AI’s Power Problem, Apple Goes Meta on AI Glasses | Pat Gelsinger, Josh Isner, Sheel Mohnot, Santiago Nestares, Austin Federa

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Today is Thursday, October 2, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome.

Temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

The capital of capital. That's right.

It is good to be back.

That is a lovely fedora, Jordy, if I say so myself. A yellow fedora celebrating ramp.com Kyler Also, time is money.

Looking good.

Save both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more. If you've been sleeping under a pile of receipts, you probably haven't heard the news. Ramp is doing a publicity stunt in Manhattan. In New York, the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps.

With Kevin from the office.

Yes. He's gonna be locked in a box, I believe. I don't know how much they've actually teased about this, but we obviously know a lot. But there are some billboards up and some out of home ads and they look great. And the tagline that I did see on the timeline, that is public says I'm CFO now, of course, a reference to the social network and Mark Zuckerberg. And it's a lot of fun. And we will be tracking this stunt.

As that is right. I cannot get enough of this fedora. I might start wearing this every day.

And I believe it might be streamed live. It might be on restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are.

Right.

The top story today is of course about the slop trough. How are we going to keep the lights on at the slop trough? That's right, the slop trough. It takes an incredible amount of electricity to keep the lights on for the piggies.

Everyone was worried about water.

Yep. Turns out electricity may be a bigger deal.

Data centers need water.

They need water, but they recycle the water. They recycle the water. So the water isn't that big of a deal. Maybe we don't know all the data, but.

But if the electricity next to a data center. Get ready for your electricity prices to keep skyrocketing. And what in the. You know, among, you know, many of the issues with that is that it will just ultimately make huge amounts of everyday. Americans genuinely hate AI because ChatGPT is cool. They might use some other tools, but if somebody's sitting there watching their electrical bill just climb month over month, year over year, at some point they're going to look around and say I miss when I could just google something and I didn't have to pay an extra $100 a month for power.

Totally. So this is already Hitting the timeline. It's clearly in the zeitgeist, this question of electricity prices. Is it worth it? Culturally, as a trade off, we get AI, but we pay more in electricity. Whether or not using AI, this has been bubbling up for a long time, but the Sora thing seems like a big deal. I don't even know if this is a Sora video, but there's a post from September 5th. Oh, that must have been pre Sora. So this wasn't even Sora, but someone generated an AI video of a woman. Smashing.

Play this video because there's gonna be maybe one person on earth that thinks the, you know, massive increase in electrical is worth it.

Okay, so let's play this video. Oh, God. Not with the sound. Okay. Horrific.

Worth it. Worth every penny.

And clearly fake and weird. And the glass flows through. Pretty interesting. Tyler's over there being like, we're going to train robots on that. We got it. It's an accurate physics sim. It's worth it. We're getting humanized.

So this is how we get to the Dyson sphere.

Yes, this is very clear critical path to the Dyson sphere. Obviously, if you, if you're doubting that you are.

So what's notable here is that the guy, Chipotle Rowan.

Yes.

Says pretty cool that my electric bill has gone up 25%. So other people can make this crap. And he gets 300,000.

300,000 likes on X. Like this is the pro tech environment.

That's basically every user like this post.

8 million views, 17,000 reposts. It's a lot. And I wanted to dig into some numbers, so I did fact check that. 25%. I think it's real. So in 2021, the average electric bill for an average American was $1,452. That's. It's like a significant amount. If you're an average American, you're making 60k or something like that, or 100k a year. And now that's up to 17 $28. That's exactly 25% increase. So it does seem like electricity prices have gone up by 25%. And if you look at some of the charts, there really is a Spike right after 2020, which when AI investment started ramping, electricity prices went up. Now, some of this might be Covid, but it does seem like from 2010 to 2020, electricity prices were pretty stable. About 12 cents per kilowatt hour in the US city average on the St Louis Fed. But then 2020 hits AI comes and things have been up and to the right ever since, and not in a good way. JP Morgan estimated that 70% of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand. And the flow here is. The logic is not quite perfect, but it's not great either. So it's that AI slop will be irresistibly dominant. We've seen this with everyone who works at our company becoming entirely one shotted by short form AI video. No one can get anything done. It's a disaster. It's a crisis.

Of course John is being sarcastic, somewhat sarcastic. There's a couple people that have been a little.

They're on notice. They're on.

They're on notice.

But yes, so. So you have to assume Meta Vibes OpenAI Sora will be massive successes and energy prices will skyrocket as humans spend all their time at the slop trough. I don't think personally that there'll be a fast takeoff in AI slop consumption. I think it will kind of grow slowly. I think this TikTok is just one of many that people will watch. But there's no denying that energy prices are rising. Per capita consumption, interestingly, in electricity has been flat to down, mostly thanks to efficiency standards. But also there's just not that many new things that require a lot of energy. So a lot of people are migrating from incandescent light bulbs to LED light bulbs to more efficient cars, more efficient washing machines, dishwashers, Everything's getting more efficient. So the use is actually pretty flat. Flat. But the price is going up because we haven't been building any new electrical infrastructure. But that is changing. So the good news is that American energy production is growing with tons more capacity coming online soon. Companies are working across all categories and there's actually a bit of a fight developing between nuclear and solar maxis. Elon is this total solar maxi, but there are a bunch of folks who are going all in on nuclear, including Rick Perry.

Rick Perry Fermi IPO'd today at a $15 billion valuation. Not bad for a nine month old company.

Not bad.

A land lease and not a lot else.

And the hyperscalers are doing deals to bring decommissioned nuclear power plants back online. I see that as a very positive development. We've talked to probably what, five different, ten different nuclear CEOs on this program. From radian to Volar to the nuclear company to general matter. There's so many companies in the space that are doing cool stuff in nuclear and hopefully all of that comes online. Although the nuclear projects are very slow. But there is more Capacity coming online. And the tech industry just has no incentive to become maybe more of an enemy of average Americans. They're not, they're not polling super great, but this could potentially make it worse.

The tech industry is addressing that through the social media is terrible and bad crisis. Everybody's sort of. A lot of the people that were most negative around it are still power users of social media.

I mean the social network too. Like the leaked plot is about how they were like meddling and all the, I think it was like election stuff.

Okay.

It's about, I don't know if people are flee over it yet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No people are, people are upset generally. And that gives the tech industry an incentive to build more electricity so this doesn't become a bigger issue. Sam Altman's guided towards 250 gigawatts of capacity at OpenAI by 2033. That's an insane number. For reference, in 2023, 10 years before his prediction, America as a whole produced average power of around 500 gigawatts. 485. And so he's saying I need half of the power in America currently for ChatGPT and AI slop. Right. And if he doesn't build more and doesn't justify more builds, that would mean way higher prices. Right. Because OpenAI would be buying all of that electricity and selling it.

Not to mention he'd have to choose between curing cancer free education.

That's true, that's true.

Which he's effectively requested.

No one wants to make that tradeoff.

Not make him choose.

No one wants to make that trade off. So the, the, that 250 gigawatts will not just be pulled from the grid broadly, it will be built, there will be new builds and that's already happening. So AI companies, the problem right now is that AI companies are pulling forward energy way faster than new capacity can be built. Like it's very easy to buy some GPUs, rack them in a tent and run the 1 gigawatt cluster. Like Colossus 2 is an example of that. Like build it and then pull the electricity from the grid. It's not as easy to build a new nuclear reactor. It's not that easy to build entirely new energy capacity. But there are certainly plans to do that back in the day.

There's also some new. I saw a good post earlier from an account called Pantex Cap talking about how power companies are overwhelmed and tired of a lot of the BS that's happening in some of these new data center buildouts. They're putting up huge barriers to weed out the BS. If you want 500 megawatts from Georgia Power, you now have to put up 600 million upfront. And it's held against a 10 year power agreement and withdrawn monthly.

Interesting.

Alabama Power is making people to commit to a minimum of 90% of the power requested. So you can't ask for 500 when you want 200 and release it later. So a lot of people will be requesting a lot and just not even necessarily confident that they're going to use it, understanding that it's an asset to have access to it.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, years ago, the hyperscalers, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, they were in a very stable place in terms of energy consumption pre AI boom. And it was so stable that they could basically promise to go all in on clean energy going forward. They made Net zero pledges, they satisfied a bunch of ESG requirements. But now the AI race is on and so new data centers need to come online. And we're seeing that with these new data centers in tents and all these new construction projects, natural gas, solar, recommissioned nuclear, anything's on the table. We've heard that quote before from Chase over at Crusoe. AI companies would burn whale oil if they could. The energy is so scarce. It really is the most important resource for all of this. And so data centers consumed about 4 1/2% of US electricity in 2023. And that number's growing quickly. Could be percent in the next few years. By late 2024, 6.5 gigawatts of new capacity was underway. That's actually not just for the data center world, but just in America. They're adding 6.5 gigawatts of capacity. Now remember, we're almost at 500 gigawatts, so that's like a 1 to 2% increase. It's like not that much. But there are now plans for up to 100 gigawatts of new build out over the next few years. Obviously a lot of that, you know, is up for. It's like still at the LOI phase. But that would mean a 20%. Like, like 20% increase in energy production is sort of like being papered right now. You can think about it that way. Like America and the business community and the energy world and the AI companies, they've all come together and said like, okay, let's sign and let's jump over the threshold and let's go build an extra 20% capacity. Which would be incredible because if AI flatlines and people don't show up to the slop trough and they're just like, I'm good, just give me a database query, please. Then and they go back to 10 blue links. Who knows? Then basically you have 20% more capacity. Price should fall. It's a basic supply and demand equation. On the flip side, if tech builds the Infinite Jest ultimate slot machine, but nobody comes in that case, energy prices fall. On the flip side, if demand is certainly, demand is certainly there today, you can just look at Foundation Labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, they're all seeing exponential growth in token generation. If it's an exponential curve, get ready for expensive electricity. But if it's a sigmoid curve and we're on our sigmoid grind sets, America probably overbuilds and then prices fall. The Internet overbuild that followed the dot com boom was pretty positive. Externality birthed a ton of new tech companies that were able to leverage cheap broadband and backhaul and Internet services. Once the application's actually caught up, it's even easier to imagine a positive scenario with excess energy lying around because you can do even more with it than just fiber lines. But all of this is tight walking on a power line and so interesting to keep track on it. Sagar and Jetty had a good take. So Derek Thompson shared a series of charts in the first slide of our deck today. Derek Thompson, friend of the show, says data centers and AI are gobbling up electricity, but the share differs significantly by State. Between 2010 and 2025, data centers went from less than 5% to roughly 40% of Virginia's electricity consumption. Sweet Jesus. And of course the city, the states that are not on here, like California. California produces an immense amount of electricity, doesn't have a lot of data centers. When we use Netflix in California, it goes, it comes out of Oregon. Usually when you're on the east coast, it's not. The energy is not made in New York State, it's made in Virginia. And then you access the US east in AWS cluster and we're seeing that with Texas and Mississippi and Alabama and all the new data center construction not really happening in the biggest states. And so you can look at this and see, wow, Virginia's at 40% electricity consumption. Well, nationally we're still at 4%, 5% of data center consumption, but it's rising and it's a big deal and it's crazy in those state legislation.

So yeah, Sagar's point is that, you know, right now Effectively single family homeowners businesses are subsidizing the. Basically subsidizing the cost for these data centers that are coming online.

Yep. And so yeah, he says, why should we be paying sky high power bills for Sam Altman's AI slot video generator? And it's a question that tech will have to answer.

And then also it's crazy because of course Sam Altman, leader of OpenAI was a driving force in creating Sora, but he's also. Videos of him are the ones are some of the most viral.

Yeah.

Videos created on the platform so far. So it really is him.

But we are at this precipice where AI is cool and tech people are into it, but it's becoming culturally like the danger here is it becomes like NFTs. Right. I think you were saying this yesterday.

I think. Yeah. Potentially hated even faster than social media.

Yes. Especially with the video stuff. The video stuff has the same potential for like, oh, this just bugs me in the same way that the expensive monkey picture bugged people. People weren't that annoyed by Vitalik Buterin building Ethereum and nerding out about secure blockchains. It was when it became, okay, wait, what the celebrity is hawking and million dollar monkey picture on a late night TV show and I'm losing my mortgage off of like, why is this happening? That's where people got really frustra. And I think it'll be the same thing if people are like, okay, I.

Don'T like this and it's increasing my life.

Yeah, yeah. It's very different when it's like, like I have a job and there was a little bit of a boring thing and Now I use ChatGPT to summarize those meeting notes and it's delightful and I'm okay with that. Versus like this stuff is not good and I don't like it. And, and also I'm paying for it. That sentiment that got 300,000 likes that.

There'S also, there's also a growing sentiment around even the, the non coding use cases, what the value is. We had, we had dinner last night with a very successful entrepreneur who's not really, he's, you know, built a widely known SaaS company, but not really in the Silicon Valley bubble. Not kind of caught up in the AI hype cycle himself. And he said something, a line that stood out, which is AI is really good at helping people do unnecessary work faster. Right. Just like producing big reports, producing research. Right.

What was your example?

And you gave the example of, you know, if you're Prompting an AI and you're like kind of bullet bulleting out, for example, an email or a document you can kind of get, you could kind of just send give somebody the bullet points.

That's because I have ChatGPT running in my brain. Like if you send me three bullet points and you just say, hey John, imagine this is like five paragraphs. I can just do that in my head in two seconds. It's very easy for me to do.

That based on organic facts, organic intelligence.

Yeah. Also you know what else I can do? I can imagine that it's being read to me by a monkey on a jet ski. I can just imagine that if you tell me three bullet points. Hey, today we're going to talk about AI. We're going to talk about crypto, we're going to talk about ramp. I can just imagine a monkey saying that to me. Like you don't actually have to instantiate it, you can just share the idea and I can instantiate it in my head. But yeah, the example you had was funny, was like if you're going to a five minute meeting and you're like I used AI to generate a 50 slide deck in a 400 page memo and it's like, did that help? That seems entirely unnecessary.

Yeah, yeah. A while back when GPT psychosis was becoming more discussed, I was predicting that AI was going to go through a really, really rough PR on par with what social media started to go through. Yeah, I think that's generally happened.

Correct in the macro maybe.

Well, well no, I actually think, I think generally correct. Right. Every day. Yeah. Every legacy media company has been putting out articles on people that are, you know, using AI in weird ways and going crazy or talking about how, you know, you know, ChatGPT or another product is like mentioning, you know, the word suicide a bunch to two users. It seems like they released some pretty big updates recently that basically take people from 4, 0 back to GPT5 reality if they sense behavior that's unhealthy. But again, every legacy media company has been pushing out content around people going crazy through AI. Now you add in electricity costs going up and I think it's just going to continue.

Well, the good news is that we've been here before and there are two positive possible outcomes here. One is just that the tech community comes together and builds a bunch of nuclear and solar and just power gets cheaper. Like that would be amazing. We need more energy production and clean energy production is kind of limitless. It's magical when it works.

Problem is, AI usage is exponential tokens.

But maybe it's a sigmoid function and we wind up building even more and then prices do fall. It's totally possible. The flip side is that we've seen there are solutions to energy intense algorithms. We've seen this in past with crypto. So there was the same during the NFT bubble there was a huge push for oh Ethereum is using so much energy for proof of work they were able to migrate to proof of stake and energy prices fell and it actually took a huge hit to Nvidia's sales that year because NFT companies and blockchain companies didn't need to buy as many GPUs because they were able to do the same algorithm effectively on a more.

Efficient so you're saying Jensen is Satoshi?

Maybe, maybe. It was extremely bullish for him for sure. But I do think that we've successfully moved past the crypto is using all the energy narrative and that was a technological solution to that. What are you laughing at? The Fedora Finance Fedora Finance well, speaking of crypto privy, the wallet infrastructure for every bank privy makes it easy to build on crypto Rails securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on.

Chain infrastructure all through all infrastructure provider.

You're not going to be needing a gigawatt of energy capacity to spin up a an application on crypto.

Great line. Paracletes. The Fedora Finance.

Yes, that's great. Well, Andrej Karpathy had some reactions to the Dwarkesh Patel podcast with Richard Sutton. He said his background the Bitter Lesson has become a bit of a biblical text. In frontier LLM circles, researchers routinely talk about and ask whether this or that approach or idea is sufficiently bitter lesson pilled, meaning arranged so that it benefits from added computation for free as a proxy for whether it's going to work or even worth pursuing. The underlying assumption being that LLMs are of course highly bitter lesson pilled indeed. Just look at LLM scaling laws, the chinchilla scaling laws discovered by Google, where if you put compute on the x axis number go up and to the right. So it's amusing to see that Sutton, the author of the post, is not so sure that LLMs are bitter lesson pilled at all. They are trained on a giant data set of fundamentally human data which is both human generated and finite. What do you do when you run out? This is the data wall that was a popular point of contention for a while. How do you prevent bias? So there you have it. Bitter lesson pilled LLM researchers taken down by the author of the bitter lesson directly rough, he says. In some sense, Dwarkesh, who represents the LLM researchers viewpoint in the pod, and Sutton are slightly speaking past each other because Sutton has a very different architecture in mind and LLMs break a lot of principles. He calls himself a classicist and evokes the original concept of Alan Turing building a child machine, a system capable of learning through experience by dynamically interacting with the world. There's no giant pre training stage of imitating Internet web pages if you're a kid. Dylan Patel was on Invest like the best and he keeps talking about how he has like a baby cousin, I think, who learns by like. And he keeps using this example of like the baby puts the hand in the mouth or puts the foot in the mouth and like learns immediately. And it's not like the baby looked at you and saw like, this is what a hand tastes like, this is what a foot tastes like, or like this is what a rock tastes like. The the baby definitely learned that from first principles through exploring the actual physical environment. And that's not what LLMs do. And so there is a good point there. So there's no supervised there's also no supervised fine tuning, at which point which he points out is absent in the animal kingdom. It's a subtle point, but Sutton is right in the strong sense. Animals may of course observe demonstrations, but their actions are not directly forced or teleoperated by other animals. Another important note he makes is that even if you treat if you just treat pre training as an initialization of a prior before you fine tune with reinforcement learning. Sutton sees the approach as tainted with human bias and fundamentally off course, a bit like when AlphaZero, which has never seen human games of Go, beats AlphaGo, which initializes with them. In Sutton's worldview, all there is is an interaction with the world via reinforcement learning where the reward functions are partially environment specific but also intrinsically motivated. For example, fun, curiosity and related to the quality of the prediction in your world model. And the agent is always learning at test time. By default it's not trained once and then deployed thereafter. Overall, Sutton is a lot more interested in what we have in common with the animal kingdom instead of what differentiates us. If we understood a squirrel, we'd be almost done, he says. Well, speaking of agents, go check out Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So Andrej Karpathy gives his take.

If we understood a squirrel, we'd be almost done.

Andhra Karpathy gives his take on the Dwarkesh Patel Richard suttonpad He says First I should say that I think Sutton was a great guest for the pod and I like that the AI field maintains entropy of thought and that not everyone is exploiting the local iteration of LLMs. I completely agree. It was great pot AI has gone through too many discrete transitions of the dominant approach to lose that. And I also think that his criticism of LLMs is not bitter lesson pilled is not inadequate Frontier LLMs are now highly complex artifacts with a lot of humanness involved at all the stages the foundation the pre training data is all human text. The fine tuning data is human and curated. The reinforcement learning environment mixture is tuned by human engineers. We do not in fact have an actual single clean actually bitter lesson pilled. Turn the crank algorithm that you could unleash upon the world and see it learn automatically from experience alone. Does such an algorithm even exist? Asks Andrej Karpathy, co founder of OpenAI, head of Tesla's autopilot program for a while now working on something new binding it.

What is he actually working on?

He is working on education technology, correct?

Yeah, it's called Eureka Labs. I think they haven't released anything yet.

He's in the trenches.

Yeah. I think the question that I have is Ilya has said broadly they're focused on their own definition of super intelligence and that and it seems like he might not just it certainly doesn't feel like he's going to launch a chatbot anytime soon.

Ad network or business process optimizer enterprise software.

I wouldn't be mad at that.

I would love that.

But I would hope that he's working on something maybe just entirely crank algorithm.

Yeah.

Entirely novel that he could unleash on the world.

Yeah. I mean it makes sense to give him the budget and time to go figure that out and explore.

I love it.

Two example proofs are commonly argued.

Are.

Commonly offered to argue that such a thing is possible. The first example is the Success of Alpha Alpha 0 Learning to play GO completely from scratch with no human supervision whatsoever. But the game of Go is clearly such a simple closed environment that it's difficult to see the analogous formulation in the messiness of reality. I love Go, but algorithmically and categorically it is essentially a harder version of Tic Tac Toe owned sorry Go players stick to Tic Tac Toe buddy. The second example is that of animals like squirrels. And here personally I am quite hesitant to whether it's appropriate because animals arise by a very different computational process and via different constraints than what we have practically available to us in the industry. Animal brains are nowhere near the blank slate they appear to be at birth. First, a lot of what is commonly attributed to learning is in Andrea's opinion, a lot more maturation. And second, even that which is clearly learning and not maturation is a lot more fine tuning on top of something clearly powerful and pre existing the brain. For example, a baby zebra is born with and within a few dozen minutes it can run around the savannah and follow its mother. This is a highly complex sensory motor task and there's no way in my mind that this is achieved from scratch. Tabula rasa, the brains of animals and the billions of parameters within have a powerful initialization encoded into atgs of their DNA, trained via the outer loop optimization. In the course of evolution, if the baby zebra spasmed its muscles around at random, as a reinforcement learning policy would have you do at initialization, it would not get very far. Similarly, our AIs now have neural networks with billions of parameters. Andre goes on, he does give a summary. He says anyway, in summary, overall in actionably I think this pod is solid real talk from Sutton to the frontier LLM researchers who might be gear shifted a little too much into the exploit mode and not enough in exploring. Probably we are still not sufficiently bitter lesson pilled. And there's a very good chance of more powerful ideas in parallel paradigms other than exhaustive bench building and benchmaxing and bench pressing and animals might be a good source of inspiration. Just look at how a gorilla can bench press. That's what we need to do.

Is anybody actually working on that yet? Working on getting gorillas?

Come on, you got the robot Olympics, let's see some Olympic lifting.

Yeah.

Intrinsic motivation, fun curiosity, empowerment, multi agent self play culture. Use your imagination. I keep coming back to this idea of like we're obsessed with this like agentic horizon. One hour, two hours. I'm like my initialization prompt, humanity's initialization prompt is like be fruitful, multiply, right? That's genesis. And I think there's something where humans, the goal that we seek is like survive forever, reproduce forever. And so I don't really see my life as like a string of one hour tasks or five hour tasks. I see it as like a hundred year journey, potentially thousands of years when I think about my multi generations and so I, it just feels like we're pretty far from something that is satisfying all the different criteria and of course you know, we need smell o vision and we're not making any progress. There. Tyler, what was your reaction to this?

Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. I think, like, Sutton is very RL pilled. I think, like.

Wait, wait, RL Pilled?

Yeah.

Sutton, are we in the RL paradigm?

Yeah, but it's still. I mean, we're still like very early days. Right. I think Sutton envisions this thing. It's like, it's just R.L.

Right.

At its core. You start with nothing and you learn the world where the current paradigm is like, first, you basically pre train a bunch of stuff and you're basically like. At first, when you're training a model, it's literally just like memorizing facts and then you slowly get it to generalize.

Yep. So right now, the way I think about it is like, for a modern chatbot that I'm using, there's maybe like 300 megawatts of pre training compute and then 300 megawatts of RL thrown at it, and it's like a 50, 50 balance or something. And then maybe he's saying it should be like 100% balance towards RL and like, there should be.

Well, so to ground this in Sora, part of why this new app is strategic is they're generating an asset and then they get to immediately see feedback. See feedback. Basically, the reward is more engagement in the, you know, watching it longer. If you see a soar video and you're just on. On X OpenAI is not really able to leverage that.

Yep.

Right. You could indirectly be like, okay, this went viral. Like that maybe that's good there. But in the app, if you're in the. In the trough, you're immediately, you know, the time that you've spent watching the video, did you like it? Did you send it? All of that is providing feedback for the model R.L.

Yeah, Tyler.

Yeah. I mean, so I think if you look at just training, like, RL is nowhere close to half of compute. It's like, way less. But I think it is like, a very cool idea to basically have this very, like, pure model. In some sense, it's just like experiencing the world and learning from that. But I don't know, if you go to the Dylan Patel kind of example of the baby putting its finger in its mouth to figure out where its fingers are. The baby is not just randomly twitching. Its nerves are not just randomly firing. There's still some prior that comes from evolution or whatever, but it's not just purely experiencing things and then updating. There's something there I was thinking about.

With the zebra example that's True. But also, like, the baby is kind of randomly twitching in the womb, and the baby, you can see on the. What's it called? The oscilloscope or something? I forget what it's called. There's some sort of device that you can look inside and see the baby. And the baby's moving very basically, but probably doing some reinforcement learning, essentially, pre birth, I think. I don't know.

Yeah.

I mean, on some level, there is some encoding that is going on into the baby of this is how, like, you can walk around or something like that. Yeah, there's some, like. I think if you just had a baby and, like, without any other people around.

Yep.

Like, maybe it could, like, learn to walk and stuff. But there's some, like. I think there is still some imitation going on generally. Like, Sutton is saying that, like, none of it is imitation. It's all just like rl. You're experiencing world. Then you're updating on those, on the actions you took. You have some goal. You either, like, complete the action or you don't. And then you update.

Yep.

I think. I think imitation is, like, more important.

Right.

There's like, the kind of, like, the Girardian take or whatever is that, like, humans are apes. Right. To ape is to imitate.

If you drop a baby in a prison cell from birth, it'll never learn to walk because it needs to see a human walk to learn that. Yeah, I think they'd figure it out.

Okay, maybe not walking, but, like, doing, you know, useful things. Like, it's not gonna.

I think. I think if. I think if my son was born in a padded closet and just given food and an Excel sheet, he'd be writing VBA macros in five years with no external.

Well, maybe it's been encoded in pure.

Pure reinforcement learning experimentation from first principles. I think it's possible. I don't know. Anyway, figma Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Hey, man, just wanted to say I think we talked about this yesterday, but I love it so much I put it back in. Hey, man, I just wanted to reach out and say I loved how much you drank at the networking event last night. There are a few of those. This is becoming a new format. There was another one.

I'll find the.

Find the other one for me. In the meantime.

Yesterday.

Apparently there's a game that makes you a YC partner for a day. You watch old pitches and guess if they made the batch. I wonder where this data came from. Usually YC is pretty Locked down with these. With these old pitches. But this seems like a fun game. I went to the top of Hacker news yesterday.

Here's the other piece. Hey man. Just wanted to follow up and say I admired your ability after three drinks to persistently ask who had a bag at the super serious networking event last night.

Super serious networking event. I could never. What do you think about. I was texting with Tyler about this. There's this post. Sam Altman is playing 4D chess. Sora 2 is about to take over social media. The virality is guaranteed. Once this scales, billions in ad revenue will flow straight into more compute fueling the flywheel. In a year, Sora 2 will be so efficient and cheap that margins explode. You can't out accelerate Sam Altman. And I wanted to reflect on this idea that Sam said. It's way less strange to watch a feed full of memes of yourself than I thought it would be. Not sure what to make of this.

And gave me again my read on this is. I don't fully believe that he actually. I don't know. I don't know how to read into this other than he is very incentivized to normalize people being deep faked all the time. Right.

I mean it's a crazy, crazy move to just be like somebody had like this. I'm going first. My life. I'm merging. I'm merging.

It's like him going first.

SpaceX rocket.

Hey, it's not so bad. Look, it's not so bad. I don't want to turn this off. I don't. I don't want to see that.

I mean I don't like the skibidi toilet thing to begin with. And then you mash it up and.

It gets even more horrifying. Anyways, he. He went first. He's very incentivized to get a bunch of other big names personalities to agree to do the same thing.

Did is this.

I would imagine it's very weird to watch videos of yourself committing crimes. You know, there's a video of guess video of him in blackface floating around. There's a bunch of videos that I think would be incredibly strange to watch of yourself. So.

But stranger than your expectation because I would expect it to be weird. I expected it to be weird. When Tyler sent me a deep face of myself bench pressing and then turning into a golden retriever. I was kind of just like, yeah, this is below my expectation. Like it is less weird to me. I don't know. You haven't seen one of yourself yet, right? Has anyone made one of you you haven't uploaded?

I don't think I've done. I haven't.

You haven't done the cameo thing?

I haven't agreed to do the cameo thing.

What about you, Tyler? Did you expect it to be weird to see yourself in a Sora video and then was it weirder or less weird than you expected?

I don't think it's that weird. Yeah, but it's also like. It's still not like, like that good where like, it's kind of me, but it's not like all the way there.

Totally, totally.

But I think. Okay, Jordy, do you think that him basically releasing a social media where like half the content is just him, is that an Aura Farming move?

I think it increases his fame, which is a resource that he's able to leverage, but I don't know that it didn't. You know, a lot of the videos that, that I've seen don't. I don't think are necessarily good for the brand. But it's also just putting out so much stuff into the world that it just all gets diluted. And you don't read too much into any one video because it's not created by him.

Do you believe in Cosgrove's Law that.

Aura farming is all you need?

Break it down for us.

Always be ore farming. Okay, I think I have the text somewhere, but yeah. Okay. Basically, Ore farming, right?

Yeah.

You can think of like most things are on some level like based off, like interacting with other people. Like any kind of. If you're, you know, raising around, if you're going to make some deal.

Right.

It's based off like your interaction with someone else.

Yeah. People raise, want to raise from tier ones because every dollar is the same. But you get to aura farm the gp.

Yeah.

And then it's like in like when you're raising around, you want to be ore farming the vc.

Right.

Because they want to be like, oh, this guy's like pretty sick. Like I want to give him money or something like this. Right. So basically the idea is always be ora farming. Right. You always want to be doing something that increases your aura. Because everything you do, like any kind of interaction you have will be influenced by like your personal aura.

Yes, but stretch the interaction wearing a fedora of nance.

But stretch the analogy to the absolute limits. Sometimes when you farm, your lands grow fallow and you have a failed harvest. And you can also salt the ground so that nothing will ever grow.

No bounty.

And so there is a world where you go out to Ora farm, you set up your ora farm, but someone has salted the ground and you don't grow a single crop.

Yeah.

So that's like a. I mean, that's a failed Aura Farm.

Failed Aura Farm. So the question is, is this the soar to putting yourself in the cameo? It is. It is an attempted Aura Farming. Was it a successful Aura Farm?

Yeah, I think most, like I would say in most cases or farms, you can only tell the success of a farm in retrospect if it's successful. Yeah. So it's like in six months, we'll see. I think if. If people are still on Sora.

Yeah.

If the app is still like being used as a social media platform, not just like a creative tool, then I think it will be a successful farm. Because now Sam is just. He's just everywhere.

It does feel like there's always a winner and a loser in an ore farm. And like if you are ore farming.

Yeah.

VCs.

VCs will do this. They'll buy secondaries in a company to say they're an investor even though they didn't participate in a primary round.

That's true. And then also for every time, for every time a founder or a farms a tier one venture capitalist and then blows the company up in a major scandal, that reduces the aura of the fund that put the money in. And they got farmed. They got farmed.

Yeah.

It makes. If you backed ftx, you got farmed, you look bad.

Yeah.

Like there's always two sides. Right. Because in Jordy's example, the VC is farming company. But when it gets. When it gets exposed that they actually bought secondary, that they weren't real investors.

Then it's a negative aura.

The company is farming the vc.

Yes.

They're like, oh, we're so great that.

But there must be positive sum or a farms where two people come together, they grow a beautiful garden together.

When an emerging fashion brand partners with a legacy brand, let's say a streetwear company, partners with Salomon.

Yep.

They can both benefit because the streetwear brand is getting new legitimacy and Salomon gets to be like, culturally relevant and cool. And that is a positive sum or a farm.

Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle. Positive sum or a farm. The stock's way up. Everyone's doing well in American Eagle world. Sydney Sweeney is back in the news and dominating. It seems like a win win. They ore farmed each other successfully. They grew a new bountiful harvest together.

It was more positive for American Eagle. It was More like net neutral, I think for Sydney Sweeney in that she got a bun of blowback from it. You got a bunch of attention, but it wasn't all positive. Whereas American Eagle, just the stock ripped. Anyways, I have an interesting post here that I wanted to throw in. It's from a guy named Robert. If we can pull it up in the timeline.

Let's pull that up and I'll tell you about Vanta. Automate Compliance. Manage risk, Improve Trust Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

There we go. So this post went super viral. This is Robert says, good game everyone. And he's charting total job openings versus the S&P 500. And he shows that when ChatGPT was released there was this massive divergence. Now a lot of people took this at face value and they thought, okay, chatgpt is just killing jobs. But, but I put in another post here. Anybody that's used ChatGPT understands that it's valuable, but it doesn't replace them at work.

Yep.

Like maybe I don't. I haven't met somebody that's been like, hey Jordy, like I have to admit I lost my job because ChatGPT just does it for me. Right? Yeah, it's. There's certainly in key areas like fin is like replacing like the need to add more CX reps. But. But by and large, ChatGPT was not the catalyst that's just like, you know, totally reducing the number of job openings. So there's another post in here from Simon Saris who says the zero interest rate era is going to become lost history because people want to make up a narrative around AI. The white collar bloodbath didn't happen because of a chat app release. It happened because of the end of ZIRP, which occurred rapidly in 2022. So literally when FTX, like ChatGPT was released, when FTX collapsed effectively during, you know, within like the same 30 day window.

Yep.

And so it really was. A lot of CEOs woke up and said we have to get a lot more efficient, we have to get more lean. Let's not hire, you know, a ton of new people, let's do more with what we have. The AI narrative from a job loss standpoint has also, it's also in some ways I feel like, been a lot more narrative driven in that CEOs have a massive incentive to show they're getting more efficiency out of AI. And so they're just saying to their Teams, like, I don't want you to hire more people, just be more efficient. And even that by itself, just forcing people to say, like, no, we're not expanding your team, just do more with less.

Yeah. There was also huge nomadic contagion from the Twitter buyout where X was able to run with like 1/5 the staff. And the service doesn't really go down in their shipping features. And so I think a lot of CEOs just kind of adopted a year of austerity, a year of efficiency, and wanted to test what they could do with less. And so they pulled.

And so, yeah, you have to look at the labs are scaling headcount rapidly. Anthropic is, you know, hiring teams to, you know, you know, capitalize on all the demand they have. And they're some of the most AGI pilled of anyone. Right. And so you have to read into what people are actually doing. And certainly there's been massive job creation in the kind of startup ecosystem broadly, just because of. We were talking yesterday with a friend. Seems like it's become so normalized, but it feels like every day there's like just on TVPN, like at least 100 million of new funding announced. Usually like you know, half a billion at least lately. And so all, you know, a lot of that is going to go into hiring teams. And so anyways, this, this original chart thought it was worth calling out.

Yeah, it's important to reality check the put one chart over the other and see if they line up perfectly. We had some updates from Tyler Cosgrove.

Yeah, there was another chart we were asking. Somebody had made a chart tracking the nasdaq.com bubble to today. And this person effectively did graphic design to make them look like they match up perfectly by the day.

So perfect.

It looks so Perfect. Tyler spent 24 hours this week trying to recreate it. And no matter which index he was looking at.

Yeah, take us through the thought process.

Yeah, I just sent it in the chat. But basically it's supposed to be NASDAQ from 1998, 2001. And then overlaid on top is 2023 to now.

Yeah.

And then, yeah, I mean, they just like don't line up. You can kind of see like there's a little spike and then it goes down a little bit, rises.

So the person just like made up the data or something.

No one would ever do that.

I don't know if it's like literally made up.

But this is the original post, right?

Yeah.

So the time scales are not lined up correctly.

Okay.

And then.

Oh, so they compress time on one of the charts and not on the other.

Yeah, even when I did that, they still wouldn't really line up. So I think certain parts of the graph are more like compressed than others to make the kind of.

So it's like a linear scale and then a log scale and then a linear scale. It's the ultimate chart crime.

Yeah, this is. I think this is pretty bad.

Do you have your actual overlay available? Can we look at that?

Yes. Let me pull it up.

I would love to see that. While you pull that up, let me tell you about graphite Code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

I love that when I get that sound effect I know you can amp.

Up the fire me up while he's pulling that up. John Galt shares websites should be this again. Waiting for the first company to authentically do it. Everything looks like a venture capitalist yoga retreat website at the moment. It's from the Sony website in 2002. Web Design History. Remember when we pulled up the old iPhone website on Apple in 2008 and we were like, oh, it's gonna be like all iPhone focused because it was the iPhone moment.

It was the new MacBook.

It was like the MacBook Air and like the iPhone's off to the side and it's high technology is one of the features that you get with the iPhone. I like this. I wonder if this would convert how bad this would be. I wonder if someone's actually going to take this post and run with it and build a site that looks like this. We've seen some cool people do interesting things with web design. Posthog had a very cool website. There's still room for innovation in the website. Have fun. Do something different. Don't just copy Linear. Our sponsor Linear is the tool. It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product.

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So do we have the actual Truth zone edition of the stock chart? Okay. There's some overlap there.

Yeah, I mean they're both.

But it just rising.

Yeah, they're both rising.

They're both up and to the right.

But yeah, it's a wildly different timescale. Yeah. And that and that little like that like dip and then pick back up. Does not line up at all.

Yeah, well now it was driven.

You can line up certain parts of it. Yeah, that was the big dip. And you can like line up Certain parts of it, but then the rest of it doesn't work. So if you shift it around, like you shift actual time scales of certain parts of the graph.

Sure.

Then I think I could get it to line up.

Yeah.

Copy the red line and make it a different color and just offset it by a little bit and be like, I'm going viral. That's the secret. That's the secret. Well, if you want to do your own analysis, head over to Julius AI, chat with your data, get expert level insights in seconds. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. And so back on Sora 2 and the question of energy, Zephyr says, pretty sure OpenAI made an algorithmic breakthrough. Sora 2 is a much smaller model. Tyler, I don't know what you think about this, but Andrew Main is saying another interesting metric is that VO3 costs $3.20 per eight second clip. You get three a day, that's ten bucks a day. I pay 250. So they're basically paying like if I use all my VO3 credits on Google's top tier of Gemini, I'm break even. But Sora currently gives you 110 second clips per day. That's $320 of video generation per person for free right now. If that's what they're doing, I think they'd eat that cost all day long. What do you think? Do you think that they've actually brought the cost down to $0.32 per clip? To $0.03 per clip? Where do you think it's going?

Yeah, I mean, I would be very surprised if it was like the same kind of cost as a VO3. If I had to guess, I would say maybe like 10x. So maybe it's like 30 cents, but even then that's like pretty steep. That's like pretty hard to squeeze that out.

I just think like they gave me 100, I've generated six over three days. Have you generated 300? No way.

Yeah, I'm at like five.

You've done five. And we're like kind of power users, early adopters, really testing this for work. And then they're also rolling out the invite slowly. I wouldn't be surprised if this is. Yeah, it's three bucks a prompt, but. But they're just gonna eat that for a while until it gets to scale where, I mean, if it's a million new videos a day coming on the platform, that's only 3 million bucks, that's only a billion a year. They can eat that.

Right. It's only a Billion a year.

It's only a billion. That's really nothing for OpenAI. They're $500 billion company that's raising tens of billions of dollars every second. And they. And what's at stake? Like winning the next social platform, like really eating the trough wars. The trough wars. The trough wars are gonna be fought one 10 second clip at a time, no matter what it costs. Well, people are still doing things the old fashioned way. Ramp is doing things the old fashioned way. We talked about this earlier in the show, But Kareem says Sora 2 is insane. Unbelievable. And he got a community note on it because Ramp published a launch video that it was not with a real camera. And the community notes team put them in the truth zones that it was not really Sora. It's a real commercial. I think that helps with the virality and it helped. Kareem got 400,000 views on this. 450,000 views.

I wonder what percentage actually just believed it was Sora too.

I saw someone in the chat saying they think it's Sora. I don't know if they were joking, but I do think some people. It's hard to tell. It's hard to tell these days.

Well, we have an amazing announcement.

What's that?

Which is that there are 19,000 private equity funds in the U.S. and there are 14,000 McDonald's in the U.S. we have more private equity funds than McDonald's. And I just, I think it's important to recognize this moment, this milestone.

I wonder how that's calculated. Is that like, does that count? Like an LLC that holds a sports car in Montana is technically a private equity fund? Or. Or are we talking like there's a real office with a couple people that are buying companies with debt and equity? Like, is it a true private equity fund? Like, what's the scale? There's probably some crazy power law, right? Where like KKR is like here and then there's like some company accounting funds for ants. What's the median size of that private equity fund? I would love to know that. Anyway, we can dig into it more. Speaking of budget, the government is about to shut down and it already shut down. I believe it did shut down. Not good. The parties fight to cast shut down blame, you know? You know, do people like the government, I don't know, do it seems like a mess. Delian was on the show laughing about like how no other country just shuts down the government. Do you have the polymarket on when the shutdown might end? That seems like a useful, useful data point for us to track hours into the government shutdown, the White House issued new threats. Congressional leaders were digging in and some rank and file Democrats and Republicans were searching for a way out. Senate Majority Leader John Thune And Vice President J.D. vance said they are open to talking to Democrats about extending expiring health care subsidies, but won't negotiate as long as the government is closed. Democratic leaders said they won't agree to reopen the government until their healthcare demands at least some of them are met. And when does polymarket think it's the.

Vast majority of folks, over 70% think that it'll be October 10th or beyond. 44% believe October 10th.

That's our one year anniversary, I believe.

Really?

Something like that. So you know the government reopens and we can celebrate the one year anniversary of this show. In other news, Apple is shelving development for of the cheaper, lighter Vision Pro, the Vision air planned for 2027. And they're prioritizing a more urgent effort developing AI smart glasses to rival Meta. This is interesting. There's some debate over whether or not this is actually going to happen. Apple's a big company. They could just be working on multiple things. But the news from Mark Gurman is that they are reorienting. So the company Apple had been preparing for a cheaper, lighter variant of its head Safely it codenamed N100 for release in 2027. But Apple announced internally last week that it's moving staff from that project to accelerate work on glasses. According to people with knowledge of the matter, smart glasses have emerged as a critical arena for tech companies which are racing to develop AI centric devices.

That's crazy that Meta's making them dance.

Making them dance.

Duck's making them dance.

Tim Cook was watching our Meta Connect coverage and was like, I want to hit that gong with those guys. Let me do it. I gotta make some glasses someday.

Someday.

I gotta get my own Rocco Basilisk. I gotta get. There's only one my own Rocco. Yeah, what could they do? Oliver Peoples? Is that owned by luxottica as well? Also also owned by luxottica. Where will Apple go? I think Apple will not try and partner with a fashion brand. I would make that prediction that they will do their own and they will look like AirPods and they will be mostly all white and they will be a big status symbol to, to let people know that you have an Apple product on your face and there will be a couple of different colors. There will be different colors every year, but Apple will try and own that design language. Apple has done a few partnerships. Didn't they do an Hermes band for the Apple watch? I believe they did that and a few other collaborations. But Apple generally has been pretty limited on the. Let's partner with Nike. They've done a little bit there on the running side but in general they have not done a lot of like this iPhone is co designed with another brand. It's just you can get a case from them. We'll give them the design. It's up to them to do whatever they want. You can get the Louis Vuitton, you know, colors and whatnot.

One more post before our first guest. There's a post from Modest Proposal who's sharing a screenshot from a transcript of Patrick's interview with Dylan Patel. Patrick says, yeah, he's doing demand guarantees. He's doing all this crazy stuff right now. Of course they're talking about Jensen and Nvidia. Dylan says, yeah, right, right. He's using his balance sheet to win, try and win more. Which is an interesting dynamic. I don't know if there's ever been anything this in terms of the anti competitive nature of this where you backstop clusters core. We've recently got a deal with Nvidia where was where they backstopped a cluster. Right. So that's saying like if you buy this.

Yep.

And bring it online, we will guarantee the demand is there. Dylan continues now core Weave would have never built this cluster because it's for short term demand. And renting GPUs on short term is a terrible business model. You want to do long term contracts and you want to do long term contracts with people with balance sheets. That's the golden goose. But that doesn't exist so much important point. So you do long term contracts with people who don't have a balance sheet OpenAI. And if you can't do that, then you'll do short contracts with people who do have a balance sheet. There's this whole matrix of who you rent GPUs to. But from Nvidia's interest it's. You know what I really love is when venture capitalists fund a company and then 70% of their round is spent on compute. They effing love that. Talking about Nvidia. Right. And that's what's happening with all these companies. Whether it's physical intelligence, they're spending a lot on robot arms and shit too. But they're also spending a lot on compute or it's any other startup that's raising cursor, et cetera. And even if it's not directly, it's indirectly going to GPUs. They love when people spend their entire round on GPUs. Would be really good if this wasn't a two year deal or a three year deal for that Compute. If it was, you can spend 70% of your round on one training run. Leave a company with these ideas, gather the data, do the training run and then you have a product and you show how good the model is and try and raise again. That would be really great for Nvidia. But no one wants to build a cluster who's predicated on that as a business model. That's crazy. So they have to backstop a cluster to do that.

Yep. Before we bring in our next guest, there's a related article in the Financial Times. One of Britain's best known tech investors has warned of a disconcerting rise in artificial intelligence valuations, saying Nvidia's planned 100 billion investment in OpenAI brought uncomfortable echoes of the dot com bubble. This is about James Anderson who is at Bailey Gifford. He had a massive position in Nvidia. He was the largest. That was his largest holding. He's now in Chinese battery maker Catl Catl. And he said, I have to say the words vendor financing do not carry nice reflections to someone of my age. And so the. Yes, the echoes of the dot com bubble are growing louder. Well, we are pleased to be joined by someone who is building in a completely different space. We have the chief operating officer of Axon, the president. The president of Axon. I was reading the chat. A little misinformation.

Sorry, what's going on, Josh?

Welcome to the show, boys.

Good to see you.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on.

What is this setup here? This looks amazing. That looks incredible.

Space, virtual background.

You're in the command center. Yeah, yeah.

We have some folks at Axon who just on their own come out. They just churn out new zoom backgrounds. So every time I open Zoom, there's like five or six options to choose from that I've never seen before. So this one looks pretty cool.

It's looking great.

Can you take us through kind of the shape of the business today? Maybe a little bit about your journey just to kind of set the table for those who might not be familiar with the business.

Sure.

At Axon, we make pretty much all the cool technology that police officers use day to day. Everything from their taser gun to their body camera to all the SAS software and digital evidence management to all their reporting products. Drones, virtual reality, police training. We really believe that we can add a lot of value in a lot of different spots where really software and hardware intersect in policing. And so I've been at the company 16 years. Two years or two months, sorry, two weeks after graduating college, drove across the country to join Axon, and here I am.

That's amazing. What's been the most recent transformation in the business? I was talking to somebody about this category and very experienced investor. He was like, oh, no one's really made it work. And I was like, well, what about Axon? They seem to be doing pretty well. And he was like, oh, it's not that big of a company. And then we looked at the market cap and it's a huge company and you've been massively successful. But what has been the biggest transformative moment over the past five years for the business?

Sure. I think really for the first 25 years of the company's history, it was really about hardware. And in the last five years, it's been far more about software. So we manage more than 40 times as much content as the Netflix library combined. So. So we're managing all of this. Police evidence in the cloud and in figuring out how to make use of this massive data set for our customers has been the name of the game. So most notably, a couple years ago, we released a product called Draft one, which is a Gen AI product, analyzes the body camera transcripts and creates the first draft of the police report for the police officer. So cops spend about 50% of their time writing police reports. We think we can make that like 10% of the time.

So is that use of Gen.

So is that something where an officer in the middle of an actual. Let's say they're pulling somebody over for speeding, do they talk out loud and say, all right, you know, how are you? How. Where is that data coming in from? Because I could imagine they're just kind of. John actively uses like, transcription with chat gbt. So we'll be like, talking about something and then he'll, you know, be prompting it just with voice. I could imagine an officer does the same thing where they're saying, like. Like pulling this over. I'm at this intersection. I clocked him going 20 over, and then that just gets built in. Or what does that workflow like?

Sure.

So it's a great point. Cops are getting better at prompting the AI to improve the quality of the police reports. But even without doing that just in the normal conversation, you can imagine that same incident when the cop walks up to the person's window and says, hey, you know you're speeding, you're going 20 miles an hour over the speed limit.

It's still pick that stuff up. Yeah, yeah.

And even just like what's your name? And then the person says that and then that's in the audio file and then that gets transcribed and that's just like so much manual work. You're not putting anyone out of a job, you're just making their life better. It feels like a fantastic use of artificial intelligence. Very exciting.

And you guys have been super acquisitive. I think you've done a number of acquisitions but recently completed. It was an 800ish million dollar acquisition. We got a gong here. We'd love to. We'd love to, you know.

Yeah, it was about 630 million. It was prepare AI.

There we go.

Love that.

We have a well at headquarters. Nice big deals. You hit the gong. I love.

Of course we're excited about those guys joining the company. Their founder, Michael Chime, super, super talented and very happy to have him as part of Axon.

Is the strategy with that deal to kind of diffuse the technology over everything you do, keep it as a separate business line, cross sell it. How are you thinking about that?

Yeah, so our mission is to protect life. We want to keep people from getting killed in policing incidents to include police officers. And the best way we can do that is shrink the time between the incident taking place and help being on the way. Right now that's like a two minute cycle. Someone calls 91 1, they talk to a call taker, call taker talks to the dispatcher, dispatcher figures out the right officer to to send to the scene and we think we can automate that entire process in partnership with prepared. So essentially call 911 based on the metadata of the call. Drone has already taken off to head to the incident. You know, over time we think we can route the proper police officers to those scenes without a lot of human intervention. And so that's a lot of what we have to look forward to with Prepared moving into the future.

Here you guys are at the stage where you're a true platform multi product. I'm sure you started with, you know, I don't know the exact first product but in this category is it how hard is it to get point solutions through? I imagine, you know, if you're just building for other startups, like you know, a typical YC company for example, they can build a really narrow, simple point solution, sell that into to somebody in their batch, it's pretty easy. You know, these aren't you know, super sophisticated operations, whereas selling into police departments, I imagine just the, just, just the timeline alone of building that relationship is probably really hard for, for a young company. I guess, like, talk about the different maybe stages of the companies and getting to the point where you're truly a platform.

Sure. The biggest part is, you know, you have to recognize that US Public safety is less than a million total users. So a lot of startups wouldn't even be able to get funding based on that Tam, you know, and so when you go into public safety or defense tech or this segment, you really have to be confident you can build something for the long term where you can win the majority of the users on your platform. That's really the only way you can have a viable business model in this space. And so we look at this like, hey, we start with the most talented teams we can find and then the most product synergy. And so with a company like Prepared or one like Fusis that we acquired last year, we really believe we can help accelerate their growth by plugging them into our ecosystem. And you know, the products nicely play off each other. And you know, with police, they want to outsource as much of the technology as they can. They don't want to build things internally to, you know, to, to capture their use cases. And so when we can show up with a really nice end to end workflow from what we call capture to courtroom, that really has a lot of value to our customers. And so that's part of our thinking and hypothesis as we look at M and A and which companies to partner.

With in terms of that platform. Is there demand from local law enforcement agencies for you to play nice with other companies, build some sort of open API? Is there another kind of enterprise resource planning backbone that they want you to plug into what's kind of the software supply chain of a modern police department look like these days?

Yeah, it's a great question. And the short answer is yes, you want to build something that's open that at the end of the day, this isn't about trying to help people make more money or make more effective ads on the Internet. This is about fighting crime and saving people's lives. So when you do those kind of sketchy things where people don't have access to your data or you don't, you know, you don't work well with others, you're ultimately undermining the police department's mission of protecting their communities. And so for us, we try to look at this like, hey, we want to be the Switzerland in this space, and regardless of the hardware inputs or the software outputs, we want to play nice and, and leverage open open APIs to, to help our customers achieve what they're setting out to do.

What robotic form factors are you guys most bullish on over the long run? I'm sure you leverage a lot of drones. Is there any other? We had Tony from Doordash on this week who built a really cute robot for delivery, L4 autonomy. What are you guys thinking about? Are drones enough or are there other things on the steeds we want?

So the reason I'm smiling is I thought like, I pitched our founder Rick on this idea like two years ago to do this big hugging robot that looks like the Michelin Man. Just imagine this thing kind of walks down the street.

It's like Big Hero 6 criminal.

It takes them into custody.

So people aren't as scared of robots.

I don't think that one's in our future. But the thing I'm most excited about is bear hug. The ability to put less lethal on drones. So you can think of a school shooting taking place and if you have drones in nests in the, in the roof of a school, there's no reason those things can't be equipped with taser technology. And they can fly autonomously. They have targeting software for us end user. You know, a police department would always decide when to use force that would not be autonomous. But this idea of finding ways where we can keep people safe in these mass shooting incidents before first responders ever get there, that's. That's very interesting to us. And over the, over the next few years, we hope to be playing in that space more and more here with, with some tools that can really, you know, again, shrink the time frame where these incidents are happening from when they start to when they're concluded.

What about some. Somebody in the chat is asking about technology for, you know, firefighters, like specifically wildland firefighters. We're here in la. As the fires unfolded at the beginning of this year, it felt like they were so they had too little technology. At least that was the perception. We had firefighters relying on the nonprofit fire tracker that kept going down because they didn't even have capacity. What are you guys doing on that front? It's a tough market because fires are so unpredictable, but certainly feels important.

Sure thing. Sure thing. I think the most interesting thing I've seen in that space to date is these drones that carry thousands and thousands of pounds that can stay in the air for hours. And you can imagine you could actually string those along with you know, with very lengthy fire hoses. Hoses and fly out into the fire and try to contain the fire from within. Like those types of improvements through the air, I think will help. I think in software, it's a little bit of what you said. It's predictive. It's based on the wind. I'm not sure that's like a major game changer. I think you got to find a way to get water faster, more reliably into these fires. And it feels like drones, over time, especially as they can carry more and more weight, will be, you know, a reasonable kind of creative way to help there.

What are your current thinking around facial recognition? Obviously, image generation or generative AI is getting so much better, but there's different parties. How are police feeling about it? How are different communities feel about it? Does it differ from township and city to city? How are lawmakers thinking about the trade offs there? It seems like one of those conversations that's like forever ongoing and maybe that's the best process in a democracy. But how are you thinking about it?

Yeah, I think you characterize that. Well, you know, the United States is one of the few markets right now where facial recognition is not used in policing. And we haven't participated in that market yet. I do think we're more interested in it now. The thing we've been waiting for is to be able to demonstrably show that the algorithms are rid of racial bias. I think that is certainly something that is worth making sure that you got that right. And ultimately, you know, up until now, we haven't felt comfortable with the technology, but it is improving and we're seeing those improvements. And so as we start to kick the tires on what this looks like, ethical design principles and you know, like we say internally helping make the right things easier and the wrong things harder, that's going to be kind of at the center of our thinking as we, as we think about facial recognition on fixed cameras, on body cameras and so forth.

Yeah, where's the. Who has ball control on that narrative? Someone in the chat was asking about this documentary, all light everywhere, very small box office. I hadn't heard of it until this person mentioned it. Are there other communities or nonprofits or. I mean, we talk about AI all day and there's this guy, Eliezer Yudakowski, who's kind of like defined like the AI doom scenario of like super take off. And there's a couple thought leaders. The Dwarkesh Patel show is talking about trade offs in AI building.

Who.

Who are the key thought leaders? Influencers groups, public groups, nonprofits that are actually defining the conversation there.

Sure. I think a big piece of it on the policing side is major county, major county sheriffs and major city chiefs. Those are the large organizations that, that, you know, that kind of, of paint the path forward on what the priorities are for public safety. But I think ultimately it's going to be very political. Like, we need to get to a place where mayors and city councilors and the downstream folks they serve. The community is looking at this saying, hey, there's far, far, far more good than harm here in this technology. And it's progressing, albeit slowly. But I do think we're getting closer to the point where we can say, hey, look, you know, everybody should be interested in equipping public safety with ways that you can reliably fight crime and keep constituents safe. And between mayors and city councils and the police chiefs and sheriffs, I think that's the key combination of folks coming together on this one.

What about on the hardware side? It feels like that piece of the business is pretty stable. But is there anything interesting happening that you can share on? You know, there's this big American dynamism movement. Make stuff in America. There's a trade war. Like, has anything shifted your thinking about manufacturing just hardware devices in America or for, you know, your business over the past few years?

Yeah, for sure. And as a, a company that's sold to not only US Public safety, but the federal government and federal law enforcement for a long time, we've always manufactured in the United States. So Scottsdale, Arizona is where our headquarters is. Hopefully it will be in the future. We got a lot of drama around that right now, but we can get past that. We'll keep building tasers and body cams in Scottsdale, and we're proud of that. We were supporters of the Buy American Act. We, we think it's in the best interest of the company to have all of our defense equipment made here. And so we're happy to participate in that process.

How, how crazy valuable is an individual person in the manufacturing process? There's been this debate going on in Silicon Valley about process knowledge. This idea that. I don't know if you've been tracking this, but Mark Zuckerberg has been paying hundreds of millions of dollars to people that know how to train just a very specific set of skills on how you train a large language model. And once they know that information, once they know how to do it, they're worth so much because they understand how to do it and no one else does. And there's been this debate about, well, could we do the same thing with semiconductors and bring some people over from Taiwan who know how to make that, make it in Arizona where their TSMC is already set up. But does the same thing exist in the world of like hardware manufacturing? Is that even something that exists or is it more diffuse?

It exists to some extent. I think. You know, for us, all of our cartridges, the things that go in the tasers that have the darts in them that fire out, those are all made by robots. They're all automated at this point. So you know, we make millions of those every year. So the idea of people kind of hand winding darts and so forth, that gets expensive. And so robots are expensive too, but they scale really well. And so ultimately we've really made a big bet on automation for taser manufacturing. And we think it's the right bet. We've had automation for years and years, but we continue to invest more in it. And frankly, the people who know how to do that really well, like you said, they might not be as valuable as some of the folks on the cutting edge of LLMs right now, but they're very valuable to us. And got to make sure manufacturing automation is, is one of the things we continue to be really, really good at.

Awesome. Well, thank you for the updates and come back on when you guys do your next. Maybe the next acquisition will hit the 1 billion dollar mark, but always welcome in the 600 million range.

Sorry for keeping you over time. Thanks so much for hopping on. This is good.

Congrats on all your success and looking.

Forward to seeing you again soon.

Thanks. Great to meet you, Josh.

Cheers.

You gotta look up the Axon market cap stock chart. It is, it's beautiful. It's a thing of Beauty. Up 128,000% for all time. IPO'd according to Google in 2001 and.

Just went, wow, I had no idea.

It's a $55 billion company now. Yeah, it's really big. Well, back in the startup world, Dish Jain is announcing Mosaic, an agentic video editor. I definitely wann give this a try. He says in a world trending towards AI slop, create something real. There's no wait list, there's a public beta.

We gotta, we gotta pull up the video.

Let's pull up this video and see is it slop or not slop. How are we feeling? Comment? Mosaica, you can get some credits. Let's watch this launch video. They didn't bring us here to change the past.

Mosaic, the Mosaic.

Mosaic Mosaic.

The real test. Was this built in Mosaic or was this After Effects or Premiere?

I can see this being pretty good.

Yeah, I think so. Node based workflows are really popular like this where you wire things together because then you can repeat the process very quickly by just dropping in a new base clip and all the pro. So if you say, I want to use AI to remove the background add subtitle. We have a workflow for this that we've defined with clips in code. But oftentimes it helps to just be able to have a node based workflow that you can just wire up and understand where each piece goes to the next overlay the text. DaVinci Resolve is doing this and a lot of other. The next generation of Blender and Houdini have all moved to node based workflows. Cinema4D recently moved to a node based workflow.

Well, I like that. I thought it was a good video. Focus on the actual product. Yeah, you could do with it.

It shows you how I was worried.

Because he was the founder. Said, in the era of AI slop. And then it looked like. Like it was just. It was gonna be a bunch of clips of.

No, no, no. This is very clearly stolen footage from Interstellar. They licensed it, but that's fine for one second.

Yeah, I think that. Isn't it legal to do use it for like.

Yes, it would be transformative. It'd be fair use. Yeah, probably. You know, I wouldn't. You know, you got to talk to a lawyer if you want to.

Dede Doss is sharing some news from earlier. A lot of people have already seen it. Probably. OpenAI wrapped a $6.6 billion share sale at 500 billion. This wasn't primary capital. This was employees selling into it. The sale short of the 10.3 billion that was authorized. But does that mean it was oversubscribed?

Does that mean that 10 billion of demand came in, they went to the employees and said, you can sell up to 10 billion. Employees held. Is that what happened? I want to dig into it.

Okay. Yeah. So it says with insiders seeing this as a sign of employee confidence, continued investor demand.

I was hearing that people were getting cut down.

Yeah, that could be a spin.

Sure.

By being like, employees don't want to sell. But I think a lot of employees at 500 billion are probably happy to convert a meaningful amount into liquidity. Just given. They're smart, they're running the comps. It's life changing money. They can see. Like, I'm sure you can still be very bullish. On the business and want to sell even half of your position at 500 billion. Many people weren't underwriting that when they joined the company. Yeah, it's eight and a half million per employee on average apparently. And so Didi says, thanks ChatGPT, for absolutely destroying the SF real estate market. So even after taxes, these employees are all going to be sitting there being like, it's time to hit market buy on Zillow.

Will they be buying in San Francisco? They might be renting in San Francisco and buying an incline village, getting those Nevada taxes going.

I don't know. They're in office.

I don't think they might be buying in Menlo park, you know, Atherton Bay area.

Broadly.

They might be, yeah.

The challenge is like, you know, hundreds of employees sold into this and if you look at how many nice single family homes that are move in ready are available, I'm sure it's in the hundred, you know, less than the number of employees. Right? Yeah. If everybody rushes to buy a home, it's going to really spike prices.

It doesn't feel like it, it's happened yet necessarily. Right. It feels like there was, there was a time when SF real estate was really hot and then it sort of sold off. I believe during the pandemic you could.

Buy, remember you could buy like a two bedroom condo and sf, you know, not in the nicest area but for like 600k.

But that was down from like really elevated prices totally. And so we crashed and now we're, we're predicting a resurgence and I mean it feels like it will come back. I mean San Francisco's been, you know, on a tear in a bunch of different ways. It seems like it's more like a better place to actually settle down. But still there's always the pull of South Bay of what's up.

Yeah, it's interesting because it still looks reasonable. Maybe because we're in la, obviously home prices are crazy here too. But you can get a four bedroom for 1.8 million. That seems reasonable.

Take the money and run to the, to the Ozarks. Do you see the story? First, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. There's a very cool video that we are featured in that was generated on Fall that we will show later in the show. But we only have five minutes until our next guest joins. But the article from Performative Mail says this is the biggest, toughest article I've done about so called AI psychosis. It's the story of a man who committed a horrific crime in his youth but served his time and against all odds found love and a new life. One that swiftly unrattled. After he started talking to a chatbot, he grew obsessed with an AI chatbot. Then he vanished into the Ozarks. What a wild story. John Gantz committed a terrible crime. Very dark. Always tough to read into these anecdotes and see like how widespread is this? Would this have happened without AI? Would this person be deranged by something else? A book? Did you get one Shotted by Walden? The book about going and living by a lake. Who knows? But you can go read it on Rolling Stone if you want to dig into that piece.

Citrini says as highlighting or quoting one of his own posts saying Korea's financial news is so ridiculously lit. It's a bunch of sad ants crying and the Samsung chart just goes down.

Oh, that's hilarious.

Citrini says this article was posted like 24 hours before the absolute bottom for Samsung.

The ants are very happy now. Let's go.

The ants are so I've never been a Samsung shareholder.

No, but Samsung is. I mean they did that big deal with Elon for Tesla AI chips, I believe so you know, they're certainly getting in on the AI boom. Well, econ kids will see this and think I should give this guy money to help me get rich. And it's two of the most crazy looking individuals. I don't recognize either of these.

This is the guy on the left is a. Is a rapper. What's his name?

Tyler.

Oh yes. He was the basis of Spring Break. This is Riff Raff.

Riffraff.

This is Riff Raff. I don't know that he's actually done a get rich quick scheme or like a.

No, they just. There are some guys out there that.

Look somewhat like this. It's a very evocative by Rob Freund.

We haven't seen a course, bro. Just sell a course called how to Make Money Just Reasonably Priced and just really breaking down. You know, here are the different ways.

That it's Econ 101, baby. Tyler Town. Conversations with Tyler. That's all you need.

You can sell services yourself. You can sell services that you deliver through a team. You can buy something for one price and sell it for a higher price. And that's pretty much it.

Yeah, naval kind of one shotted that entire category with the how to get rich without getting lucky thread.

He should have dropped a chord.

He didn't need to, because he summed it all up in a series of like, 20 pithy tweets. And you can just scroll and be like, yep, that's the algorithm.

Yeah.

Anyway, mounted cash flow says, always exciting when you see a new letter get added to the end of ebitda. What is he talking about? What's the latest one? I did a sale.

Community adjusted was the classic community adjusted.

What was that? It cr ca EBITDA or EBITDA ca. I guess ebitda. I don't know. I don't know if there's a new one that's going around because the AI companies aren't even talking about EBITDA yet. It's all ARR and Lois and just.

Top line Nvidia Only company with profits.

Yeah. So they haven't had to dip into some crazy EBITDA calculation. I don't know who is, but stay.

Alert to talk about cash flow.

Yeah. And if you're diving into EBITDA numbers, head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields. And they're trusted by millions, folks.

Adam, person of swag says you can just do things. Option on the left, quietly announce a $200 million Series A in a tweet saying back to work. And the second option, get black hat drunk at Cheesecake Factory after closing. 120k pre seed. Seems a little specific there, Adam.

They think those are both great, great options.

One more post from Buco Capital bloke. Most people think investing makes you rich, but that's wrong until you're making at least 500k a year. The best ROI is growing your paycheck. Get the cash flowing first. Totally agree. We had this conversation with the team. No matter how much how excited you are about investing, when you're young, focus on developing the skill set that allows you to be more valuable to your market. So, without further ado, I think we should bring in our next guest. Man that should need no introduction, Pat Gelsinger.

He's in the Restream waiting room. We will bring patients into the TVP and ultra realm. Welcome to the show, Pat. Great to meet you.

So good to be able to join. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

So excited.

I would love a little bit to catch everyone up on what you're doing today. Take us through the current project, the current business, and what you've been focusing on over the last few years.

Yeah, thanks, John. Thanks, Jordy. So Since Intel, I've been focusing and I've been wearing two hats.

Hats.

One is the deep tech investing hat with playgrounds. So the hard stuff, you know, quantum computer, superconducting, next generation light sources, new materials, you know, those types of things. And then my other hat is being the head of technology for Glue, a faith tech company. I've lived my life at the intersection of faith and technology, and Glue is building the platform for the faith and flourishing ecosystem from running it all the way up through the latest and greatest trained models for AI services for the church and the faith ecosystem.

Yeah, I'm fascinated by Glue. We've talked to the founder of Holo on the show and it feels like an industry that is super ready to adopt technology and yet there just aren't that many founders that are pursuing it. Would love to talk more about some of the findings that you put out when you investigated the foundation models. How did you process that information? What was the methodology for evaluating these models? And then I'm sure we can dig into more about the consequences of those findings.

Yeah, and maybe the first point is I've been driving benchmarks for 40 years. My name, right? In fact, some of the benchmarks that are still used today have my code in them. Yeah, it's sort of embarrassing. Like you move.

It's amazing.

Yeah, you should have moved on by now. But some of my code is still there, so I've been deeply associated with, okay, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So, you know, this idea of measuring AI models and, you know, people are working on this today, but we're also seeing that they're just measuring performance or cost per first time. The first token cost per token, total token throughput. Those are great metrics, but it doesn't measure, is it good? And to me, the absence of bad does not demonstrate the presence of good. So what we did, the second point is there's this body of work that was fairly recently released by Harvard, Baylor and Gallup, measuring Human Flourishing, a five year Lilly study that across 22 nations, across 50 plus cultural groups, what is human flourishing? So now we can answer fairly definitively across multiple dimensions, across, you know, relationships, character development, you know, finances, spirituality and faith. Is it good? So now we have, you know, a solid view for that. And then the final piece is, okay, let's create benchmarks for AI systems using that foundational research. And now we have, you know, a corpus of qualitative and quantitative results to measure good. So if you say, which is the better model for human flourishing. OpenAI Gemini anthropic. You know, Claude, I can give you an answer based on a solid corpus of data with the most rigorous of benchmarking experiences and numerical analysis sitting behind it. And we believe, and our objective is, as the result of that, is we will make models better because they can start measuring not just first token time, but did I give a good answer that's aligned with human values?

How do you think about that benchmark of human flourishing? When you go through your life, are you thinking about your finances, character, happiness, relationships, meaning faith, health? Are you consciously checking in with yourself? Or is this something that's more reflective on your life, where it all kind of rolls up into happiness or well being? And then when you investigate your life, you realize that those are the things that you've done. How intentional have you been? I guess.

Yeah, you know, I'd say it's sort of in two different dimensions there. I mean, hey, I don't go benchmarking myself all the time. But, you know, that said, you know, every time a major new model comes out, I want to ask the question, is it better?

Yeah.

And on these dimensions, so, you know, we'll be producing these benchmarks on a periodic basis every couple of weeks, you know, we'll be updating those benchmarks to say, okay, are we better? You know, which model is better? Is Deep seq better than OpenAI than OSS and so on. I want that rigor to be in place that everybody is, you know, okay, you know, are we improving in this area? Because you don't fix these things overnight. You know, it's a long trajectory of, you know, evolution and development of the technologies, you know, secondly. Oh, yeah, yeah. And then the second side is, okay, you know, you'll hear disastrous situations, you know, where we have kids committing suicide, you know, their best friend has become the chatbot. Wow, when those things come up, would our benchmarks be detecting those? Can we, you know, and then do we have to add more and make them more rigorous, that those kind of things can now be avoided, you know, in a constructed way, you know, that we really are happy that we are making technology better or the language I like, like to use, you know, technology as a force for good. Technology itself is neutral. Are we going to bend that arc toward good?

How receptive have the labs been to to the benchmark?

You know, I'll say it's early at this point and, you know, so, you know, we're interacting with all the names that you would like. And I'll say, you Know, they're getting better, you know, their scores have improved somewhat lot, you know, so I do think we're having some influence with them, but it's still early and you know, as I would like to, you know, also say, I don't think the benchmarks are rigorous enough yet. You know, we gotta, you know, we have sort of, you know, an early version of them out there. These are Good, you know, 12, 30 questions or so are part of them as well. But I expect that becomes a bigger corpus. Right. Of questions. You know, also we got to go deeper, you know, for the most part these are single shot, you know, questions. We got to get into multi turn conversations. We have to, you know, have more of a mixture of experts, you know, that you're testing different experts also. How do we test the safeguards? Right. You know, we're now at the sixth turn of a conversation. You know, this individual is clearly suicidal. You know, how do we go handle that?

Yeah, I think a lot of the safety concerns that at least we have is when people are, you know, many, many, many, many prompts deep. Right. In a specific conversation. It could be thousands. Right. Depths to which that personally I've never gone. Right. I don't know how crazy it gets that far, but certainly the labs need to be thinking about all those extreme edge cases.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. So I think we have more work to do on, I'll say, multi turn conversations and how we build more of that robustness into the benchmarks. But you know what we have today and you can go to the glue website FAI and see what we have today. This is a good start. But I do think in the speed of evolution of the AI technologies we have a lot more work to do and I'm sort of excited now as we get some of that momentum underway, really start crawling into, just like you said, more of the multi turn conversations. And we can be pretty aggressive in the questioning sets for multi turn to drive some of those extreme behaviors. Because the first few questions is mostly driven by prompts. As you get deeper into it's much more reflecting what's the underlying model weights themselves. So all of that we have more work to do. But I'm excited to have this first version out there and we're starting to get some impact and good results.

Yeah, there also seems to be some sort of unresolved question around alignment by default. How much do the models just reflect you? If you show up with a lot of negative energy, they can kind of become negative and it feels like it's this self reinforcing spiral, if you come to it, just asking interesting questions about the world and wanting to understand how math works. Like you're going to get a tutor if you come to it with something bad. So a lot to sort out there. I have a question. One of my favorite quotes from you is from this talk you gave where you sort of lightly accused Silicon Valley to be a group of miserly pagans. It's a great quote. I think it's very apt analysis. And when I look at the performance scorecard on glue.com flourishinghubresearch, I noticed that the models seem to be doing very well at finances and very poor at faith. And I'm wondering if that's a reflection of the humans that people that made them or the data set that's going into the model or both or how intractable is that problem?

Yeah, you know, and I think that's great because, you know, I mean, where's a lot of the training data coming from?

Yeah.

Right. Associated with that, you know, and I.

View it as Reddit.

Hey, you put bad stuff in, you're going to get bad stuff out. You put good stuff in, you're going to get good stuff out Y, you know, for it. And you know, I mean, we're doing some work, you know, we, we glue, you know, we'll have our own values aligned models. Right. And part of the reason we're going to do our own foundational training, you know, for those models is specifically I'm not going to put the bad stuff in.

Yeah, that's good.

I don't have to worry about it ever coming out because it was never in, you know, that we can never probabilistically producing those things.

Things.

So, you know, but you know, getting more specifically to your question, I think a lot of it does have to do with the implications, right. Of those training sets in the first place, you know, and every, you know, you've seen lots of conversations about the challenges of we don't have enough training data, we don't have good training data, you know, the quality of synthesized data, you know, versus raw data, you know, associated with it. So I do think there's a valid problem, you know, and you know, I'm always a bit optimistic on the individuals that their motives are good for it, you know, but we've clearly seen in the social networks, you know, the algorithms were bad. Right. You know, I mean, it leads to more degrange behavior. Right. You know, it's only about dwell time on sites. And I think those same motivations would naturally drive the AI models if there wasn't further accountability. And that's what leads us to saying we have to have better benchmarks that are rigorous and values based, that get the answers we want.

Yeah. Even with human driven social media and how it can take people down these extreme rabbit holes, they're not as worrisome as LLMs because LLMs can be totally private. They can go to these kind of dark places and it's just one human interacting with the model. Whereas social media, at least if somebody's on some crazy forum, there is a point at which they can say something that goes too far. People can say, hey, I think you should go out and touch grass. Right. And I don't, I haven't seen a model tell somebody to touch grass yet. Maybe that's built in, maybe that'll come in the next version somewhere. Did you, did you always predict? You know, it feels over the last few years, Silicon Valley has a, you know, massively renewed interest in faith and religion. How, how much did you anticipate that? Clearly, you know, you never cared what the industry thought. You had your own faith. But is that something that you predicted? Did it come faster or sooner?

Yeah, maybe three different dimensions. You know, there, you know, I mean, one is, there is, I'll call it a post Covid and a post success renewal. Right. Where, you know, this is very endemic of Silicon Valley, but you see it in lots of other, you know, communities, New York, Austin as well. People presume success and now they're asking deeper questions like is it significant? So there is this national shift in what's important. Some of that might have been driven and some suggest it was driven by COVID isolation. Some of it is driven by the success phenomena, you know, that we're in, you know, but it isn't just Silicon Valley. You know, there's a number of statistics, you know, those that, you know, believe in a faith view of Jesus Christ, the church engagement or spiritual engagement, you know, we're seeing very much, you know, 20 to 35 year olds, you know, is going up in very meaningful ways. You know, four data points in a row of rising engagements or spiritual value engagement. So it's a national phenomena at this point. Clearly in Silicon Valley we've seen a greater willingness to talk about faith. You know, I started an organization about 12 years ago called Transforming the Bay with Christ. One of one of my other hobbies. And that organization now is over 800 churches strong. Right. You know, when I talk to people, they didn't believe we had eight churches in the Bay Area. I have over 800, you know, participating in transforming the Bay. And I'll just say there is a renewal, a connectivity, you know, associated with that. You've seen other things recently, you know, some news and commentary about Act 17.

Yeah.

Trey and Michelle Stevens and, and you know, Peter Thiel and Gary Tan, you know, friends, friends of mine that, huh, all of a sudden, you know, I mean, we're hosting these events, they're sold out events, right. You know, where hundreds of people are showing up, you know, asking life questions. You know, some of it's, hey, I want to come in here Pat speak. I want to come and hear Peter Thiel speak. But some of it is they want to have life questions from someone they respect. So I'll just say, you know, there is this renewal going on, you know, and personally I've been at it so long, people often say, well, do you feel more comfortable? Well, you know, I felt comfortably uncomfortable 30 years ago to speak about my faith in the Bay area, you know, 30 years later. Well, I've been doing so long, everybody expects me to do it. So it's not as uncomfortable, you know, but in many regards, you know, it's like it's who I am. Right. And if you have a different faith or a different worldview, you know, everybody should be comfortable talking about that. And I'd say from my faith perspective, it's, you know, like, I spoke to a Baha' I womanly recently. I don't know anything about Baha'.

I.

Tell me about Baha'.

I. Right.

And the more I engage you where your worldview is, the more freedom I have to talk about my Christian worldview and why I think that's good, powerful and meaningful as well.

What do you make of it? Feels like an easy prediction to make that there will be religions built around AI. Feels like they're already emerging. If you go into the Reddit forum on ChatGPT, you have people that, that warship4.0. It feels scary.

Even in technology circles, people kind of joke, oh, we're building AI God or God in a box. It's gonna be so power. It's super intelligence. It'll be above humans in some way. And it's a little bit tongue in cheek with some people, but some people seem to believe it.

And I think there's a long history of Silicon Valley and even parts of the Bay Area trying to recreate religion from first principles. I have, you know, my family has been in, you know, Palo Alto in some way or another since the early 1900s. And I've heard Stories of like cults emerging around Stanford in the 60s where people were basically creating a club that looked like a church, they would meet like a church, but ultimately were just basically trying to create new religion. And I think these, yeah, these conversations are uncomfortable, but they're important because they're. I think it's inevitable that they're going to pop up and it feels like, you know, potentially can go to a very dark place.

Yeah. And I'd say, you know, you know, maybe three different comments there. One is, you know, technology is neutral. You can use it for good and bad. Right. AI, most powerful technology that we've created yet. In no small part because it's built on the shoulders of all the other technologies, connectivity, cloud, et cetera. So it can grow and expand more rapidly. But our job is to make it good. Can it get used for cults and other things? Of course. Just like everything. What was the early driving use case of the Internet that. Right. I think the number one websites early on were pornography. Yeah. Not what we intended, but, you know, gambling and pornography is like, oh man.

What have you done?

Right.

So I have no doubt, no hesitation, that there will be, you know, these cultish experiences that emerge. Right. But again, our job is make technology a force for good.

It.

Yeah.

And where and how do we build safeguards and other into it? Second general comment is, you know, people talk about super intelligence and those, you know, and some of it is, you know, it's like, man, you know, the calculator is a super intelligence.

Yeah.

It does math and better than I do. Right. And you know, my Excel spreadsheet, man, I ain't giving that up. Right. You know, and I don't want my accountant to give it up. Yeah, right. You know, and so on. And we think about LLMs in the futures, man, they're going to become indispensable because it is like the real time contextually relevant encyclopedia of my life. It's going to have better memory, better knowledge, better connectivity. I mean, we're going to use AI to conquer language. For the first time in humanity's history, I'm going to be able to teach every kid in their native language contextually relevant using the power of AI. And because of that, you know, almost all of the people that live in poverty live in the fringe languages that are not conquered. Wow. You know, how exciting, you know, I mean, the extraordinary opportunities, you know, this is going to give us to truly improve the life of the planet. But you know, ultimately it's been interesting.

I've been debating with John how, you know, how bad would it be if I suddenly didn't have access to LLMs? And we've gone back and forth on this. I personally would much rather live without LLMs than a mobile device or the Internet. Right. I think some of these enabling technologies that we have that make LLMs valuable and useful and widely available are feel today more foundationally important. But that is coming from a viewpoint where the most of the Internet is English. Most of the media that I want to watch is English. And so the point you made about, you know, being from a, you know, being from somewhere in the world, that English isn't your native language, being able to educate yourself on, you know, and watch any content, you know, things like that are pretty exciting. Where do you think continuing?

And going back to the core of your question though. Will there be AI Gods? God designed us as humans to be in relationship and any technology that's driving us apart. Three teenagers sitting on the couch texting each other. How terrible. Talk to each other. God designed us to be relational. Right. Individuals and, you know, a foundation of religion. Spirituality, you know, isn't just the self, it's the community. Right. That you're part of. So, you know, I fundamentally, you know, things that take us apart, you know, I think, okay, we have to build safe cars to have them be tools bringing us together. You know, I do not want my AI doing suicide prevention counseling. I want a real human who doing those things. You know, I want a real human interacting with kids and teaching and learning. You know, I want AI agents that are helping the teacher do better education. Right. You know, because, you know, of the modalities, the training and so on. But ultimately these are very, you know, powerful. Right. Human experiences that we need to keep as human experiences.

How have you been processing the dialogue around the Antichrist? You mentioned Acts 17, Acts 17's and Peter Thiel. It's something that's really sparked a huge discourse in Silicon Valley that I think a lot of people weren't even thinking about. Christianity is somewhat unique in the idea of the Antichrist. But how have you processed it through your life? And then how are you thinking about that concept today?

Yeah, you know, I do think there's, you know, you know, there was, you know, when I was in my, you know, whatever 20s or 30s, there was a series called Left Behind.

Yeah, right.

And it was like, oh, you know, if you go back and read that, you know, and the late Great Planet or, you know, there's sort of been this episodic flow of end times to discussions and discussions on the Antichrist and what they would be. So, so, you know, this topic has, you know, only persisted for about 2,000 years. You know, it just sort of goes Lindy.

It's Lindy.

Yes. It's been around forever.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you know, hey, having another cycle of that. Great. Because it causes people to ask deep questions. Yeah, right. You know, to me, that is a good side effect to it. Now, from a biblical scholarship perspective, you know, Antichrist is mentioned one time in the Bible and not contextually in Revelation. Right. It's like, okay, this is a thin discussion. Right. If you look at it theologically, you know, that way, you know, when most of the revelation and you know, apocryphal conversations in the Bible are actually much simpler. Right. You know, people of those days were looking at, they were seeing the Antichrist and his name was Caesar. Right. You know, in that sense. And you know, the Bible was written to be, you know, I'll say eternal but current.

Yeah.

At the same time. So I think a lot of this is this episodic flow of excitement on the topic. But I think a theological, you know, study of it would say calm down a little bit. Right. You know, we are living in the end days, meaning that, you know. Right. You know, there isn't another expression of Jesus Christ coming until the end of time, you know, seen through scripture, you know, because of that, you know, hey, if this causes people to be more interested in religion, yes. But at the end of the day, let's make sure we have good theology behind the conversation as well.

What about millenarian thinking generally? Apocalyptic thinking generally, it feels like, feels like it's. Maybe I'm out of touch with, with what the vibe was in the semiconductor industry when you were active in it, but it feels like the semiconductor companies, not historically said if we don't build this, the world will end. But we've seen a rise of entrepreneurs who have been talking about apocalyptic consequences to either building or not building what they're working on. And it feels like it's more in the zeitgeist. It's kind of the final conversation you can have about the impact of a technology. And it's so far, I mean, it's not just the AI folks. Even Elon Musk talks about the consequences of not becoming multi planetary, being apocalyptic potentially. And so we have to explore the stars, which I completely agree with. I love space exploration. And so I'm wondering about that as a rhetorical tool in entrepreneurship. Is that something that you've noticed is on the uptick or has it always been this way?

Well, again, I think there's an episodic nature to it. It, you know, and let's, you know, when, you know, go read some of the press. When Sputnik.

Oh, yeah.

Through the sky.

Yeah.

The Russians hear everything, right? Yeah, they can read my mind. I just saw it in the sky last night. Right. You know, you know, so my father, you know, talked to me about when he saw Sputnik in the night sky. Right. You know, so. Right. You know, and I, so I do think there's somewhat of episodic nature and when you hit these huge inflection points, right, like AI that is just exploding in capacity and capability. I think. Okay, you know, we're in the next episodic discussion. Yeah, right. As a result, you know, but I think if you look over history, we've seen that, you know, go through over time, you know, in the first days of the Internet, you know, my cell phone is gonna, you know. Right. Turn my, my brain to jello and, you know, all of these other kind of things, you know, I just don't get too.

Oh, we might have a technical issue. Let's give just a second. Hopefully we can get Pat down the.

Deep state took down the.

It was getting too real. Fantastic interview. We were enjoying that. Hopefully we can bring back Pat Gelsinger.

I didn't get to ask him about AI CapEx. We'll work on getting him back.

In the meantime, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer search. Every byte serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Head over to Turbopuffer and we have Pat Gelsinger back. Sorry about that.

AGI is here, but the Internet still doesn't work sometimes.

I always get a kick out of this when the cell network. Here, let me close this as well. Yeah, we are cell network or the Internet drops in Silicon Valley.

Oh man. What's going on? What's going on?

The place we should get this right.

I don't know where exactly where we got cut off, but I, I wanted to ask you about. There's been so many insane headlines this year around AI, AI CapEx, AI talent wars, you know, rewinding in your career in the 90s, early 2000s, like what, what have, what parallels are you personally drawing?

Yeah, you know, I do think. Let me give two different answers to that. First, because people are talking about these 1, 5, 10 gigawatt data centers. Every time somebody says gigawatt, the image I Want in your mind is a nuclear reactor? Because one nuclear reactor is about a gigawatt of power capacity. How many nuclear reactors has the US built in the last 25 years?

I think it's one or three at Vodal. Right?

Yeah.

Remember China? I think China has 60 under.

Right.

You know, construction today. Right. You know, and fundamentally energy capacity, you know, we sort of lost a decade. Right. You know, as we were so focused on. Right. You know, climate that we weren't building our energy capacity and renewables, hey, I'm the biggest believer. But for the most part they're not economic. Right. There's a lot of work going into making them economic. You know, some of the playground companies are working on that, but for the most part they weren't economic and they didn't add that much to the grid. Right. So there's this craziness going on.

Right.

You know, of that capex expectation and so on. You don't have the energy to do it. Now obviously we're working on dramatic improvements to make inferencing 10 or 100 times more power effective.

Right.

Because ultimately, you know, I think the demand for inferencing capacity is nigh on infinite. Right to Jevons law or the gas law. You know, it really should be permeating every aspect of what we do going forward. You know, but some of the crazy predictions associated with this, you know, it's not going to be chip limited, it's not going to be land limited, it's not going to be capital limited, it'll be energy limited going forward. So. And I do think it's inducing a lot of investment into the energy systems which I view as very positive because our long term economic growth as a nation will be energy limited. So even if we're quote over building capacity, I view it as a super good thing. Right. Because hey, whether I need that for my electrification, whether I need it for my quantum computers, whether I need it.

For just make my power bill cheaper, if you have more energy to go around, the price is going to fall. For average Americans, that's a win.

Yeah. The oil crisis. Great. Could become the electrification crisis in the future, Right. If I don't. So I just view that as such a good thing because we have so mismanaged our nation's energy capacity going forward now, you know, some of these forecasts are just nutty.

So like that 100 nuclear power plants next year, who knows?

Yeah, I mean we did, we did have an IPO today, Fermi, that is planning to make a nuclear reactor by 202038 or something like they're, they raises money to try to bring it online. So I was poking a little bit of fun at that because the company's nine months old, they're valued at $17 billion, but maybe it will be net good. Yeah. If we can bring, you know, a new nuclear plan or two online.

Yeah.

And you know, by the way, you know, I just, you know, I just became the general partner lead on investment that we're doing in the nuclear space at Playground have. So I'm learning a lot about this. Right. And a lot of the, you know, the small nuclear reactors, they're not economic. Right. You can't connect them to the grid, you can't scale them, you know, the regulatory thing. So, you know, I do think it's a very fundamental problem, you know, for the nation. And one, hey, I'm now diving into that problem as well. So, you know, we need to bring on many gigawatts of additional capacity for, you know, the future of our nation. Now, some of the other projections there that people point to, I think they're way over their skis. Not everybody is going to add 10 gigawatts of additional capacity. And I am excited that one of our companies, Snocat, we're out to make AI 100 times more power efficient than it is today. Not 10%, not 10x, 100x.

That's great.

Right?

You know, as we move to superconducting. So instead of that gigawatt, you know, I'm going to have 100 megawatts of cryogenic capacity. That produces 10 times more inferencing.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's industry reshaping, you know, and those are the kind of things that are truly going to, you all say, do a better job of the energy capacity we have and. Right. You know, creating more ultimate capacity for the future.

And what about, you know, some of the vendor financing going on, some of the demand guarantees that people have been making? Is that immediately worrisome to you because of some of the negative events that came after things like that in the dot com era? Or do you think it's we've kind of hurt both sides part of the cycle?

We've seen this before. You know, look at all the optical companies, you know, in the early days of the Internet. Right. Well, you know, everything is up and to the right you know, for, you know, exponential growth for unlimited periods of time, you know. Okay. You know, I mean, it was a, it was a stunning 10 years, but it didn't extrapolate to 30 years.

Yep.

Right. And I see most of the AI thing. You know, I see, you know, fundamentally no change for the next two, three, four years. But by the end of the decade, some of these transformational technologies will be at scale. So I do see a real shift right. In them before the end of the decade, particularly on inferencing costs, inferencing performance and power consumption for inferencing, which is sort of like the big one for broad deployment of AI.

How do you think about. I mean, there's a lot of founders in our audience who are, you know, it's raining right now and they're happy and everything's good, but you've been through so many market cycles. Is there a story or advice that you give to entrepreneurs or founders who are going through a reset and going through a bear market? How do you think about getting through those hard times?

Well, you know, so they're going to come, right. Right now, you know, as a CEO, right, your job is the high is never as high and the low is never as low. Right. You know, your job is to sort of, you know, cut the tops off of the crazy highs and, you know, manage through the crazy lows. Right. That's your job. And if you're not ready to do that, you know, if you're the, you know, the super enthusiastic champion that everything's up and to the right, you know, for the next two, three decades, you shouldn't be in the CEO's job. Right. That's called a cheerleader, not a CEO. And, you know, we have way too many companies that are led by cheerleaders as opposed to CEOs. Right. And we can go back over history and identify a number of those. Yeah. Also, you know, like I say, I think the next couple of years, I think, are going to be just fine.

Yeah.

But, you know, you know, as we get to the end of the decade, okay, things are not going to be just fine. You know, there's going to be fundamental shifts in the economics and the capacity, and a CEO's job is to, you know, get the balance sheet in place that they can navigate through those times. Right. You get cash when you don't need it, because when you need it, you can't get it. Right. So you have to be managing thoughtfully, you know, about when those disruptions occur. So, you know, I do think, particularly a couple of years out from now, okay, that's your job as the CEO, as the leader, as the entrepreneur. Do I have enough capacity to take a meaningfully negative time and be able to go Navigate through it.

What about team building, leadership? How should you be communicating with potentially thousands of employees who are looking to the CEO for leadership, not just cheerleading.

Well, you know, the first job of the leader is to represent reality where it is. That is the first job. Here's where we are. Life is great, but it's not as good as that. Life is bad. And here's the situation, and it's not as bad of that first job of the leader being that point of truth, that point of reality. As I say, the leader's job is to communicate the vision over and over and over again to the point that you are absolutely sick and tired of it. Right. You know, you think there can't be a single person that hasn't heard you communicate the vision. And just about the time that you're absolutely dreadfully bored by it, it's the first time it's really getting through.

Right.

It was just that hard. And about the time your organization knows it, usually one to two years, it takes another year or two for the customers to understand it.

It.

Yeah, right. You know, and if you change. Right. In less than three or four years, nobody understands it. Yeah. You know, so. Right. That constancy of vision, purpose, mission is a super important thing, you know, for the leader. You know, preparing for the bad days like we already touched on. There will be bad days that, you know, you have to navigate through, you know, and then when you have success, you give it all to the organization, and when you have failure, you claim it all in a transparent, you know, effacing way. You know, this. Right. And that's how you build, you know, loyalty and commitment from your teams, you know, and being a CEO, it's not cut out for everybody, period. Stop. You know, if you're not ready to take accountability, if you're not ready to make the hard calls, you know, if you're not ready to hire but also fire at the same time, if you're not ready to demand your organization to excellence, you shouldn't be a CEO at the same time, if you're ready to do that. It is one of the most fulfilling, satisfying opportunities of a leader's career.

It's fantastic. Well, very well said.

Do you have time for one more question? I know we're 10 minutes over for you.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Incredible.

I'm really enjoying this.

We were talking with, with Brett Taylor of Sierra about kind of the SaaS apocalypse and how there's a lot of legacy enterprise software companies that are needing to react and respond and evolve as LLMs and generative AI sort of comes online and he said something I wanted to get your thoughts on and maybe some examples, but he believes that it's easier to change your technology stack than your business model. And he was saying in the context of it's great if you're a software company that started and is charging based on value, but if you have seat based pricing today and your competitors are now selling, you know, not, not trying to get you to scale headcount, but just trying to deliver more and more value, that can be tough. I wanted to ask if there was any notable kind of moments in your career where, you know, you, you witness a company sort of be able to effectively evolve their business model and, and, or on the technology side and how those two things play together in your view?

Yeah, yeah. And you know, first, you know, Brett, you know, just, he's a world class guy.

Yeah.

So if you have the chance to bring Brett on or pat on, take.

Brett, you know, well, we, we've.

Why not both?

Both.

Why not both?

But Brett is great. You know, the, you know, we took VMware through the transition from enterprise licensing to a SaaS business model. It is, but ugly, hard, right. You know, a business model is like a deep rut, Right. You know, one of my favorite posters on this was, you know, it showed a deeply rutted Indian road. And the caption read, right, you'll pick your what carefully. You'll be in it for 100 kilometers. Right. You know, and there's sort of this truth to a business model because your competitors get used to it, your customers get used to it, your supply chain get you, you know, you just get funneled into it. And when you try to change your business model, man, it is dreadful. You know, the contractual, the legal, the renegotiations, etc. You know.

Yeah, team compensation.

Yeah, everything is hard about it, you know, because, you know, you build, you know, every aspect of the business around, you know, those business, the, the characteristics of the business model you've chosen. So, you know, Brett is right on. Changing the technology is quite a bit easier than changing the business model. Now, you know, the master stroke is if you can keep sort of that interface to the customer and the business model the same and do a major rev. Retooling right. Of the technology underneath it. Okay, now you win, right? By the way, you know that, you know, the first major success in the enterprise to SaaS conversion. You know, my, you know, friends at Adobe, you know, they navigated through it, you know, I mean, that was, you know, you know, their Masterstroke and many others followed in their footsteps after it. But that was hard, you know, for the transition. Now as we go to AI, most are going to be in a SaaS like business model going forward. You know, that said, the user experience in an AI native application is dramatically different. Right. You know. You know, and if we think about it, you know, and I, you know, in very broad terms, the computer has, I have been adopting to the computer for the last 50 years. In an AI world, the computer adapts to me. Right. You know, if you think about the fundamental shift of that, where now I am speaking to it on my terms, it's hearing me in my way, you know, it's understanding my face, my recognition, my thoughts. Right. Contextualizing them in my language and understanding. So I do think the idea of just flipping to a SaaS AI business business model versus an AI native experience that truly harnesses the full breadth of that power. I think many people, as they talk about the AI conversion of their applications, wholly underestimate what will be associated with truly creating an AI native experience for the future. Everything changes.

Yeah. It's not just even business model going maybe from seat based and fixed contracts to value or selling the work, but it's even the entire user interface. And what does the application look like? What does it feel like? Does it feel like hiring and managing a team? Does it feel like hitting buttons yourself? So doing both of those things at the same time.

Okay, actual last question. Is it true or do you still have a VMware tattoo on your arm?

So. No, I don't.

Okay.

And it was so funny because when, you know my.

But you did at one point.

I did.

Right.

But it was like one of those 30 day tattoos.

Okay, okay.

That's great.

So, you know, and I came home from that trip and my wife, you know, somebody sends the video to my wife. Yeah, right. You know, the tattoo artist and everything like that. And she says, you may not have that on your arm by the time I go on vacation with you.

That's amazing. People think tech people are hardcore today when they launch like a video or something or they put up a billboard like the 30 day. Living with your brand for 30 days is a new level. And we thank you for your service to the technology industry. Pat, thank you so much for having.

Me on the show. This was fantastic. And thank you for the work that you're doing. It's very important.

I'm very excited. I mean, we'd love to have you back, dive into all the different portfolio companies also. What's happening on the glue side in terms of actual productization. I know we spent a bunch of time in the AI world and talking about the other labs, but there's so much more that we could go and. But we'll give you back the rest of your day. Have a great day.

Thank you. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.

Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Bye.

Let's pull up this video of the Meta Ray Ban display.

Okay.

Right back.

I will react to this. The meta Ray ban display has a new video that we are going to pull up. In the meantime, let me tell you about Profound. You've heard that you can now buy products on ChatGPT. You're going to need to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. You send, you can reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. We did this just yesterday. We found some new microphone stands. I took a picture of a microphone stand that I saw, dumped it in ChatGPT. What is this wound up? I didn't check out actually in the ChatGPT workflow, but we were pretty close to getting there. And you're gonna want your brand mentioned in ChatGPT with profound. Let's watch the Meta Ray Bans video right now. This is. We've. So we've demoed this. Both Jordi and I have looked at. This is what the heads up display looks like. It looks better when you're actually using your human eyes instead of trying to film through it. But the navigation, the heads up display, the COD mini map, I think they should give it much more Call of Duty aesthetics if they want it to really pop and go viral. Tyler, what's your reaction? Would you wear this?

So is it like running through your phone at all?

So I believe we were debating this with Simon on the show when he was here. I believe that almost all of the compute is done on the phone and it is serving up maybe a small JSON file that it renders on the headset or maybe it's even just streaming images. The bandwidth over Bluetooth has to be limited. And then the compute on the device is also limited. So I would imagine that it doesn't have gps. It's not doing any on device inference. It's really doing limited. Just this is the graphics that I need to show. Render that graphics and pipe it in there. But then keep that battery life going as long as possible.

Yeah, because I mean with these. These are the Oakley ones.

Yes.

And these, like when you set up, you have to connect to your phone. That's like the very first thing you do.

Yes. So these you definitely have to connect to your phone. They do not work without a phone. Over time, you would imagine that they try and bootstrap a true platform on top of this and say, hey, now.

That we have developer access to this, I'm going to add the sound effects. So it'll. Using the live AI feature you got, you walk out outside, you're walking down the street, the glasses are, you know, monitoring the situation and you're getting. You're getting these kind of sound effects.

It would be electric. Electric. Bobby in the chat asks, why don't we use lav mics? Well, we were discussing. It turns out lav mics are complicated. We're figuring it out. We're going to see some applications.

Lav mics are coming. We want to be able to walk around.

Enjoy the horse. Enjoy the horse. Can we go to the horse cam? Do we have a horse cam today?

No.

Putting the production team on short notice with that one.

Get the horse cam going.

I mean, here's the wide. Let's go. We got the horse over there and the gong over here. We're filling out the studio. We're having a lot of fun. Zoom in on the horse. It has been unboxed. Some folks in the chat were asking, what's the genesis of the horse? There's a few things. We enjoy equestrianism. We enjoy polo. This was from the early brand exploration that we did. We found the. That there was a bit of white space there. People. A lot of people in tech are.

Too many people in tech media were afraid to show their appreciation. And so in some ways, the horse is a monument to technology journalism.

Yes.

Obviously, many technology journalists grew up with a very equestrian lifestyle. So we thought this was. Considering the show wouldn't be possible without the brave reporting from many technology journalists, we thought, why not put a horse.

Also I have a buddy, Truman Sachs. He's been on the show. He runs a company called Cubby and his. He's. He's obsessed with horsepower horse metaphors. He's obsessed with the idea of channeling the energy of a horse, much like I channel the energy of a golden retriever. The horse is very. It's a noble stallion. It. It has a lot of noble qualities that you should be emulating. And so the horse made its way onto the soundboard. And now the horse lives physically in our world every day at the TVPN Ultradome. Anyway, let me tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. It's a horse for your sales tax. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That's faster than a horse can run around the Kentucky Derby, I think. I don't actually know how long it takes.

Breaking some breaking news. Barry Weiss to be named editor in chief of CBS News. Let's go.

Congratulations.

People were predicting.

Trade deal.

This is such a brutal deal. There's another post here. Paramount will announce deal to acquire Free Press and bring Barry Weiss to CBS News on Monday. I feel like this deal has been announced 50 times so that when it actually gets announced, I wonder why are.

Media people obsessed with media people? Turns out, yes, yes, people love reporting on this. You could never get this much Press for a $250 million acquisition of your database, ERP Enterprise AI company. You'd be begging for Bloomberg and TechCrunch pieces. But when you're in the media, the media loves to tell a story about media and so you get a lot of press. In other news, Arvind over at Perplexity is announcing the browser, which I think was teased earlier, but he said announcement in 3.5 hours. I'd love to get an update from Tyler on what this announcement was and how it's shaping up, what the timeline saying. Do you know what's going on in Perplexity World or are you perplexed?

I believe that the main announcement is that Comet is just free.

Okay. It was originally 20 or 200amonth.

Yeah, well there's two different plans. Okay. I think it was like usage based and I think it was also, I mean it was recently in. It was in beta as of very recently and I think it was released probably to just the paid plans and now it's fully free.

Well, you should give it a try again. See if you churn, see if you stick around.

Some people love it.

Some people have just kind of stuck with Chrome. I'm kind of still living in Chrome world, although I do Chrome on desktop, Safari on iPhone, which I feel like is the worst possible combination. Like I should have some bleed over but I posted a screenshot of of some app store rankings for Sora and Microsoft Teams.

So is this a mobile based browser? Can you get comment in the good question.

Let's go to Tyler Cosgrove, IRL Cluly. Anyway, let me tell you about Fin AI while everyone looks that up, it's the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

Yeah, don't believe comment is is available as a mobile app, which again, it's very hard to be a $20 billion company trying to grind to product market fit for a new product.

And the browser company was working on something similar and there's news that OpenAI will be launching something as well.

I mean, even Anthropic now has a extension which it's very similar.

Okay. Yeah. So it bends in Claude 4.5 into your browser basically. And is it taking. Do you know if it's taking. I wonder if it's taking screenshots or looking at the HTML and JSON as it comes in. Acting at a lower level?

Yeah, I don't know exactly. I don't think it's agentic like Comet. One of the main things is that it can actually make actions. I don't think the CLAUDE one is actually agentic yet.

Perplexity is a fascinating story. We've had fun with the founder on the show, but it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Feels like there's a whole bunch of big deals that need to happen under the hood. Dance partners with, you know, they tried to buy TikTok and you could see partnering up with another legacy tech company revitalizing them. We saw the browser company go over to Atlassian and there's so many different ways this could break. But good luck to the team over there. In other news, open source Pantex Cap says here's the thing on data centers. I laughed at all the dumb sell side reports on data centers being canceled earlier this year. Remember those people were saying, oh yeah, we're not going to build data centers. Turns out that was.

Satya was pulling back and I read a little bit on this.

He went back on pulling back. There's news today in the Journal that Satya said that. Oh, where is it? It's somewhere in here amid a bunch of other articles we won't be reading. Microsoft CEO gives up some responsibilities. Nadella said in a note to employees that Judson Altoff has been promoted to helm the company's commercial business. In essentially overseeing a large swath of the technology giant's operations, Nadella is saying that he needs to focus on the company's biggest artificial intelligence bets. So he's going back in and really doubling down on AI personally and he's promoting other folks to take stuff off his plate so he can refocus on AI. So kind of a retrench into let's go big on AI.

Yeah, it was. I was pretty. I got a little. I got personally a little bit Bearish when Satya was pulling back. Right. I respect. Has more data.

Yeah.

Than almost anyone on Earth. Right. Very smart guy. He. He was basically actively getting fit. They're do. They're doing rounds of layoffs as he pulled back. A lot of other people, you know, have stepped up. Oracle's obviously seen a massive appreciation from leaning into totally.

And you could see like filling that.

Gap if Oracle hadn't stepped up totally. But what open source or Pantex cap is saying. But he says I laughed at all the dumb sell side reports on data centers being canceled earlier this year. Made a ton of money going long against that nonsense and bearishness. But now we're on the other end. I don't think people understand the actual logistical hurdles in place for data centers now. First, power companies are overwhelmed and tired of all the fud. They're putting up huge barriers to weed out all the BS. You mentioned this earlier. If you want 500 megawatts from Georgia power, you now have to put up about 600 million up front. That's just such a massive number to be locked up. I'm sure people are also like lend it now lending helping people finance that. And he says second, communities are pushing back. More deals are getting canceled on it. The water we saw, the Amazon data center was in Tennessee. Where was it that just got canceled? He's saying water consumption is a real issue. Data centers actually help electricity prices go down. Overall rates are shooting up and they're getting blamed. So I want to dig into this more, unpack this more because that's not.

This was always my anti fast takeoff take, which was even in this world where the algorithms hold, the scaling is all you need, the bitter lesson holds. It's like at a certain point you're just moving like billions of tons of sand and refining it into silicon to make chips. And the laws of physics come into play at a certain level. If you're just moving an immense amount of equipment around the world and you need more boats to move the GPUs from one place to another, you need more energy. You have to build a new Hoover Dam every two minutes because you're accelerating so fast. And it feels like there will be some laws of physics that will kind of act as a drag. I don't know. I don't know. Tyler, what do you think?

I mean, yeah, but periodic labs is kind of like the answer to that. I mean, obviously like at some level you always have to like, you know, conform to physics.

Sure.

But I think we have a long way to Go where like you can actually have the LLMs improving the chips.

How many days until AGI on the day tracker?

Right now it's 3600.

3600. So that's what, 12 years or something?

Yeah, I think so.

Based on today, based on this week, based on Sora 2, it hasn't been updated.

Sora, I think I need to kind of give a good think about this, figure out where I am.

What about you, Jordy? If the singularity is roughly 10 years away, does the Sora 2 news, does the energy consumption news move your estimate out or move it forward? I think I'm moving a little bit out. I'd probably add another hundred days to the singularity counter personally. But feel free to.

Feel free to fence signals. It signals. Yeah. This is a Willmanitis post from yesterday saying, is this the product you release if you believe you're three to four years away from super intelligence?

Yeah. Well, if you're looking for super intelligence for CRM, head over to Adeo. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company the next level level. Get started for free. Also another extremely AGI pilled news headline. Google Ads are now live in Gemini. Let's go.

There we go. We love ads.

Where was DeepMind on your AGI pilled category?

Ads were always on.

I think this is critical path. I don't think this is bearish. Let's take 2,000 days off the singularity counter. It's coming tomorrow. Considering Gemini is the only provider which doesn't allow users to opt out of training training their models on their data, which I don't think is true because we just got news about the meta team will be training ads and targeting ads based on your interactions with meta AI chatbots, which makes tons of sense. Targeting here will be off the charts as wasteland capital. Every data point about you, every question you've ever had sold to the highest bidder. And so if you're just chatting with Gemini or you're chatting with meta AI, you'll start seeing ads that reflect what you've been searching for in the chatbot or talking to the chatbot about makes a ton of sense. I'm sure there's gonna be a bunch of weird things. It was already weird where people would say like I talked about this with my, this product with my friend and then I saw a targeted ad. How did that happen? It was already feeling like creepily accurate and I'm sure this will make it way creepier, but it'll be good for the business, probably.

Right.

What do you think? Bullish. I think it's pretty good.

We know we're bullish ads.

Bullish ads. Well, we are also bullish. Shiel, a good friend of the show, he has some big news and we're going to bring him into the TVPN ultradome from the Restream waiting room shield. How are you doing?

Boom.

Great. How are you guys doing?

Fantastically.

It is great to have you back. It's been too long.

Awesome chat with pal Gelsinger. Really went deep with him. It was a lot of fun.

That's amazing. Yeah, I mean I feel like the only, like since I was last on, you guys have had like Zucker, like a bunch of. I feel like the level getting on TVPN now is a really big deal.

Well, we're happy to help you give us the news. What's new in your world?

Yeah. So we just announced yesterday that we raised a new $140 million.

Multiple times. Guest. Massive new fun. Congratulations. One gong hit for every fund you're on Fund.

It's crazy. I thought you guys were on. I. I would have if I had to guess what fund you're on. It would have been like at least five by by now. Maybe you're like, you got that wise unk status or something. But yeah, just.

Just getting started.

I appreciate that. Yeah. It feels like we're still brand new though. Like it feels. I still feel. I still refer to myself as like a new investor, but we've been running BTV for six years now.

Any change in strategy with this fund or can you just restate the thesis for me?

Yeah, so the thesis is investing in the best precedent. Seed stage founders building fintech companies. Yeah, we take a pretty broad view on fintech. So for us there's a lot of stuff that you might not think about AS fintech. Vertical SaaS is probably the main one. So if you look at Toast Shopify, those kind of mind body, those kind of companies, actually largely fintech companies. So 80% plus of the revenue for those companies comes from financial services. So we invest in those kind of companies. We invest in some B2B marketplaces, but primarily we're just investing in the future financial services.

What's the mood on the ground with LPs? Like, is it easier than in past years to raise this fund? Is it, is it contrarian to be focused on fintech when everything's AI? Or were you able to kind of roll that into the narrative? Every fintech company is obviously leveraging AI now What, what talking points were you running through?

Yeah, it was definitely, I mean the mood on Fintech is definitely not what it was when we last raised which was 2021. Nothing could, could have been, I mean.

In 2200 x revenue multiples for a team that had started two weeks ago and had, you know, an idea of a customer, it was absolutely.

Exactly. We actually, we announced it yesterday and we haven't even started deploying from the fund but we actually raised it a little while ago. I think now things are probably a little bit easier but it was, it was a harder fundraise for us than, than the Last one in 2021 for sure. But we'd actually, we actually are larger than we had planned for. We had planned to shrink our fund size and the idea was last fund took us three and a half years to deploy this one. We wanted to go back to a three year cycle so we were going to go from 150 to 125 but we ended up, ended up going to 140. We wanted to have, we had some LPs that we really wanted to have involved. So overall it wasn't too bad and we're excited to deploy from it but I think since we raised it and now there's actually, it's actually like the market is ripping. You had Chime Klarna Etoro go public circle and you have so many more coming. Wealth front navon ethos in our portfolio and so I think the market is pretty hot on fintech. So actually I was just before this talking to another fintech investor who's, who's about to raise and I said now's a great time to raise. The market's awesome. Fintech.

What, I mean you've been through a proper cycle. What, what advice did you give to founders at that time? What are the stories that you share about like buckling up and getting through rough periods, Rough patches as a founder entrepreneur?

Yeah, it's just like do what you can to survive and if you live another day and you're a smart team, you'll figure it out. And we've had that happen. Like some of our companies basically had no growth for two years and then all of a sudden the last year total inflection and, And I think 23 and 24, 22 and 23 were really hard for fintech because a lot of these companies are selling into other fintech companies. If you're an infrastructure company, you're selling into other fintech companies and the funding completely stopped. There were all these neobank for X that got funded in 2021, like way too many of them. And so you had, it was just so easy to grow in 2021 and then 22 and 23, you had to grow significantly just to tread water, just to stay like even. And then now we're seeing companies grow a lot. So it was really just stay alive, hunker down. A lot of our companies got to a point where they didn't need to raise money and obviously that's the best time to raise money now. Now investors are throwing cash out.

How are you thinking about stablecoins? I think we've talked about them, you know, before. It's such an, it's an interesting time to me because people are so bullish on stablecoins as a category and yet it seems like the people, the companies best suited to capitalize on this opportunity are not startups. And I don't know if you, you feel the same way, but you see Stripes launch of open issuance, you see, which was interesting to me because we had a company online like a week and a half prior that was building the exact same product and then Stripe launches it and they already have, you.

Know, there's also a public company circle that like is mature in that space and there's a tether.

Yeah. And then, and then it feels like. Also interesting because even the scaled stablecoins, the Tether usdt, USDC are now under attack from every institution on earth. And you know, the, the pie will grow, but at the same time it's going to get sliced up. So. So where are you thinking about the opportunities to deploy against this kind of technology at the early stage?

Yeah, I think you're right. I think one challenge we're having right now is we're just seeing. So especially we talked about last time I was on the Bridge acquisition. Since then we've just been seeing so many companies built in every sector within stablecoins and I haven't seen that many that compelled me to say, okay, this is. You're going to beat Stripe on this. Like Stripe is executing at an amazing clip and I haven't found the use cases I found are specific to a geo. So like you're solving a problem in Latin America and I think you might be the best person for that. You might be able to. Yeah, I'm an investor in that region.

You have an investor in Mintia, which is doing something similar to Bridge, but just for Latam. They've been building banking relationships for years now and so they're in a good position. But yeah, it's a weird thing for venture capitalists and angel investors to be, at least from my point of view, super bullish on the category. And it's like it's hard to deploy against it other than just buying some Stripe secondaries.

It's totally true. One thing that I like, a couple of days ago Stripe announced that they were doing agentic payments and obviously that was coming, but it's so hard. Like I met at least a dozen companies in the last year doing agentic payments and I feel like as a VC you're not supposed to say, you know, what if Stripe does this? But it was so obvious that Stripe was going to do it.

Yeah, but saying what if Stripe does this is very different than what if Google does this. Right.

What if like Morgan Stanley does this or, or JP Morgan or like an older company that maybe isn't in founder mode, maybe not in Silicon Valley, maybe not. Sam Altman on the cap table with the company that's doing the thing. It's like this is going to happen. Anyway, we have one last question.

That payments are going to be awesome. So it's the same thing that you just said, Jordi, which is I believe in the category, I believe that I will be making purchases through like through my chat interface, but I don't think that there is necessarily a lot of opportunities for new startups.

Yeah, last question from the chat. They're calling you the people's mayor of San Francisco and everyone wants to know what's the best place to get Indian food in San Francisco or New York?

It's a great question. Okay. All right. So New York, my favorite restaurant in the country, in the world Indian restaurant is my favorite high end Indian restaurant is a place called Ambassadors Clubhouse. It's in London and there's an Ambassador's Clubhouse in Gymkhana and they're actually opening in New York next year. So that's going to be big.

Lines out the door.

Lines out the door.

Book the flight now.

There's book a flight now. Sema in New York is very good. I got to say in San Francisco, I don't think we have excellent high end Indian food. There's a place called Etan in Palo Alto. And then my best, my favorite spots are Udupi palace on Valencia Street, Kola Pasi, also in the Mission. And then there's a new spot called Jalebi street on Hate or in the Hate. So those would be my three go to's in San Francisco, all kind of hole in the wall places. But that's the best Indian food.

Well, thank you so much for breaking it down and coming on the show.

And excited to get a reservation.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's impossible to get a reservation in any of those places after this pod drops. Thank you so much. Great catching up. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. We will bring in Santi from Dual Entity, Dual entry.

Sorry, what's happening?

How you doing? Sorry to keep you waiting. What's the latest in your world? Please?

Do we have video? Do we have sound? No.

Well, we do have another advertisement. We got. Don't tempt john getbezel.com your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet.

Seriously, what did you call it yesterday?

AGI for your wrist or something? I don't know. It's probably on one.

Out of home ads for your wrist.

I think it was out of home ads for your wrist. It works now.

Hey.

Welcome to the TVP at Ultra Dome.

What's happening?

How are you doing?

Thanks for having me.

Sorry for keeping you waiting. We were going long with Shiel but good to have you here. Please introduce yourself the company and what's the news today?

Thank you. I'm Santi. I'm a co founder of Dual entry. We're an AI ERP and we're announcing our $90 million Series A.

Let's go.

Nothing like.

There's nothing like feeling of coming out of stealth with an AI ERP with 90 million of funding. It just doesn't. I don't think it gets better than that.

It's fantastic. Led by none other than life.

How long you been.

How long you been working on it? What were you doing before?

We've been working for about a year and it does feel good. I will say it does feel good. But it feels even better to be able to run an ERP that doesn't suck like the 1990s for sure. We've been working for about a year now under stealth. We used to run a product company before and we suffered one of those legacy ERP migrations for over nine months. And you know, as good entrepreneurs, whenever you have a problem, that means there's an opportunity to solve.

When I'm going to steal Jordy's question. When did you know you wanted to build an erp?

The first day we were out of the. Out of the other prior company. We promised ourselves that was the day we were going to do it. I'll tell you, it was a very unpopular. We had a ton of people saying we'd back you guys for any other idea other than that one. Because that sounds like a very stupid one.

Yeah. So what is the trick? How are you? I mean, it's the hardest system of record to rip out. It's an enterprise, It's a company that is built on something else out there. They're maybe unhappy, but they're really stuck. Are you better at migrations with AI? Are you just better at sales? How do you actually onboard customers? Because I have to imagine that you have some serious traction to hit this Series A so quickly.

That's exactly right. I mean, we understood from the very beginning that ERP is like having chronic back pain. It's sort of a pain that keeps growing with time. But if you have to think about back pain surgery, it's very risky, it's expensive, it might go wrong. And we had to fix that problem. The back pain surgery in ERP is the implementation process. It takes nine months. The failure rates are over 50%. It's very expensive at times two, three times the software fee. So we fix that with our next day ERP migration engine. So you actually plug into whatever system you're coming from, whether it's legacy Europe or starter cloud, and we actually have you live by the time that you're doing the demo in most cases, whether.

They like it or not.

Wow.

Pull the data from their cold dead hands. I love it.

It's our customers data.

Yeah, of course it is. Speaking of customers, what's the median size of a customer? Are you going mid market to start? Are you going for the huge Fortune 100, Fortune 10? How do you see the market now and then? Where will it develop?

Yeah, so we're targeting the mid market. We're starting with companies as small as 5 million. But we have publicly listed traded companies running on dual engine today, their full set of books. Books. Not a subsidiary, not a department, just the entire company. And the most important thing for us is to give customers a certainty that this is the last ERP that they'll ever have to do. You jump on, you upgrade from starter cloud and this will take you all the way.

Why do you guys think you're having more success getting people to trust you? Switch over is a Lot of it helping, I imagine agentically sort of do the migration or what's working now where, you know, some of the investors you talked to maybe a year ago were saying, I'd fund you, but doing anything else?

Yep.

Well, I think, I think is bridging that last mile in migration, especially when it comes to the mappings that need to be done. They're very tedious and they're conventionally done by overseas teams. Then it takes weeks and it's error prone. But I think, you know, the best thing is we don't have to ask our customers for trust. We just say, go use it, demo it out. You don't have to come with us with questions and think about all the hypotheticals because you also don't know how your business is going to evolve. And you know, it's where we're the only ERP in the world that we know of that can actually give you a free trial that lets you use your data and consume it. And by the way, this ERP migration engine is perpetual. So, like, you can plug it in and if it takes you a month to make that decision, the data will continue to flow. You can show your CEO your reporting. I know you can really play around with it, test all the edge cases before you make a decision. And that's how we've won the trust of our customers.

Interesting. How are you actually. And feel free to pass on the question if it's too much detail, but are you basically saying you have an existing legacy arp, finish out your contract, but we'll start the migration over. You can start building trust with us now and then when it comes up for contract renewal on your existing arp, you can make the call then, do I want to stay with the legacy or do I have enough trust with you guys, guys to just keep running here?

That's exactly right. And we send you a link, you click on it, we authorize the connection, and the data is flowing within 24 hours. And then at times, people like it so much more and they realize how much time they're saving that the actual starting to pay for dual entry is not even the biggest issue or the biggest part of the budget is the fact that they're saving two or three people doing manual categorizations and the same journal entries every single month. Month. And accounting is a very repetitive task by nature. But every accountant doesn't want to be bogged down in repetitive tasks. Every finance team member wants to be bored looking and thinking, you know, sitting down with the CEO and saying these are the areas where you should be investing more. This is the areas we should be cutting back. Not. Not chasing invoices or categorizing transactions or drafting the same journals over and over. So. So oftentimes they see that and they make the jump even. Even before the contract collapses.

Very cool. What's. What's the go to market going forward? You guys have been obviously in stock. You're out of stealth now. Are you going to get loud? Are you going to buy up all the billboards on the 101? What's the next move?

Well, we like to get referrals. That's the best way. So far we've gotten most of our customers through referrals from existing customers and we hope to continue that. We've never gotten so many demo requests in an hour in the past. But we're excited to use those customers as a way to get the word out and have more people come to us. There's no reason why you need to have a dinosaur in your office to today.

I love it.

Nice. You should. Yeah. Skip a. Skip the dinosaur. Get a horse. We have a. We have a full size horse here. So statues are in dual entry. Is really sounding like this a stallion of the. The ERP market. So I like that short the Dinos.

Very inspirational office view right there. Wonderful having you on the show today. Thanks so much for stopping by.

Thank you for having me. Thank you John.

Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

Good to you meet.

Let me tell you about wander.

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Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. Our last guest of the show is Austin from 00. He's in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultradrome. Austin, how are you doing? How's it going?

Good. Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for hopping on. Kick us off with an introduction to you and the company and the news today. We'd love to get up to speed on 00.

Yeah, certainly. So double zero is a blockchain protocol building an alternative Internet for high performance distributed systems and blockchain and so at its core this is a physical fiber infrastructure network run by multiple independent contributors to allow systems like blockchains to go faster than the public Internet will allow them to go.

What's the status quo in the industry? I feel like. Like if I sign up for AWS I'm going to get charged ingress and egress bills and they're kind of abstracting the underlying infrastructure, the physical infrastructure. At what level are you operating? How does all of this fit together?

Yeah, so this is what's called an OSI layer 1, 2 and 3 network. So this is pretty much the lowest level down in the networking stack. And so this is the physical cables, the, the protocols that transport over them. But fundamentally this is exactly what you're talking about. The egress and ingress problems in cloud data centers. That's pretty much the only thing that you get billed for in a data center when you really think about it, especially the cloud data centers. And so this is a way that they generate lock in. It is easier to stay in the Amazon ecosystem because data moving within Amazon does not get charged, whereas data leaving Amazon does. And this is why you have such a vendor lock in, in the cloud market today. And so if you think about the ultimate mission of decentralizing the entire AWS stack or the GCP stack and basically rebuilding these on decentralized rails, not just for the point of decentralization, but so you have greater choice from a consumer standpoint. The network and connectivity layer really is, in my view, the first piece of that that we need to tackle. And it's in some ways the most broken piece of it today. The Internet is an incredible resource. It connects us all. It serves data in far flung regions of the world, but it was never built for high performance systems. And so Wall street does not use the public Internet. Facebook does not really use the public Internet. Even all these big Internet companies that we think of, they run private networks. And they run private networks because the Internet is too slow to show you Instagram reels. And so why are we building what is supposed to be the alternative replacement to traditional finance on those rails?

Who are the suppliers that are bringing Internet connectivity to the network? Do you need to do deals with companies like Akamai? I don't really know who the major players are in the space that you would be pitching to bring resources to the system.

Yeah, so Today we have 11 independent basically fiber contributors to the network. And this ranges from the folks you'd expect. You know, large trading firms that own and operate their own private networks for high frequency trading purposes like DRW Cumberland and you know, jump to digital asset native firms like Galaxy that are, this is a new thing for them running private fiber, but it supports a lot of the other business lines that they already do like market making and trading. And then you have data centers themselves, bare metal providers like Terraswitch, Latitude Servers.com, cherry Servers, getting involved on this as well as a way to basically make their regions more attractive for this new burgeoning blockchain and AI infrastructure. And then you sort of have the last category, which are blockchain native groups themselves like jito.

How does the high frequency trading like example work? I remember reading, was it Flash boys where they build the fiber lines between Chicago and the New York Stock Exchange so they can trade commodities faster or something? Do those just go dark outside of market hours and then you can resell the slack capacity? Is that the idea? Or like why would a high frequency trading firm, if they built this pipe and they got it and they're making money off of it, like in what world do they end up with extra capacity that they want to sell back to basically a grid that you're building.

Yeah. So there's two things that are going on there. One is simply the technology changes very quickly. And so if you are in the business of being a high frequency trading firm, you pay a pretty extreme premium to be on the absolute fastest path in blockchain. The second fastest path or the fourth fastest path is actually totally fine. These are still orders of magnitude improvement over the public Internet. And so sometimes they have what you'd call sort of secondary inventory that they can contribute to something like double zero. The other component of this too is there's not that many financial centers in the world. When you think about it, it's a pretty tractable problem for a large trading firm with a large budget to go out and have a team that connects all these major financial centers. You look at just Solana. It's run in over 300 data centers around the world. And when you include other blockchains, that number goes up dramatically. It's too big of a problem for any one organization to solve and address. And so what do we turn to? We turn to a consortium model powered and aligned through tokens. And that is what the token is the best unit at. It can bring disparate efforts together again, a common goal to benefit all. And it really is an innovation on the traditional corporate structure which of course in itself changed the world in its own right.

Sure.

Tokens just happen to be the best way to create this to type of alignment.

Yeah, your guys token launched this morning sometime in the early hours. It's now trading at somewhere around a $6 billion fully diluted valuation. What goes into like what, what's like the, what's the process to get, to get to this point from a More from like a financial standpoint, obviously you need traction with the network and usage and a bunch of different partners. But we talk to a lot of more traditional public company CEOs. We'll often talk to them on their IPO day and we'll talk about the different processes around the road shows. But on the digital asset side, launching a network like this, what are kind of the key steps leading up to this moment? And congratulations, by the way.

Thank you. Yes. One of the things that is different about a blockchain protocol that than any sort of traditional structure is we don't own and operate any of the fiber. And now you can say, sure, Uber does not own and operate any of the cars. But at the end of the day, the role of the core contributors to the Double Zero protocol is to build the software layer with other core contributors that then allow this contribution of fiber units to it. And so a ton of the work in the early days on this project, apart from the software side of how do we actually build these things in decentralized fashions that allow for permissionless contribution of fiber. But how do we go out and convince these people who have access to fiber that they should take a quite valuable asset that has fairly high OPEX and fairly high capex and contribute that to the Double Zero network? And a lot of that comes back to our contributors, for the most part are fundamental believers in the power of this technology. We don't have today an AT&T or a Verizon or a Lumen contributing capacity to the network because those are largely either publicly traded companies or companies that are owned by PE firms. And they're expecting a very traditional, dependable type of return from that. Crypto is not that this is very much the Wild West. The hope, of course, is that over time, we basically prove that it's worth contributing even a small slice of a global fiber network network owned by one of these subsea cable firms or these traditional telcos into the mix. And we've had a number of outreaches just today from more traditional players asking how they can get involved. The real thing here is all of these companies. It's the same thing that the cable companies were going through in the United States maybe 10 or 15 years ago. They're priced and they're valued and they sell effectively dumb pipes. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way. They're, they're quite sophisticated, advanced technologies, but they don't have the same ability to take a cut of what flows over them. The way you see in other types of spaces, especially in software. And so the promise of going from selling something for a fixed dollar amount to a token model where validators operating on it and traders operating on it pay a percentage of their earnings into the network is a potentially disruptive business model opportunity for these traditional players providers the same way that the cloud providers. Yes, there was a technology revolution there, but it was as much a business revolution as anything else.

How has the new admin been helpful to you guys, even just in terms of being generally pro crypto? I don't know how long you've been building the foundation in the network, but I imagine this wouldn't have been the kind of thing you wanted to launch two, three years ago for a number of reasons.

Yeah. I mean, I got involved in Crypto in late 2017, early 2018, worked for a company called Republic, worked for a company called Bison Trails, which then got acquired by Coinbase and spent the previous four years working for the Solana Foundation. So I've been through the changing regulatory landscape. You know, we received a no action letter from the SEC for key components of the flow of tokens in the Double Zero network.

Shout out Cooley.

Really important.

Shout out Cooley. That was your law firm, right?

Shout out Cooley.

Let's go. We love lawyers here. They don't get enough.

I owe him a drink.

Yes, but there you go.

I will say that the, you know, the whole thing that came together here was, you know, going to the SEC and asking for relief. So this is a process where you can basically go to them and say, we would like to do this. What do you think of this? Do you see any problems with this under current securities law? And so we applied for relief on two specific areas. The first area was around the reward distributions to contributors. So basically the network programmatically paying out tokens proportional to the utility that a contributor brings to the network. This is not like proof of stake. This is much more similar to proof of work where if you generate 10% of the hash power for Bitcoin, you get 10% of the rewards. But this is really important to us because many of our potential contributors, especially as we sort of move lower down and closer to the direct fiber owners, they are not sophisticated crypto lawyers. They may not even be sophisticated securities lawyers. And that sort of reassurance that we can get from the SEC of, hey, this programmatic payment based on this type of model, they don't see any issue with that from a security standpoint.

Yeah, makes a ton of sense.

Absolutely massive day. Congratulations. Unlike public company, CEOs, the market closes and then you get a little breather. You're not so fortunate. But massive milestone. And as you start knocking down some of these massive partnerships, come back on and tell us about it.

Thanks so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate it. He said that the Internet is not a series of tubes. Are you familiar with the famous line that was said in Congress? I believe the Internet is a series of tubes. There's a music video. This is a music video. Huge sign of respect. They turned it into a meme. It's from 2006. It's one of the great sign of respect in my culture. To show you a YouTube video that you might not have seen, I want to show you this video From Internet Explorer 4.0. The Internet being a series of tubes. Let's play this. The Internet is not.

The Internet is not a big truck. The Internet is not something that you.

Just dump something on.

The Internet is not. This is huge in 2006. This is a real clip from. Real sound bite.

We can cut it.

This is a real clip from a testimony that happened in Washington D.C. with a lawmaker who's trying to explain the Internet to the like to Congress. Basically. It's not a truck. It's not something you just dump something on. It's not fixed. It's a flow of tubes. And he was lambasted and made fun of for this, but it's kind of true. It's like the flow rate matters more than the. A fixed quantity, you know, it's not. It's not a. It's not a data center. It's a. It's a series of tubes.

It's a series of tubes.

Anyway, how'd you sleep last night?

Brutally. It's just been such. It's honestly been a brutal week of sleep.

I got an 85.

I got a 65.

Oh, give me the sound. Give me the sound.

Let's go.

Yes.

There you go.

Boom.

Yeah. They have this new feature that tracks your sleep debt.

Oh, I saw this. The sleep debt is really, really nagging me these days.

I've accumulated two and a half.

Okay. I'm at zero. I'm at perfect sleep balance. Not in debt. No surplus, no debt. I'm doing good.

It's great because I have this handicap of having a much longer drive in to work. And so it kind of. I really got to push myself, you know.

Equalizes for the twins earlier.

Yeah, it equalizes for the twins.

Yeah.

It was great to see. We saw Will Robbins in the chat earlier. He was.

Thank you to everyone in the chat today.

Pumping up Dual Entry. We had Dual Entry and then double zero back to back. That is a funny little bit confusing. But apparently Will did the seed of Dual Entry. So he's feeling pretty good.

That's amazing.

Announcement.

In other news, Inversion Space announced Ark, the world's first space based delivery vehicle. This video looks remarkable. ARK enables the on demand delivery of cargo and effects to anywhere on Earth in under an hour and offers unparalleled hypersonic testing. Sounds very sci fi. They have a rendered video here. We'll have to dig in and understand the actual timeline for this. It seems like a very ambitious project. But congrats to everyone over there at Inversion Space.

Very cool. And we got to get on with London. We do tomorrow. Unfortunately we will not have a stream. We encourage you to touch grass. Watch our recap of the week. Maybe we'll release the recap early. No show tomorrow.

Watch the first episode we ever dropped. There's a lot of lore in there.

A lot of lore.

Enjoy that.

A lot of fun.

We will be off tomorrow.

We will be back Monday. Full force. I cannot wait. And we hope you all have a fantastic weekend. But don't start until tomorrow. Maybe around 5, maybe around 10. Maybe burn the midnight oil. But have a great weekend. We love you. We'll see you Monday.

See you later. Bye.