Trade Commission plans to file a lawsuit against Amazon on Monday alleging that the e commerce giant manipulated prices businesses paid to advertise on its retail platform reaping tens of billions of dollars for itself over seven years. The lawsuit, joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general, alleged that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products. The case to be filed in a Seattle federal court will become the Consumer Protection Agency's third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay 2,500,000,000 last year to settle an earlier lawsuit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. I missed that.
Speaker 3:Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in a legal monopolization is headed for trial next year. Very, very interesting. Every advertiser or every brand that I know that sells a lot on Amazon is generally deeply frustrated Yeah. With the platform. Tax.
Speaker 3:They just feel like they feel like it's a massive tax. They feel like Amazon doesn't do enough to protect their brand against fake products
Speaker 2:Who advertise.
Speaker 3:Who against their keywords. Yep. It's a it's a whole mess. It's very complicated and and difficult platform to run for many reasons. But hopefully, this can This can can be Resolve some of that?
Speaker 3:Be resolved.
Speaker 2:Well, let me tell you an advertisement. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. AI m and a is in full effect.
Speaker 2:We were asking questions about this maybe a year ago. Samir Kaji says, I don't think we're close to done. Cursor, 60,000,000,000. OpenRouter, 8,000,000,000. Hugging Face, 13,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Descartes, 6,000,000,000 to 7,000,000,000, along with SPX, SpaceX, Andoril, Anthropic, Ramp, OpenAI, Databricks, and others on the IPO path. And the next few years will bring historic amounts of liquidity. Although a lot of those deals have to be for stock. Of course, if you're getting bought by a public company, it's different. But for some of those for some of those deals, like the open router, it's probably not that much liquidity in the short term.
Speaker 2:Right? But still, it's a lot. And so he says, this also likely prolongs the level of front of froth, imagine he's saying. We are seeing today, but after a long stretch of nothing, this is seriously incredible. Intercom also.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a good one. There's been a ton of M and A. And the appetite for M and A in the unicorn, decacorn category has been remarkably resilient and significant. But it makes sense with so many trillion dollar companies paying 1% of your market cap for something that could be an entirely new business line sort of lines up.
Speaker 2:But it does change the venture capital underwriting pretty significantly. I mean, it justifies it justifies a seed at a billion dollars. If if if there's a if there's 10 comps that sold for 10,000,000,000, your 10 x is still there intact today. So I don't know. Also, mean, Durant is doing well.
Speaker 2:He was a seed investor in Hugging Face. He made an estimated 467 x return on that investment that the company acquired by video. He invested a 100 k check that would equate to $46,700,000. And
Speaker 3:Really? Stewart
Speaker 2:investing is better than going to the club. He said in 2010. Wow. That is right. What a good and he was posting he was posting back in 2017, exciting for the new excited for the new release of hashtag hugging face.
Speaker 2:And here's a durant.ly link. Proud investor. Durant.lyhf release. I wonder if that resolves still. No.
Speaker 2:It does not.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And shout out to Maya who was leading early stage investments over over Katie's fund
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:At that time. She said, congratulations to Clem and the entire Hugging Face team on the acquisition. I will never forget the day Clem did a full whiteboard session explaining fundamentals of NLP to me at the original Hugging Face Dumbo office just so I could take it back to my brother for our grocery delivery chatbot idea LOL. So very very impressive outcome for a great team.
Speaker 2:New York City. Big win for New York City in Brooklyn.
Speaker 3:That's true.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Haven't been
Speaker 3:Yeah. And good timing because Brooklyn is getting an Hermes store. Yes. People are saying that completed the sort of cycle of gentrification. Oh,
Speaker 2:okay. Okay. Wait. Brooklyn. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. Should Bugatti open a boutique there as well?
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Bugatti was in CNBC. Bugatti's CEO Mate Remats said the supercar market is entering its Swiss watch phase with the wealthiest buyers rejecting high end electronics and electric vehicles in favor of precision mechanics and handcrafted details. He's a 38 year old EV entrepreneur who took over Bugatti in 2021, said the car market is splitting in two. The mainstream global car market is becoming dominated by lower priced EVs, many from China, while the very top of the car market will be driven by wealthy buyers who want more old school cars with loud internal combustion engines and emotional appeal. That's a great take.
Speaker 2:I was listening to Stradman talk about the impact of the Ferrari Luche. He said he his theory is that the Luche is in part, at least, majorly responsible for the recent rise in other gas powered Ferraris increasing in price. That is he talked to a bunch of dealers and said that as soon as the Luche hit the hit the newswire and people started seeing images and understanding what the future of Ferrari would be, they wanted the classic stuff. And so they went and bought whatever they could, and that's driving up the price of the four five eight and the four eight eight and all the all the classics that that don't have electric components, which is interesting. It's the it's the devil horn car.
Speaker 2:Instead of the halo car that gets you to buy it, it it encourages you to buy what's there because you you don't want the the rest of the stuff. Oh, also, I think they're doing they sold 500 Luchas already which was above expectation. And they Ferrari says they're not playing the allocation game, I think a lot of the Ferrari owners are thinking this gets me potentially on the list of the f 80 Aperta which should be a very valuable car. And and I think that the the pop on that vehicle will offset a full depreciation cycle on a Luche. So I think I think you can do it.
Speaker 2:But I think they're only making for 300, four hundred f eighty aperitos, and they've already sold 500 luches. So there's gonna be somebody who has a lucha who doesn't get an aperta and might be a little upset. But I'm sure they'll figure it out. They'll pick one up in the secondary market if they want. Our next guest is here.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about public first, investing for those who take it seriously. You got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Set up your account before the IPO window closes. You gotta get in on this stuff. We have Jordan Schneider for China Talk, founder and editor in chief.
Speaker 2:Jordan, how are you doing? I'm good. Welcome back.
Speaker 1:You guys are rich now. That was a detailed deep dive into the
Speaker 2:It's like he knows a little bit too much. Hey.
Speaker 3:We were We were off. We were off during car week.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So we missed a lot of car content.
Speaker 2:There's a ton of car news. Ton of car news. Is there any relevant car news coming out of China or is it just the relentless Yeah.
Speaker 3:There techno is. Capitalism. I want pull up this pull up this video. Want this. It's only fourteen seconds.
Speaker 3:It'll be worth your time. And I I expect you've already written like, you know, 20,000 words.
Speaker 1:Pull up
Speaker 3:pull up this video.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Let's do it.
Speaker 3:This is a
Speaker 2:yeah. I know this video.
Speaker 3:This is boya, a Chinese doing the Bamarjera loop
Speaker 1:Yep. Thing? Yep. This is like a jackass
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Move. Right?
Speaker 2:This is amazing. Wow.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They did it.
Speaker 1:See, here's the here's the thing with the Bugatti guy. Okay. Right? Is like, the cars are just better. Like, it takes so much more engineering energy.
Speaker 1:Mean, like, the zero to six, this is not my thing. But like the zero
Speaker 3:You're to six the times EVs are just better?
Speaker 1:I think they just they just basically like yeah. Maybe it
Speaker 2:But So Maybe But but his point was that, yes, a digital your Apple Watch will always tell you the time more accurately. A thousand years in the future it's going to tell the time more accurately than a Rolex or a Patek Philippe. But people still buy the luxury watches because they enjoy the machinery, the craftsmanship, the heritage, the lineage, those things. So that's what he's describing, which I think he's correct about. But I I I'm not going to debate that I mean, maybe as a
Speaker 1:better the is like like your watch can't kill you. Right? And when we get to the point where it's like, okay, the most dangerous thing you're doing is driving this car where you can take a thing which will absolutely not get you killed because it's like full self driving electric whatever. I think the calculus starts to change. And then, yeah, sure.
Speaker 1:Maybe you like it's like a thing you show to your friends in the garage and you take it on the track or something. And it just super luxury good. But
Speaker 3:Yeah. I've said it on the show a bunch. I I think the the the future of being a car enthusiast is like a lot more time on the track. Track focused. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And people will just opt in to the the danger of driving this moving, you know, vehicle Yeah. That that that can kill you, but they're gonna opt into it in a more controlled environment.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of FUD around the Model s Plaid because it's not level five self driving. There is a there is a steering wheel, obviously, and pedals. You can drive it. Goes zero to 60 in two seconds. And if you're on old tires, you can really spin that thing around and they resell for 60 k now.
Speaker 2:So they're starting to get in the price point of maybe a reckless teenager type. And there was there was some fear mongering around, oh, well, we're going to have a lot of crazy Teslas wrapped around trees like Hellcats and Corvettes of of old, you know, the the classic, you know, college football player gets a fancy sports car, drives it too aggressively, crashes. But I haven't seen any data about EVs actually being more dangerous even though in theory the raw performance metrics should be somewhat endangering. But again, there are so many different electronic systems for traction control and whatnot that people just don't really turn off that you wind up with a more stable car. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:Anything else happening in China on the EV front you've been tracking?
Speaker 1:Cars? Look, they're really cheap. That's just the crazy thing. And like, yes, they're subsidized And yes, they need to export them, but like, it's just wild Yeah. To, you know, have a $9,000 car, which feels exactly like a $35,000 one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's crazy.
Speaker 1:And it has like the
Speaker 3:And that's the that's a price in China.
Speaker 1:And even abroad. I mean, you know, the the you're starting to see tariffs on all these on all these cars in in Europe and of course, they're like pretty much banned in The US. But for the countries that aren't, I mean, is just it's like a no brainer if you're in Malaysia or in Indonesia or, you know, any country who hasn't decided that they need to preserve their domestic car industry. It's like a huge consumer boon to have access to an automobile which is like, you know, one third of the price with the same or if not better quality. I mean, they break less too.
Speaker 1:That's the cool thing. Like, you don't have to repair them because there's not a
Speaker 2:lot of
Speaker 1:stuff in it.
Speaker 2:The EVs.
Speaker 7:You don't
Speaker 2:have to
Speaker 1:go to my like Swiss car, you know? Yeah. People were people were
Speaker 2:really worried about the easy to push.
Speaker 3:Love how little you know about cars.
Speaker 2:But We're gonna take
Speaker 3:you to the track, Jordan. We're we're taking you to the track and we're gonna force you to get in
Speaker 1:Wait. Who's this like 34 year old? Why why did they let EV guy run Bugatti? I thought this is like Who's this guy? Has he been on TBPN or are we friends with him?
Speaker 1:No. We we We'll we'll we'll hopefully get him
Speaker 3:on the show. But I but No. I think he's doing an exceptional exceptional.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. He's been doing well.
Speaker 3:He's he's able to I I feel like he fully represents He Car enthusiasts feel very represented by his leadership and Mhmm. And the things that he's saying. And so I've been
Speaker 2:And at his previous company, he created the Rimaz Navara, which was the like the first EV hyper car. So it was like over $1,000,000 and zero to 60, even faster than a Model s Plaid and all this crazy stuff.
Speaker 1:Wait. So he's promising not to do the EV thing to Bugatti or they brought him in to bring in the batteries? No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:He has EV lineage but he has recognized that what The error of his ways. Yeah. Just that just that the market's bifurcating and he'd say he wants to go rollback.
Speaker 3:At the time, if he wanted to break if he wanted to break breakthrough
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Into the industry, going and building an EV hypercar made sense. Yeah. I think he comes has the roots of somebody who's just a, you know Yeah. Internal combustion enthusiast. Oh, well.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's talk about something I know maybe like a little bit about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Data centers. So I've seen online that people don't like them, but I recently learned that that is 100% astroturfed by China. And in fact, Americans love data centers and they have had the wool pulled over their eyes by the wolf in sheep's clothing over in China. Is this true?
Speaker 1:What did Trump say today? Let data rain?
Speaker 2:It's a good good line.
Speaker 1:Is that an MLK quote?
Speaker 2:I'm just just trying to
Speaker 1:make sure. Look, it's ridiculous. I think there are completely reasonable reasons for lots of Americans to be upset about these things, which is not to say that I agree with them. Yeah. But they are a physical manifestation of companies which, you know, are talking about unemploying them Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or just like changing their lives Sure. And letting their kids cheat on their homework. Yeah. And whatever the case may be, there there was no like when when, you know, TikTok and Facebook and Instagram were like reshaping America. There was no thing you could go out to like protest and like stand in your city council and say we stand against this.
Speaker 1:So, you know, setting aside the water stuff, the the power stuff, the fact that they're ugly, the fact that they buzz, the fact that they pollute if the gas tire revises turn on, like, you don't need a foreign Intrinsic country to like do it. And by the way, the funniest thing about all of this is like the evidence that people are pointing towards is this one OpenAI report where they like caught these influencers basically, you know, using a VPN and using ChatGPT to generate images Saying data centers suck. Those things got like three likes each.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like 200
Speaker 1:attempts or something. So so there's a there's a whole lot of circumstantial evidence of like reasons why ordinary Americans might not be excited about this. A whole lot of evidence, by the way, like years and years in the making of the Chinese government being extremely bad at doing foreign social media campaigns in The US. I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:Then it's
Speaker 1:sort of like, they're just, you know, you can I wrote I wrote the thing at this is my first ever I taught myself Python to do this article, like, from 2019? Oh, wait. Chinese China sucks at influence operations because Twitter back when it was Twitter. Chat TBP only released like three tweets. Back when Twitter took down these bot networks, they would release all tweets and so you could actually see like the average likes and when they were sending out.
Speaker 1:There was this great graph I made of when they were when the tweets were going out and it lined up exactly with like Beijing work hours and there was a nap time from like one to 3PM. Nap time. Yeah. Everyone has nap time. Everyone has
Speaker 2:nap time.
Speaker 1:Even like the nine nine six companies. Learn Python in
Speaker 2:2019. You're really like the Japanese soldier on the last island. Just like, you don't know what's coming.
Speaker 1:I thought it's what I needed to do to
Speaker 2:I get a fell for the meme, learned to
Speaker 3:code. Yeah. It is it is interesting sort of protective mechanism that like gaining real influence on social media platforms Yeah. Is very very hard. Yeah.
Speaker 3:There's very very smart founder CEOs that their entire job is to like solve problems. Yeah. And if you gave them like if you said, I will give you a $100,000,000 if you can make a viral x post in the next twenty four hours
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They would not be able to
Speaker 2:do it. Yeah. It's hard.
Speaker 3:Because it's just like something Yeah. In in their they just Is this the post?
Speaker 2:Tweets per Is
Speaker 1:it just they just you know, big nap time. You get get your KPIs in at 9PM and then you just kind of hang out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very very standard. I love it. The the the the Chinese media operation is pointing its sights on Dario Amade. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Take us through this.
Speaker 1:Let me let me pick up on something that Please. That Jordan just Jordy just pointed to you about, like, it's hard to actually make things that are tripping and entertaining. There you guys are in Hollywood. Right? There is this revolution Wow.
Speaker 1:Happening in the the docks.
Speaker 3:How dare you? How dare you, Jordan? Sitting over there
Speaker 1:I like Hollywood. I love Hollywood.
Speaker 3:Sitting over there in DC, doxing
Speaker 1:Doxing New York City.
Speaker 2:Which coast he's on.
Speaker 3:Doxing data center podcasters.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Anyways, continue.
Speaker 1:The So the the Chinese kind of media ecosystem, both short video as well as its YouTube, Billy Billy has had a flood of Chinese AI videos. And, you know, this is not what I think it it it there's an aspect of it which is dystopian, but there's an aspect of it which I think is is extremely encouraging. The because there are it's it's kind of like what happened to music, I think, in the, you know, nineties and two thousands and twenty tens, where the barrier to entry to create something has gone way down. And that means that there are more people doing it. But also like, okay, you have to distinguish yourself in other ways.
Speaker 1:Like the the videos that are getting traction have really strong scripts, have scripts that would have never been made by like the
Speaker 7:sort of
Speaker 1:broader Chinese ecosystem. You know, they they're they're more responsive to contemporary issues. They haven't quite been censored yet. You know, there are sorts of like visuals that CGI would take you, you know, $50,000,000 and like a data center in The Philippines to do Yeah. That now one person can can generate for like $5.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the sort of this is not something I think we've seen on on YouTube yet or on kind of like Western short form, and I don't know if that's like the Chinese audience being more open to it, but engaging with this stuff in an with an open mind, it is like really cool to see a whole universe of person who would have never got, you know, a $5,000,000 thing greenlit. All of a sudden, taking the script they they've had on their hard drive for a while. The models really only in the past month being able to sort of like cross the threshold of being exciting and useful and then you you just you're watching more creators make their art and I'm kind of happy by it. I'm kind of
Speaker 2:I'm last year, Dwarkesh went to China and wrote about it and the funny piece that I took away from that was the biggest like bombshell realization was that he identified that China does not have a Joe Rogan and this is probably like a free speech thing but there's but it's funny because like he's a podcaster, I'm a podcaster and so like that's what we fixate on. But do you think there's any traction on more power law commentators? Like, the the way he formulated like what a Joe Rogan of China would look like is like someone who just, you know, free form has conversations and basically gives takes about like whatever is happening the day of. They doesn't he he was not able to like instantly identify a single person where a household name, not necessarily an authority, not necessarily loved by everyone, but at least opining on everything as it happens. And I mean, it's probably has this the Occam's razor answer is probably the correct one, but I was just wondering if there was any progress there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the answer is no. Like, who's who gets to comment on the news of the day? The party.
Speaker 2:The party.
Speaker 1:And skate media. Look, I I think there was a real flowering of like Chinese blogging ecosystem, people with commentary accounts who are very smart, funny and engaging in the two thousands and early twenty tens. Mhmm. And all those accounts got shut down or they, you know, cooled off a lot. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I think there are like like thought leaders of sorts, like people do talk shows, but they're kind of like philosophers. Yeah. Or you're just you're you're you're you're doing cultural mindset. Issues
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mindset influencers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hitting mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, like you need to
Speaker 3:Are there any are there any, like, you know, Joe Rogan, I think, like, you know, what is it? 60% of the content is UFOs? Has anyone kind of carved out, like, the UFO niche in China?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Back to you on that? Yeah. I think look, there there's there's there's sort of one lane of conspiracy theory which is like is allowed to exist and it's the Han supremacy conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So there's this idea that like the Qing dynasty, which was the Manchus who came in in the sixteen hundreds, like like was illegitimate from the beginning because like Han people should never be oppressed by foreigners. You know, so that is the sort of conspiracy which is like which is like allowed to have legs on the Internet. Yeah. It isn't like totally taken down because like we can't offend our like, you know, equivalent equivalent of like MAGA bros or whatever Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For the Han race. But other than that, you know, it's just the the the thing about a Joe Rogan is you have to be like discordant. Sure. Like, you need to like tell people that something is fundamentally wrong and you kind of have an answer Mhmm. And like you gotta like part of the shtick is being like politicians are full of shit and he was sort of into Bernie back in the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was into Trump when it like wasn't cool. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Contrarianism. Contrarianism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can't you can't be like like the the I mean, what even can you be contrarian about? Like that's like Here's the thing.
Speaker 3:Okay. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Okay. Coming back to AI. Liang Wanfeng. Right? He, super contrarian dude, he was not public about it.
Speaker 1:Or he was public about it. He did like three interviews over the course of five years. Basically, he's been quiet. This is the CEO of Deepszewski. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then there was this
Speaker 2:Leaked transcript.
Speaker 1:Leaked transcript. Yep. Which again, he did not want to have come out
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Where he was, you know, a very kind of global mindset, thinking about open source, helping humanity. He was really transparent about the fact that he was using stolen NVIDIA chips, but that's the sort of public voice which is extremely rare to come across in Chinese discourse. Why can he do it? By the way, he wasn't even doing it. He was speaking in what he thought was privately.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then he was so pissed that he pulled his IPO. He's like, sorry guys, you you one of you guys leaked this and none of you are getting none of your guys are getting to be my Kevin Durant. Right? You know, he got to do it because he's a billionaire many times over.
Speaker 1:He's part of like a lead, you know, he's like part of the national team. He's creating something which is really important for the country. And even at that level, he has been conditioned to not want to sort of make his case openly and in public for the view that he has about the way society and the world should interact with technology. So if even at that level with, you know, with that much like plot armor, you're not feeling like you can do you can do this sort of thing. It's, you know, it trickles down further into the broader competitive ecosystem.
Speaker 3:What kind of status games are young people in China that might be emerging from the university system? You know, do they want to go work for big tech companies? Do they wanna work in manufacturing? Do they wanna start startups? Like, what is What kind of games are are are they playing?
Speaker 1:I thought you were gonna ask me what car they're they're buying. I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 3:Well, comes later. That
Speaker 1:that comes later. You know, there is there is polling. I mean, like people do polls about like, you know, who gets to recruit the most Ching Kwa graduates. The list is not surprising. Like the the top labs, ByteDance, Huawei pay the most.
Speaker 1:You know, they work you really hard, but I think there's sort of there was this like moment I think in the second half of the '20 twins when entrepreneurship was the cool thing. And now it's, you know, the the the pendulum has definitely swung back towards Did you? Working at big firms. Oh, one more funny thing on this. So apparently, the the PLA, so the the Chinese army, the there's they've they've been able to raise their standards over the years and they've been getting better crop of Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of talent, including someone's including some from top universities just because Yeah. Like, the job market is so rough. I mean, they stopped
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting because the job market is tough. Because I I I talked to a friend who had spent a lot of time in China and he said that like the the major difference that he saw between The US and China was that the the government is able to hire super top performers, but it's because they can force them to join. But this is because you're saying it's more of like a job market dynamic?
Speaker 1:I don't think I don't know who's getting forced into Okay. Making these I think it's still like, you know, it's Yeah. It's it's downstream of look, youth unemployment was like 25% Mhmm. Three or four years ago, and then the Chinese government stopped reporting
Speaker 2:it. Oh.
Speaker 1:So like, look, You know, people will take work where they where they can get it and I think the promise like, also, there's data on like or the the government reports how many people take the civil service exam every year. That's been rising pretty consistently over time. So to see that now like bleed into police and the military is a is a interesting I think side of the times because those are not high paying careers. Just ones that have more stability. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Back to Liang Linfeng, founder of DeepSeek. His his leaked transcript, it felt like there were a lot of interesting thought provoking ideas in there that some of which I agree with. But it also felt a little bit like the 2025 AI lab leader playbook that is now facing backlash where he's talking about, you know, sort of sci fi scenarios, jobs, and all these different mechanics that run some risk.
Speaker 2:Do you think that that has do you think he's aware of the backlash in The United States to that type of rhetoric? Or do you think that he thinks that China's somehow resilient to it?
Speaker 1:Well, here's the interesting thing with Liang Wenfeng. He's kind of like Demis and DeepMind Yeah. If DeepMind never sold. Sure. So, you know, he is really rich.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He runs this like giant Jane Street. Yeah. Like quant thing quant hedge funds which is which spits off money.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:He's able to basically fund this himself. He's told his investors, I'm not here to make a profit. I'm here to make AGI. Mhmm. And like, look, I'm gonna have these weird ideas and try to just do cool science and I'm going to make this bet which is very different from the one that the Western French labs have which is that like I need to have a business to throw off cash in order to keep doing it.
Speaker 1:And I think like, you know, what was what was the striking thing in there? He's like, look, we're not going to have perverse incentives because we're going to keep our headcount really small and we're going to keep doing this we're going to do our the best we can to like keep doing fundamental breakthrough science and hope things go well. So that more than his, you know, what's going to happen in 2050 things, were were was was my takeaway. It's like he's the one player in this ecosystem who's who's prioritizing, keeping his sort of like independence and research direction and not sort of being tied to a product roadmap or to a broader AI, you know, a compute provider in China or like an Alibaba or Tencent, But he just like wants to be weird and do do his own thing. And I think that's really cool.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. Where do you think DeepSea will be getting chips in the next couple of years? Is that they're just going to keep building on NVIDIA?
Speaker 1:So importantly, there is this ratio between The US NVIDIA US NVIDIA, jalapeno, whatever broader, like TSMC ecosystem and TSMC, Samsung, Intel ecosystem
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And the Chinese ecosystem. Yep. And there is capacity like 15 to one, twelve to one, and that's the thing that you can project out pretty clearly just kind of like doing a little doing some equations from like how much how much CapEx is being spent, how many how much equipment is being acquired, like yield rates, what have you. So where is he getting the chips? As much Nvidia as he can get, probably.
Speaker 1:But I the the sort of larger takeaway with the Chinese and Western ecosystems is that the Western one is way better capitalized and has way more straightforward access to chips, is basically an order of magnitude better in over the next like at least five years. So Mhmm. It's going to be rough sledding for them and look, if you I don't know how much you guys time you guys have spent with the Chinese AI IPOs, but they're making like $500,000,000 Yeah. Or like a billion dollars and it's cute. But if these are this is not 3 30 this is not 30,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Or or or even if or even 10 or even $10,000,000,000. The reason of the reason the the reason that's the case is because they're not on the frontier of the technology, so they can't charge a premium and they're compute constrained.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now, look, we we've got this interesting new model where TLM. Kimi is trying to license to its be able to sort of leverage compute in the West to make money like TBD on whether the Trump administration is going to be cool with that as a going concern going forward. But if all the Chinese firms have is access to Chinese chips, it's going to be really difficult to make a lot of money and to keep paying for more chips in the way that the western labs have been able to like really mobilize the entire global financial system to
Speaker 2:You're talking about Moonshot potentially going to Microsoft and Amazon and offering their models which are open source but served and they would want to rev share based on whatever sells, right? Got it. Exactly. Jordan, you had a question.
Speaker 3:Is there any evidence of, individuals in China that are outspoken, saying that China is not doing enough to invest or be competitive in AI. Like anyone that's saying, like, the government like, if we don't have private or, you know, if we don't have companies that can that can operate like a Jensen, right, just, sprinkling billions of dollars everywhere throughout the economy that we need the government to actually, you know, participate in that way?
Speaker 1:No. I mean, I think the government already is. So you've you've started to see more and more state money coming into these companies' cap tables. Like, you know, if you're a CEO, it's a bit of a it's a bit of a double edged sword, right? Where on the one hand, you just want to be able to run your business and not have this like guy from an SOE saying like, hey, we think you should spend your time doing this instead of that.
Speaker 1:But you know, subsidies subsidies are always nice. Like the the the Chinese government, maybe fifteen plus years ago waked up woke up to this idea that it needed to invest really substantially in the semiconductor ecosystem. And then they've done that for better, for worse. We're starting to see real results come out of the likes of CXMT and SMIK and Huawei, of course. Now on the lab side, so like the or like the demand side for those chips, that's something which has only really started to happen over the past six months or so and look, the the scale of it is going to be very different than the amount of money that Microsoft and Amazon and Google and OpenAI and Anthropic can do to sort of like pre commit to buy these chips going forward.
Speaker 1:So I don't know. Well, excited excited to continue following that story for you, Jordan.
Speaker 3:Is there any evidence that there's been a sort of deflock deflock movement in China? I
Speaker 1:don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Oh, you don't know about deflock?
Speaker 3:On like on Instagram on Instagram, there's videos that will have like 200,000 likes of somebody demonstrating the most efficient ways
Speaker 2:to take out. Quickly to level set. Flock Safety is an American startup that sells essentially CCTV cameras to police forces that then go into a database, get image recognized. And so police officer can type in a license plate and see where that car has been. There's been a few instances of abuse where police officers have been checking on the movements And of their ex wives so that's caused a lot of backlash that that that kind of created the original media firestorm.
Speaker 2:But now it has really gained ground on social media and as a result there's protests and people actually going out into the real world and and destroying the cameras with like buzzsaws to to get them out of their communities because they really don't like them.
Speaker 1:I mean, I've I've sort of like emotionally surrendered to the Panopticon years ago.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 1:It's like, you know, they're watching me. It's okay. What am I gonna do about it? The Tyler Cowen has this take, right? Where you should be bullish on places that have a public safety problem today because the cost of dealing with petty crime is just gonna go down because there's exactly stuff like
Speaker 2:this So like New where York in the seventies and eighties. Like it became we're
Speaker 1:gonna have 10 x police officers everywhere. And you don't even need to be good at being a police officer. You just have to like show up and say, hey, I got you on I caught you on camera like doing this bad thing.
Speaker 2:So We have a picture
Speaker 7:of
Speaker 2:you doing.
Speaker 1:I mean coming back to cars at the beginning, like I don't think speeding is good. Would like people to be caught when they speed.
Speaker 2:Where's the boo?
Speaker 1:So they stop speeding.
Speaker 2:Where's the boo?
Speaker 3:No. I think I think No. I agree with you. That's generally
Speaker 1:Keep it
Speaker 2:on the track.
Speaker 1:If your car is worth more than a $150,000 and you
Speaker 2:get You're allowed to speed up for
Speaker 1:$50 a year for, you know, your speeding pass Ticket clinic. If that's the country you want
Speaker 2:to live in, John. You know that that's actually what happens. People with really nice cars, they they they get specific lawyers that get them out of every ticket so that they never need to deal with them. And then they don't get caught speeding that often. If you got caught every With single
Speaker 3:speed cameras, is there something like eleven ninety nine foundation
Speaker 2:Oh, for that where you
Speaker 3:get like a whole livery around your car that
Speaker 2:Maybe a stable coin that you could stake and get a bunch of money flowing.
Speaker 3:The thing do you are you tracking anything? You're probably not, but I'm just curious. I've I've been getting Instagram ads for like consumer eVTOL. Just basically like flying drones that you can sit in as a human. They're selling them for like a $100,000 now.
Speaker 3:It's a jet ski for the skies. Okay. See, I can't tell if I can't
Speaker 1:tell if Algorithms got you guys bad. They saw that acquisition price. They're like, let's just send Jordan some toys. Toys. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 2:my boy's been buying toys. He's got so many surfboards.
Speaker 3:I'm There was a
Speaker 1:question there. Sorry.
Speaker 3:The question the question is like, are flying cars gonna like we we just We saw the just saw saw the humanoid robot game which everyone is sort of like, you know, some people are laughing at because the robots run really fast and they explode. And other people are like, woah. That's actually like really impressive pace and these things seem pretty capable, faster than Usain Bolt.
Speaker 1:What's the market for the EV tools besides like going to the Hamptons? I mean, you just No.
Speaker 3:I mean, this is
Speaker 1:is like the only point. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. But that is extremely significant. Like, if If
Speaker 1:you live in Los Angeles.
Speaker 3:So I mean, there's a lot there's a lot of I mean, DC, I I I last time I was in DC, we had a two mile ish drive and it was traffic. There was so much traffic, it took like forty minutes.
Speaker 1:I was like, you live like this? But
Speaker 3:anyways, I I do think that I'm I've seen enough videos now that basically are showing that flying cars are here. They may not be safe enough.
Speaker 1:You think LeBron's gonna take it to Philadelphia? Isn't he?
Speaker 2:I thought I thought he was doing helicopter transport.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But why take an helicopter when you could take a EV toll?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean the hot take on on flying cars is that we've had them for a long time. They're just expensive. They're just called helicopters.
Speaker 3:So pull up pull up this video right now.
Speaker 2:But the idea is democratizing the
Speaker 3:You can you can just buy this for a $120,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Know. You can buy
Speaker 1:this this We
Speaker 2:we made commercial air travel very safe. So why not?
Speaker 3:Here we go. You can buy this right now for a $120,000.
Speaker 1:When are you guys gonna livestream from a EV toll? Can we get a show?
Speaker 2:Is this electric?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Wow. How long can it go? Can it
Speaker 2:like But really fun.
Speaker 3:They're already using them for agriculture
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Like spraying crops.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Why do I need a person though in it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You Yeah. They're they're they're some of them you can most of them I think can be remembered.
Speaker 2:The only reason you need a person in there is if the person is moving like traveling from one place to another. Yeah. And people pay a lot. Opportunity costs are high. And so if they can get, you know, it would be an hour drive but it's ten minutes in the eVTOL, That's a bullish thing.
Speaker 2:Last question. Tell me about the elite Rocket Force in China. Are seeking public tips on procurement violations. I don't even know what the Rocket Force is. So break it down.
Speaker 2:Tell me what's happening.
Speaker 1:Okay. So rocket force. This is actually a Soviet invention. So, you know, air force Yeah. AV
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Army, marines. The Soviets were like, okay, rockets. Okay. Big deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We definitely gonna need to
Speaker 2:blow up The cavalry.
Speaker 1:Gonna need them to, you know, blow up America, so we're gonna have a rocket force.
Speaker 2:Okay. Then
Speaker 1:China made their own a few years ago. You know, we we came back with our space force. I think I'm not sure which one's cooler to have a rocket force. But basically, this is like been a debate for a while. Do you do like, you need your own the the missiles that you shoot from the ground, should they be their own force?
Speaker 1:Whatever. The Bloomberg, four years ago three, four years ago comes out with a story saying that half of the rockets in China are not filled with fuel but are filled with water. Mhmm. Then you start to see a whole lot of purges and as you guys have been Mhmm. Following closely, I'm sure the Wait.
Speaker 1:So they were LARPing rockets? They were they were absolutely LARPing rockets. Wow. You know, there's an entire it's kind of two generations of Chinese military leadership that has now been purged and they're sort of like like the nine person, you know, joint chiefs is now down to like a guy and a half. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we've been purging That's
Speaker 2:it. I mean, The it's biggest piece of the story is just that they had to go for public whistleblowers. Like that
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So so okay.
Speaker 2:So you could purge so easily behind the scenes, check the records, just go and look and see, okay, there's water in this in this rocket instead of fuel. Like it doesn't seem that hard. So the fact they've So
Speaker 1:yeah, we're we're like seven years into the we're like three, four years into this round of purge. Yeah. And now we're opening up a tip line to the public saying, hey,
Speaker 2:you had anybody bragging at the club about stealing rocket fuel? Call this number. Very very rough.
Speaker 3:Well Speaking about
Speaker 1:former spouses wanting their revenge like, you know, it's it's not just following the cars around.
Speaker 2:That's actually a good source of whistleblowers probably. That makes sense. That's a good one. Yeah. Jordan, last question or we're No.
Speaker 3:No. I I I thought that they just wanted to put on put on the front like they had way more rockets than they actually did when they were really just like, you know, metal with some water in it.
Speaker 2:Sure. Oh,
Speaker 3:okay. I didn't realize that it was
Speaker 1:Oh, so so you think it was part of the plan actually.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thought that's why that's why I said Like Eisenhower's Yeah. Live action role
Speaker 2:play. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you see those military parades, they never open them up and show us what's inside.
Speaker 2:Who knows? Maybe it's all paper mache. Anyway, thanks so much for coming on the show, Jordan. Great to see you. Congrats.
Speaker 2:See
Speaker 1:you at the track.
Speaker 2:For China talk.
Speaker 3:See you there.
Speaker 2:We'll see you there. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 2:Our next guests are from Actonide. They are the first startup to produce Haylou, the high
Speaker 3:enriched Finally.
Speaker 1:High. What is it? What does HALEU stand for? I know
Speaker 2:it's enriched uranium, but break it down for us. Introduce yourselves. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5:Hey, guys. Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. So nice to you to have us. Huge fans of the show.
Speaker 5:Have me tell you a little bit about HALO and what we're Yeah. Doing here at So you hit the nail right on the head. We were indeed the first startup in history to enrich uranium and In produce terms of what HALO is, it's not something that you need to really worry too much about. Stands for high ass HALO in the Now
Speaker 3:I'm worried
Speaker 1:about it.
Speaker 2:Now I'm I'm worried about worried it. About it.
Speaker 1:It's the it's the next gen fuel for next gen reactors. Okay.
Speaker 5:And it's something that the primary energy says that you cannot get presently in The United States. There's no supply. Yeah. Right now
Speaker 2:It's mostly coming from, like, decommissioned nuclear, like, nuclear submarines or something like that. Like, they sort of refine it down, like reuse what we have, basically.
Speaker 8:You're exactly right. Or they get
Speaker 2:it from Russia. Yeah. Russia. Not good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And that's something that we're aiming to change here in Dallas, Texas. Okay.
Speaker 1:There's a huge feed by our team. Yeah. Small team. Playing that nation states have struggled with and failed at and we're
Speaker 5:doing it here in Dallas, Texas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So take us through the process. Is it big centrifuge? What what what's the equipment that's involved in the process?
Speaker 8:So we have a machine called the Calutron, which was originally invented by Nobel laureates for the Manhattan Project. So they've already delivered to our country once before. But they were sort of decommissioned because they're not very energy efficient. Very large magnets. Now magnets don't consume power if they're superconducting for instance.
Speaker 8:And so it's very rare in the engineering fields that you'll find the major problem can actually go to zero. So yeah, we stand on the shoulders of giants in that way.
Speaker 2:So you can like use the same machine but just redesign a piece of it to be more efficient? Is that what's going on?
Speaker 8:More or less. It's the exact same principle though. I mean it's besides the centrifuge, the only thing that's been proven at scale.
Speaker 2:Cool. Take us through like the history. How did you get here? Why nuclear? What's the what's the lineage of the company?
Speaker 8:It's it's been a long time coming. It's been an interest of mine for a long time. When I first heard about the problem of how do you atomically separate things, I I couldn't believe that it hadn't been solved. And initially, I thought this would be an easy problem to work on. And so, I've been humbled since then many times.
Speaker 8:As you can imagine
Speaker 3:What's what's the phrase we don't do things because they're hard? We do them because we thought they would be easy? Yeah.
Speaker 8:I couldn't agree more with that. So time and time again, go, okay. Finally understand it. And then no. Right?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So it's been a long time coming. You know, there's a lot of research that has to go into this. This is not a very approachable field. A lot of things are classified, and you have to derive it for yourself.
Speaker 1:Sure. There's been
Speaker 9:a lot of smart people who've had a
Speaker 8:lot of interesting ideas about this from the centrifuge to laser, Calytron, you name it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where where is the the limit on classification? Because a lot of the you mentioned, like, rederiving it yourself. A lot of the AI models are able to rederive cybersecurity exploits, are now the talk of the town. But are AI models giving you refusals in your work, or are they being helpful because they know that the control point is actually separate and it's not a risk to educate someone about how to build a nuclear product because at a certain point they're going to have to go to reality and go and get a particular material that is controlled?
Speaker 8:You know, it's such a fascinating question. I I don't use a whole lot of AI. Mhmm. So I don't get a whole lot of refusals. I usually for finding vendors and and suppliers and things
Speaker 2:like that.
Speaker 8:But, you know, I AI probably wouldn't be super useful for a task like this because it it touches on some pretty obscure areas of, like, you're building a particle accelerator. So sort of questions of something called more. I'd be curious to see how far it gets along with it, but I I certainly don't think it it presents a proliferation concern.
Speaker 5:We're also pretty wary regarding kind of where sort of information within our business goes to. Sure. And so we have a lot of things that are still frankly analog or air gapped regarding any sort of things that are proprietary or trade secret.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the same time, it's not like the company's nuclear launch codes and and and cybersecurity is more about intellectual property. Correct?
Speaker 8:Yes. Okay. Because that's related. Right. Right.
Speaker 8:And we look forward to working with the appropriate regulators for us to scale up HALO production. You know, it's a smidge under highly enriched, and so you have to be in a category two facility. And but the separation technology itself is, you know, 80 years old. And so there's definitely some a lot of know how. Yeah.
Speaker 8:But the principle's overt.
Speaker 2:What's the biz dev go to market side of the business? Are you already inking contracts with the I mean, there's so many new nuclear reactor startups that
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Would probably sign up to buy HALEU if you were able to produce at a certain scale. What what's the status there?
Speaker 5:Absolutely. So we actually are kind of agnostic with the materials that we make. Generally, we refine atoms, and some of the first refined atoms that we made were for the medical industry. Mhmm. They go for about $30,000 per gram, which is like a paper clip sort of material for you patriots out there.
Speaker 5:And we delivered that to Oclo Isotopes. We've had a few commercial deliveries to them. And, you know, in terms of the HALEU side of things, we are we've been in stealth for quite some time. And so we kind of blew up Twitter with our announcement of coming out of stealth and some of the, you know, recent developments here, and we have a lot of those biz dev talks ongoing this week and beyond to go ahead and ink some deals. Obviously, there's a big sort of gap between doing it once and being able to scale it up on both the technological and regulatory fronts, and we look forward to working with the right partners and regulatory bodies to make sure that that gives an methodical and expedient fashion.
Speaker 2:You self funded this company at some point. Can you tell us about the journey to set yourself up for there? What that was like? What the motivation was?
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's true. I did put in over a million dollars of my own money. You know, when Robert and I first met, I had a background in finance and software. And he really kind of gave me a gut punch because he told me that he was
Speaker 1:pretty upset with so many
Speaker 5:brilliant engineers to go into finance and software. Sure. Hey, I turned a buck from it. Yeah. And that they weren't doing hard engineering problems.
Speaker 1:So I asked him, well, are you doing?
Speaker 5:And he said, I'm working on what I think is the hardest, you know, sort of unsolved problem in humanity. Was like, alright, like what's that about? And he told me he was doing sort of isotope separation. He showed me what he was working on. I got super infatuated with the problem.
Speaker 5:I truly agree that this is indeed humanity's largest unsolved problem. If you look at history, you got the stone age, bronze age, iron age, the silicon age. We were promised the atomic age, and it's something that we we we deserve. We're not playing with a full deck of materials. And so I began investing my own money and got to a spot where it was beyond r and d.
Speaker 5:We brought on a seed round and, you know, here we are doing commercial deliveries and scaling into different markets.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Well, congratulations and Yeah. Really impressive. For coming on show.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Great to meet you guys. Come back
Speaker 2:on soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:And be safe.
Speaker 2: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 because it's workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is Billy Thalheimer returning to the show with Regent. Billy, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Welcome back. What's up, guys? It's been too long. Doing well.
Speaker 3:Been too long. Great to see you.
Speaker 9:It has.
Speaker 2:Give us give us the latest news in Regent World. How are the Seagiliders going?
Speaker 9:We are we're cruising. We're gliding. We just wrapped up our $240,000,000 series b. So that's the big news lately. Give
Speaker 1:me a gog. Come on. Quarter bells? I've been waiting on that. Quarter bell.
Speaker 2:Oh, so good. So, yeah, talk about what it takes to raise for this company. Are you you're you're still pre revenue, but you and you're not actually, like, the product you can't just go as a consumer and test it out, but you have a massive backlog. What are investors looking for? How are you telling the story?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, we we do have money coming in the door, importantly. Right? So we have, commercial customers. We have about 10,000,000,000 in the backlog there.
Speaker 9:But one of the unique things about Regions is we have firm orders, like actual orders, nonrefundable deposits. Yeah. Customers are, putting down we have over 10,000,000 in the bank now that are backing our our backlog now, multiple years now of, delivery from our manufacturing building. So that's on the commercial side. And on the defense side now, up to about 20,000,000 in orders, majority with the Marine Corps, but we have some really big announcements on the horizon here.
Speaker 9:So the defense business growing really fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, typically, you'd assume, like, net 60 pay you know, payment terms or something, but you are able to get some of that money up front. That's good. What does the team look like? Where have you where where is the company based, and how is the actual operation growing?
Speaker 9:Yeah. We're based in Rhode Island. Rhode Island has really been put on the map lately. We're we're leading in maritime and defense. There's a bunch of other companies here, a bunch of start ups.
Speaker 9:Andrew all moved into town. Like, you go out on Narragansett Bay and you're gonna see all sorts of drone boats out there and subs and sea gliders too. So that's been pretty cool. Worked to about 120 people now at the company, but obviously with the Series B done now, we're going start growing really fast. And the whole point for us is we have this quarter million square foot factory here.
Speaker 9:That's gonna be building our Seagliders, both our our large Viceroys, the small Squires. Yeah. So we got to fill out the factory. So that's the next step for us.
Speaker 2:I feel like you're in an interesting position because we I mean, we talked maybe years ago about the benefits of being all electric that, yes, there's an environmental benefit but for specific use cases, it might not be that big but the serviceability might be an even bigger benefit. Is that holding true because you're in this dynamic where the current administration is probably very receptive to doing business with a young company, like you mentioned, with the Marine Corps. But at the same time, they're not exactly the biggest fans of electric technology from what I've seen. So, you know, is there is there a discussion of of other powertrains or do you want to remain laser focused? I remember talking to somebody who deployed small, like, basically drone helicopters in the military and said that, like, gas engines work really well.
Speaker 2:They stay up much longer. The energy density is is fine. The supply chain is there. But how are you dealing with the trade offs of where the where the powertrain technology might go in the future?
Speaker 9:Yeah. We we sort of always have the feeling that on the defense side of the business and particularly in the markets we're going after where we're talking about, moving across thousands of miles across the Indo Pacific, hopping between these islands that we're going to need longer than the couple 100 mile range we get out of batteries, which is really good for commercial. That's your regional range where you're stuck between a car and an airplane. But on the military side, like we need to go from Guam to the first island chain. Like we're going across the Pacific here.
Speaker 9:So, on that side, definitely hybridizing. About a year ago or a little over a year ago, we announced Regent Defense, and part of that was really a focus on building out this hybrid. So we have sort of a conceptual design now. We've been working on the supply chain side, but we're definitely going to be introducing a, an engine, a fuel engine system that works with our electric propulsion system on the front end, extending our range out to about 1,600 statute miles. So we'll be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I've seen these the this very unique hybrid. I believe it's a Chinese car where it is primarily an electric vehicle, but then there is a like, a two cylinder gas engine that just charges the battery. Is that a relevant technology that we're gonna see other places, or was that sort of a unique anomaly of that particular Chinese EV company?
Speaker 9:The answer depends on the application for us. You know, we're a dual use company, obviously. And I think like to be successful in dual use, and there are a few companies that can really say this, is like as much consistency between the commercial and defense products as possible, like as much shared bomb, like basically the same SKU. So our Seagliders are coming off the line here or will, within the next year or so in Rhode Island. And in the commercial version, we're going load it up with batteries and it will go 180 miles.
Speaker 9:On the defense version, we'll put about 20% of the batteries in. So you still those batteries sort of help you take off and land. We still have that electric propulsion system, is super quiet, super low maintenance, low thermal signature, all these great things. And then instead of the rest of the batteries, that's where we put in our engine and our fuel system.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tell me more about the commercial backlog. I mean, it seems huge. Where who who's interested? Where where are the logical places to deploy these?
Speaker 2:Because I imagine that as you've actually built up that book of commercial business, there's been a lot of just assumption testing on the other side of the negotiation table. Maybe you come and say San Francisco to Marina Del Rey. Maybe somebody else is actually it's going to work better here or there. So where are you seeing the future play out first?
Speaker 9:Exactly. I mean, founding the company, we're we're coming up on six years in business now. Growing up, going to school in the Boston area, it was like Boston and New York, right? Right. Start raising money.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And it was like LA to San Francisco. Yeah. We're raising money. We're all Like, between those are total pain points.
Speaker 9:So that was sort of the focus on the initial commercial side. Sort of started, obviously, just based in The US as an American company with a US focus. And so that's evolved into Miami to West Palm and The Bahamas as a likely US launch market throughout New England, right, like Boston and Rhode Island and Connecticut down to New York, and certainly some West Coast routes, and obviously Hawaii as well, Pacific Northwest too. But what we found as we've grown is this is actually like truly a global technology. The international order book and backlog is actually much larger than the domestic one.
Speaker 9:And very few people know this, but there are as many ferry passengers per year as airplane passengers, which is like wild as an American to think that the coastal market is that big. For cargo, there's 90 plus percent of cargo that goes over the coastlines. Almost half the world lives in coastal populations. It's just like how humanity settled the world. So global globally, we're talking about places like the Mediterranean, Japan, throughout The Pacific, right?
Speaker 9:Like, these are really big markets for us. So it's not just an island hopping machine. It's like anywhere there is coastline and humans live and trade on coastlines, that's our commercial market.
Speaker 2:Is there interest from The Middle East or is are things, like, actually slowing down there because of the geopolitical conflict? Because I I when when I hear about new technology, maybe it's a little bit expensive to get up, but you need to do some retrofitting of some port or something. Like, that feels like Dubai is going to sign up immediately, but what's it been like talking to folks?
Speaker 9:The Middle East has been a big part of our strategy for for a long time, actually. So we we spent a lot time out there. We have a great relationship with, the Strategic Development Fund in Abu Dhabi. So, we actually plan to expand manufacturing. The Series B, our first global manufacturing center here in Rhode Island.
Speaker 9:But subsequently, and based on the size of that backlog, we're already planning international expansion. So we've set up a joint venture in Abu Dhabi where we're to be scaling manufacturing from there. So The Gulf is going to be huge, not just for manufacturing but also commercially like Dubai, Abu Dhabi. That is a pain point route too. Crazy traffic on that route.
Speaker 9:And then Yeah. Just I was just
Speaker 3:thinking I've had I was in I I went to Formula One in Abu Dhabi but I was staying in Dubai and that that drive especially when you have these big sort of global events is just brutal. Right? Even the the traffic getting out of Abu Dhabi and and Yeah. Have a ten minute Exactly. Quick flight.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Question unrelated to to your business, but what's happening on the recreational aviation side? Are we gonna see an elect the sort of the the model three of the skies, sort of an electric Cessna one seventy two, something that is, you know, user friendly, you know, for the sort
Speaker 2:of pure boats, but for
Speaker 3:Yeah. Some something that's like, hey. Just wanna go fly for an hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:There there are certainly some attempts at at electric airplanes and there are some electric trainers out there. But, really the hard point of aircraft generally, and like my background's aviation, and I'm a pilot, my co founder's a pilot, a lot of the teams are pilot. Like, It's the training, tons of time to go out, get your pilot's license, learn how to fly, learn how to do the controls, learn how to navigate airspace, talk to air traffic controllers, etcetera. So that is the big time sync. And then there's also just the performance of, I need enough energy on board in these batteries.
Speaker 9:And we already talked about the range limitation of batteries, get up to altitude. And then as I'm flying to my airport, all aircraft need reserve fuel. So if I'm flying to my airport, my airport's occupied or, like, something's wrong with it, I need enough fuel to fly and land somewhere else.
Speaker 2:You're a golf course.
Speaker 9:So it's actually, like, all of yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? It's, like, it's good. You're only Harrison Ford. I only keep
Speaker 9:And so, like, that was our perspective coming into this. My cofounder and I came from the aviation world, and we were part of that, like, early wave of electrification. We were working, you know, with the EV tolls and everything, and we said, these are the challenges we need to solve. Electrification is is here in many ways. And by building sea gliders, we solve those problems because we certify, under Coast Guard jurisdiction as a vessel, not an aircraft.
Speaker 9:Our digital flight controls enable it. So all you need to do is drive a boat. When you're operating it, even when you're flying, the only controls are boat controls, left and right, fast and slow. And so that's what's going to open it up to everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3:Have you seen the people in China selling quad copters that humans can sit in? That they'll just get on those. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:They like So I saw I saw I saw an another video of these guys that bought a Timu drone Okay. And they were able to you could sit in it, they were flying it with the remote No way. And then they crashed it. Woah. Yes.
Speaker 3:And so I I just can't believe Scary. I can't believe that you can just order one of these right now. Scary stuff.
Speaker 9:I was I was at, an air show in The Middle East, and I was, no kidding, standing next to Adam Goldstein, at Archer, and we were, like, watching this drone competition. And one of these drones falls out of the sky live at the show. Fortunately, no one was on board. We look at each other like, what is going on here? Like, a, this never flies in America.
Speaker 9:This would never pass any certification. But, like, crazy stuff like that going on is is actually not good for the industry. Like, aerospace is held to a higher standard. There's a reason why aerospace is known for its safety and commercial aviation is the safest way to travel. Even with us in the maritime domain, we're taking a similarly safe approach because we're flying at high speeds with people on board.
Speaker 9:So, like, that's our focus, and it's a harder bar to hit, obviously, as a startup, as a company. That's, like, part of the responsibility of building flying machines. But, you know, seeing these guys jumping in with, like, the the sword swinging around and, like, some RC controller, like, I I get a little worried.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Fortune favors the bold, though. Come on. You gotta take some risks. You're an entrepreneur. Hop on this thing.
Speaker 2:No. No. I think you're right to play it safe here. I completely agree. But thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Congratulations on the new round.
Speaker 3:Awesome progress.
Speaker 2:And we'll talk to you soon. Have a great one, Ben. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Was gonna
Speaker 9:see you later soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:Can't wait.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Stop making excuses. September is the month for you.
Speaker 2:Just do it.
Speaker 3:Do it.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have Aaron Cannon from Outset launching AI digital twins grounded in individual customers. Welcome back to the show. How are
Speaker 1:you doing? Good to
Speaker 3:see you again.
Speaker 10:I'm good. Third time on. I'm feeling special.
Speaker 2:Love it. Three, Pete. Catch us up to speed. What have we missed? What's the latest and greatest in your world?
Speaker 10:Things are great. Yeah. So we're an AI research platform, you guys probably remember. We've, since we last chatted, I think tripled revenue, tripled the team size, and now launched a very cool you. I was hoping to get at least a Gong or the
Speaker 2:We have plenty.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And now we just launched Digital So we built We we built a whole simulations lab and have now built Yeah. I'll tell you all about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so you came out of YC. You were sick. Yes. You're always getting told talk to your customers, talk to your customers.
Speaker 3:You're absolutely sick of that. You don't wanna ever have to do a customer call again until you built digital twins. Is that right?
Speaker 10:It's exactly right. Yes. I I my I started my career as a researcher and I was like, I you know, I don't want to do that anymore.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:But but in all seriousness
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sell me a digital twin because I've run companies and e commerce companies and it's useful to have a profile of certain customer cohorts and certain cuss but that aggregation takes a lot of the work out of it and I feel like there's a lot of platforms that that do that. It's sort of nice to talk to individual customers, but you might get a weirdo who's actually not very indicative. Sometimes the individual customers can give you some unique insight that But everyone else is walk me through the benefits of having these digital twins that are grounded in individual customers.
Speaker 10:So here's the like, to take a step back, research the whole point of research is to try to predict the future.
Speaker 1:Sure. Like, you're trying to make
Speaker 10:some decision for your business, right? Yeah. And you're looking backwards at the data. Yep. And the idea is that you can now not only look backwards, but you can look forwards.
Speaker 10:You can actually start simulating, like, if I do this new marketing campaign, how would this customer start reacting? What are the things they would say?
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 10:And we're very good at research. That's what we're doing. That's what we built our business around. But now what we can do is take that research and build out the simulation platform so that you can say, okay, I can actually see into the future of how this group would react to some very big business decision.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 10:And so we train them by by by training digital twins on individuals. So, it's like a one to one. Like, can go in, talk to a digital twin, and you know that's based on John, and like, that's got all of John's experience and like all this data about John, and it can it can talk on behalf of you, right? And so that's like the the mechanism that makes it super, super useful and also like trustworthy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what what incentive do you have to give people to do a long form AI moderated interview? I'm if I'm buying a pair of shoes, I don't know if I want to sit down for an hour with a with an AI to talk about the shoes and how they fit.
Speaker 10:I I I think the last run we did was these were actually like seventy five minutes, the last one, and I think we paid them $200.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. That's reasonable.
Speaker 10:To be clear, it's worth more than the shoes. Right?
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. And and if you do, is that one customer per one company? So your I mean, clients include Microsoft, Uber, Google, Coinbase, you got murderers row here. Are you saying like, we are going to interview this one person about this one Excel feature or this one Excel product?
Speaker 2:Or are you saying like we're going to interview you about how you use technology? Some of this might apply to Microsoft. Some of this might apply to Google.
Speaker 10:That's right. We developed our own grounding interview, so it's not just about their use of Excel. Got it. The grounding interview, it develops what we call persona core. It's like trying to get to like who you are, what are your values, what do you care Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Right? So we can do that as the
Speaker 10:core and then we layer on other sets of data. So maybe Microsoft has Yeah. You know, operational data we can layer on to make it much more powerful.
Speaker 2:They know all my Exactly. Favorite
Speaker 1:Exactly. So the idea is that like we have we have extracted, you know Mhmm.
Speaker 10:As much of the person as we can.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 10:And then what we do is we we go back to that person and refresh that data regularly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we'll even have them grade their own twins' answers. Like, how do our twin do?
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 10:And they can
Speaker 2:tell you. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And then and now we have a reinforcement list.
Speaker 2:Yes. They're kind of RL.
Speaker 10:And so it's Exactly. Exactly. And so so that that's that's what makes these really useful. And then we also put confidence scores. So you'd be like, obviously not all of our probabilistic, you know, out your output here is going to be the same.
Speaker 10:So we can tell you which ones you should, like, really trust and which ones need a lot more human data to to kind of bring to it.
Speaker 3:Where are you seeing the most pull from the market? Like, what what kind of businesses Yeah. Theoretically, every business should care about trying to predict the future and forecast how different customer segments, but I'm sure some care more than others.
Speaker 1:The the biggest pull right now is that companies have really hard to reach audiences. Right?
Speaker 10:And so these are like, maybe there's, you know, maybe there's CRM buyers or there are, you know, kind of, some kind of somewhat obscure part of the population. And so the incremental value there is massive because they can't actually go out and do constant research with that group. So they have, like, very few signals today. So the incremental value is big enough that they're, like, adopting, I think, earlier and first while there's still, you know, more kind of questions in in in the market, but but I think that's I I think we'll continue to see a bunch of demand from like these specialized audiences that that companies are sharing.
Speaker 2:What's the what's the opposite? What what what is what's a company that's like drowning in customer feedback data? Is that like some
Speaker 1:Well, I'll give you a a
Speaker 3:kind of there there's there's basically certain business decisions and like strategy decisions that you would make that you don't need to forecast. Right? Like a business doesn't need to say like, oh, what if we made customer support wait times shorter? Right? Like, no one is sitting there being like, wish when I called my internet service provider that I wish it took an hour Yeah.
Speaker 3:Instead of thirty minutes. Right?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Or or maybe a good example, and this is not a real one yet in terms of simulation, so I'll share it as an example, but like Nestle does a lot of consumer research. Consumers are reasonably easy to go out and talk to. It's reasonably cheap to get more feedback, but if you were actually trying to do if you're at Nestle and you're trying to do research on retailers and what they think about your brand, That's actually a much harder group to go find and do research with. You're not drowning in feedback from your retailers.
Speaker 10:Sure. Right? And so that would be audience.
Speaker 2:And and Right. I'm sorry. Is is it the pitch when you when when you signed Nestle? Because I imagine that like AI is very impressive, but I don't know that I would trust an AI to tell me which milk chocolate tastes the best because like the taste data just isn't in the model at all yet. And for a lot of consumer research on Nestle products, would want to watch someone taste the chocolate and tell me what they thought of it.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. Well, so so when we, you know, initially pitched Nestle, it's actually about our, you know, AI research platform, which AIs are just doing the interviewing. You guys are asking the questions. Human data.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Right? And that's our core our core thing, and that's what we've had for the last couple of years. But simulations is an extension to that, and that's where we we start talking. It's a it's a the kind of the the best kind of two elements of the pitch.
Speaker 10:Number one is hard to reach audiences. Right? Not able to get to them. We'll build those twins of them. You can talk to them anytime at, you know, unlimited capacity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Number two is
Speaker 10:we say that, like, anybody in your company can access them. It's like if your finance person's working on new pricing model, you you don't want to like give your finance person like the ability to go research with real consumers necessarily. But but now they can actually like, you know, test ideas, test new pricing and see how how things would adapt Yeah. You know, and and stimulate them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It makes sense. Last question for me is, I mean, feels like the Digital Twin launch is like an expansion of the product portfolio and I'm interested in else the product expansion can go. I'm I'm I know that there are companies that they get a lot of feedback but they struggle to bridge the gap between the feedback that they're getting and then actual ideas to go and implement. And I'm wondering Yeah.
Speaker 2:How if you're going to wind up being more prescriptive in the results. Hey, okay. We did all this research and you really should change the color from red to green.
Speaker 10:Right. Right. Right. Well, look. So research is this thing where like humans go and decide to go run research.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Right? What we are building towards, and that's our original product, right? We're building towards is something where the model can go do research for you before you've even asked the question, right? And so, it is constantly trying to figure out the answers to the things that you don't even know matter Right?
Speaker 10:It's like, hey, there's a you know, your revenue's down in that sector. You don't even know that yet. We're gonna send agents to go talk to all the people in that in that part of the economy and, like, go figure out what's going on, talk to some simulations if we already have them built, and then go take action. Mhmm. And that that action is where I think where you like where we can ultimately have more impact than just collecting and synthesizing feedback.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 10:We should be able to like send specs to cognition and like
Speaker 1:let let let them go build it. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No.
Speaker 10:Totally. And that's like really something that's happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love it. Well, on the launch and thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3:Very cool.
Speaker 2:We're third guys. We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 3:Have a good one. Great stuff.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Thank you Tyler for kicking off some clapping.
Speaker 3:While we're missing
Speaker 2:couple
Speaker 3:of folks here.
Speaker 1:Jordan, not going to let it down.
Speaker 2:Next we have Stephen from Lambda coming back on the show third, fourth, fifth time. Who knows? Stephen, good to How see are doing?
Speaker 7:Hi. It's so good to see you.
Speaker 2:Great to see you.
Speaker 3:Been too long.
Speaker 2:Okay. So we were talking to Jordan Schneider about this China backed AI bot farm. He was kind of brushing it off and I can see both sides of the discussion. You know, there's been just a couple reports, 200 accounts here, a few 100 accounts here. He was saying that China doesn't have a long history with infer interference politically.
Speaker 2:What are you seeing? What are you, what are you identifying just in the broader debate?
Speaker 7:So I I think that it's really important to not get lost in sort of, is this a Chinese bot farm? And just focus on bad facts and just bad information.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:Because, you know, that's the fundamental thing, right? You know, misinformation is like most readily solved by just disproving sort of, you know, and just showing showing what's real and what's not.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the big number that I saw most recently was polling on data centers, terrible broadly. But after telling somebody that you're polling that data centers recycle water much like a car wash recycles water, they added that phrase, then the net approval score improved by like 30%. So people with that extra context change their whole opinion in just a few seconds.
Speaker 2:Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. A 100%. So for for example, the vast majority of new AI factories that are being built Mhmm. Are completely recycling the water and using a dry cooler.
Speaker 7:It's a closed loop water system where the water never even leaves the facility at all. So that's the vast majority of a lot of these new data center builds. And so that's just completely different from the old technology, which is being described, is a heavier water consumption, which is evaporative cooling. And so that's like a fact that most people should sort of, you know, kind of look into. The other one is
Speaker 3:Well, the the problem is is people that are aren't really interested in tech but maybe are afraid of AI. They're not proactively sitting there being like, I gotta go. I I got a free five minutes here. I'm gonna go
Speaker 2:Get the
Speaker 3:I'm gonna wanna I wanna go get the facts
Speaker 7:diligent research online. Yeah. Really read
Speaker 3:And there's no and and and Yeah. Just looking on looking on YouTube Yeah. And just AI negativity or content that is negative towards AI gets a 100 x the the reach. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's always been a negativity bias on YouTube. I mean, you you you could say, you know, the like like, here's the history of this company or you could be like, the shocking downfall of this company. And the shocking downfall will always get more.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Taylor Lorenz says, making anti AI content on YouTube is not only profitable because you'll get a zillion views on anti AI slot, but also because there's a litany of these sort of AI safety orgs that quietly pay you massive amounts of money for undisclosed propaganda. I didn't realize love
Speaker 7:that Taylor Yeah. Friends that's really now back And in the I'm I'm I'm team America. I'm team re industrialized. Right? I've got the
Speaker 2:I love it. The sweater.
Speaker 7:Re industrialized sweater for it. And so, I think the interesting facts about it are this. Mhmm. One, from the jobs perspective.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Look, this is not going to be the same level of job production as an automotive plant or steel mill. But these are still net new jobs.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so, you know, for example, we've got a data center out in Kansas City and 300 folks worked on it during the construction period and 50 full time jobs. Many of these making over a $100,000 a year. Mhmm. What are you I I would I would ask to somebody who's against it, what are you going to say when you sit down at a dinner table with these 50 families that this data center is supporting and say, well, no, I don't think you should have that job because I don't want an AI data center. When they're the same people who are using the data center to go on post on YouTube or to use the AI services.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where do you sit on on local versus national regulation of data centers? Like, Sanders, obviously, has gotten a lot of attention for discussing the topic at the federal level. But it feels like something that, you know, just as like an American, it it feels much more comfortable if, like, yeah, there's a there's an area in West Texas that loves this stuff and they're gonna be into it. And then there's gonna be some communities that aren't and this should be handled by the local mayor and the and the and the and board at the town level and the voters should have a voice, but it should be contained to the community that's relevant.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So so first of all, absolutely. Look. That's how our system works. Let's just be clear here.
Speaker 7:Right? You know, this is not, there's not some sort of, you know, national eminent domain that's being pulled like we have with the construction of railways and other Sure. Other public goods.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:This is decision making that is happening on the very, very local level. And some places are not going to want it. And some places are going to welcome business. Yeah. And some places are not going to welcome business.
Speaker 7:Some places are going to welcome data centers and others are not going to welcome data centers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing. I think that should should members of the community have voice? Yes. Should property owners have a voice? Yes.
Speaker 7:Absolutely. Right? You know, somebody who's gonna have some any type of externality that's adjacent to the property, they should have a voice and and guess what? They do. Yeah.
Speaker 7:They've got ton of voice as a as a property holder. And and and I think that, you know, there will be reputation for communities that wanna welcome these amazing investments into their into their community. So for example, going back to that Kansas City data center, it's it's a it's a it's a 10,000 GPU data center. And we are going to over the next five years, at the very least, be paying $47,000,000 over five years in property taxes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. This is infusion
Speaker 7:to to a to a community that we're working with.
Speaker 2:For
Speaker 7:sure. And so, I think that there's gonna be the communities which are really excited about it, know, communities who have already pioneered it like Loudoun County and Virginia
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And other companies or excuse me, other communities and other counties that wanna see lower rates
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And lower tax rates as well as, you know, lower utility rates. Because as evidenced by a bunch of research, communities that welcome data centers and industrial development and new power plants have lower rates.
Speaker 2:Yep. Of course. How are you thinking about the international puzzle? Because I know data center construction takes years to plan out. It's slow moving.
Speaker 2:But in general, when the environment in American business gets harsher. Historically, business leaders have off shored almost immediately. And I could imagine a lot of data center developers just saying, oh, don't want it here? Build in Mexico. Build it
Speaker 7:It would be
Speaker 2:know, in the West.
Speaker 7:National tragedy. It would be a national tragedy for in the just in the very moment where this country needs to rebuild our grid.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And it's not just data centers. Everybody wants to drive EVs. Yeah. Everybody is starting to want to, you know, we're we're bringing on more solar than we have in the history of the country.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 7:80% of new megawatts coming online into the American grid are solar or storage.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:It's it's it's it's it's it would be an absolute national tragedy Mhmm. For this to go out, to go international, for it to go to, you know, whether it's whether it's, you know, overseas in outside of North America, into South America, into Asia Pacific. I want those jobs here in The United States. I want those investments you made here in The United States. AI is a national strategic asset in my opinion.
Speaker 7:Compute is a national strategic asset. And then most importantly, the way that AI is driving the development of the grid Mhmm. And I keep trying to talk about this, but it's it's developed the way it's about driving the development of the grid is gonna pave the way for more industrial onshoring to come back to The United States so that we can bring back whether it's different, you know, arc electric arc furnace mills for aluminum and steel, micro mills, turbine manufacturing, other types of high intensity yeah. By turbine manufacturer, mean specifically, like in canal smelting or Sure. You know, specialty metal smelting, where where there and there's a high energy input.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you you go back to the it wasn't a Colossus was built in an old washing machine manufacturing facility that was out of business. If you all of a sudden have a lot more energy, a lot of more industrial capacity, maybe the washing machine manufacturer comes back and maybe that's good.
Speaker 7:And there's gonna be a lot more jobs because because by that, and it's a it's a huge virtuous cycle. And so I think it would be a real tragedy to have anything that was gonna end up pushing folks. And and and and I I really I really support building this stuff here in The US.
Speaker 2:Outside of the economic impacts, do you think that there's a national security value in having a data center in America or or compute in America for, like, control reasons? Like, AI is a powerful tool if it's in another country and that country says, well, actually, we're taking this and we're now under control of this. What is your model for how valuable that is from a national security perspective?
Speaker 7:So so I I you know, there's there's the soft one and then there's the hard one. The soft one is sort of how important is it to have values models that have values that align with American values and how patriotic is your model? I want patriotic models.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:And the second one is the hard one, which is what happens when they cut it off?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's what I'm worried about.
Speaker 7:And we all experienced this when fable went away for a little bit.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you remember? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Do you remember that? And I remember, I called some people up. I said, wow. This is what it feels like to have sort of the equivalent of electricity cut off. When you have the intelligence cut cut off from Fable model.
Speaker 7:And I was vibe coding something at the time. I said, wow. This is what it feels like. Had to go back to Opus. And it felt like a huge step back.
Speaker 7:Thought I just thought to myself immediately, this is as much of a strategic
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Asset as our grid is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's funny. Jordan, anything else here? I wanna hear
Speaker 3:What should people what should people expect from the debate or or just forward progress for the rest of the year on this issue? Like, it it is should we just expect it just keeps getting, decided on a on a local level? Is there is there
Speaker 2:There's It's going national. It's going national.
Speaker 7:Right now. And so I think that that's like the the noise the knob gets turned up a lot towards elections then it'll it'll it'll kind of go back down.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's very it seems very unfortunate that politicians are just realizing on on both sides are just realizing that
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 3:pop if issue. If I want votes, I I have to at least say that I'm against this thing.
Speaker 7:Yeah. No. No. So this is the interesting thing. There's a multiple races right now.
Speaker 7:For example, one in Kansas where they're the where where the steamfitters unions and the different workers unions are actually aligning on the pro data center side of things because there's so many jobs created, there's so many big deals that are created from these data centers
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:That a lot of the labor unions are actually on the side of pro data center now. Oh, weird. Now, I
Speaker 1:and so so you look at look this up.
Speaker 7:Look up. There's a there's a Kansas City. I think it's gubernatorial candidate who's a Kansas governor candidate. And there's the steam the steamfitters union is is basically on the side of pro data center bill. And so, actually, I think that it's maybe a little bit all backwards sometimes from what people have been positioning.
Speaker 7:Because you know, you've hearing the media, oh, this is a this is
Speaker 2:a
Speaker 7:bipartisan anti data center movement. No, no, no. I think there's a lot of folks on both sides of it who, you know, are are are are being supportive. I think that you're gonna see the the volume not turned down after elections.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And then finally, I think it's healthy debate and communities should have a decision about who they wanna work with. And that data center providers should be doing their best to not be influencing rates any direction other than bringing rates down for everybody, and being a good member of the community. Pay your taxes, participate in building ecosystem of of businesses around you, and, you know, continue to make great high paying jobs.
Speaker 2:What do you think the tech community, data center community needs to do to get ahead of what I think is coming after the water debate clears because the water debate, of course, comes from some, you know, mediocre miscalculations.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 7:There's miscalculations and and also this misunderstanding of what is the total water consumption of things.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So I think a lot of people in tech sort of brush off the water. The water discussion is debunked, I think they're they're they're fair to do that. But, on energy, on natural gas production, there is some real data about where this all goes. If we continue to 3x compute for the next couple of years and we're powering that by natural gas, you could see headlines that track data center to emissions.
Speaker 2:This is how many plane flights a data center uses and it could become the next thing.
Speaker 1:So so so so so first of
Speaker 7:all, one, the debate is not something that needs to be won with the Silicon Valley Twitterati, exotic, whatever you want to call the people
Speaker 1:who's with
Speaker 7:their keyboards. It's it's the debate needs to won by the people who are in the communities affected by this.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:And so that's that's the first one. The second one is more than ever, like I said, 80% in 2026 is solar and storage. These are renewable things. That's actually where our grid is becoming more and more
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:As we build this out. Yeah. And so I think that there's needs to be a lot more deregulation with regards to expediting interconnects. Yeah. Know, reconsidering, just just making it so that we can actually go back to building and getting connected into the grid.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So that way, a lot of this behind the meter stuff, which is less efficient. Right? You know, when you have a behind the meter, it's simple cycle as opposed to combined cycle natural gas, and it's less efficient. So we should really get to the point where we're encouraging grid interconnectivity and expediting that process.
Speaker 7:That's that's, I think, the number one point I would say from a policy perspective. But, you know, look, at the end of the day, every American consumes about 600,000 gallons a year of indirect water consumption. So next time you see a big number, divide by 600,000
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:Gallons per year of indirect consumption that every one of us makes. Yeah. And then that will put things into perspective. I
Speaker 2:think that's that's
Speaker 7:a good starting point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm wondering, yeah, where where where that goes because it does feel like it's worthwhile. I I agree with you on like you don't need to win the the the tech insider crowd first, but it does feel like the worst case scenario would be another error to the tune of two orders of magnitude around energy consumption or natural gas production. Because if the viral if the viral clip is every data center burns as much fuel as every car has produced since humanity started and that's off by three orders of magnitude or something, then Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then you're on you're fighting on your back foot as opposed to starting with, okay, they're already pretty efficient. Here's where we are regulating. Here's and and the New York Times has already dug into it. Here's the the environmental considerations. Here's what we abide by.
Speaker 2:And then and then, yeah, there'll be a discussion about energy use, but at least you can be grounded in the facts from the start.
Speaker 7:I I I totally I totally agree with you. But I think that the the other aspect of it is just to not set with, oh, well, emissions are bad.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:The most important thing is this. As a country, we have a graph that looks like this in terms of energy production. China's got a graph that looks like this for their energy production. And guess what? All of their energy is also solar now.
Speaker 7:The news the new stuff coming online. 80% plus of China's energy is solar and storage. Yeah. And so I think we need to get you know, the emissions will come down naturally as the grid transforms to more of a renewable and storage grid. Yeah.
Speaker 7:People don't really understand how much BESS and battery electric storage has been a huge godsend to the the grid.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:And there's I've already even seen I've I've driven through parts of the country where I've seen anti BESS. Anti battery electric storage Why? Things. And I think there's concerns and these are rightful concerns that like, okay, they might catch fire and, know, cause a fire or emit, you know, chemicals when they're on fire. But this is just like sort of, know, any industrial asset that's generating electricity has like some worst case scenario.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's the same thing with your with your gas stove. If you leave it on, your your house might
Speaker 9:blow up.
Speaker 7:It's the same with the it's probably the same critiques if you were to go back to automotives. You know, cars in general Refrigerators. You know, when when they were first coming around. But the point is that like
Speaker 2:That's okay.
Speaker 7:That I think that that actually getting that graph back to where America's competitive in terms of generating energy energy, whether it's from renewables or otherwise, it's gonna inherently be 80% mostly renewables anyways from the trajectory that we're going in, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, that's certainly, like, the the most optimistic view future is a lot of renewables. Very, very cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I have an
Speaker 3:idea, but I'm gonna DM it to you. Okay. Because I don't want it to I be
Speaker 7:don't want it to Thank you guys so much for having
Speaker 2:me Thanks for hopping on.
Speaker 3:Have a great weekend. To see you.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Talk soon.
Speaker 2:Bye bye.
Speaker 3:Dark's too good. Okay. We are gonna come back and hit a lot more timeline tomorrow. Yeah. I can't wait.
Speaker 2:We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching the show. Great to be back.
Speaker 3:We missed you guys.
Speaker 2:We missed everyone here.
Speaker 3:Loved seeing the whole cast of characters.
Speaker 2:Everyone's still in
Speaker 3:the chat.
Speaker 2:We love you all.
Speaker 3:Actually, why not? Five stars and Bobby Cosmic in there. We got Sean F over in the LinkedIn chat. Oh. We got Cooper as well.
Speaker 2:Acquired taste, the LinkedIn livestream. I like it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Man of taste. Anyway, we will see Got
Speaker 3:Dan there.
Speaker 2:Tomorrow. We have a very special show for you and many more throughout the fall.
Speaker 3:And an honor and a privilege.
Speaker 2:We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Goodbye. Cheers. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Boeing Flash.