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You're watching TVPN. It is Wednesday, April 30, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We're here with Zach White from 8 VC at the Hill and Valley Forum, 2025 in Capital. We're in the. We're in the literal capital, which is great. We're normally in the capital of capital. Today we're in the capital of America. Call this the capital of. Many people. Call it. It is. It is. We are here with Zach. Can you introduce yourself? What do you do? What do you like to invest in? What do you. What's your takeaway from Hill and Valley so far? So my name is Zach White. I work at a fund called 8 VC. We invest in everything from defense to biotech, health care. I spend a lot of time doing defense stuff. Yep. And the Hill and Valley has been a crazy vibe so far. We had Hamas protesters. Oh, yeah. We've had, you know, a variety of different things happening here, so it's been great. Talk about the difference between this year's Hill and Valley versus the last couple of years. From our understanding, it's been, you know, almost an order of magnitude more people here. Yeah, I think there's like, 10x people here. There's, like, random influencers here, which is awesome. We have people rap and Teflon. Like, it's. Oh, yeah, it's an. It's an amazing vibe. Like, it's like Coachella for, you know, people with G550. So. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure the tarmacs are absolutely stacked right now. Who. Who. Have you listened to any of the speeches? Is there anyone that you're excited to hear? Yeah. What do you think is the best, like, pitch for an actual concrete plan? Because there's a lot of people that are just like, we want better communication between tech and D.C. but then there's other people that come with concrete things. We need to fund this. Yeah, well, I mean, I think Jensen, he was talking about how we need to just be, like, onshoring all of these fabs and stuff. And, you know, everybody wants to be in and, like, in is crazy around Jensen. So, you know, I think that he has, like, a really good plan on, like, what we need to do to make sure that we're not relying on China for all this stuff. Yeah, yeah, he. He was doing great. And then Brian Schimp also, he killed it at Andrew. You know, there's. There's a lot of stuff that they're doing right now, and it's just really exciting to see building every arsenal. Right. That is the most re industrialized pilled project right now. There's like a bunch of generals here and stuff. Yeah. And they have the, you know, an actual factory, not just hype videos. Right. It's coming out. I think it was cool to hear from Jensen personally. I mean, we've seen these headlines around Nvidia's investment in the United States. And our big question historically has been, you know, how much of that is like really real? And it seems like he is, you know, extremely. Yeah. I have a few questions for Jensen. We want to follow up with him. Is like, is he a customer of re industrialization or is he truly a re industrializer? Because Nvidia is an American company. They fab with tsmc. TSMC now investing very heavily in America and Arizona. And we could see that go a lot further. In which case, I don't know why Jensen wouldn't want to buy chips from Arizona. Tsmc, that seems very logical package with Foxconn. Like he's going to be very happy with that. But is there something that he can do personally to bring back jobs or create more manufacturing infrastructure in America? I don't even know if he has the tools or needs to do that. But that was kind of interesting. It's interesting how Foxconn is always doesn't seem to be in the conversation. It's so associated with China, despite being a Taiwan. Totally, totally, totally. That they have the same incentive to next Hill and Valley. We got to get the CEO of Foxconn. Yeah, yeah, that'd be sick. I mean, I think he just needs to start pushing demand here. Like there's so much demand and if he starts reshoring it here all of a sudden, there's going to be a lot of work that people need to do here. Yeah. And I think that that's kind of just like what he was talking about at Hill Valley today. So yeah, the, the other line that stood out to me, he was like, some people there's going to be new job creation. Some people are going to lose their jobs and then everybody's job is going to change. So it's like, you know, basically embracing that change, I think is. Except I don't know if you guys saw the Marc Andreessen clip this morning. Apparently VCs are the only things that stay. Yeah, we've been saying this, actually. I mean, I think it's actually the job of an investor is somewhat, somewhat in the. You know, I would actually compare it to just to come to Mark's defense a little bit, I would compare it in some way to the job of a lawyer or a doctor where just because a computer can do something well, you still want a human sort of like sign off on the investment and have responsibility. Yeah. Because it's just not as satisfying to sort of like fire a, it's not as satisfying to fire a, you know, a robot as it is to say like, you know, you have, you had responsibility, capital, you know, you know, etc. Etc. So the other big question I have is on the robotics side. I know you've done some AI investing. There's a big question in my mind. Obviously we've scaled up on the pre training side and these massive data centers have been built out. XAI famously bought a ton of Nvidia chips. When does that start to happen with robotics companies? Because robots are generating a lot of data. At a certain point you need to build the big transformer and you need to crunch all that data down. And I haven't seen any of the robotics companies, they're still early. And you see Boston Dynamics, you don't hear about the Boston Dynamics data center. You don't hear about the Physical Intelligence data center yet, but it feels like it's coming. Jensen kind of put it as a five year timeline. I think anything that we can do to get more sight lines on how that grows is going to be really, really key to Nvidia. Because everyone needs a second act and Nvidia is like the king of the second, third, fourth act. Scientific computing, then gaming, then, then, then AI and robotics. I mean after LLMs could be the thing that really drives like massive, massive GPU demand. What's your take? Brett Adcock might be the guy here, but I, I, I actually, I really think that like you have to be like really talented at fundraising. You just need such an insane amount of capital. Yeah, yeah. You need tens of billions of dollars to do this well. And so it's really going to come down to the people who can actually raise the money very well. And that's like a very small handful of people. Maybe, maybe Adam Newman could do it, maybe Brad Adcock, I don't know who else, but I was kind of, I was hoping for a surprise Elon appearance today. I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's happening, but it's probably around here somewhere. He's probably like, yeah, he's probably proximate to where we are right now. We should go pop in. Yeah, that makes Sense. What. What else is top of mind for you this week? I know in many ways, eight has placed so many bets in this sort of broad category that's relevant to where we are today that I imagine a lot of. It's just kind of like, you know, being a part of this, watching it play out. Where. Where do you. Where do you. Anything specific you're hoping to learn from today? I don't know, I just think that, like, this was, like this weird heretical space for so long, and now you see, like, hundreds of people here all just, like, sort of reveling in the fact that, you know, it's cool to do this now. I'm just kind of like, taking it all in. And I don't know, Joe from our fund has been doing this for so long, and he always has this like, pithy thing where it's like, now this is the cool thing. What's the next sort of contrarian thing to do? And I don't know, it doesn't seem that contrarian anymore, which is, like, really interesting. It's you. We see people who are doing all sorts of things, you know, five years ago that are now here doing defense. Is there. Is there more, like practical or like, tactics that you can do as a founder in an event like this? Maybe not just looking to get a feel for the vibe of D.C. but actually understand, okay, there. There are dollars going towards this. We can make this happen. We can go after this pool of capital. Is this a place where you can learn that? Is that. Is that a reasonable strategy? Something that you should have, like, done some pre training yourself and learned a little bit about, like, who are the. Who are the dealmakers here? Who are the people with the pools of money where the programs of records, like, who are the guys? And they're all walking around here right now. And so you should have basically done your homework before and walk up to the people that are actually in control of where this money's coming from. Well, we got Dave Freeberg coming in for a couple minutes. Thank you, Zach. Nice to see you. Great. Great to have you on, Dave. Welcome back to the show. Let's hear it for Dave Friedberg. We will. There he is. We are on a speaker badge. We're on a. We're on a mission to get every single all in podcast host on the show. You're the first. How many have you had? You're the first. You're the first. Might be the last. Let's see. Yeah, might be in the last. Let's see how it goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're on camera here, there, there, everywhere. We are live. What's your audience like right now, do you think? How many people? Probably a few thousand growing. It grows over time. The longer we stream, the more people flow in. Yeah, yeah. You mean, you mean the live stream this very moment? Yeah. Probably a few thousand, say in the thousands. But now that you're here, it's probably going to 10x, maybe 100x. Go to 30. Be awesome. What are you talking about today? So it's the same topic for everyone. America leadership. Yeah. America strength. Yeah. China bad. America good. America good. America good. Technology reigns supreme. Yes. We must win. Yes. So that is the topic. My every one of the topics is I think worded a little bit differently, but they all have the same. In the same spot. The same spot. Can you talk a little bit about Ohalo and how you interact with the government? Because it's very different than like what we normally hear with like dod, I got to get a program of record. The government's going to buy my stuff. But it does seem like it's important for you to interface with the government in some way. What does that look like for you? The seed industry has three regulators. It's the usda, the EPA and the fda. So there are regulators, regulatory frameworks and bodies in those agencies. And it's a pretty well kind of tried and true, but there's not a lot of procurement. You're not servicing the government. So DoD is very different. There's a massive industry here that services the government, but like a lot of other industries, agriculture is regulated to some extent, food is regulated. So there are regulators that we deal with. But we're not building a business, selling it to the government. Yeah. And supporting government action. Are we overregulated? Are we underregulated? Everything's overregulated. Okay. That is a matter of fact. I was talking with someone last night who I dinner with, who works in the government about his observations coming in to the government and just how insane it is. We were talking about why that is and I think like every organization has a fundamental incentive to grow from a couple of different points. You as an individual, start out as an individual contributor in a company. Yep. Then you get promoted to be a manager. Now you're managing two or three people. So your career progression ultimately is I want to manage 20 people, I want to manage a department. Totally. Totally. So when you have that incentive model within any organization, whether it's a school, meaning administrative bureaucracy or a startup or the government, there's an incentive for people to want to get more resources. So every year everyone says, not what can I do less this year, Everyone says, how can I do more this year? And the answer is always, I need more people. I need more budget. So the natural flow of any organization, nonprofit, school, government, company, over time, get more money, grow, add more people, and ultimately you end up seeing all of these things that don't necessarily map to the mission of the organization, but they're created to meet those incentive models. So in the government, we have a lot of regulatory overhead. Like the guy I was talking with, he's like, I cannot believe the regulatory processes that we've created for no reason, just stuff that came out of the blue. So this is true in energy, it's true in agriculture, it's true in drug testing, it's true in so many different markets that I think it's, you know, it's starting to become apparent to a lot of these outsiders who are now stepping into the government that there's an opportunity. Now. Last year, the important point that there was a Supreme Court case where they struck down what's called the Chevron doctrine. And the Chevron doctrine basically vested authority to the agencies to regulate their industry however they see fit. Meaning the courts always said, hey, whatever the agency says is the way we need to regulate, we're going to rely on that. And that was the Chevron case from years ago. And what they ended up saying is, like, no, that's actually not true. That agency does not have legal authority to just regulate everything however they want. They have to have a law passed. Congress has to pass a law that says, these are the regulations that need to be enforced. Yeah. And if that law doesn't exist, the agency can't just make up regulations, regulatory process. So what we're seeing now is a lot of attempts and. And it's gonna all go to court. And there's gonna be years of court battles, of attempts to unwind and deregulate. And as they do that, they're gonna cut people, they're gonna change the rules. That's gonna lead to people that are regulatory captcha people saying, hey, wait, those regulations are awesome. We need them or we gotta keep them in place. And then that's all gonna get adjudicated. And hopefully that Supreme Court decision is referenced and holds up as this goes forward. So I think deregulation is a big feature theme. It's going to take a while. It's going to take a while to work through the courts. Sort of like all the Doge Actions, they're all going to go to court. And you believe that's something that's a trend that we can see carry out across admins. You think it's a decade plus long trend or is it going to be sort of oscillating back and forth? I think it is the. I think what happens is it's such a sharp tack right now. Yeah, yeah. My personal belief is that the response to this is a sharp tack towards more socialism, bigger government, more kind of principles of everyone working for and living off the government. And I think that what we're going to end up seeing in this midterm cycle is candidates and policy proposals that look like they're diametrically opposed because that's how you're going to get elected. Because people are going to be pissed off about how quick these changes were, how quick these actions were, how bad they're going. So the storyline will be let's do the opposite, let's put everyone back in, let's spend more money, let's it do blah, blah, blah. And so I worry a lot that this is actually going to be now a flip flop back the other way. So many people in Washington, the American people are going to decide. Yeah, yeah, there's so many people in Washington today that have lost their jobs in the last three months and I don't think they're going anywhere. Right. There's just sort of like you know, circling around in many ways and want to find have you seen all the homes listed on Zillow? And yeah, it's crazy. There's like a million homes. The prices are down like 30%. Yeah, there's a lot of talk, especially with the Maha movement of like comparisons to Europe, comparisons to Japan. On the agriculture side, are there any other countries that you look to as examples for what America should be doing or are we already kind of like the least bad regulatory regime for agriculture? So there's a couple of aspects to that. One is the ingredients, supply, supply chain and food, where a lot of stuff is being addressed and talked about and there's issues there and that's independent, I would say, of agriculture. So there's a lot of technology and innovation happening and needs to happen in agriculture to grow things more efficiently. That's a lot. That's the work we do at Ohalo, for example and we have these incredible tools that didn't exist using AI to make predictions and take actions in the field and so on and so forth. So people, the US today is the most advanced agriculture technology adopted market. But we're still very far behind its potential. And when it comes to food supply chains. Yeah, that's where things are. Okay, great. I'm going to go on stage. We'll see you guys. Perfect. We'll talk to you soon. Bye, guys. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your, Enjoy your talk. Is Keith out there? Yeah, yeah, Jacob can. Come on. We'd love to have you. How are you, Jacob? You got five minutes. You have five minutes. Sit down. We're here with the man himself. The man himself. The man who organized Hillen Valley and has championed and grown it by a thousand acts. I think it's, it's been fantastic to watch. Last year I was here, I was able to find a seat. Now it's standing room only. Yeah. What, what has it been like growing this? What can you give us kind of the, the, the, the, the general overview of what the mission and goals are for Helen Valley? So the Helen Valley was always designed to be a bipartisan, bicoastal alliance between technologists and policymakers on the basic premise that builders and policymakers are both in the business of building the future. They just use different tools to do it. Builders use the laws of science and nature and policymakers use the laws of man. And ultimately it was very clear through conversations with Diana and Christian that there was a huge amount of distrust between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. But also there was this cliche that had taken hold on Capitol Hill that our best and brightest people were focused on advertising technology, not building paradigm shifting technologies. And so ultimately it was clear that, you know, from the vantage point of the tech industry, we actually as a country do have a really deep ecosystem of builders working to solve really hard problems. And so we thought it was incredibly important to actually bring them to Washington, give them the attention that they need so that policymakers actually knew this existed, but also thought of them as a toolkit to solve some of our hardest national problems. That's great. How does it feel being here today? Everybody senses that, you guys, 10x year over year, does it feel that way? And I know there's like significantly more demand. I heard a rumor about the waiting list being well beyond probably even the actual people here. Yeah. What is Hill and Valley turning to over time? Yeah, that's, it's really interesting because in a way I think the success of the Hill and Valley Forum actually reflects a lot of the Peter Thiel isms about, you know, high growth startups where at first, you know, it's, it's an invention that you can't really give a name to, because if you're really going from zero to one, it's something that by definition doesn't really exist. And then you start out with something that it's a small community that's really hyped up about it. And all of those principles have actually applied to the Hilton Valley Forum. I mean, we started out and it was kind of this opaque dinner that was totally behind closed doors. And we were initially planning four tables of 10 people. It ended up being 100 people. And it just. The growth has actually been exponential. Now you have random live streamers here and you know you've made it when you draw the pro Hamas crowd. Totally. Next year, the goal is code pink. I'm surprised they got in. It's was remarkable. They impersonated press badges impersonating a journalist. Well, we. We impersonate some way we do our best journalist impression. I know you're waiting for confirmation, so you can't talk about much else. Is there anything else that folks should be aware of or take away from Hill and Valley other than, I guess, in terms of, like, what the audience is getting out of this? Do you have any advice for founders who are in attendance, anyone who's watching online? What is the best way to engage? I think it's really inspiring to see so many bright, talented people actually make the effort of flying across the country to come here and show up. You know, they say there's the old saying that so much about life is about showing up, especially in politics. Yeah, totally. And the fact that people actually spend the money, took the time to come here and engage in these policy conversations really does make an impact. And there isn't a single year where we've had the Helen Valley Forum where there hasn't been legislation that's actually come out as a direct result of people having conversations here. So it's gratifying to see people show up, but it's also really inspiring to see people talking about reindustrialization this year. This has been the plague of our country is that we de industrialized 20 years ago. And it's inspiring to see so many bright people working hard to reverse that. Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll let you get back to it. I'm sure you have a million more panels to host and hands on shape anytime, but we'd love to have you back. Thanks for having me. Look forward to doing this again. Fantastic. Cheers. Cheers. Thanks for doing this. You want to do this now? Zach, can you come in in 15? Are you good? In 15 from now? Okay, 10 minutes. Yeah. Let's do 10 with Keith and then 10 with Keith and then we'll have you on. Is that great? Yeah. Keith, come on. Sweet. Welcome. Hey, how are you? What's going on? I love this live studio. Yes, yes, yes. We are live. But we're very fortunate to be graced by someone who's not going through confirmation. Maybe can give us a little more hot takes, you know. Oh, yeah, I can see. First question. Do we need a Department of Government efficiency for confirmation hearings? It seems like they're going slow. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I think this should be simplified at some point, which is basically the president should nominate you for the Constitution and the Senate should provide advice and consent and we don't need too many other steps in the process. But that said, you know, there's lots of room improvements in the government first. Saving money is probably more important. Yeah, yeah. Making it more attractive for talented people. As we talked about, to serve and doja, setting a good example for this is being a magnet for talent. The best people in America want to improve society through the government would be great. Those are much more fundamental. So there's details that can be improved at the margin, but I wouldn't confuse the details with the strategy. Yeah. Are you doing more investing in companies that touch the government now? Because this feels like Hill and Valley is like the floodgates are open. D.C. is kind of open for business in some ways. Willing to do business with startups. We've seen success with the big defense tech companies, but now we're seeing energy and agriculture and a lot of kind of like hard tech companies. Are hard tech adjacent just. Yeah. I mean, the big issue is it feel, you know, being here. Nothing about investing in these categories feels contrarian anymore, but it was for a long time. If you look at, like the hot sectors, AI still is the most. You know, there's some AI founders here and defense tech is the second. Yes, yes. And so I think that that is a structural problem. I don't think I agree more with Delhi and comments about there's not going to be many successful defense companies. I think the one thing that is a positive change and is structural and, you know, can improve the odds of success for many founders and entrepreneurs is moving into federal revenue earlier than usual. So many companies have historically had a federal revenue arm. They may not talk about as much publicly for a variety of reasons, but usually that comes after significant commercial success. Yep. You might see the sequencing change. I mean, the government runs on Microsoft Office scale, federal revenue. It has federal meaning. Varda significant federal revenue early in the trajectory. Yeah. That may be more normal and more common. Interesting. But I don't think government only revenue is going to lead to a lot of successful companies except for very, very small sliver. Yeah. And so we as a fund are not really investing their actively in government oriented solutions. We do have, I just did make a defense oriented technology investment, but that's like an outlier. Yeah. But we have lots of, lots of companies that have meaningful federal revenue and continue to scale. And this feels like a category. Last time we had you on the show, or maybe it was the first time you talked about how most like a lot of people just shouldn't be like, oh, I want to be a founder, I'm going to start a company, they should go work for a great company. And if you're trying to, if you're excited about spaces that are going to require federal funding early, you probably shouldn't start that. Right. You know, when you're 20 years old maybe unless you're, you know, truly. Well, you need to understand the sales process in the federal government, which is different than the sales process in a commercial environment. And there's probably a limited scare, there's probably more scarcity on quality salespeople that can sell successfully. The federal government. Yeah. And maybe there's 40 of them. And so unless you have an angle to be able to attract one of those 40. So do you have a better product that the salespeople think, oh my God, I can sell this? Yeah. The best way to attract salespeople is make their life easy. I've got something cool, differentiated and I know the buyer. Second, you have a missionary zeal that's off the charts. Yeah. Without, without the ability to attract one of the top 40 people who can sell into let's say defense oriented stuff, three letter agency stuff. I think it's really dangerous. So I think that's more critical sometimes than the technical breakthrough. Yeah. You know, the government is decades behind as Sephard is talking about like, yeah, you know, Oracle started serving CIA and nsa. There are examples like that, but there's very few. And so you know, one every decade. Yeah. So that seems to me to be a bad strategy. Unless you have a reasonably lead. You're the once every decade company and that should be part of your initial seed deck. Yeah. Talk about what you're talking about today. You're doing a talk with Eric Kleiman, correct? Yeah, we just finished. Eric and I were on stage with Senator Ernst from Iowa talking about how we can make the federal Government's expenses more streamlined using programmatic expense reporting like that. RAM offers commercial sector commercial products. Commercial customers of ramps save between 5 and 15% on expenses, and the federal government probably would be able to save more. So there's 4.5 million cardholders in the federal government. There's only 2-point something million employees. So there's clearly a lot of waste, fraud and abuse. The senator cited a bunch of examples of 80,000 charges on federal credit cards at casinos. Clear. The Most of those 80,000 charges are not doing official business on behalf of the federal government. Hopefully that's an easy savings. It doesn't require cutting programs that people care about, doesn't require this big controversial debate. But every dollar we save goes back to the American family and they can spend it on raising a family successfully. Secondly, if we can cut 1% from the federal budget, just 1%, the Federal Reserve can lower interest rates by 1% safely and allow people to afford mortgages, allow the economy to grow without triggering inflation. So it's a very big deal to save 1 or 2%. I think a lot of people miss that. Yeah. Do you have any good stories from visits to Washington during the PayPal days? Was. It was a different time. It was different. I was actually just mentioning. I don't know if I'd been back in the capital before today. Since 2003. Wow. When I was lobbying. That means we're officially back. We have. But. Yeah, we spent a lot of time, time and energy. I spent a lot of personal time and energy using the federal government to help protect payball from a lot of people that didn't like us. Visa, MasterCard, eBay. And then later the Treasury Department post 9, 11. The Treasury Department wanted to issue these regs that would have imposed significant burdens on consumers and small businesses. And we were able, using a lot of connections on the Hill and messaging about not interfering with E commerce to put a lot of pressure back on the treasury to draft much more reasonable regulations. They really wanted everybody to put in their Social Security number on every, like, every transaction, which is, you know, crazy intense. Last question. Jensen was saying SF is back because of AI. What's your take? Well, he stole my line. Yeah, I mentioned that my version of the line was slight, slightly narrower, but obviously can expand it. Mine was OpenAI saved SF. Yep. Without OpenAI success, SF would be dead and still dying. You get another power law company. And that drives a ton of. Well, it does. And you know, the people who are favorable to SF would say, oh, that. Well, that happens every 10 or 20 years. Like the Internet saved SF too. Yeah, yeah. You know, when I graduated Stanford, before the Internet, SF was like a 12th to 15th ranked city in the United States. Nobody. There was no business going on. Oakland was actually a better commercial city at the time. The only people who stayed in SF to work at like Bain or BCG were like, for lifestyle reason. Totally. It was a dead city. Then the Internet revolution happened. And although a lot of the best Internet companies, the best technology companies were in Palo Alto and Mountain View and Sunnyvale, there was enough spillover at SF to sort of save the city. It was just cheaper in some ways, right? Yeah, no, and, well, cheaper. And you need large floor plan, like, floor plan off floor, floor print offices, like, and those didn't exist in the city. The city's culture was really never great for building companies. Like, when we considered moving the PayPal office to SF in 2001, Peter asked this question, Peter Tail asked this question of name a successful SF company. And the largest SF company at the time was like CNET or something incredibly mediocre. So we didn't. We moved to Mountain View. Interesting. Wow. Well, thanks so much for joining. This was fantastic. Great to see you and we'll see you out. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Cheers. Ben, do we need to shift. Thank you. Do we need to shift the microphone a little bit? Have Zach maybe sit at the end of the table, point towards us? Yeah, we're going to. We're good to go. Yeah, come on in. Welcome. Repeat guest. Yeah, we're going to go right here so that you're kind of aiming at us right here. So just kind of sit right here. Thank you. As much as possible. Look at this. Doing your own AV setup. Yeah, yeah. Two of the best in the business here. Yeah, but, you know, it helps when everyone's an individual contributor when you're running a startup. Right, totally. I've got to say, this, getting into this room is the hottest ticket here. The line at your door is just like impressive person after impressive person. All right. Were you, Were you an early, like an individual contributor in the early days? Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course you were. Who else would do the work? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, yeah, remember fintech, like, wasn't always, you know, one of the hottest categories. Yeah, yeah. The first, like four years of the business were me telling VCs, hey, financial services, we could innovate here. Like, this might be a thing. Yeah. 2016, someone came up with the word fintech and then finally cut out a story from Keith. You wouldn't have heard, but he said the last time he was in the Capitol building was in 2003 fighting for PayPal's life. Oh my goodness. After 9 11, there was like a lot of regulations pushback. Yeah, yeah. But speaking of financial regulation is like everyone here is obviously, you know, super aware of what's going on with the DoD. There's a lot of DoD budgets and every defense tech company is looking for their next program record or sbir. What is the mood in Washington around financial regulations? Are there, is there low hanging fruit? Is it getting enough meme that everyone talks about or are people talking about it enough? It's a good question. Right now there's probably three things that are top of mind for everybody. First is the genius act, which is the crypto stablecoin regulation. That is, as far as I can tell, moving though I don't know the day to day details of that one. Second is there's section 1033 of Dodd Frank. This is the open banking regulation that was put into, put into place under the last administration, this administration. We'll see what happens. But there's some talk of making a few modifications to it before it fully goes live. And then the third big thing is the conversation somewhat kicked off by Doge, somewhat not about payments modernization. So can we move the payment system of the US to not send out paper checks to everybody in all these places with all addresses and so on and so forth and actually make it a little more modern. So do you have any type of estimate of how, of how many of those paper checks just never ever even get, you know, have basically been paid, but just sort of sit in the. Well, they don't get cash. That's, that's money back in the taxpayer. Maybe we don't want to move off paper. Maybe there's free money for the taxpayer. Perhaps. You got to keep in mind the cost in the system. So of course you have people that are writing the checks, you have people that are mailing the checks. Probably costs, you know, 5 to 10, $10 to, to send out the check to each person. Then you get it, you bring it to the bank across the bank, five or ten dollars to actually cash the check. So getting that out of the system would be a net worth. Plus getting people payments a little faster is not a bad thing. Totally talk about the difference in your experience, you know, this week versus maybe your first trip to D.C. for, for plaid. For plaid. Ever. Yeah. Oh my gosh. What was your first trip ever? I think it's must have been seven years since since the first trip here, we were lucky. We hired our first head of business development, had worked in the previous administration. At some point, she said, hey, Zach, we should go to D.C. and meet some people and talk about it. You know, there's. There's some things that are relevant to Plaid. We know that this open banking rule was going to come eventually. And so even seven years ago, you were thinking about this new open banking. Oh, yeah. I mean, the concept of Plaid has always been to kind of build open banking for the world, to build infrastructure that enables people to link their bank accounts really easily. We've, of course, created a ton of stuff on top of the network that can come out later. But we knew that this regulation was a thing that would be written at some point, so we started spending time here. We hired a policy team in dc. I think we probably still have four or five people that are just based in DC full time. And right now, just the conversation is totally different. The size of this conference, the number of people that are here, the number of other tech CEOs that I'm seeing in DC, even just casually. I was here about a month ago and was walking into a building, and out of the building was walking a kind of big public company. CEO. Yeah. Say hello. And it's like that running would not have happened seven or eight years ago. So it is kind of a testament to, in some sense, Silicon Valley for people being willing to come out here and have these conversations. In a big sense, it's a testament to the administration and to a lot of the people that have put together forums like this to bring the two sides together. So it's been an awesome event so far. That's awesome. Well, you got to get to your next panel. I think I do, yes. Well, it's been great having you stopped having on. We'll see you out on the floor later. See you soon. Let's bring in Zach. You want to come on? Who else is out there? Welcome to the stream. Let's play this song. Let's play. Let's play a sound effect to let everyone know. Sound effect. A song like, I'm on morning radio. Let's scoot in as much as possible. We want to get your mouth right up close to that. All right, you have me all the way on. There we go. Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah. Introduce yourself. By the way, I just got to say, you look very kind, comfortable in a suit. Thank you. That's a horrible insult, but I appreciate it nonetheless. I'm not calling you a suit. I'm Just saying. No, I appreciate it. It looks like we haven't put it on in a long time. I think Will was saying womanitis on the stream yesterday was saying, you know, it's Hill and Valley when you can't. When you don't need to put in new business cards because they're still in there for the last Hill and Valley. That's the standard. I will say. When I first moved to dc, I'm a lobbyist. Short version is I'm a lobbyist. I was a venture capitalist for a long time. General catalyst, the Emergency Capital. Before that. I work here now. I lead the tech and venture capital practice of a lobbying firm. Okay. And I also hang out at a think tank called fai, the foundation on American Innovation, where I'm a senior fellow too. That's the short version. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The long version, it is a suit. I am a suit. I wear a suit now all the time. I have ties. You're still a technology brother. I am, at my heart, a technology brother. This feels like a safe space for suits, to be honest. This feels like you guys rock a. We wear suits every day. You guys brought back suits actually, on the lobbying front, you know, Lulu's talked about going direct in the world. Yeah. Going to an event like Hill and Valley feels like going direct for lobbying. I agree fully. Talk about the compliments or substitutes of founder led lobbying, essentially. Well, the best founders are the ones who are building the relationships themselves. The truth is, by the way, I guess I'm talking myself out of a job in some ways. But the truth, if you outsource, if you are building in a space that is key to regulatory work, and you outsource your regulatory relationships, your government relationships to somebody else, you're not doing your job. I mean, think about it this way. If you're raising money, you wouldn't hire a banker. If you're. You're good, frankly, you wouldn't hire a banker to go out and organize your fundraise for you. Right. But if you come to D.C. and your attitude is great, I'll have my lobbyists do everything. I don't need to go meet these people. That's a problem. And in fact, the biggest people, there's that Blake on the show from. Boom. Has he been on? Not yet. Okay. Not yet. He's just. Yeah, yeah, he's somewhere. Somewhere back there. But Blake's done a great job of this, right? He came in here five, seven years ago. The idea of supersonic flight was totally outside the Overton window. But he's Done such a good job getting into the D.C. establishment and I actually say that as a compliment. So to put this all in. Yeah, please, please. The job of a lobbyist is to make great intros. Yes. Much like a VC does. And then that's exactly right. It's like a part shrin. Part Ari Emanuel. Right. You sort of do the, like, you're a little bit of an agent selling somebody downstream. You're a little bit of a shrink because they complain bitterly about government. They have every reason to do so. So you hear all that out too. And then your job is to help. Actually, in some ways, I think about it as you are teaching people in government who don't know about what you do. You're an educator to them because it's not that they don't care or they don't have any whatever. It's. You're just not high enough in the priority stack and they don't have the background to understand it. Yeah, I mean, I met a congressman a couple years ago who was like, like, thanks for telling me about Andor. Yeah, yeah, exactly. How do you not know about that company? But it's like, how do you feel is part of the best lobbyists are selective on who they work with because you're not going to be, you're not going to be successful if you're, if it's not a solid underlying sort of company. How much are politicians reading into who a company is working with on the lobbying front in terms of understanding the quality of the underlying sort of like, you know, potential? It's a really good question. The best lobbyists are tremendously demand constrained. Right. So. So you're sorry, supply constrained. By which I mean like an infinite amount of people more who want to work with those lobbyists and they have room to work with. Yeah. The compliment that I love to get is when somebody says to us, hey, you don't feel like other lobbyists because when you actually, you come in and you bring the client with you, we actually have a real relationship with them at the end of the day. And it's not just, oh, I've come in and I've done my briefing book and I've given you your one pager and so on and so forth. So there is a stamp imprimatur. You're totally correct. And because the lobbyists who are smart proactively think about organizing the opportunity. Right. Like I had dinner with two members. They came to me, they're like, great, I would love to meet folks in the Valley. I don't Know anybody in tech? Yeah. Is there a holy trinity of lobbying firms? You know, we talk about McKinsey, Bain, BCG, we talk about Goldman, Morgan Stanley, we talk about Sequoia, Andreessen, Founders Fund. Yeah, not only a trinity, it's more of a single firm. And it's mine, obviously. Yeah, there's not really much of a long. You have a coupon code we can share? Yeah, you can send you. Yeah, exactly. We want our cut. Give us 10% of the ongoing revenue. 10% of ongoing revenue. I mean, athletic greens does that all day long. Athletic greens does that. What's the average order size of athletic greens? Because I bet you it's a little lower than a lobbying. No, but that's. That's the beauty of the athletic greens deal. You use the coupon code and you get paid every month. That's a nice plug, by the way. That was very well done. Very, very organic. Do you guys have specific sectors that you're most oriented around or things that you avoid? We do a lot of tech and science, so as a firm, we do a lot of tech and science. I lead the tech component of what we do. We avoid things that don't feel values aligned. So there are some folks in the world who are doing interesting work, compelling work. Gambling, yes. Sin vice are probably outside of the scope for us a little bit. Anything with a foreign government is outside of the scope for us a little bit. But when it comes to things that are around American dominance, around American dynamism, around global resilience, when America comes first, that's the sort of stuff we focus on. But lobbying is pretty fragmented. The truth is it's not a great comp for the Bain McKinsey BCG, because there's a huge. Like, anybody, any schmo who has one rich friend can say, I'm a lobbyist now. Right? Because they can get one contract and put up a shingle and. And say, okay, great, I'm going to service this one person. It's hard to have great 50, 100, 200 clients and do that at a really high caliber. How damaging can the wrong lobbyist be? I imagine it can kill your company. Yeah, yeah. Well, they're. They're your representative. Like, you shouldn't work with somebody if you don't feel comfortable with them telling your story when you're not around. Because part of the gig is when you guys go back to SF or you go back to la, they're the ones that are. I'm still out there. Correct. Talking you up all over town. That's right. That's right in the market. So, yeah, give me a call. We're trying to. We're trying to put really, really harsh bands ideally, but maybe tariffs on foreign podcasts. Yeah, I think that's great. And we want significant subsidies for American made podcasts. In fact, you guys should be getting a tax break. That's what we also should have, a tax break. We actually want it to cost a million dollars a year to host a podcast. Barriers to engineering. It's very dangerous. You guys are familiar, familiar with the taxi medallion system? It's a very similar idea for podcasts. Very, very similar. Podcast safely. Let's play them off with the, with the sound. Thanks for having me, boys. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. This has been great. Would you mind grabbing Mike Solana? I think he's right out there if he's. If he can. Great having you on, Zach. The soundboard is a work in production. We are actively looping the short, but hopefully. No, no, no. Mike Solana's coming into the street. Welcome to the studio. The temple of technology. What's up, guys? We are live. We are live. What's up, guys? Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great, Great to have you on. What's been your reaction? And also I'd love to know, like, I know you're writing a piece. I'm sure it's churning in your head, but, like, what is the angle? What is the interesting thread to pull on here? I mean, I don't know if I'm supposed to say this. Okay. Yeah. The thing that I thought was the funniest was getting out of Union Station. The first thing I see are a bunch of sort of failed bureaucrats in shirts that say federal workers matter. Oh, no. It's just the overall sort of circus vibe of D.C. i think is funny. Yeah. And then I'm paging through the Washington Post this morning. It's just like horrifying headline after horrifying headline in D.C. and they're talking about D.C. they're like, yeah, people, Things are tense. People are losing their minds. Yeah. No one is at ease. Yeah. And it's just like I'm in this beautiful hotel overlooking the White House and there are all these people going to work there, drinking coffee. People are happy. I don't know what they're talking. Yeah. I don't like what you're reading. Is not what I'm experiencing in D.C. every time I'm here, I'm just like. I mean, I Actually move home. Well, it's a momentum thing. The people at this event feel like they have real momentum, an opportunity right now, and then if you just lost the job you had for 20 years, and obviously they're not. They're feeling. You know, they're not accelerating. Right. I don't know. But I was. I don't. I hate to be Tom Freeman about it, but I was in a car today, and the driver was like, things change here. These people have to. We're looking at these protesters outside, and he's like, they got to get over it. Yeah, they got to get over it. That's what D.C. is. I mean, we were reflecting on this with the tariffs. Like, there's all these crazy headlines about, like, the global economy is destroyed, and yet, like, the stock market's kind of flat this year. You know, it's not really, like, Covid level down 30%. We'll see. We'll see what happens with. I mean, Silver is predicting a recession. 70% chance. Yeah. But even then, we had a recession a couple of years ago is very mild. Like, we seem to be better than ever at just maintaining the status quo. Like, America is somewhat Lindy in this case. Yeah. It's got to decide what you want to do and work on that, and you can't. Truly. The reason I brought the noise was because also with those federal workers, they were just standing there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then Jack Pose, a bitch gets out there and starts a fight with them, and everyone's like, DC's in chaos. And I thought, it's not that bad. It's a lot of theater. Everything. Everything's fine. You got to just ignore the noise and focus on your own. Yeah. And that's what I'm trying to do. It just so happens that the shit that I focus on is noise. That's my art that's running at the noise. The noise is my signal. The noise is my muse. Is there a good metaphor for dc? Is it like, you know, lunchroom tables in middle school or something? Like, I feel like it's very clicky. Maybe even clickier than San Francisco Tech. I don't know. I'm trying to understand what's the mindset of. I think it's a little more sociopathic. I think it's sort of like all the people care about here is power, and they're willing to happily do it over to the other table if they're in power, generally speaking. And then you have. You have the exceptions, but mostly, yeah, Industry town. This is why I felt like Kind of out of my element in dc, because in tech there's still a lot of, like, power games, there's less status games and you can be like a famous founder, but. But at the same time, there is the concept of locking in and actually going and building something. But in dc, there's nothing really to build. No, there's no. Like, oh, yeah, this person was heads down for six years and then produced like a beautiful piece of legislation. Like, that's not how it works. Make stuff happen. And sometimes that means a lot of dinners. Exactly. Anyway, can you talk about kind of your. I mean, obviously you've been in Silicon Valley forever. How has just the mood around Silicon Valley and Washington changed over your career? What was it like when you first got to Silicon Valley and how has it changed? Like. Yeah, maybe talk about your first trip to D.C. too. Yeah, that'd be interesting to hear. Ever. Yeah. Or in the context of work and tech. Well, the first. My first work trip to D.C. would have been. I wasn't in D.C. ever. We didn't do things here. Right. Yeah. The first time I came out was for pirate wires. Oh, no way. Because I was invited out by a congressman and I realized that. Or maybe it was conversation, comfortably smug. That might have been effectively. And then I realized there were all these people here who were reading pirate wires because they were interested in tech. They were interested in the sort of tech center. Right. Maybe perspective, or let's say heterodox perspective within tech. It's very different than what it was, what, 14 years ago, no one thought about government at all. In fact, it was considered like, I don't know, a red flag if you cared about government, like a distraction. The businesses changed, and now, you know, the most exciting businesses, a lot of them are working with the government. And you have to understand how it works. Yeah. And so there's a lot of excitement here. And also in Silicon Valley. Yeah. I always think that that's like an underrated thing. I mean, a lot of people in. In tech kind of criticize media. Tech media when they start talking about politics or whatever. But I think that's, like, incredibly valuable because it's very hard for D.C. to get the tech perspective if they're. If it's not from us, it's from somebody else. Yeah. Kara Swisher. Right? Do you have that in the back of your mind when you're writing in terms of the avatars that you're writing for the messages that you want to send, or is it just like you're just going to Write and they're going to read. I just get on the page and just let it rip. Like, spit out what I'm thinking. That's great. And I hope it resonates. Yeah, yeah, it certainly has been. Yeah. Uh, so. So, I mean, coming out of this, are there. Are. Are you trying to interview the politicians and get their perspective and kind of bring that back to Silicon Valley? Because. Well, I'm here with one of my colleagues, Blair Blake. Yeah. Who's a new writer at Pyres. So she's doing a bunch of interviews right now and kind of sleuthing around. She said, gathering facts. We love sleuthing for our takedown hit. Peace. Incoming. Yeah. No, so she's just. She's exploring now and. Great. We'll probably collaborate on something. But the interesting thing is it does feel like this is my experience, but it does feel like it's Hill and Valley, but there's not a ton, not as much overlap maybe as you would. You would like, right. There's, like, a lot of people from the Valley, a lot of people from the Hill, and, like, technically we're in the same space, but, like, it's like tech people. I mean, I just don't think they know how to talk to each other. I think I even myself. And I know that I know about. But I showed up today without a suit, and I rolled up. I've been following the facts at all. I didn't even know where I was going. I did not know I was going to the Capitol building. I just have gotten used to just looking at my calendar and doing things. So I got here and I was like, oh, no, I cannot be that guy. So I head back. But that's a cultural vibe. I've never had to wear a suit in San Francisco. I didn't even own a suit until a few years ago. I think I had one for our LP meeting, but that's it. And today you're wearing Fiorentino label. Is that correct? Fiorentino. Oh, good. Good friend of the show. Yeah, we love him. A true craftsman. He is. He is. Were you surprised at how much press was allowed to come today? Oh, yeah. We went to the press briefing yesterday. We saw your name tag there. Too big. We were sitting there looking around. We were like, we are fish out of water here. Yeah, I don't think so. I think that journalists are looking for things to write about, and there are a lot of people here that want to write about. My question with it was more like, obviously they would like to be here just because there's so many ways that you could spin what's going on. I was just surprised that Delian, that they got the yes, they got the invis instead of saying hey, no. Yeah. I think that broadly tech's relationship with the media is very different than it was five years ago. The war is over and there are actually plenty of writers who are not unfair even at New York. Teddy Schleifer out there, that's a guy who's just reporting on wealth and he reports what he sees in both direct. And I think that there are people who have integrity now. I think it's just the environment's different and they're going to be hit pieces. But you have to just read people's work and see who they are and what. And what kind of interview they run and then make an educated guess. Every once in a while. Teddy shows up with the telephoto lens and goes TMZ mode outside of a party. But for most of the time he's just writing good write ups. It's good. Are you obviously, you know, manufacturing, reindustrialization, defense tech are sort of like dominating the narrative here. Is there anybody that. That is kind of flying under the radar that you're. Or any like industries specifically that you're. Yeah, I feel like you've written a lot about like the sperm racing stuff and some of the like the Zaner stuff. Yeah. Where is the sperm race representation? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Infuriating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Do we need subsidy or do we need a tax? Tax on foreign. No, I think I was having a conversation yesterday and what's actually interesting is they've really expanded beyond tech or defense tech. There's much broader. Yeah, there's a much broader interest in the technology industry now, which is pretty cool. People are open. Who was it? Oh, it was Delian who was talking to me about how senators and congressmen were just really excited to even talk to RAMP or something which a few years ago was just not on their radar. Totally. Yeah. Keith was saying there's about four times more federal corporate cards than there are federal employees. Well, that and there was 80,000 charges at casinos. Wow. Like last year or something like that. I mean gambling is the most American thing. But remember, federal workers matter. Yes, yes. Yeah. Even if they're gambling, it could have been team building activities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Team. You take him to the game, you take slots anyway. Slot. Yeah. What's the difference? So what's next coming out of here? How do you think about covering this from the pirate wires perspective? Is it just meeting people, doing interviews downstream or is there supposed to be like a definitive write up or new angle? You're still on the hunt, right? I think we're still looking. I think probably a lot of people are going to do the. Just here's what I saw. Here's the Hill and Valley. Maybe what would be more interesting is to find some sort of meaningful interaction between someone in tech and someone in dc. I can write about that. Yeah, yeah. There's all these like big budgets and you see 150 billion in defense, but then you get down into like, okay, what is the actual mechanic of a seed stage or series? A founder like actually getting a $10 million contract. That's. Jacob was talking about this too. Every Hill and Valley so far there's been some policy or like some major sort of business activity that's come out of it. So it's clearly working. The question is like if we've 10x the size of Hill and Valley, are you going to get an order 10x the output, right? Yeah, yeah, probably. I mean last year's theme. Yeah, yeah. Last year's theme was TikTok. Have you been tracking that? Do you have a, do you have a TikTok take or have you evolved at all since last year? Shut it down is. How is my. Shut it down? Don't even sell it. Shut it down. I don't even believe that you, you can sell it and have it still not be backdoored in some way that I don't understand. But I also just think that we're in Trump era now and anything like nothing matters and the rules change every day. So it's like, why am I going to sit here and be like the right policy for TikTok is because we don't. We're not playing those rules anymore. No, it's a new set of rules. The rules are. It's like a bunch. It's like Trump says some shit and writes executive orders and then a bunch of wizards and coats in D.C. fight back with like their random pen shit. It's like everyone is searching back to past court cases for I guess, justification for what they're doing. And it all is just to me quite chaotic. But also I don't care. My intention for this administration was to be calm while others were crazy. And I am trying my very. Maintain the calmness through the storm. Yeah, it is a great time to be in media. Does it feel like it's the best time possible to be in tech media or is it like the. The war is over where the dog that caught the car. Yeah. It depends on what kind of press you're doing. I think right now what's happening in the tech press is people are trying to figure out who they are in the context of a very different culture. Totally. And how they're supposed to navigate that. You see this sort of center left, like Atlantic type people who have pivoted wildly to just anti. Anti Trump, anti typo stuff. Yeah. But more so than I would say your standard issue left it. Yeah. Like I think there's like this strange thing that's happening where people are just trying to find a lane. Yeah, yeah. And I'm trying to be. I just want to take my time and write the stories that matter to me. There's also that interesting development with the Ezra Klein abundance thing that feels like very near, but you're rolling your eyes. What's your abundance take? Because they just ripped it off of like your standard issue tech bro from five years ago. Right. Or yeah. Like eak or what about anatomy next? Like I talked about all of this. Yeah, yeah, you did all of them. All those anecdotes. In fact. In fact, Derek, the author, the co author of that book I saw at Founders Fund for a Charter cities. Oh, really? A Charter Cities conference years ago. Many years ago. Which we hosted. But I would describe that as finesse. It's like we took your best ideas, we rebranded them, and now we're selling it ourselves. Yeah. I mean, you. You insulted. They haven't. They've definitely successfully created something that they're now selling. The question is whether or not the conclusion is the right. Their whole thing is like we've taken all of these ideas and we blame the fact that we don't have them on the people who created those ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the reason that we don't have, for example, you know, housing in California is it's just the people who are in charge of the government in California. It's very simple. Yeah. At what point do you expect tech's sort of, you know, basically attention to shift more towards California, given that it's the home of our industry? We've seen, I think immigrant Gary Tan. Yeah. You know, the Gary. The Gary Tans of the world obviously kind of were. Took a big stand now probably a couple of years ago. I would argue that he's suffered in some ways because of that, just given how much negative attention he's drawn locally. But at some point tech. Tech seems so focused on Washington that at some point you're just going to look around your backyard and be like, actually we have some pretty big problems here. Well, I guess I think a lot of people are. I think more people. I disagree slightly. I think more people are focused on local politics in San Francisco within our industry than any other point is different than like broadly in California though, because like we're in Southern California and. Right. And I would say most of the people in the Gundo again have much more. Partly is the nature of the industry, LA is a lost cause. I think it's just like you're never going to save Los Angeles. We are saving Hollywood. We're bringing media to Hollywood. Hollywood, that's our big push. I think that your best bet is San Francisco. I really think tactically that the closest. That's the best chance you have at fixing anything. And if you could save even one city, maybe you could do something else. But I think that Gary actually has made a lot of progress and I don't think it's hurt his brand. I think that it's, it's. He's, he's. I mean, I don't think people are asking for his help online. Totally. I wasn't saying it's hurt its brand. I was just saying like acceleration of death threats and people saying, yeah, just frustration, stuff like that. That's the price to play, unfortunately. Yeah, it's kind of like raised the standard deviation of his experience. Like he said some really great experiences and then some really negative ones as opposed to just the anonymous VC who flies on the radar. Doesn't. Switching gears a little bit. Did you have a reaction to benchmark investing in Chinese AI? Did that feel. That was very contrarian in some ways, but I was trying to, I was personally trying to understand the decision of like, okay, Hill and Valley is happening next week. We should invest in this company. While TikTok is like, probably should be banned. Maybe it's getting banned, maybe selling. I mean, if their job is just to make money and they think that's going to make money, it's. There's like a, there's a moral question about it. But then are we going to break down every single investment that everybody. I mean, what is. I don't know. This is a much longer conversation. Sure. Yeah. I guess I didn't feel the way that other people felt. I don't. Yeah. I have a much bigger problem with what they did to Travis Kalanick than I do with their investment in a Chinese company. Yeah. Are you, are you digging in at all this idea that feels like there's a divide right now? It's like if you're a foundation model company, you want to tell people that we're in an AI war and a race. Like, we have to win the race. And that's a good narrative if you're needing to raise a lot of capital and sort of solidify significance. The other side. And this is a real side, and this is actually Gurley's position, which is that we're not in, you know, the idea that you can win the AI war or race and this technology is not just going to disseminate anyways, and he believes it's flawed. In conversations that you've had this week, do you feel like, you know, just sort of everybody sort of understands we are in an AI race, we need to win it, or do you have what. And kind of maybe what side are you on? I don't think anybody knows anything. I think AI is so like, we're waiting for a paradigm shift. And we're trying to also make really firm predictions about what happens after the paradigm shift. And so I think that all I kind of know is that it's obviously really powerful, it's obviously improving really fast. But if something is fundamentally changing society, then it's anyone's guess. I don't think that we know if it's centralizing. I don't think we know if it's going to be decentralized. I don't think we know if it's a race. I actually just. I don't think we know. I think all that anybody knows is that it's powerful and everything else is just people. I don't know. I saw Tyler Cowen announced that we had reached AGI the other day, and I felt like you're just saying shit. Like, I don't. You don't. Do you even believe that? Like, I don't think he believes that. Like, I think that. I think that people are just. I think that, yeah, I think that a lot of people are just saying shit. That's kind of how I feel about the Trump administration. Did you think there was an overreaction then over the weekend when 4O rolled out and it was just saying, solana, you might be the goat. A lot of. You're one of the greatest laser about this. So the latest chat GPT4.0 release, they fine tuned it. Basically any question you asked would be like, that is so brilliant. Mike, you are one of the best writers. Because I was like, like, yeah, I am. I am. I was like these just acting the landscape. Like I felt different. A plus. Yeah. Yeah, I Love it. Well, then, yeah, you gotta think there's a story there, potentially, for pirate wires around that. That was the first time I felt like a model could be dangerous. Where if somebody is having, you know, significant delusions of grandeur. Of grandeur. Mental health issues, they think they're God. They think they're on some. It confirms all of that and says, yeah, you should go and try. And you're like, you know, if I went to you and I was like, mike, you know, confidentially, like, I think that I'm God, Right. I'm on this thing. You might be like, hey, Jordy, like, let's talk about it a bit more. Let's dial this back. That's not. That's not what I would do. That's not what I. I ramp it up. Shows up and is like. Like some old kind of guy, and he looks at me and he says, I'm you from the future. Yeah, I'm leaning in. Yeah. I'm like, all right. Like, I'm listening. Like, prove it. I'm here. If I want the. Give me the evidence. If you said you were God, I'd be like, all right, like, do some God shit. Okay. That's amazing. That's my. Well, thank you so much. We need you to do some reinforcement learning. Yeah. This is amazing. Dial it in. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, great. We'd love to have you back. Looking sharp. Glad you got your super news and stuff. I'll see you guys later. Have a great rest of you. Have fun. We'll talk soon. I texted Sean McGuire, told him we are ready. Hopefully he can swing by. In the meantime, why don't I give you a little. We should just literally read some. Hey, how you doing? What's up? We are on air. You can feel free to introduce yourself. Sit down. Tell us about yourself. Tell everyone who you are. What'd you do? Michael Eisenberg, general partner at Olive Tel Aviv. Before that at Benchmark. Fantastic. Yeah. An original member of the Silan Valley Forum. Really? Four years ago, it was just a dinner in the Library of Congress rotunda. Yeah. So, yeah. Was the dinner, you know, more intimate? Was it more. You know, what was your read on it then? What's your read on it now? This is overwhelming. Yeah. Yeah. It's big. You know, for a guy like me, it's, like, super overwhelming. Yeah. You know, I'm used to being on the other side of the microphone. I have my own podcast. I interview other people. This is kind of fun. It's fun. It's fun. Well, yeah. What are you trying to get out of the event? Are you specifically looking for founders that you could potentially invest in here? I'm not. So we invest only in Israel. Okay. But come to Hill and Valley. Why? Because politics and intersection of geopolitics and technology is perhaps the most important issue of our time. Got it. And where there's enormous opportunity. Yeah. Maybe a little cap. By the size of in general, the defense establishment. The M and A side won't be as big as Google, Cisco, Microsoft. Sure. Yeah. So is that angle here where you kind of act as like a part of your value add as a venture capitalist is a de facto lobbyist for the. Until they can afford a lobbyist where you're a lobbyist. But. But you can make introductions. I can make people. This is a relationship that's. Yeah. Right. At the first Hill and Valley, you know. Yeah. Senator Cotton was here. J.D. vancer, now the vice President United States was here. I remember last year. Yeah. And you know this Josh Wolf is still here. You should have Joshua. He's coming on in 20 minutes. He's a great guy. The best. And I will be together in Tel Aviv next week also. Oh. So we're having Sean McGuire jump on in just a minute. He told us about how Talpio has become a pipeline for great founders. Can you give us more insight there? Have you backed any Telpio founders? Yes, we've backed many. Topio. I've been doing 30 years. Well, yeah. Yeah. What is Telpio? Why is it such a hotbed for entrepreneurial talent? Everybody knows about 8200 unit which is like the cyber unit of the Israeli military. Topio is a unique program. Takes about 30 kids a year who are the best and the brightest. Yeah. The Israeli genius goes there. It's a ten year program. Wow. In which you get a couple of degrees along the way and then you get a budget to go do a big weapons program or military program. And so we give these 22, 23 year old kids the most immense responsibility. Yeah. They grow up, they deliver and then ought to build essentially companies. That's in a box. Can you give some examples of alums that you think are worth digging into or understanding their history? Sure. So we backed a company called One Step. It's actually three Topio guys which is like hitting the jackpot. There we go. Led by Tomer Shoes. Three of a kind. They just took. They just took this little telephone device. Yeah. And turned it into what's called a gate lab. Okay. And it Turns out that how you walk is predictive of your health. Oh, interesting. In many ways it's like a blood test. Literally like a blood test. I can tell if you're going to have dementia. Yeah. Or Alzheimer's, by the way, whether your hip and knee replacement works. Interesting. That's what I mean. Only guys who are literally rocket scientists could turn the phone into what's called a gate lab. And that's very cool. Use it to measure everything. That's one example. What's the business model? Sell to the customer directly or vend that into Apple Health or something? No, they're actually selling to facilities that do rehab. Sure. For elderly people or people have hip and knee replacements. They sold to medical device guys like Zimmer. It's growing extremely fast. That's great. And you know, incredible genius. And you know, then there are others. There's a guy out there, you might have met him, Michael Kaufman, who's working with a bunch of guys who come out of that place. Cool. I think met him last night. Talk about collaboration with this group here and your companies back in Israel. What does that look like? Here's the thing about Israel is there's no local market. Right. 10 million citizens doesn't make much of a market. 400 million on the hand is big. And so if you assume that US defense spending is going to go up, this is a good place to do defense technology. We've backed a bunch of companies in the area. A company called or, which makes rocket fuel and explosives using natural and biological means. And another company called Dream Chemistry Company. It is actually a chemistry company using biological means. A specialty chemicals company. Our co investor there are Standard Industries on WR Grace and we've backed a company that's in the kinetic defense area and another company called Dream, you may have heard it was founded by Sebastian Kurtz, the former Chancellor of Austria and Shalev Julio that is doing national level AI protection is one of the fastest growing companies I think in the world right now. What's your, what's your read on whether or not we are really. We're clearly in an AI race? What, what is. Is that something that can be won or is it like any other industry where it's just sort of a perpetual race? There's. There's no ending, you know. Do you have a thesis around? Do you agree or disagree with Bill Gurley? I agree with Bill Gurley. Okay. My former partner, Benchmark. I agree with Bill Gurley. It's an infinite game. But I'm not sure the question is framed right sure. So AI is going to impact just about everything we do. It's a super accelerant of many things. I think the question becomes, because the clock gets sped up, you could fall really far behind in every iterative game you play. If you're not at the head of the game, if you're not winning the game, it's not that you win in order to defeat the other person. You win in order to stay ahead. One of the written a bunch of books. One of the core thesis of the books is that civic society runs on iOS and AI and runs really quickly and government runs on the fax machines. And that inevitably creates friction and civil society pulls ahead and it creates tension with the government. I think that's part of the loss of faith in institutions. So if you don't accelerate the clock on absolutely everything, what you just have is unending friction. Society kind of collapses on itself. So you need to stay ahead of the race in order for your society actually to be healthy and then also to deter others from doing other things. As science accelerates with AI and weapons development starts with AI, it can be troubling. I gave a talk in Abu Dhabi about a year and three months ago where I showed that there is correlation. We can argue whether there's causality. I think there is. Between the increase in compute power and cyber attacks and interest in bioweapon attacks online. I think it's not an accident. There's agents of chaos in the world and now they have access to super tools like AI. So if we don't stay ahead, these people get emboldened and you can't kind of keep in a box what, you know, there's a lot of talk today around just efficiency in government, specifically around like payments, things like that. Does the US have anything that we can learn from Israel in terms of. Do you think Israel's done a better job in terms of like modernizing the way that governments actually run, or is it still fax machines all the way down? The really interesting thing about Israel is not the government. What Israel has is the most incredible civic society on the planet. If you look at what happened October 7, the government was absent, but the civilians all turned up. They turned up to evacuate. People turned up with their own weapons and their own cars and took care of business of what needed to be done. In fact, the evacuees were taken care of mostly by civilians. The government didn't turn up. And what I think Israel is a model for the 21st century, which is it's almost impossible for government to Catch up on so many of these technology things. It's just going to take them a while. Yeah. What we're doing now is devolving this to citizens to take over more control of the economy, emergency response and everything else. I chair the largest volunteer organization in Israel. There's actually wildfires going on right now in Israel. They've been set on fire by terrorists. There's 20 places that the fires are. My civilian organization that I chair called the New Guardians is out there with thousands of volunteers stopping the fires and stopping people from lighting more. And so the lesson from Israeli society is how you leverage technology and civic society to take over more capabilities from the government. Now, you can't defend people like that. That still requires the government. And policing should be done by the government. But the Israeli government, I think is like every government right now, which is. There's lower trust in institutions. They're still very, very slow and they're kind of coming around to this very late. But because of the force of the public, I think it'll get there faster than most other governments. Yeah, that makes sense. What do you think about different GEOs to invest in? Benchmark was obviously in the news for the Manus investment, which is kind of controversial, but you could see a world where, hey, they're just great founders. They want to get out. And so, you know, American capitalism is like the path out. Are there more. Are there other GEOs that are, you think are interesting or more on this continuum of like east versus west narrative? I'm pretty bearish on Europe. Yeah. Broadly. I've said that Harris Debbings podcast and other places. I'm super bullish on the US and Israel. Sure. And you went on the. On the King of Europe's podcast. That's. I did. By the way. I should say. I'm an LP of Harry's too. But, you know, he, he feels the need to disprove me right now, you know, was super bearish on Europe. He's all in. He's all in. He's dying on the Hill. He's got to make it work. He's got to make it work. It's good to be young and ambitious like Harry is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And do it. I think there's interesting things going on in Pockets, but still Mecca is. It's. By the way, it's not the United States per se. It's Silicon Valley and New York and maybe Austin, a little bit of Miami and Tel Aviv. It's cities around the world and maybe the southern London. I think the most Interesting thing going on right now is that actually in Abu Dhabi and Dubai they've become a massive magnet for the talent fleeing Russia and Ukraine. Really easy to come there. More and more companies are setting up facilities here. Just here I met three people who've set up an Abu Dhabi. Yeah. And so. Well, they have a lot of incentives too. I've heard that they'll basically say free space, free energy. There's a lot of, you know, they'll basically like massively reduce the cost. My understanding of operating things like manufacturing, any type of like hard tech, you know, projects. They're also really good at building big projects and they have low cost energy. So they're going to build big data centers. They're building big data centers for the US giants and Microsoft has a partnership, you know, and MGX with mobile. And I think there's interesting things going on in the Emirates more broadly. Not as much, you know, entrepreneurship coming out of there, but places where you can kind of build infrastructure and deploying. I think the really, really big question facing the west right now, and I'm a fan of Alex, I think we're here to defend the west, is how do we create a secure and resilient supply chain for the infrastructure we need to stay ahead in AI and not just in AI, AI, robotics, defense, whatever the next generation of bio is and chemicals as we've talked about that requires real infrastructure in a secure supply chain for the west to win. And we got to focus on that. Yeah, yeah. What is your postmortem on the BRICS narrative? That I don't know. I grew up with Brazil, Russia, India, China. Goldman was calling these the next major markets and the way that's bifurcated, if you invested in Russia and China, it's really rough. But Brazil and India, they've developed but not fully. Are there still like jump balls on the geopolitical like chessboard that can be pulled towards like the broader definition of the west even if India is not in what we traditionally think of as the West. It's funny you should ask this question. I was just remarking to somebody a couple days ago there was brics and now there's imec. Imec, what's that? Ah, the India Middle east corridor. Okay, sure. So we assume that India would go with Brazil, China and Russia. But if you look at China and Russia in particular on some level, Brazil, these aren't real democracies in. India is a democracy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it turns out by the way, if you invest in a non democracy, you actually don't own what you think you own. Yep. They take it from you. Yep. You don't, you know, free markets, as Freeman said, you know, create free societies. Yes. It turns out the opposite is also true. If you don't have a free society, you actually don't have a free market. You don't own what you think you own. And I never thought India was actually a part of that. But this imac thing, what's the IMEC corridor? India Middle East Corridor. Yep. It's the alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative. You know, people understand this. Find geopolitical point. So Turkey, which is kind of on the side now, Turkey, Pakistan, which is now warring with India, are part of the Belt and Road Initiative that China initiative that China has initiated to try to get to Europe via land imic. India Middle East Corridor is an alternative that where you go via India, via the sea, to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, you cross through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and out to the Mediterranean and then in there. And this, I think is a big deal. So I think BRICS fell apart because democracy doesn't belong with these people. But I think there's a giant opportunity for the west and for the United States if we can bring India on board and make them a core part of the supply chain across the Middle east and into Israel and Europe and more and more companies testing the waters. But these things take more time. It takes a long time. These things take more time than anyone believes. The supply chain created in Shenzhen in China and Taiwan is 30 years in the making. Yep. It's not going to happen overnight. Yep. Well, thank you so much waiting. Can you go grab them? I'm like a warm up for Sean McGuire. That's like, you know, I mean, life goal unlock. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Great to meet you. Thanks for stopping by. Fantastic. I think Jordy has to send a, a tweet or post promoting the feed. We're gonna bring in Sean McGuire from Sequoia Capital. Welcome to the Stream. Third time appearance on TVPN. How are you doing? I think we have a question. By the way, he's like leaning down. These guys are much taller. Baller in first and then. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 1. Yeah, we'll do six minutes, then we'll bring him in. Great, great, Great to see you. Who's the VIP at one? Josh Wolf is coming on. Good buddy. You guys could share your mic. Yeah, that'd be entertaining. Yeah. What's the initial reaction? Is this your third hill and valley? Fourth hill and valley, Something like that. Third. You Know, I actually met you for the first time at the last Hill. Yeah, I missed. I missed the first one, which is a big mistake. Got the invite. I think I got food poisoning before. This thing has grown every year it just gets crazier and crazier. Yeah. Do you like the framing of reindustrialization being the focus? Last year was a lot of TikTok stuff. Is there something else we should be focused on or is re industrialization really the heart and soul of the agenda with Hillen Valley now? Whatever the agenda is, I think the conference is focused on how tech meets Washington and, like, how we play nice together in the future. And I think that's the right focus. And it's, you know, what technologies are going to matter in the future, what policies can happen that will help us get there. And I think, like, re industrialization is critical, but I'm already hearing, you know, there's a lot of talk of a lot of other things too. Yeah, yeah. Like energy, you know, all sorts of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does. It does feel like even defense tech, if defense tech ends up being involved in anything, it ends up overshadowing it because it's just exciting. You have these planes and drones and then great videos. Like great videos. Even better demos. Even better demos. Yeah. The Neros demo is wild. Pretty good. I got that one early on. Soren's a champion drone pilot. Great drone, great demo. In terms of energy, should every venture capitalist be on the hunt for the Elon of energy? It feels like there is a lot of energy. Might end up being Elon. You think he's going to go into it? I mean, I can't read his mind, but if he does tell me where to wire the money. Is there any limit? I mean, Elon is Elon, because we're talking about, like, that's kind of my reassuring reshoring semis. But like, there has to be an upper limit to, like, you know, how much industrial work he can do at some point or, I mean, look, so there have been, to the credit of the tech industry, yeah, there have been probably 10 to 20 pretty promising fission startups in the last five, six years and probably five to 10 fusion startups. I haven't invested in any of those, which means I'm not doing my part to just raise the tide. And the challenge for me has been, even though I believe so much in the category, I believe in the macro, I have to get the micro right. I made that comment before and it's been hard for me to pick. Pick, like, who's going to win in that category. And I think this is something that we kind of struggle with and I think some sectors there should be a lot of government support for all these if one ends up as number 10 in the space. But it's still a public good and is a positive payback for the government anyways. I think we need more government. I just feel like there's an opportunity for a startup that's like yeah, SMRs are cool, people are building those. There's new designs that are great. But our startup is just copy pasting Diablo Canyon. We're going to copy paste it 100 times. 500 times exactly. But that does seem hard to. We've had a lot of people on from the valley side of Hill and Valley. Who on the hillside have you been excited about talking with that you think really gets it? I mean I was just on a panel with Senator Todd Young and I think he deeply gets it. And for example, one comment he just made was he doesn't want to re onshore everything, only a small number of very strategic industries. He doesn't want to onshore garments. And he's fine with things that are not. There's different levels of how strategic something is and it's fine if the medium strategic things go to friendly nations. And so anyways, I think Todd has had very nuanced opinions. I think up right now or next is Richie Torres who is someone on the left who I've generally admired and felt like has very even though I disagree with him a lot of times, I think he's a very principled person who really deeply cares about America and is willing to say unpopular things that he believes in. And for me, anyone that is willing to be bipartisan, like not just purely tribal, but take a on some topic that is core dogma of their party and they're willing to go against that dogma. Like that's someone that I generally admire. Yeah, yeah. I mean that should be a good fit for Silicon Valley. Like the whole search for contrarianism is like pervasive in Silicon Valley. Right? Pervasive in Silicon Valley. A little less pervasive in Washington. Yeah. But it still exists and there's pockets of it that you have to seek out. Seek out. What is your read on the new defense budget? We're hearing this $150 billion number. For a while it seemed like there was going to be a freeze maybe very bad for challenger defense tech companies. Then it seemed like the floodgates open and there's all these huge numbers for even Just small series A companies are throwing out, oh, there's a billion dollars hanging out for my thing. How optimistic are you about that? And how optimistic are you about not just like the SpaceXes of the world, but the actual up and comers, the next generation of defense tech. Unpopular opinion. I simultaneously believe that defense tech is one of the most important categories in the world. But I also believe that there's going to be a very small number of winners. Call it in the west, including Europe and Israel and America, roughly 10 companies that go on to be really big next generation companies. Call it companies with 10 billion plus market caps. And I think there will be multiple with greater than $100 billion market cap. Wow. And I think that the defense tech companies of the next generation are going to be way better businesses than the last generation. So I think it's kind of focus on efficiency, focus on efficiency, focus on vertical integration. If you go look at, I think one of the core things people got wrong about Tesla in the public markets going Back to like 2017, 2018 is they were comping it to auto companies and they're comping it to GM or Ford or whatever. And people didn't realize that GM and Ford don't really make anything anymore. They basically design cars and are customer acquisition channels and maybe some financing, but they subcontract out everything. And so they would look at, oh, GM or Ford have these market caps and Tesla's already here, but they would ignore NXP and ignore all these supply chain companies. And I think we've kind of been doing the same with the defense prime. Interesting. Boeing, Lockheed, they subcontract out almost everything that goes into their. So you're only getting a slice of the market cap. You're only getting a slice of the market cap. And I think these next generation companies are going to have way more vertical integration, higher margins. I actually think that we're going to see a change with how procurement happens to move away from cost plus. I think we're already starting to see that. But basically the reason it's unpopular is I think there's going to be a very small number of winners that win mega hard and then a lot of losers or companies get rolled up into the big winners. Were you surprised that I think the number was $500 million was earmarked for autonomous systems and when you compare that to some of the other categories, it felt pretty low. Do you have any insight into, into, into how they got around to that number or you know, general reaction? So like there's different Philosophies I think one philosophy would be that like we're trying to push a boulder up a hill in terms of like changing the defense budget and moving budget towards next generation emerging industries. And if that's something where if like every year it's predictably getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and if 10 years from now, 40, 50% of the budget is going towards kind of next generation strategic technologies, then I'll be very happy. What would be very bad is if it's like 500 this year and then zero next year. That's a really great take. It's like if A company raises $100 million in VC and they have to spend it all in the first year, they're going to probably spend it really inefficiently versus like hey, let's stage this out 100 on certain milestones. And so yeah, I think that's the right take. And this has been the look. I learned this lesson the hard way with my cybersecurity company that focus on defense. Our first big contract, we got awarded $10.5 million contract and then government sequestration happened like they couldn't pass a congressional bill. And we basically got told like, either we accept the contract with 60 cents on the dollar or no contract at all. So obviously we took the 60 cents on the dollar. And we were lucky that this was actually our first big contract because it taught us from day one how unpredictable government funding can be. But is that predictability? Like if you know it's going to be 500 this year and a billion next year, et cetera, you can invest strategically. If you have no idea what it's going to be in the future, it's just very hard to plan. Totally. Do you have you guys get. Josh, last question, 60 seconds. Do you have a take on this idea of whether we're in an AI race? But is it an infinite game? Is it just sort of a perpetual game, or is it something that can be worn? Is an AI war even the right framing? Right. I feel like this has been. Oh man, I'm so glad you asked this. I've been obsessing over this for a couple years. I have a pretty strong opinion that the foundation model companies are going to capture way more value than people realize. I think it's a combination of operating systems plus cloud, which means this will be incredible businesses. Let me just make this point. If you think on the operating system level, there's Windows, there's Apple, there's Android by Google, there's Linux and Open Source, and these Companies, the value capture of Microsoft or Apple, it's not on the operating system, it's on all the applications that they control and built on top. And same with Android, but by control. I think the operating system are going to be the foundation models themselves. I think there's incredible kind of capex and development to get to the point where you are one of the top operating system that has eyeballs. But then I think the lock in and the value capture will be with the applications that are kind of verticalized on top of the. And I think there will be an additional moat which will be like the moat of cloud. Cloud has done a very poor job of the application lock in the way the operating systems did, but they've done a very good job of having a hardware moat and a capex moat. And I think these AI foundation model companies are going to have both. They're going to have a capex lock in moat and they're going to have the usage and application moat plus value and then it's the last thing I'll say on this. And if you look at Linux, Linux probably has five times as many installs as Windows but the value capture of Linux is like 1/100th of Microsoft. But Red Hat's still a big business. But Red Hat's still a great business. But I personally think this is where we're going to go with AI. The open source deep SEQ and all this stuff will be great and there'll be more open source models used in the world. I think the value capture will be lower by that than xai, OpenAI, anthropic, some Chinese income, et cetera. Get Josh Wolf on here. Let's go. Yeah, we got to do a whole deep dive on that. We'll see you back in la. See you. Peace guys. Let's bring in Josh Wolf and I got a post that we are live so much to dig into. 60 second question. Jordy, you, you, you hit him with the deepest possible question. Deepest possible question. I wanted to take more on on this idea of, you know, should we be investing in Chinese AI companies? Yes, yes, yes. Well, well, we have Josh Wolf, the man himself. Welcome to the streams. How you doing? Please. Awesome. We've been wanting to have you on for a while. Yeah, I've been wanting to be glad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad you can make it. I'm gonna disagree with everything that Sean said. Okay, perfect line by line, love shine by line. Yeah. He said AI is valuable. What, what, what about that? You're in front of a camera can you? Yeah, I think you're good right there. Yeah, yeah, you should be good there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. How's it going? Is this, is this, I, I, I'm wearing a tie. I love it. You're wearing a tie. You look sharp. Has it been exactly one year since you put on the suit and tie for Hill and Valley last year? Break down your, your first business trip to Washington because I feel like I've been coming to D.C. for a very long. I feel like you've been banging the, the public private partnership drum for a long time. Long time. And many of the companies, I feel like oftentimes I see a new fundraiser announcement from a new sort of hard tech company and I'm like, I feel like Josh invested in this exact company like six years ago or something like that. Sometimes that's the company and they raise a lot more money. We've been in this for a long time. I think we really started with a lot of intel community facing things. So most of that was with sort of software, maybe sensor sigint, data collection. That was a lot easier to work with. Then we started working with soft special operations, which basically had rapid fielding so they could deploy stuff. And it wasn't at the scale that you need to like win a big army contract. Sure. Started doing stuff in space with satellites. And then I would say, like really the first pure play, non quote unquote dual use thing, which was unapologetic, was first round of Vanderal. And I wish that there was some sophisticated analysis we did for that, but it really was me and Trey at Balthazar in New York. He's like, I'm gonna start this company with Palmer Lucky. I'm like, I'm in. I'm in. That's great. That was the diligence. How have you found, you know, you do a first round in Anderall and then you're like, okay, this category is going to be really important. You want to invest more. But then there's this issue where the Anderall of Anduroll is probably. Anduroll. Yeah, it is. And so have you had to hold back in a lot of, of instances where you're. There are venture funds and we compete with them and we partner with them that are sort of a little bit more polymers and they're doing lots of deals with lots of different people. We try to be really monogamous. And so there was one company in particular, I'll say it out loud, but it was DIVE Technologies. They came to pitch us and they Were doing subsea, which is complementary to our company Saildrone which is doing autonomous version on C. And I said, you know, I think you would really be better off as a part of a platform that has the muscle and the mechanisms to be able to win contracts and scale and manufacturing and think about this as part of a portfolio. And so at first I think they were a little bit hesitant, but then they ended up going to Anduril and I got to say I think it was like 60 or 90 days. We then won the big Ossock deal. And that to me is just like proof positive of high tech in the right platform, able to execute Matt Grimm credit and props to him. I mean he picked up his family, moved to Australia, set up this operation. 60 plus people, billion dollar plus contract like very, you know, but, but clear sign of winning. So we love that. But yes, it is harder, yeah to do something that is in a category as and oral expands because we really want and roll to just be, you know, is there a different type of underwriting that investors could be thinking about? Not necessarily. Hey, I'm trying to back the next and roll and I'm underwriting to a 1% chance of $100 billion outcome. Or is there a world where yes, we're building something that might get acquired or might go through an M and A process and is that even the, is that even the purview at that point you go back to Sequoia, Sequoia fund at Cisco, you know Cisco, yeah. Sequoia made a fortune selling company after company Cisco in the late 90s. Right. So, so if Anduril, you know, ends up being a 50, 80, 100, 200 billion dollar business, the ability for them to buy a bill a company for a billion is venture making for a lot of fun. So I think that the ecosystem is growing the right way that it should. Yeah, we will have a bubble in aerospace and defense. It will happen and it will happen in part because of capital formation, which is really interesting. So you got venture funds like us, that us and Sequoia and Founders and KP and Coastline, a handful of people that are doing these kinds of investments. Then you got dedicated specialist funds. Then you got fund of funds. And the fund of funds are interesting because you have a bunch of universities and endowments and hospitals that are like we won't invest in the defense category because we are not comfortable being part of a kill chain. We as a partnership are right, but they might not be. But we would invest in a fund of funds that is investing in A venture fund that is investing in a company. So you have this moral remove that is going to provoke more formation of capital. But there won't be enough companies in the first few years. So you're going to get a bubble. There's going to be a bunch of frauds, there's going to be a bunch of crashes and disasters. An argument against building like a dedicated defense tech fund. Have you ever done a segmented fund? I know a lot of big, big VC funds have. No, we, we, we have like a little opportunity fund for some of our best defense companies, but not a carve out. We are generalists. We like to have one pocket, one pool. You can do a hundred thousand dollar check, you $100 million check, that's great. And you can go sort of all sectors. But I don't think there's anything wrong with it. If somebody's a specialist and super passionate about it, go for it. Yeah, Jordy, what was your kind of DC playbook? What advice would you give to your portfolio? Maybe five years ago? And how is it different than today? You know, five years ago, I think you were working with a lot of lobbyists to try to get meetings on the Hill. You'd be lucky if you can get a senator. You were mostly getting congressmen or staffers with that. Today, I think everybody wants to be in the conversation because they don't want to be ignorant. You have a lot more alliances between red and blue, Republicans and Dems on things like shared adversaries. China. That's a question which everybody converged upon. So American competitiveness, thinking about the scientists, the engineering people, are going to debate some of the policy stuff. Should we be cutting science funding? Should we be partnering with South Korea or Japan or UK and these kinds of things. But everybody wants to be in the conversation. So your access today, as evidenced by this conference, I mean, what Jacob and Delian and Christian have done here is just really amazing because it started as this napkin sketch, it became a cool crowd. Now the crowd has become sort of a movement. But the caliber of the people that you're getting is both extraordinary. And the politicians sort of keep getting older, but the people that are doing, the tech companies that we're looking to fund keep getting younger. And I think that's a beautiful thing. Are you taking, would you say you're taking more, a lot more pitches today? I mean, I imagine in the halls here. No, no, no. Just in the context of, I know you guys have all, you know, been focused for a long time on like, you know, finding like Research that were developing things that could be commercialized. But I imagine just the scale of inbound as hard tech, manufacturing, defense tech, all these categories became hot and started to get heated. I'm assuming the number of pitches just gone through the roof. I mean the number of entrepreneurs and by the way, the best entrepreneurs frankly are the people that we backed at Anduril. And we've done two people that have vested and sort of with blessing have gone and left and started their own company. And so being able to find these fountains of talent that have seen success, have seen rapid scaling, have seen valuations, they understand the venture game, they can raise money, they can attract technologists, they can in license IP or develop it themselves. Those are the people that you can back time and time again. So I think we have a decade long run of amazing talent in this ecosystem that isn't going to be just Silicon Valley, right? It's going to be SoCal and it's going to be other parts of the US down in Texas and maybe even Florida. How do you think about. And by the way, sorry, international too. We did our first two ever Israel investments, both are defense companies. We did a company in Japan, company in the uk so we're interested in not just American defense also, but American allied defense totally. How do you think about VCs as a conduit to DC? It feels like potentially low hanging fruit for some sort of value add. A lot of VCs would say oh we'll help you find your first, you know, VP of engineering or we'll help you with some comms puzzle. But like almost like light lobbyist, just making some introductions to the senators and congresspeople that you might know. Is that a more modern form of value add that's coming out of venture funds these days? I think partners at firms like ours and others have relationships and they're authentic relationships and you spend time with these folks and you admire them. There's congressmen who I deeply admire and I think are the future leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, people like Richie Torres and Jake Auchincloss and then on the Senate side Young and Slotkin. I mean these are like real patriotic Americans that are smart and savvy, might have been in the CIA, might have been a Marine, but quite savvy. And they are tech savvy and they're young and they want to know these companies and they want a future donor base too in their own self interest, as Ben Franklin said. Would you persuade, Appeal to interest, not reason. But I think understanding that game and also understanding Tech moves at this crazy velocity that is hard to compete with. It's why tech wins, because they out compete, because they move faster. Government does not move that fast. And so you have to be a realist. Government is moving faster than it has in the past, particularly in defense. You look at this appropriation bill, this reconciliation bill, trillion dollars, 47 billion plus going to be going towards shipbuilding autonomous systems. That's going to be a big boon for Anduril, for Hadrian, for Varda, for Saildrone. How do you think about founders that are trying to time some of these broader structural changes? If you're in shipbuilding at all, the best time, if you want to take advantage of this new bill to start your company was maybe a decade ago because you're sort of ramped and you failed and you have a great team and you have some credibility. But how do you think, what's your advice to kind of early stage founders that are seeing the world change and trying to kind of navigate and see opportunities. An example being like I'm not convinced that every manufacturing automation company is going to do is the right time to start. It is now because we don't know the future is like murky. Right. A lot of these things are unfolding. How do you help founders kind of understand market timing when there's so much in flux? The honest answer, a lot of it is luck. I mean honestly I always say that there's a five year psychological bias that you want to be invested today where you should have been five years ago. Okay. But I'll just give you a few quick examples. You think about the people that were doing modular reactors. Oh yeah. Not a personal great believer. And I think it's great for society. We're not invested in them. I did a lot of nuclear, nuclear clean up. You agree with Sean on that? You guys, doesn't sound like I hope it happens more solar bowl or it's happening and it's getting cheaper. Like I'm not crap it on solar, but it's just, it's not super exciting. But, but, but I'm a huge nuclear bomb. You know, I've renamed it Elemental Energy. Yeah, but, but if you were developing modular reactors, you might be like okay, it's large baseload power, it's better than intermittency. But you weren't anticipating that there was going to be this data center buildup. Yep. Which is at least part of the narrative. Gigawatt scale. Correct. And whether or not that will actually see the light of day today they're able to Capitalize and draft off the hype of that. That's number one. They're thinking about bringing back Three Mile Island, Diablo Canyon, potentially. There's a lot of big opportunities for a large scale nuclear. You look at people that are doing minerals and mining, which is not a really sexy area. But suddenly you're thinking about supply chain geopolitical conflict with China. You're thinking about robots and magnets and things that have to go into materials general. My question is like if you're doing anything in mining or rare earths, obviously great. If you started a company three years ago and then you get to capture this momentum. But do you see potentially enough explosion of demand and new markets that you could still start something today? You can always start something today. But you got to remember that I think some of the best successes are not just execution. You follow this playbook, but it's luck. Fifteen years ago we started a high tech nuclear waste cleanup company to go after the defense nuclear waste from pre and post Cold War bomb making. All of a sudden, earthquake, tsunami, Fukushima disaster. We become the only US company picked for the cleanup to clean up this nuclear disaster. Right. That became a boon for this company. It was a total black swan for Japan. A negative one. A total positive black swan for this company today. Saildrone, autonomous fleets of boats. They started oceanographic research and all this kind of stuff, bright orange ships. The guy that's here, I don't know if you've seen him, Hondo Gertz, he's a big hulking guy. The two of us are together looks like the old poster of Schwarzenegger DeVito and he's like, you know, I got a big strategic idea for you. What if you paint these things gray? Yeah. Bright orange. And all of a sudden you open up to this defense market. But that wasn't in their founding thesis of we are going to make a fleet of autonomous systems FOR Task Force 59 in Bahrain and then expand to the rest of the world. What do you think? I mean, you mentioned some of the other countries that you're investing in. Japan, I think you mentioned Australia. What do you think the future of partnership between the United States and Middle east allies looks like? Huge. Explain. You know, we call this scitech diplomacy. We brought onto our team maybe six, seven years ago. Tony Thomas, T2, head of SOCOM. 90 people, 90 countries, 90,000, you know, all special operations. Incredible guy, great entree into aerospace, defense. Yep. A guy that was on the boards of one of our early intel companies that were focused on intelligence community. Was Brett McGurk. Brett just left the administration. He was in Bush White House, Obama White House, Trump White House. Left the Trump White House because he had put together the counter ISIS coalition. And when Trump surreptitiously sort of pulled out from Syria, he abandoned the Kurds and he had built that allied nation with the Kurds and said that allied force with the Kurds and said we're gonna supply you militarily. He then resigned, came back in for Biden. His capstone deal was the Gaza, Hamas, Israel hostage deal. John 20th left, joined us a few weeks later. Company Middle East. We met with MBS, we've met with Tanoon and Abz Abdul bin Zayed. I am so bullish about UAE. UAE is so ideologically righteous on being coexistence all three major religions. You know, the Abraham Accords, Major Sinai, Tech Forward, Cleveland Clinic, nyu, Johns Hopkins, the Guggenheim, the Louvre. Major cultural institutions. The Louvre. It's incredible. And they're building a super fast but they're building it thoughtfully and the ability to make a decision very quickly. High tech. You think about G42 and some of these other things. They've decided we're not going to cast our light with China, we're going with the us we're going to build data centers, we're going to partner with the US and it's going to be at like giga scale, hundreds of billions of dollars. Super bullish about uae, Saudi I think is next. Both for normalization with Israel. They want to be in the defense umbrella of the us. They are going to spend a lot of money on AI infrastructure and computer Falcon 9B. Huge. Yeah. So, so, so UAE, Bahrain, Saudi next I think in the region. But of course Israel, I mean it is a tech mecca. Many of those countries realize it's really far to fly to Silicon Valley, but if you can go to Israel, it's a big deal. Tel Aviv is right there short of flight. Our first two deals, like I said, defense focused. Hamut Al Maherador who ran Palantir in Israel, we backed her with Sean in a company called Kela. Oh great. So Lux and Sequoia teamed on that and just really bullish on the region. How do you think about how quickly information spreads? Today it feels like a category. A decade ago you'd have a category that could be under hyped for a long time. Now somebody enters a space, they release a video and suddenly a bunch of new people are pouring in. Where are you looking at this point? Just besides your own network for the next founder that you're going to fund. So I have this as a flaw in my personality, which is I want to know everything that everybody else is talking about. But then I need to understand what's the white space like Sherlock Holmes, what's the curious incident in the dog in the night, the thing that people, people aren't talking about. So I'll give you one because it's unsexy and I've talked about it publicly. Maintenance. Maintenance is the most boring thing you can think about. But here's the simple logic that I had. It wasn't reactive to a quarter or even a year. It was the basic idea that the cost of capital is going to rise if the cost of capital rises and you're not funding low interest rate stuffs. If you think about capex on a financial statement, you've got growth and you've got maintenance. Everybody's been funding growth. New data centers, new satellites, new military installations, new H vac systems, equipment, EVs, hospitals, everything. Yeah. Now if you're a CFO or you're a capital allocation committee or you're a board and you're like do we really need to spend another 100 or billion on that? Do we need another data center or can we maintain the stuff we have? So I think that there's going to be a demand shift from buy the new shit to how do we maintain the old shit? And that is going to be demand for preventative maintenance, early maintenance detection, robots that can go out into certain things and repair them. So all of that I think is going to be a big wave. That's the kind of thinking at LOCKS that we're thinking about orthogonally. Everybody else might be tacking here, but how do you find something? Start making some bets and then three, four, five years, everybody wants to be in that space. Yep, fantastic. Well, thanks so much for joining. Hey, come on the show again. Yeah, yeah, we'd love to go way deeper on a proper. So much to talk about. Thank you so much. And we're bringing in Delian Asprooha from Founders Fund, a co host and co creator, co founder of Hillen Valley Forum. Very excited to have him on the show for the what, seventh time. So let's bring him in. Jordi is posting, amplifying the stream, pumping it up, pump up the numbers. How we doing, Ben? Can we get a little review of the stream is up. The Internet's working. It was a fascinating. I'll give you a little inside baseball here. We brought in something called pop up WI fi to do this stream and it does not look like something that would normally get through security at the Capitol. It's locked, and only the TSA can unlock it. Capitol security police do not have the key that TSA has. And so it was very tricky to get in. They had to X ray a bunch. We couldn't get into this locked Pelican case that has a WI fi router and a bunch of cell phone like modems in there. But we got it through, and we are live streaming and we're very excited to have Delian coming in later. We also have Christian Garrett hopping on to break down the other third. Co founder of the Hill and Valley Forum, 2025. And Jordy is tagging madly. All of our guests getting us in to the timeline, promoting the stream. And we have. We have an absolutely stacked line lineup. We got Delian and Christian coming on, then Eric Lyman, Lulu should be coming on. A lot of repeat guests. Breaking down what's going on in D.C. today at Hill and Valley. And here he is, Delian. Welcome to the stream. TVPN Hillen Valley. Tvpn Hillen. Valley. Valley. Valley. Let's fucking go, baby. Welcome to the show. Let's go. How are you doing? Good. You know, made sure to arrive here on Monday. Got a little accustomed to the East Coast. Realized I haven't, you know, switched time zones in like three months. It's tricky. It's weirdly the most brutal time. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's rough. It's tough. But, you know, we started off the day strong. Yep. Hamas protesters from the Gecko. You know, you've made it as a contest. This is the first time you've been contested journalist. First time. Yeah. And she. That's when, you know, you really made it. If somebody is discovered disguising themselves as a journalist to sneak into your conference pretty crazy. And protest on behalf of terrorists. Yeah. What was Karp actually saying? Was he being particularly controversial? I think he said anything literally. He was like, you know, he was like, talking about his book and they were like, oh, you're killing Palestinians. Okay, okay. Yeah. But other than that, how's the reaction been? What have the most important messages been? Obviously, reindustrialization is the theme, but what else is popping up today? Yeah, I mean, I think what's cool is, like, this is a week where, you know, we talked about this in a couple of prior segments around the, you know, continuing resolution. So this week, the, you know, sort of big bill in Congress is the reconciliation. Yes. Transferring it from basically, you know, sort of leadership into now, you Know, sort of congressional language that actually goes. Gets appropriated to individual program offices. And so I think it's, like, a really fascinating week to have this conference because, you know, a significant portion of that bill was around shipbuilding. And then today we have panels on shipbuilding with some of the appropriators that are literally, by the way, on the other side. I've been bopping back and forth between Capitol Hill, briefing Congressman and Congress. And so it's just like, there's something magical about it where this stuff is happening on, like, the perfect, you know, sort of week. And then the other thing that's been fun is even for congressmen that weren't aware or not even attending the event, they've been like, so do you know what's going on? Like, I have, like, a lot more Silicon Valley tech companies on, like, my briefing calendar this week ever before. And I was like, well, sir, like, I'd like to describe to you about this thing called the Hill and Valley Forum. We'd love to have you this whole year. So, I don't know, it just feels like an institution. And then the, you know, other piece of feedback that's been fun is, like, congressmen have even said that, like, this is a place where they get far more casual time, and especially on a bipartisan basis. Like tonight's dinner, we have 17 Republicans. 17, 17 Democrats. Wow. And it's extremely bipartisan, and it's totally off the record, completely casual. If one person misses the dinner, somebody will write an article. Oh, it's left wing. It's right wing. Exactly. We got to be right down the middle. Sorry, you can't come in. We guarantee it's got to be equal on the $150 billion appropriation. Is that an update to what we talked about? I think the first or second time you were on the show where you said, hey, maybe there's not more money coming. Maybe it's not going to be a jump ball for a bunch of startups. Has this updated your thinking? Yeah, I mean, I think it was sort of, you know, the February bills were clearly like, a pause. Yeah. Look, we're not just going forward with what the prior administration did, and even though we're very late in the game on passing this year's budget, we're just going to pass a continuing resolution to put everything on pause, and then let's instead, you know, sort of set it from the top. So it's definitely, you know, sort of a step in the right direction. Obviously, you know, SecDef is talking about the first trillion dollar you know, sort of defense budget since we last chatted. Also, they pushed out the executive order on analyzing all the contracts and programs that are behind schedule and behind budget, you know, sort of, you know, looking at canceling those. So, yeah, I think generally trending, you know, sort of on the right direction. But I'll always continuously reiterate of just like, this doesn't mean that there needs to be, like, unbridled optimism. All of this is default going to Silicon Valley companies. Like, a significant amount of that reconciliation package has a bunch of line items that are currently only possibly to be served by traditional defense contractors. And like, the primes. And so, yeah, is there anything to read into when you see a really round number versus a very precise number? The round numbers are when leadership are doing it. The precise numbers is when the program office is actually saying, like, okay, is one more bullish than the other. If I see a. If I see a very precise number and I'm like, oh, that's definitely happening versus the round numbers. Just like, oh, they just threw something out and they're going to figure it out. Oh, yeah, the precise number is going to be more bullish on the reconciliation package is like, great. Yes. But it's leadership saying, like, there should be approximately 150, like, million dollars, you know, sort of sent towards, you know, sort of this package. And it's like, okay, but like, what is that really, really the right number? Like, it happens to be exactly $150 million. Exactly. It's like, what's necessary. So there'll be. Early in my career v. D.C. was like, oh, we had our whole team run like a dcf. We know. Exactly. And the value of your company came back at $100 million. And I was like, there's no way that you actually had a spreadsheet that spit out perfectly seven zeros or whatever. No way. Well, you know, according to leadership, it happens. It happens. It happens sometimes. How do you think about sort of forecasting government demand? One of the things that was top of mind this week was $500 million allocated for, like, autonomous systems broadly felt low for a lot of people when you compared it to other categories. Yet Sean McGuire's point was like, if you kind of just as long as that number is going to go up over time, maybe it's good and it's more efficient way to kind of deploy budget where. Because if you're like, when you spend $5 billion this year, it's going to be spent pretty poorly. But how do you think about kind of like forecasting Government demand and how should teams think about it? Yeah, I think you can sort of use the reconciliation package as you're sort of like combination of TAM and kegr, right? Yeah, it gives you a sense of like what the current TAM is, but they're clearly indicating also what the CAGR of that is going to be. And so I think in some ways for defense startups and startups in general, you know, to go back to like the Peter Thiel's zero to one to philosophy, you want to monopolize a small market first and then grow from there over time. And so in some ways, if they were forced to spend $5 billion in a single year, probably inefficiently, and probably zero chance that happens to be one provider, there's no way that any startup, no matter how great you are, is ready to spend $5 billion in a single year. So by default it's super disparate. There'd be a bunch of different players which you might not necessarily want. Fifteen shipbuilding players, like, you know, probably what's best for the country is like probably not one, probably not 15, but probably like three that are constantly competing against one another. Right. I think that's probably what happens. Like the launch provider world. Right. If you look at last week, they announced the latest phase of national security. Basically, you know, launch contracts and, you know, SpaceX and ULA one, as per sort of usual. But they did introduce stoke space and use of rock Lab. And so it's like, yeah, I think that's probably like an appropriate sized pool and the equivalent on like, you know, sort of shipbuilding. So I think you can think of it as a tam, but it's not guaranteed. Just like in any TAM in technology you're not necessarily immediately going to capture. It's like, you know, VARDA had equivalent, you know, areas where there was some language around nuclear weapons modernization, reentry testing, etc. Of you know, sort of budgets that were in that same sort of dollar range. But again, that's just like literally the first step of, okay, now that's going towards that program office. Now you have to start thinking about what do the contract look like, what are the actual missions that you're providing for them, the hardware that you're providing for them. But yeah, I think generally, you know, bull for defense tech that there's a whole set of, you know, sort of budgets now that in particular are very uniquely tech forward. Right. So if you look at like the concept of like unmanned fighter jets and unmanned service vessels, this reconciliation package is by far the Biggest budgets that you've ever seen for those types of activities. And obviously that is a particular area. There's some in there that's like ammunitions and like, you know, army barracks, like, you know, refurbishment and things like that. I'm not sure that, like, Androl is great at like army barracks refurbishment. Sure. But, like, I think they'll probably be pretty great at some of this, like, unmanned surface vessel type activity. And so it's really exciting to see, like, some of these tams be pretty big that are very clearly only servable by like, you know, this next generation of tech companies. Yeah, we got to get to Christian. So last question or we want to let Dallas get back to it? Yeah, just congratulations. Yeah, this is it. I said this is the highest density of absolute killers that I've. That I've, you know, set foot in in a long time. So I'm glad. After I saw your guys YC thing, I just like texted Coogan afterwards and I was like, this at Hill and Valley. It's gonna be sick. We pull it off here we are. Good to see you. We don't need any more part time podcasters. Let's bring in Christian Garrett from number one, Hill and Valley 137. How you doing? Let's break it down. How's the day going? What's the latest with you? Is that your third or fourth coffee or are you on tea now? Because you're losing your voice. I'm a tea guy. You're a tea guy. I'm half European. Okay. And any way that I can dig it, deli in by showing how strong Europeans are. I think one way I can do that is by drinking a lot of. And you're also wearing a European watch. Today we got the Cartier Santos. I can either deny anything that a lot of checks going on. It looks fantastic. How's the day so far? Is it a bit? I'm sure it's been awesome. Yeah, it's been awesome. I'm sure you've heard from folks all day. You'll hear from more from founders, investors, folks in office. I know you guys will have elected reps in and out over the next few days. And today the enthusiasm and excitement is really, really special. This is the fourth year and just to see how big it is is a testament to how much our ecosystem has changed. I talked about earlier, it was less than a decade, nine years ago that Palantir sued the army for commercial preference and violating Title 10 U.S. 2377. And today, Palantir is seen as one of the greatest partners. And the army particularly is seen as one of the greatest partners to Palantir and to our ecosystem. It's incredible. Apparently SpaceX sued as well and they use the same lawyers. It was Palantir. Yeah. So whoever that is, there's a lesson in that. Got a good business going. I know that the theme is re industrialization. What are the other conversations that are happening here? What are the other subtopics that people are digging into? Yeah, yeah. I think within that. Right. You can go all the way down the supply chain or value chain to, you know, rare earth elements and minerals. Sure. We just had a panel recently with, you know, James Latinski from MP Materials, R.A. scully from. From Lyrack. Talk about right place, right time with MP Materials. Right time. He's awesome. Crazy. He's awesome. When did that company start? Years ago. Right, Years ago. Oh, he's been around for decades. Decades. It's one of the oldest minds and they took it over. It's a great turnaround story. Oh, wow. One of our partners, Lower Carbon Capital and Clay must moderated that. Congressman Richard Torres is in that. That was incredible. We then went all the way up to, you know, we had a panel with, with Friedberg. Yeah. And Sean McGuire. Senator Todd Young on manufacturing, which we hit on everything. We actually talked about how energy and education are the key unlocks there. And then you go up to Defense. Right. And Andrew obviously has hit on this. And you'll see more talks from Sironic and others talking about the work that all these defense companies and the existing primes are doing to shore up our industrial capacity. So I think you've just seen the full gambit. I know Jensen hit on semiconductors as well. Yeah. Jensen's interesting because he's is a. I was asking this question of like, is he a customer of re industrialization or is he truly a re industrializer? Oh, he's both. And yeah. I think you see where Nvidia is going. Right. They're now selling full systems. Right. I mean they're moving. They move away from just a gpu. I mean, they're doing the networking, cooling. Yep. So if you extrapolate where that company is going. Yeah. And you look at where they are today. 100%. You're right. They're on both sides. Yeah. You can't really be a trillion dollar company with just, hey, we just designed some stuff and then let TSMC handle the rest. There's so much more about that company. Yeah. Fascinating. Jordy. Yeah. I'm interested more on who on the Hillside really gets it. Richie Torres, his name come up quite a bit. How many people like that does the Valley need in order to continue to be successful? Right, Because I feel like a big, a big part of what's exciting about this event is because it's bipartisan. It's not about this admin. Right. It's about the next 10 years, it's about the next 15 years, the next 20 years. And so how many people are we talk about this in Silicon Valley? It doesn't take that many great CEOs to transform an industry 100%. Sometimes just takes one, right? Yep. And so how many true allies do you think we need in and are those people today or are you hoping next year we get more? Well, I mean, one piece of that, which is more of a meta point, but I think it would be great for government to have its own version of founder mode. Right. We need to get back to that within government. Shyam Sankar talks a lot about this and how that's something that's been missing. And if you look historically, when we've had success, when we were really great at building, it was because we empowered individuals within government to own these programs and see them through. So I think no one knows the name of the person who's responsible, responsible for high speed rail. I mean, Sean Boys talks about Admiral Rickover, right. Is a great example of this person. Right. Like we need these people again. Now, I will say today, Congress, there's a lot of champions in Congress. A lot of people that get it. They provide support, they obviously draft policy, they provide cover. But what you really need more of are these kind of founders at the individual level, from the program officers to the folks running these departments. And so, you know, I think that will be a big unlock. And then circling back on your question, right, within Congress, you look at the folks here today, right? You have Senator Shaheen, you have Congressman Richie Torres, you have Congressman Gay Vamo, you have Senator Todd Young, and then you have House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking later. I mean, you really see across the board, both Democrats and Republicans, there are folks that understand the importance of this. And the last panel said this, this is as bipartisan as it gets. Like, we want to have critical mineral, rare earth, element dependence. We want to get rid of our dependency on China there. We want to have redundancy there and a strong supply chain. We want to have energy abundance. Right? And we want to have a strong deterrent strategy and a strong military. And so Democrats and Republicans align on that. And the tech industry is preaching something that is in and of itself aligning and unifying. And so I think that puts us in a very good spot to try to build bridges and be successful. Yeah. Can you. I know you work with a lot of later stage companies, but. But can you share some best practices for government relations lobbying that you're seeing tech companies get it right? What are they doing? Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting is, and I've talked a lot about this, Mark Andreessen has a lot of great stuff on this. You know, tech doesn't have a trade association, and that's actually a very good thing. So it is on the onus of individuals, founders, entrepreneurs, operators, the companies and the investors, I think as well, to spend time within government educating policymakers on various subjects where they're experts in. A lot of the work that you see here are from folks that do not sell to the government. Right. There's no revenue to be had here. Right. There's just educating and making sure that their industry is a recipient of good policy, good regulation, and good support. And I think that from the first part, I think the best thing is making sure you have these relationships with folks, they are willing to take the meetings. It's incredible. And so I think that would be the first step. Yep. I think the second is also figuring out, like, where's the highest leverage thing that you want to focus on. Like, you don't want to come here and just take meetings for the sake of meetings either. Right. You want to be focused on something very specific. You want to care about something very specific, and that makes it easier for folks to digest. And so I think that's the other piece is like figuring out where your business should be focused on, whether it's a potential contracting opportunity or something you want in a budget or whether it's just a specific policy or regulation that you care about. So I think it's like, first, go build relationships, go rely on your investors, go do this directly. Like that's the way to do it. And that's how our ecosystem system is going to do and always has done it. And then number two is figure out what the high leverage thing is. And quite frankly, don't go take the time in D.C. until you have that. Interesting. Okay, cool. Well, we'll let you get back. See you guys a bit later. Yeah, we'll see you later. And let's bring in Eric from Ramp. Welcome to the Stream. Let's hear for Eric Kleiman. Has your panel already happened or is it coming up? It happened this morning. It happened this morning. It was a ton of fun. We were locked into the the stream. Yeah. But give us the overview. Revoir was fired up. Yeah. Give us, give us the high level. What is the pitch and how did it go? It was fantastic. Look, I think for private companies, startups, whatever it is, for a lot of years, getting more from every dollar spent is just obvious. Right. You know, a dollar saved is not a dollar earned. The average American business has an eight and a half percent profit margin. So a dollar saved is 12 earned. Yep. You know, the government is thinking about this. Of course there's a lot of tax dollars in but the deficit is growing every year. And so whether it's Doge and the folks there or other parts of government, everyone is starting to think about how can we start to apply modern tools to drive savings. And in many ways RAMP is at the forefront of it. A lot of the payment systems that are used by the government from the treasury, which doesn't require at least in the past, who was sending the payment, why did we send it, what was the purpose? And had a stationary payment. Now that's starting to get put into on credit cards. They're still using old antiquated designs where you have one system for cards but your actual expense policy doesn't drive how these cards behave. And so there's people who are able to go and use cards for purposes that are not really advancing taxpayer interest. And so we talked about this both at a high level. So Senator Joni Ernst talked about how she's approaching it, how the Doge team's approaching this. And then Keith and I shared a little bit from the RAMP context how we. Is there a story that you're particularly drawing from of a more recent tech company selling into the government that's not in the defense tech? Obviously we all know the SpaceX Volunteer and Oral stories. But, but at a certain point Microsoft must have said hey, we're going to try and sell Windows into the government or we're going to try and sell Outlook or Excel into the government. But that's a long time ago. It's a huge company. Are there other companies that aren't maybe government first but have developed best in class government sales functions that you look to or as interesting anecdotes? Are there other case studies that you've heard about that are interesting? Is there anyone out there? Out there? It's, I mean I, I just think, I mean a couple things. I don't think people realize the scale of how large the US government is. Yeah. Between federal, state Local education. Yeah. One of the most mind blowing stats that I learned is 1 in 6Americans who work, work for the US government. It is huge. And I think at some scale, if you want to go and, and be a, you know, a scale technology provider, financial service provider, healthcare provider. Yeah, you're gonna work with the government. Yeah, of course. I just think so. And so one of the openers this morning was the Secretary of the Interior, Deb, who you know, he had started an accounting software amazing company called Great Plains. He sold it to Microsoft. I think Microsoft is a great example of it. Yeah, totally. Yeah. That's probably the best example that I can. Yeah, yeah. An interesting like, like they're one of the big tech companies that never really blinked in their support of the government for sure. When there was that era in 2015, 2014 where a lot of the tech companies were saying, hey, maybe we want to stay away from the US Government for a variety of reasons. So it's good to see that there's like a resurgence here in terms of like technically or not even technically, but just like the sales process. Is that wildly different than a normal sales process or is it somewhat like just selling to a Fortune 500 company? I look at it, not to interrupt, but I think the dynamic, if you're a scaled up fintech company and you plan to be in business in 50 years, like you said, you know, you're going to be working with the government at some point. So it's more about figuring out the right ways to do it early on and also not being understanding, always having urgency. Because I think that every American can get behind behind efficiency. Right. It became political over the last 90 days due to Doge and stuff like that. And like you said, one out of every six people works in some way for the government, then obviously that's going to get political. But when I look at it, it's just about how do you defense if you're dual use or you're primarily serving the private market or private companies, you can think, I feel like a lot more long term versus the defense tech companies that are here and they're like if I don't get their government this year, I'm done. And so I think having that, I'm sure that sort of long term thinking around partnership with the government has driven a lot of your decision making. Oh for sure. I mean, look, it's maybe a couple things. I mean first I actually just think there's like a very, I think some of the story of technology, I think about Steve Jobs, old Famous quote of a computer is almost like a bicycle for the mind. It allows you to go faster, do more, think at an accelerated rate, and ultimately achieve more. And so I think it's not. Well, it's great that people are trying to modernize defense. I think that there's a lot of people doing many types of great work. Department of Veteran affairs, departments of. Whether it's like, it's education, Interior. There's people doing important work. And I think one of the examples that often I think, just makes clear and connects with people is, you know, there are, I think, about a million folks serving in armed services, and they're doing expense reports, too. And you take, you know, some America's most courageous people who are serving, sacrificing a lot to do this, and then you say, you know what? I'm going to make you do hours of expense reports I had on a nuclear submarine for years. And I was like, what was that like? You know, he was like, a lot of paperwork, A lot of people. I was like, I can't believe you're. You're 30,000 leagues under the sea doing paperwork. But he was like, yeah, that was my. Don't get me wrong. Like, it's like important work. You should explain why. But it's like, actually, like, it would be great if a lot more of the work was to, you know, defending the country, going in the va, serving our veterans, whatever it may be. So I think that there's like a. A human and moral side to it, but to the other question you ask of working with the government. In some ways, this was all, like, pretty organic. I mean, there was a tweet put out, I think, in February that I think there was 4.7 million credit cards issued for. I think there's about half the number of federal employees and people who are running. Where are all these extra cards? So a lot of cards were turned off and end at the. At the time we reached out to someone who was a former customer, put us in touch. And so it's early. We're involved in the same process as everyone. And I think no matter who does it, I just think that the way I would almost describe it is people would find it ludicrous if our Air Force is flying with propeller planes and a jet age. And yet that's kind of what's happening with the tools we use to make expenses, do our accounting, make sure attestation is clear. These are old, disparate systems that I think private industry has adopted tools like ramp leading the forefront of it's integrated. Your expense policy drives it, you can buy it, does your expense report, your accounting. And so however it goes, I just think countries will be a lot better off using modern technology. Yeah. I mean the thing that I thought was fascinating is they couldn't actually turn extra cards fully off. It was a dollar limit which is like well and even speaking of that like you know, you'd think okay, let's go and turn a limit, you know, to zero or $1 or whatever. I've heard stories of individual people because of the way the portal was designed. Spent four days going one by one. Oh, they couldn't even run. It's not as because no one has done something like this but it's like when you look into these things that you think should be trivial are very hard when you hold systems like this. Yeah, amazing. Well, we'll let you go and we'll bring co founder to dig deeper into the bowels of the financial system. Oh my God. Welcome to the stream, Kareem. First time. First time. Good to have you. Welcome. Welcome. We get supplies. Yes, we do. So we. Yeah. So obviously we're talking about getting the entire government on ramp and then getting every country in the western world on, on ramp one at a time. I was talking to the Anduril guys about some of the integrations that they have to do into like these antiquated systems just to do communications because they want their drones to play into the modern systems. Have you started even digging into like what the technical standards are that are running? We've talked to folks about like the Swift system and you know, stablecoins but then there's also like the overnight payments thing. Like where do you even start with that? Is it a GPT query or do you start talking to people like how do you build your, your knowledge as a technical mind in how the government runs? Because I was telling Jordy I want to talk about the running the government on rant more just because like I don't think most people know how expense reports work in the government. Like I don't think it makes sense. So yeah. What was your journey to kind of digging into this is seeing like, like is it technically feasible? Yeah, yeah. I mean it was crazy. Even yesterday I was hearing a story of someone who spent three years with the government and filed an expense report on their first week and only got the check back after they left. So three year delay. It's kind of crazy. I mean think about in the, you're at a company and you file an expense report and the company Says, yeah, we're going to pay you back for this. Then you don't get it for three years. You would be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interest. But also it's just offensive. Right. It's not nice to an employee who's, you know, you know, to basically take, take their, their funds for such an egregious amount of time. So it's kind of crazy. It's basically companies and government in some cases using their employees as a bank. Yeah, that's kind of what a bank is supposed to do. Like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From the cash so they could do your business and eventually you pay them back. Yeah. And to your point, on the complexity of those systems, I mean one of the first thing I did when we started on Ramp is try to understand how ACH works. Totally. And it is absolutely mind blowing. Really boils down to very basic CSV files, Excel files almost that every single entity puts together constructs and at the end of the day they get shared through some system and there's some computer sitting somewhere that's reconciling these files together. That's why it takes so long to send money. It's like all these systems run in batch. Take a full day to get access to that, to get access to information and be able to reconcile it. And you got about eight of those. Right. You got one for bank to bank payments, you got some for. I mean really the way people used to file expenses is they used to submit their credit card statement that doesn't connect at all to the receipts that they have in their inbox and then you have to wait an extra day before you find out that you actually forgot to submit receipt that you wanted to submit for the restaurant that you were at. But I mean, I think if you connect these systems, obviously you can move a lot faster. Talking to people in the government, I don't think they even know what they're supposed to do. So a lot of them just end up either not filing expenses or they get a card with no controls and they're lucky if they have it and they share with their friends and who knows what the money's being spent on. But yeah, one step at a time. Do you know much about like the counterparty Obviously Palantir pioneered, like the forward deployed engineer, because Shyam Sankar was telling us the first time they sold Palantir for, on prem installation, the team on the other side, a software developer, tech person, IT person who worked for the government, installed Palantir on a box with like four gigs of ram and they needed 16 or something like that. And we've seen with Doge, folks like Luke Ferretor are going in. You could see Luke Ferretor in another world, like working at Ramp or working at Palantir or working at any of the high growth, very strong engineering culture companies. Do you think that there's a need for America's best and brightest to kind of do a tour of duty as maybe just an insane IMO level software developer in the government? Even if that takes away from your pipeline? I'm sure 100%, that would be great. I mean, this is a company that we all have a stake in. Yeah, the equivalent would be that. Yeah, that's a good point. We're all American, right. You get a equity stake and yeah, we do government like the government to run. Well, we all win. If we were operating more efficiently, we're making better decisions, we all pay less in taxes. Yeah, no, it's funny. Efficient spending, which, you know, Ramp is focused on non payroll spend. Right. And so payroll spend gets political really quickly. Right. We talked about this with Eric briefly, where, yeah, if you're on the government's payroll, you don't. Most people don't want to be off it. Right. Like they have a job, they've maybe been doing it a long time. But non payroll spend should be the least political thing ever. Right. It should be like we should spend as little as possible. And the dollars that we do spend should, every single one down to the penny should be spent efficiently. What are your other kind of reactions? How much are you spending time here at the event versus meetings around town? I mean, the event is taking another form this year, it seems it's a lot bigger than it used to be. And level of excitement is incredible. I think it's the first time that I felt that government is really trying hard to modernize, build bridges with companies in Silicon Valley, New York and other places. So I think people are on the same page that yes, we do need to spend less. We do need to introduce technology to help us. Look, with a lot of the advancements in AI, some of the problems that seem too intractable now you could just throw all your massive database into an LLM and you can wrangle it that way. So we got better tools now to, to do the work. A lot of people are excited about it, so we'll see what we can do. I mean, frankly, there are a lot of founders that are here thinking about very specific regulation or deregulation. Obviously, like nuclear energy is the biggest one that is very concrete, may speed up the time to get a new reactor design approved. Is there anything like that in finance? What is it? Give us some of the history. What's the good and what's the bad? I mean, it's everywhere. Like money transmitter, license. Sure. Is the most basic one today. To move money around, you need a license, but you not only need a license, an American license, you need a license in every single state, which is kind of crazy because they're all looking at the same things and making sure that you're abiding by the rules. And the rules are quite similar. But it's kind of crazy. I remember having to sit down in a room with Achora on our team, who helped us do a lot of that work, and there was a stack of. Of papers this thick. I just had to sign one at a time. No way. It's like, I read the first ones, like, I know what this is about. I read the second one. They're very similar. And at some point I'm just like, I'm already all in. Yeah. She was trapped in a room. There's a cup of coffee as a go sign. Yeah. How has it been when you look at sort of incumbent financial services companies? A lot of them have had, I imagine, a large presence in Washington for a long time. Yeah. You imagine RAMP ends up with a fairly big office here at some point. How do you look at that? I imagine you've been taking trips here. I know you've been coming to Helen Valley, but is this a place that you and the team expect to be a lot more? We'd love to. I mean, great. To put our best resources forward and try to help. But I honestly think about it the same way. I thought about a lot of the products that we build. I think it'd be a win if people spend as little time as possible in them. Yeah. And more of the work is being automated. I think part of the problem that you have in and around Washington right now is like, the incentives are so misaligned that you have incentives to like drag projects on. They cost massive amounts of money. Yeah. Any little change that you want to do is also like another massive bill. And like, our hope is to build great technology. And hopefully if we do that, if we do that well, we don't need massive sort of time and people investments to get them to work. Technology is just doing the job. I was talking to Eric too, that the thing that stands out to me is RAMP is playing in decades. And there's a lot of founders here that are like, if I don't get a program of record in the next two years. I'm done. And I think RAMP's position is being able to think long term. There's very pressing problems that we have right now. Spending being one of the biggest. But how do you kind of zoom out and be like, you know, in. In the fullness of time, I imagine RAMP and, and the government will have a, you know, very meaningful partnership. And, and it's about finding the kind of right ways to do it in the beginning without understanding that you have tens of thousands of. Of happy customers and you got to make sure that they're like, you know, continuing to get resources and attention, so. Well, that's fantastic. We'll let you get back to the. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. Come on again soon. We'll have ara the on. On probably next week at this point. Oh, yeah, great. The rotation and let's bring in Josh. You got a minute? Come on down. Josh Simon. Yes. Look at, look at that. Fantastic. Straight from 1A. What's up? Yeah, so st. We ended up on the same flight for those who didn't see. And Stymon spotted us because had a huge RAMP logo on. My jack is outstanding. It's fantastic. It's great to see you. Yeah, great to see you too. Where'd you get that, though? Oh, we made it. Yeah. This is a one of one right now. But we will be multiplying them soon. Our people will talk to your people. Yeah, we. Every guest will get one. That's the thing. People understand the LA street wear scene. Yes. Like, so far away from tech. Yes. You can get super high quality stuff very well. Totally, totally. I saw that and I was just, just like, perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So, yeah. How's the conference been? You're probably one of the few tech founders here with real DC experience. When did you first go to dc? When you first get into politics. Take me through your journey a little bit. Yeah. So I started my career doing expeditionary stuff as a military officer. So two tours in Iraq. Wow. One, my first tour I was at a unit down in Virginia. In Southern Virginia. Yeah. And then my second, I came up here to a, to a. To an intelligence agency here in DC. Yep. And honestly, it was 20, I think I showed up in like 2011 and it was like peak Obama. And as a military officer in dc, you kind of, you were definitely the help. Yeah. You know, you'd like, go out to a bar and like, girls would be like, oh, what do you do? Oh, you're not some like staff director on the Hill. Like, you know, thanks. Out of here. Yeah. But it worked out. You have a family now. It worked out. Someone liked you. Yeah, that's true. It's great. It's true. No, it's good. So did that. Got out. Went to Silicon Valley and then. Yeah. Got a phone call from an old boss after President Trump won election the first time during the transition. He's like, come help me out on transition, White House transition. And I came and just didn't leave. He asked me to stay. I was a National Security Council staffer in the White House for four years. Fantastic. What were the top. What were the top issues then? And how have they evolved? Yeah. So I think the biggest issue in the unclassified space was telecom technology. This is Huawei 5G. So 5G. So this was like one of the big issues that I owned for four years. So. Yeah. Think of it like if you were in the middle of the Cold War, to go to the Russians and be like, hey, can you build out the electrical grid? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, of course, my friend. We'll have the best electrical grid for you. That's a fantastic Russian. Don't worry. Yeah. And, you know, it's very clear that like. And there's. There's Wall Street Journal, journal articles about this. Yeah. Like the Chinese in Africa with Huawei, they just use it as a spying tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, why would we have those people build the American telecom infrastructure? Yeah. Why would we have them build the telecom infrastructure of our five eyes partner? Yeah. Like London, Australia, other places. So. Yeah, I think that was probably the biggest. And where do. Where do we stand today with 5G? I see a 5G icon on my phone sometimes. Is it real 5G or are we behind? So interesting you should say that. Yeah. You know, a bunch of the companies kind of race to brand 5G as, like, here. Yeah. When actually it wasn't quite there. Right, exactly. So I think a lot of that stuff's been rolled out, being rolled out. You know, the big challenge is that America's a big landmass. Yeah, yeah, totally. So I'm guessing we're probably mid rollout. You'd have to talk to. You guys should have Brandon Carr, the fcc. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I met him. I met a few times. Yeah, that'd be great. He's great. Yeah. So he'd be able to tell you, like, what percentage if you put a gun on my head and you're like. Yeah, take a guess. I'd say, like, 65% sure. Because it's race. Yeah. So the themes re industrialization, but in terms of what you do. Yeah. What are the more interesting sub themes going on? I'm sure you're excited about reshoring manufacturing, but there's other stuff. Top of mind. Yeah. Spain. Power. Power outage and explosion of Northrop Grumman missile manufacturing and testing facility in the past week. Okay. So, like, there's this. Oh, yeah, you think that was an attack? So here's the thing. Do I think it's an attack? I'd say it's like we got a tinfoil hat. Get the tinfoil hat. Here's the problem. Yeah. No, I. You look at the top five. Like, you. You list out, like, the top 10 facilities that the United States and our allies use to manufacture weapons. Half of them have had catastrophic events in the past two years. So I don't know, does that seem like a coincidence to you? In the military, we used to say once is a tragedy, twice is a coincidence. Yeah. Three times is enemy action. So, like, the number's big. And yeah, they're like, oh, these things go boom. Let me tell you, it is 10 plus years old. Unclassified. You have cyber actors going out and modifying safety systems to tell operators that things are operating within the right parameters so that they blow up. Well, it's well established that Western, you know, groups have. Have tried to meddle with Iran's uranium enrichment. Exactly. Why would they. Why would the adversaries not want to do the same thing back? It's just, this is what. This is what warfare looks like. And the fact that we don't know, and I'm not saying it is or it isn't. Yeah. What I will say is every single person out there building these types of facilities today or running them now, like, needs to have the capacity to monitor them 24 7. Otherwise you're not going to know. And so it's like, what are you actually building for? Like, you're building so that on the day that things actually kick off, you'll finally figure out if you build a defense company or not, if it survives. I want to talk a little bit more about the shape of your business today. I embarrassed myself. As a podcaster, you know, we try to be experts in everything, but I completely botched the understanding of your company. And so how much of it is consulting driven? How much of it is. Is product driven? How much of it is sbir program of record? The stuff we hear in defense tech. Give us a rundown of where you are Today and where you want to go. Zero consulting, zero government, 100% private sector. Interesting. It's a SaaS offering. We come in and protect an industrial facility against cyber attacks. So we do that by installing sensors in the facility and then we've got a software layer that's collecting essentially anything that generates data. Got it. These things are already generating data on like a big. Like, you're looking for patterns, right? We're looking for patterns. We're looking for the absence of certain things. We're seeing like, hey, what process is running in this place? Yeah. What's talking to what? Yep. And we're basically the first company to actually take every single thing that's generating data on an industrial infrastructure and take that information and look for threats. Yeah. We talked to the founder of Chain Guard looking at maybe supply chain attacks. Yeah. Yeah. Is that something that's completely complementary or in some ways competitive? Oh, yeah. We're trying to, to do a deal with them. Right. Okay, cool. Yeah, we're live, by the way. But. But we'd love to see it. We love, we love companies working together. My co founders meeting with them, like right now. Fantastic. So, hey guys. Switching. Switching gears a little bit. Yeah. How important is it that Hill and Valley is bipartisan? That's been something that, you know, we're, we're Delian and. And Chris Shannon, your feed typically isn't really bipartisan. No. But. But in the context of if you're a serious technology company and you want to be around crushing it the next four years and the four years after that and then the 10 years after that. Right, Totally. Right. I feel like. And you, I'm sure, got to experience the sort of back and forth nature of Washington, but when it comes to, you know, talk about how you think Hill and Valley can kind of evolve from here, from your perspective as somebody spent so much time in Washington. Yeah. Here's the reality is that obviously, like I spent four years, first day to last day in the Trump, in the first Trump admin and was never gonna be befriended by people on the left just because of that. They didn't have to know me. All they had to know was that piece of information. And like, I was just never gonna have an opportunity to even talk to them. Sure. I do have friends. I wouldn't dare mention who they are that are on the other side of the aisle. I wouldn't want to, you know, I wouldn't want to put them in a, in a, in a spot. Crosshairs. Yeah, exactly. But like, there's good People on both sides. Yeah. And I've done a lot of good work with folks in the Democrat Party. And so I think that you want to find people that want to solve the problem that you're solving, and that can be any number of reasons. It's because you're going to put a factory in their district. It's because they care about an issue, because they're on a subcommittee. And like you hope. And I would encourage folks to just look for those folks. They'll be on both sides. Obviously, you know, part of it is just like the brand that I've built coming out of the place that I came. I was, you know, I'm talking to folks that I know, and that's what my feed looks like for that reason. Yep. But, yeah, I mean, it's. Part of it is just that's, you know, that's how I've. Yeah, you. I mean, you mentioned you're entirely B2B. No B2G yet. Or are we properly resourced on the cyber security government? Huge fight. Because, you know, we know about Palantir, we know about some. I mean, Microsoft sells to the government, but is there a cybersecurity champion that sells to the government right now? Who should we be looking to? Yeah, not really. I mean, some of the solutions in the space are okay. They're not great. You buy them and then you have to, like, put a bunch of people on top of them. Sure, sure, sure. But, yeah, look, we're in some talks with some interesting folks. I'm hoping that we'll be able to announce something soon with some of the folks here in this space about building circumstances, secure facilities, secure factories. And I just think that that's probably the most critical thing for us to think about from a security perspective, because I want us to be able to sustain operations on day one or day two or day 10 or day 50 of a conflict, because that's going to make it more likely that we're going to be able to stay in the fight and win. And if we can't, it's a huge problem. Yep, Yep, that makes sense. Well, should we let him know the question? It's fantastic. Thanks for jumping on. See you back at the floor. Yeah. Bill, come on, give us an update. You haven't been on the show in weeks. It's been far too long. We got Phil from Dirac in studio in the temple of technology in the capital of Great. Great tie, by the way. Is that a unicorn? I thought it was a unicorn. Actually, it is. Moogle Conquerors I was recently in London. Okay. Took a trip down Savile Row, walked into Drake's and said, you know what that six of six, you know. Yes. Only six made, Ty. You got to have one. You have. One of. You got to meet the other five guys who wear the same tie. So true. Let's get a group check. Let's get a group photo, you know, Patrick Bateman style, you know, let's see Bateman's card. Yep. Popular in the 90s. I'm thinking we're going to be bringing back ties. I love it. We've talked about your business before. It feels like mostly B2B, selling into defense tech companies, selling into hard tech companies. What is top of mind for you here? Obviously it's a great event, good to meet people. But is there, is there a particular agenda item that you think is important to highlight at Hillen Valley this year? Absolutely. So, yes, we sell into Airspace and Defense, Automotive, ag, Construction, Maritime. Recently to be announced soon, but closed a maritime deal which is very exciting. Congratulations. There is a very, very critical lack of discussion around the American worker. Sure. You know, we. The average age of the American manufacturer is 55. Next five, 10 years. We're losing a lot of those folks. And with that critical tribal knowledge. Yes. That without writing down, institutionalizing, capturing in some way, we are going to see an immense loss of our ability as a nation to produce. Yes. And so they're. You know, I've said this before, I'll say it again. You know, we have spent billions of dollars on environmental conservation. We have spent zero dollars on tribal knowledge. Conservation of the country. Country. This is something I'm advocating for from a policy perspective. You have a hot take on AI not disrupting your business or not really disrupting the. I guess like the American worker. Can you unpack that a little bit and take me through how you see AI changing the way we design and manufacture things in America. So a little bit of a complex perspective, I guess, when you look at what LLMs are useful for, generally. Right. People will throw them at generative tasks. But when you look at what LLMs have been trained on, it's more broadly like the Internet, the Internet full of forums and all of this context. And context is key. Right. And what you do not have in those LLMs is the context of what you need made, the specs of it and how to actually do it. Because kind of like what I mentioned earlier, it's tribal knowledge. And by that virtue it means it wasn't written down anywhere. And even if you like Even if it was written down, your scan is probably private. It's not just out on the Internet. Not crawl like some sort of private database. Interesting. Exactly. And so while LLMs are useful as a technology, you need to put them in a position to aggregate, contextualize and then leverage critical information that is not, you know, in A LLM that OpenAI might have been able to train on. So, you know, I think if you were ever going to see AI actually disrupt manufacturing, you're going to have it. You're going to have to have a way to embed it within the workflow and infrastructure of an existing manufacturing facility and make sure that you are able to well integrate it into the flow of folks who are not super tech savvy. Where are you bullish in terms of AI and manufacturing? I can imagine we've seen those reports that like, oh, I, I emailed a Chinese manufacturer, a European manufacturer and an American manufacturer and the Americans and the Europeans didn't even get back to me for a week. That feels like at the very least you could just have a chatbot that takes your order and gives you some data. That specific problem is the problem of quoting complex, not really AI. LLMy people have been doing quoting software for a while. Yeah, it's really computational geometry intensive, generally pretty complex. And so companies like, you know, Paperless Parts will or Xometry will like help you with this. What we're describing there isn't really like an AI problem. It's a like work culture problem generally. Like we as Americans work very, very hard. Yeah, but the, the Chinese have the underdog mentality. They've been hungry for 30 years. They've been on the come up. You know, we, what we're running into is that 1991 was a 1776 moment for China, you know, for you know, what specifically 19 momentum. So basically for 50, 60 years from 1945 to 1991, we were in the Cold War. Right. And so we have this, you know, global battle of, you know, the west versus communism. But is 91 different than 89? Follow the Berlin Wall. Why 91? I say 91 generally either one is just sort of like that marker of what basically said the west is one global American hegemony has won. You know, we can sort of like rest in our laurels. Yeah, very similar to the beginning of the Clinton era. Yeah, exactly. You know, NAFTA and all that stuff. We basically said let's pick a couple of nations to offshore our production to globalism is going to win. Let's pick China Japan, Korea, offshore oil production, you know, fund all that infrastructure and then, you know, just trust they'll have our best interest in mind. Very much like this industrial colonialism, like our own version of it. So if you look at historically, you know, you had the global power do that, set up colonies and then get very, you know, comfortable and think, you know, it's the end of history, we've won. What's happening with China is exactly what happened in 1776 now where we, you know, have basically seen China say, say, you know what, you know, Japan and Korea, you want to play with the U.S. fine. You know, just like Australia and Canada, you know, pay ties to the vassal state or to the mothership, fine. Right. But China is now saying, you know what, we're not going to play ball. We are going to go, you know, 1776, we are on the come up. And so there's that underdog mentality of one generation, two generations of 30 years of that baked into the culture of the Chinese manufacturer. That's what we're fighting against. Talk about, do you think there's enough conversation at Hill and Valley around just labor in general? Because I imagine like part of your thinking is like, who's going to be using my product in 20 years? Right. Like that's a big question. And it's one that's interesting because it actually does feel like there's less direct ways for private companies to develop the next labor force for manufacturing. Right. It's like, yeah, individual companies can train people. Yep. You can try to, you know, poach people from legacy firms. But it does feel like an area that the government can have a tremendous impact. Are you hearing conversation so far throughout the event on that or should? Certainly a little bit, but I would like to see more. A lot of technology brings the top up. And so you see this distribution of technology at manufacturing companies, this is always been the case. And so the companies with the most money, all the enterprises, the Lockheed's, the Toyotas, the Fords, you know, all the big guys can just dump money on the fanciest, schmanciest, you know, AI LM stuff. But the key to saving the American industrial base isn't just making the top most, you know, wealthy companies have more and more advanced technologies and having like a 99%, 1% split of that distribution technology, it's bringing the bottom up. And so when you talk about like the labor base, what I'm starting to hear folks get is, you know, this is something that I deeply agree with. We don't want cheap labor, like we don't want Bugman cheap labor, we want smart labor. So that's why tools like us, tools like a bunch of other things out there, are geared towards saying, hey, we are not just going to radically improve quality of life for the modern manufacturer. We're going to build something that makes people want to go into this job because of how cool and modern it is. People love building software engineers love building tools for other software engineers. And there's this flywheel effect and positively reinforcing feedback loop of cool tool, cool tool, cool tool. When you start doing that for production, you end up having younger folks saying, that looks super cool. SpaceX has all these cool tools. That sounds awesome. Let me go work in that facility. And so government. Yeah, SpaceX is actually an interesting example because didn't. Didn't their, their warehouse management system like spin out as its independent company or something? No, not exactly. It is, people have, it is like very, very common for like somebody to work in this like thousand plus software engineering org. They have this internal software they call Warp speed. Okay. Warp Speed. Warp Drive. Y sure. It is, you know, fairly sophisticated. And you'll often have like somebody who was at SpaceX fairly early on that team say, like, I'm gonna do this and productionize it. And then they like, there's been like five. Yeah, there's been a couple of this. Okay, they're fine. But you know, yeah. Anyway, Jordy, any other questions? No, this has been great, friends. Thank you so much for stopping by. If Aaron's out there, you want to send him in? I think I just saw him. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah, grab him because I think he was hanging out for a little bit and we got to bring him on. We got four more people, maybe five more people on the guest list. Ben is sweating. He needs a bathroom break. Should we take five? Can we go to, can we go to a break? We are going to take a five minute break, folks. Thank you for watching. Five minute break right back. Have a good one. We're live. Gbpn. We just took a quick break. Got another coffee. We are in the capital of America today. This, this room is the capital of the Capitol today. That's right. Today. That's right. It's the center and we're here with Aaron. Been on the show before. Great to have you in person. Camera was a little shakier last time, so I don't know. Yeah, you were walking around your factory. Shake the camera a little bit as you walk around the floor to simulate what it's like to Be in the trenches. Yeah, there we go. Just so everyone's familiar, big moment, Big moment for you. You've been banging the re industrial. It's the theme of the entire event. Why don't we start with your reaction to Jensen's speech earlier on high level AI, but then AI factories and how you're thinking about that. I mean it's amazing, right? Like he's obviously like, oh, you gotta do a little holding. All right. Close as possible. Okay, there we go. No, it's amazing, right? You have the most powerful man in AI sitting up there talking about bringing American manufacturing back and the role of AI converting electricity to now tokens for everything. It's a really phenomenal way to kind of wrap the story, I think, and converting that into real outcomes, no matter what the industry is, with the focus on obviously manufacturing. Right. And yet you've often said that AI is not a one shot solution for manufacturing. Break that down. So, all right. Yeah. When people get a chance to go through the transcript, watch him talk or whatever, there are key things that he kind of mentions you can pick up on. We can do this stuff in anything that has to do with text and images Today you might not want to diagnose a disease because there's no room for error there. Manufacturing. And like all of his talking about getting to physics faster. This is kind of like how we do these things eventually, right? It's a matter of computing accurate real time physics for something, not just a bottle falling. But if I'm trying to design a mold for mass production, I need that thing to be 5 micron tolerant or better. And right now there's no way to do that with current architectures and models and stuff like that. This is why not black pilled on it, but like the horizon is longer. Yeah. So a lot of work to do. Can you talk a little bit about some of the work you're doing with Re industrialize? Yeah. So last year, you know, incredible show of force from this community. Right. Like it grew from like. Wait, was last year the first year? Yeah, yeah. Because it grew from like an idea to like a massive, massive conference. Give me the stats, break it down. So last year we had about like 4,000 RSVPs and like 800 attended. Wow, that's a lot. And yeah, I mean it snowballed from like I wrote that techno industrial manifesto. We threw together like two and a half months. Yeah. And it was crazy. It just all came together magically. But you know, it was obviously. And so going back to Detroit for this one or D.C. yeah. So we're going to be back in Detroit. We have an amazing benefactor who, you know, was pretty impressed, I guess, by the first one. That's great. And they're giving us a brand new skyscraper that they just built. Fantastic. It has a beautiful. I'd hit the size gong for that beautiful, beautiful convention center attached to it. And yeah, it's gonna be. It's gonna be wild. It'll be very, very high quality. More than 800 this time. What does it take to get off the guest list then? That's hard. Just DM me. Okay. Yeah. But yeah, it'll probably be around the same. And is it a similar Hill and Valley mix? Founders, politicians, or are there other folks? Is this a place where someone could go and just find a job or. Yeah. Talent, everyone. Everything in between. This, this is like a. It's, you know, it's a good champagne problem to have because you want all these different facets from everywhere to be there. But at the same time, I think ultimately what we're going to struggle with and need to refine over the years when we do this is we want high quality decision makers there. Right. Because like the whole community has to move forward somehow. So that might just be day one eventually. And then day two, we can kind of go into startups and maybe a trade show kind of thing like that. So it's all in motion. Very cool. We'll take all the feedback and when is it? How can people learn more? Give us the plug. Is there a TVPN coupon code yet? If not, can we get one set up? Yes, we will have a TVPN coupon. Thank you. I want to kick back on Every sale. Gulf Stream 50. Gulf Stream will be. Yeah, yeah, just send the jet. That's all. Yeah. All right. July 16th. July 16th. Yeah, we're super, super excited for Re Industrialize. Yeah, we'll be out. Yeah. How? How, Where? Where do you think? Where do you. What do you think people are missing this week? Around re industrialized. When you look at kind of like the guest lineup and everything like that, are there areas we were talking to, Phil, One area that I kind of identified as something that doesn't feel like it's a huge part of the conversation is labor. Right. It's like, who's going to. Even if we're building automated factories, we still need to upskill just due to how many people within manufacturing are retiring. Education technology has always been hard. It's insane. Right, because in Jensen's talk, right, he was talking about trades, elevating trades if we want to be able to accelerate these things faster. Just because the gap has grown so large and we don't have. Have time. Yeah, we don't have another 20 years to teach these people. Right. So yeah, that's kind of like where my company comes in. Right. Like we're trying to encode tribal tradecraft into technology and then maybe it doesn't take you 20 years to learn how to make a mold anymore. Right. It takes like a year. So yeah. How much they've taken people, you know, forklift operator, and pretty soon he's like just cncing stuff. It's cool. So yeah. How can you. Can you break down. I'll give you an example I saw somebody take. They were working on their irrigation in their backyard, seemingly the very complicated system that like one person had kind of designed a long time ago. They were able to take a picture of it, plug it into Grok or 4O, and the model was able to spit out like a completely on point analysis of the situation. Aaron's about to put you in the truth zone thinks it's impossible. And so is that clearly for a simple consumer application, it works. Are we gonna see that in manufact manufacturing in the same way where an individual might not have that? You're talking about ingraining tribal manufacturing knowledge into AI. How bullish are you on that or what's the timeline? So again, just go back to the mental model of how much precision and accuracy do you need to accomplish the end task? So in manufacturing there's some room for error depending on the process. So ultimately I'm like, I'm super bullish on this, right? Yeah. But factories have to be rebuilt literally from the ground up with a software nervous system. Right. And AI will play a huge part. Not in just the SGA kind of stuff. Right. Like doing invoicing or whatever. Get rid of that. The actual skill encoding is the thing that becomes this like weird physics driven deterministic model. Like if you need to engineer something that's a. That's a really out of distribution problem. Yeah, Right. Like you need to understand the physics behind it. I mean like, does a tradesperson. No, but like they sit there and do it for 20 years, they've done it 10,000 times. So like their brain is a physics simulator. So it's just like how close are we getting there? You know, with like each task as it gets more and more refined and like accurate, I think. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, we'll let you get back to it. Thanks so much for stopping by. Thank you very excited for re industrialize and yeah, good luck. Good work on being ahead of a massive wave for sure. Thank you, bro. Awesome. Well, we have Sampriti coming on from Navia. Aaron, would you mind grabbing her? Navia? We're talking boats, talking maritime roboticist. She was formerly at NASA and she also was working on subcritical nuclear reactors at Fermilab. And fun fact, I filmed a two person podcast with Jason Carmen where Jason Carmen was on one of your boats. Welcome. Sit down, sit down. Welcome. Here you go. Great to have you. I'd love to start. I was just reading off your bio. Absolutely. Cracked MIT Mechanical Engineering, PhD. You're screwed in. So you're as close as possible. Yeah. And you can grab the microphone. It's a little bit heavy, but you can hold it. Okay. Great to have you on. How's your hill and valley been so far? It's been great. It's really incredible. People since the first one. This is my first one. Yeah. Are you hoping to be a beneficiary of all the momentum around shipbuilding broadly, or is this more just about meeting folks in Silicon Valley and the Hill as well? I think this is an incredible time to build hard things. I mean something that I feel like for years people were holding back and suddenly you see the momentum everywhere and you feel it here. They've done an incredible think. I've been in any conference where you're seeing builders, policymakers, everyone coming together and just saying, let's build, let's do it now. And it's awesome to see that energy. Speaking of building, can you describe exactly what you're building, what design trade offs you made that put your product standing out from the pack. All right, so the foundation behind building Navier is building next generation maritime vessels. And, and when we are thinking of next generation marine vessels, you have to think about why suddenly now, right? So America is number 11 in maritime and very small number of vessels. China is putting out thousands of them. So the goal is just not to think about, okay, how do we outnumber China? To really win, you have to out innovate China. So that means when you think of building marine vessels, what does out innovating mean? Means that how do you build vessels that are just not a little bit better, but a step function better? What that means is not just automation, software and all that. How do you reduce per unit mile? Right. Per unit payload, cost of moving things on water. The world moves. The whole world. Right. It moves on the turret of what is the cost and speed at which goods and People move. If you tap into that economy, if you tap into that problem, suddenly you're controlling how the world economy moves. That's a trillion dollar market. And functionally, in terms of the actual design of the vehicle, is it a hydrofoil? That. It's an electric hydrofoil. Electric hydrofoil, yes. I mean the one that is out in the market is electric vehicles build more than just. Yeah, yes, yeah. So yeah. What were some of the design trade offs? What are the specs and how do you pitch that to the eventual customer? Who is the customer? Well, so the focus, as I say, is to build a maritime company. When I started this company, we were amidst Covid actually. Right. And you know, no VC was interested in maritime and there was no excitement around it. I'm just going around and saying I'm going to go to maritime segment. That's not venture backable. And then the first application, when you think about goods and people and you're thinking electric, the first application is moving people in coastal cities. I mean that's a good demonstration of the use case operational efficiency and cost. Right. But it's Covid. So everybody is like working from home, traveling. Yeah. And no VC would believe that people will ever take a ride and go to work. But people have commuted the across across the bay for years. Yeah. But suddenly people thought that no one again, remote work is forever. Right? Sure, sure, sure. So to do that. But for me it was important. Let's get the tech out and let's get money to get the tech out. So what we did is that, well, you know what the first problem we had? Water doesn't have a brand. Let's build something that gives that awe inspiring magic, you know, that emotion and put it out in the water like you feel when you see a rocket. So that's why we started with like this super cool, Sexy High Tech Navier 30 N30 Pioneer Edition. And the initial customers who backed us are like, you know, tech entrepreneurs and whatnot. I mean they bought recreational boat buyers bought these boats. Then we also had like, you know, hospitality and so on. But now we have, you know, the recreational part is a small segment. Our major customers are defense and commercial. So we work with our patrol systems. Our technology is with US Navy vessels right now. How does the DoD think about maritime kind of fuel sources long term? Are EVs a part of how they're thinking or is it more traditional sort of fuel sources? It all depends on your use case. Right. So ev, when you make it all electric boat, it has certain use cases. So when you're thinking of low, low heat signature, sudden kind of like noise. And there are certain applications where you're looking at electric, all electric application. But the other ones that you're really looking, I mean, what is the process of a hydrofoiling boat, right? Forget electric or gas. Like compared to a conventional plowing hull, you are taking out the hydrodynamic drag. As a result, you're getting like three times longer the range. When you're thinking of long range aerial platform. So you're putting your payload that you don't want to be like bouncing around. You want a steady platform. So so far you would need like large platform gimbals and whatnot. Right? Yeah. So that's for payload but also for crew. Because crew, you know, CTB crew transfer vessels. People can get injured when you're always slamming against them. Yeah, makes sense. They're kind of. Last question or should we move on to Jared? I know he's waiting out there. No, I'm just curious how like talk about the react. You know, what it's like being in Washington, you know, today versus even a couple years ago. I imagine the response has just been completely different in so many ways. It feels like, you know, you know, every. The ocean is becoming. I think in a year it'll be overheated. Right now it seems like it's getting the right amount of investment, but it's 70% of the world and I hope there are more and more maritime company. I mean we need to build and I mean it's a huge economy. I mean people are all of this talks about jobs getting taken over and we want our jobs. And I'm thinking, wow, we are going to unlock a whole new kind of economic opportunity. I mean there will be so much jobs, so many things that will spin out and the secondary effects of it. That to me is exciting. I mean there's a whole industrial revolution that will happen around maritime and I think it's awesome to be a part of it. Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you. We have to record a stream from the boat. Yeah, yeah. Jason already filmed on one. It was extremely cinematic. Yeah, we can be nice and stable. Yeah, no, it actually was really stable. He was on the phone and we recorded the whole thing. It was amazing. We did 20 degrees banking turn and the champagne doesn't spill. That's amazing. If you, if you don't mind, can you grab Jared? He's out there in the. The suit with the Marboro pin, I think. But yes, Fantastic. Jared welcome to the stream. Look at that. Normally in a racing jacket, but you look fantastic. He dressed up first time since last Hill and Valley. Or you throw on the suit every once in a while. I, I, I wore tux at the inauguration. Okay. That's about it. That's great. There we go. Well, what's top of mind for you? I want to hear about stablecoin. I want to hear about the stuff that's less about re industrialization, manufacturing, maybe more on the crypto side. What is, what's most interesting to you today? Yeah. So the crypto industry obviously showed out extremely heavy for. Extremely heavy for the, you can hold it for the incoming. Yeah. The current administration, so. Yes, effectively. Yeah. And like $250 million donated. Like lots of crazy stuff, but also lots of reasonable stuff. Yep. So since the. And we effectively have a few pieces of legislation that is going to be delivered. Yeah. So there's currently two stable coin bills. One in the Congress and one in the Senate. One in the House. One in the Senate. Yep. One is called stable. That's the one in the House. And Genius is the one in the Senate. Genius. So the main difference between the two. Yes. Appears to be the treatment of non US Issuers. Okay. Now there's only one significant non US issuer. Is that Binance? It's tether. Tether. Okay. Yeah. So, so Tether has roughly got. God. I'm gonna butcher the number, but it's over 150 billion issued. Yeah. Circle is number two. Isn't it the most profitable on a per employee basis? Something like that, Yeah. I mean, I don't know how many people work on the medallion fund at rentech, but. Yeah. Like this has got to be it. Yeah. They claim they've made over $20 billion in profit over the past two years. Wow. It's an absolute monster of a company. It's crazy. You can make, I mean, medallion fund makes sense because they're doing such complex stuff, but stablecoins seems simple to me. I don't know, maybe I'm underselling them. I need to talk to you. If you're someone in a country like Nigeria. Yeah. You have double digit inflation rates. Yeah. Yeah. Your country desperately does not want you to be able to access US capital markets or even like things to hedge against inflation. You want dollars? Yep. And so the demand for dollars has been so strong that, you know, people all over the world go through a bunch of extremely complicated UI processes. You know, they use a bunch of these. Swapping. Yeah. Who would possibly do this? Not an American consumer. Well, it doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah. And it's like most stablecoins from tether issued on a blockchain called Tron. Okay. Because people here have probably never heard of Tron. Yeah. So it's a very international user base. The pull of the market. You know, we talk about product market. The product market fit of stablecoins is so insane. And the fact that there's a debate between, you know, the sections of the House on should we write legislation that potentially kneecaps the one group that is doing the most to export the dollar abroad I think is extremely interesting. Yes, interesting, interesting. And this is on the heels of, you know, Circle's trying to IPO right now. Yep. Yeah, we saw that prospectus. So compared to the 20 billion in profit over the past few years, I believe the ebit on Circle's $62 billion issuance was like 258 million. People did not like the S1. It was not like they were leaving a lot on the table. Their distribution costs are high due to the coinbase relationship, I think. But yeah, that makes sense. It's like the T bill is arguably the best, America's greatest export. Right. Like it's, if you, if you count the T bill into trade deficits, very general. Different story at that point. Different story. But yeah, I think your point on, hey, we're, you know, tether, regardless of your opinion of them, is exporting the dollar and getting more people on ramp to the dollar, which does have. Does have some benefits for sure. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see who ends up winning out on the reconciliation progress. I think enough people are going to recognize that Tether is probably doing that good for the U.S. like, genius will probably win out a little bit stable. But I mean, it's still the early days. We'll see who on the Hill are the biggest proponents of crypto. Who are the names that crypto founders need to be for? Who's the one politician with the laser eyes based? Mike Lee. Yeah, yeah, Mike, that's his account based Mike Lee. What he goes by online. Extremely based. Ted Cruz was one of the first guys to understand how bitcoin mining can actually help secure energy grids. Sure. He was extremely early to that. Of course. Gillen Brand alumnus in the House, French Hill, the chair of the Financial Services Committee. These are all people you need to pay attention to. And then there's a whole crop of new freshmen congressmen and senators. Richie Torres is extremely on the money and he's not even, you know, on the right. So this is very much bipartisan issue. Yeah. Almost every single person has brought up Richie Torres. Yeah, yeah, lots of people. Like, that's great. How much time have you been spending a lot of time in Washington the last few months? I've been spending a little bit of time in Washington. Look, so much money was given by so many different groups in crypto that there are a lot of us on the ground. So the people actually writing the language, working with the White House, that is extremely saturated. Where I have been spending a bit of my time is I'll meet with junior staffers. You know, I don't have any face to lose, so I'm happy to sit down with, you know, the lowest of the low. Everyone's actually really fantastic. But no, I'll go, I'll go and I'll make sure that everyone around a certain elected official knows at least what, what are the. The range of opinions that they should probably have. I'm not going to say, hey, you should think this, but it's, you know, these are the arguments, for one thing. These are the arguments against. It is the crypto industry in somewhat of a. What was the example you gave with tech? It's like the dog that caught the car. Yeah. Is that, Is that a good analogy here? That's the, that's the very negative take on, on tech's relationship with DC right now, is that like, tech kind of came in, you know, made a lot of connections, but now doesn't really know what to do. Yeah, look, I think you're seeing a lot of headlines saying things like Coinbase is trying to tank the stablecoin regulation for the market structure Bill. I think it's, of course going to be more nuanced than that. I think that there are groups that say, hey, we've won huge. We want to be able to go really hard. Let's get everything we asked for. And then there's others that want incremental wins. I will say that Sachs and Bo Hines, who is kind of his deputy, helping run many of the crypto operations of the White House. They're incredible. Like, Sachs was a direct crypto investor. He was an LP in a bunch of crypto Fox founders that know him, love him, and Bo Hinds. Not a lot of people knew him from before, but I mean, he, like, in law school, he wrote, I believe, you know, one of his theses on crypto regulation. He was a big investor. He worked with a lot of companies. So they're really on the money. And yes, maybe the dog caught the car caught its own tail. But I'm actually extremely optimistic. And then, you know, out of Treasury Descent and Commerce Lutnick, you know, both these guys are extremely frustrated. Pro bitcoin, pro crypto. So yeah, what are you seeing in terms of US based Are sort of crypto companies generally feeling more comfortable coming back to America? Are we seeing that now? Are we seeing more offices being spun up or is it a little bit more like. Well, we already did the work to set up infrastructure internationally. We want to wait to see how this stuff plays out. Yeah, there's a few things. So the first is if companies don't come back, the founders are starting to. There was a class founders that wouldn't step foot in the U.S. u.S. Yeah, it's like Paolo, the CEO of Tether, he literally would not come to the U.S. because he didn't know, like maybe he just gets seized at the airport. So the fact that one, they're coming back, they're being public about it, they're showing their face, they're meeting with people. That's big. Other things that like you might not think of crypto conferences. Companies would be scared to sponsor US based crypto conferences. Wow. Because they're like, oh, if we sponsors this conference in New York, maybe we'll get the attention of the wrong regulator. That's over. If you talk to the conference organizers, they'll be like, okay, no, our business is back. Better than. So I think, you know, the next stage is offices open up, headquarters open up. And the market structure bill that hopefully will come later this year will be a real catalyst for that. And the other, the other thing that's really important is a lot of trading activity has moved to the international offerings of these exchanges. When you look at spot volume, which is just, you know, if I buy bitcoin directly versus perpetual futures volumes, which are derivative products, the majority of crypto trading volume is all in perps. Yeah. And perps are not really clear if they're legal in the US there's some guidance that will hopefully come from the cftc. They just did a request for information a few days ago. Earlier this month. Coinbase has said that they plan to offer futures contracts with a settlement date very far in the future. So you can theoretically do like a 100 year future contract and live rebalances and it fills the role of the pers. Without new regulation, it's illegal for futures contracts not have settlement dates in the U.S. sure, sure. So hopefully that all gets addressed and we can move the liquidity back to the US because every US based crypto hedge fund has to set up offshore accounts to be able to trade their products. Are you expecting any legislation around real world assets? I mean, stablecoins in some way are taking a real world asset, even if it's a number in a database and bringing them on chain. What do you expect on that front over the next couple of years? Years. A lot of people get really excited about real world assets. RWAs, it's a horrible name for something. I mean, RWAs in finance is another thing. Yeah. But I think that the way that the stablecoin bill is written is that if something is directly redeemable as a receipt, you might be able to issue a tokenized version of it. There's some specific language around. Okay, if it's a payment coin or a payment dollar issuer, these are the reserve requirements. But you could extrapolate that into issue small. Interesting, interesting. Most of the time when people talk about real world assets, they talk about it in the lens of either a we want to bring more liquidity to an asset class or we want to be able to use something as collateral. I am far more interested in something being used as collateral, which in a sense is bringing liquidity to it. The problem is if I was to tokenize a share of, you know, if we start a company tomorrow, we raise a 10 at 50 round and I want to tokenize that and say, oh, I want this to trade at 50. There's no one, there's no buyer for that. Buyer of last resort. Right? No. And that's the interesting thing. I think the lending aspect is fascinating. But illiquidity is such a feature of private markets. And everybody's realized that at this point. Right. You don't want a company to be, you know, a company will be on chain. They, they have a bad news cycle and then suddenly it's trading at like you know, nine, you know, 90% less. Yeah, totally. And I think there's some companies that I imagine we'll see get tokenized in some form. Maybe it's out of trust in Sweden or sorry, Switzerland. Yeah. Or maybe, you know, UAE or maybe even in the US and the ones to expect are. Did you see that Yahoo Finance has a secondaries tickers? No. Yeah, they have charts now where they show where secondary transactions are reported to have traded. We need to add that. We do. Well, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. It's great to see you come on the show again. Yeah, yeah. We'll have to have you back. Deep dive Crypto day Yeah, we're doing crypto day. Can we bring in caser Eunice when we have a second? How are you doing, Christian? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's bring you in next, if you don't mind waiting 10 minutes. Thank you so much for stopping by. I know you have a crazy schedule, so we really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Yeah. What's going on? And congratulations on this, on all the success. First off, would you mind introducing yourself for those who might not? I'm a short man. Yeah, you can hold the mic. Whatever works. Some people are just doing this. I am clearly not. So my name is Caster Yunus. I'm the co founder and CEO of a company called Applied Intuition. Late stage company based in Silicon Valley. We do vehicle intelligence, broadly speaking. Let me explain a little bit of what that is. Sometimes people think we only do autonomy. But as I was just talking on stage at Hill Valley, like, imagine you work on a mine and there's these, you know, giant dirt movers that move like, you know, the size of a house. Yeah. Your mining operator. You go up to it, you know, that machine should be intelligent enough to understand who you are. Sure. What you're trying to do as you get. You talk to it. This is teaming concept. Yep, yep. So we think about AI as like on, you know, in your screen, literally on your phone. Chat box, maybe you talk in chat box. So we. We're the next kind of generation of AI, which is this AI that's all around you. Yep. But specifically on moving machines, cars, trucks, tanks, planes. Yep. And that human AI teaming, that's the company. Any. Can you talk about the path to full autonomy and what AI means in the context of just, I guess, vehicles? Broadly, we've seen teleoperation, full autonomy, even the right thing to be aiming for when teaming is clearly like, you know, like the more natural way to collaborate. So within vehicle intelligence, the broad umbrella, their subgroup is autonomy. And within autonomy, you can break that up into kind of two subgroups in itself, just for simplification, because you guys are not autonomy engineers. Right. All. We won't bust out any software tests for you, but most of the audience, they're much better than we are. Okay, dumb it down for us, not them. Exactly, exactly. Thank you. So instead of talking about society of automotive engineers, like autonomy levels, just think about autonomy as. Is there a person in the driver's seat or not? Sure. Yeah. The Waymo. There's nobody in the driver's seat in a Tesla. There's somebody in the driver's seat. And that rough analogy applies all the way to tanks, to planes, to whatever, to drive drones or whatever. So is there a human sitting there? A human not sitting there. So in the human sitting there, that's the assistance version. And really in the, in the warfighter example, that can be one to many machines. Sure. Right. It's collaborative autonomy, it's multiple multimodal. Right. In the. There's no human. In the Waymo example, then it's a Pure Level 4 autonomous system and that's the robotaxi. Both those things exist. Yeah. So then the question is, well, why would you use one versus the other? The Waymo version, broadly speaking, is way more expensive. Tesla is already a functioning business model. You can go buy a production Tesla that has FSD and it works pretty damn well. And it's profitable. Yeah, and it's profitable. Waymo hasn't figured that out, and it will. And just the nature of the actual machine, it's more expensive. The compute is way more expensive. The sensors are more. The entire operation, operations are more expensive. But what you get is you get that last 5% of scenarios that Waymo will take care of, that the Tesla requires your intervention because I can't do this. And so then you can take that into other domains, like, let's say, construction, to get that last 5%. It's generally not possible right now because in those domains that are more, let's say, open than something like a road. And so then you need a human team teaming. Take for example, you're in a fighter jet or you're in a tank and you have to make a lethal decision. Yeah. That's where teaming becomes really important. Because our cars are not. The beauty of a car is a car can just stop. Right. It's not like trans, it's not like moving something that's plane can't always land and could be damaging. How much? The answer is autonomy is here. It is here. And it's just like a lot of times people ask us like, oh, when is self driving going to be a thing? It exists. Yeah, totally. It's just now it's like mobile phones. Like, when did mobile phones happen to ask that simple question? Eighties and 2007, when we had the iPhone moment. Even then, like the iPhone. It's not like the iPhone. Everyone got expensive. It took a while. Even then, the iPhone actually isn't the thing that consumers care about. They care about. What's that. They care about Uber. And like, if you're trying to think about like an Instagram, like you can't Even think about Instagram. But the first iPhone by way the, the way no app store, no front facing camera. Yeah. You couldn't even. There's no such thing as Instagram, no selfies. So the, the, the, the macro point is autonomy is the spectrum. Yeah. So you should think about autonomy as like it's going to come in drips and it's going to be, it's unevenly. Like they, the old Peter Thiel saying, technology is unevenly distributed. Yeah. How much has your vision expanded? Right. I imagine early on, you know, even the last few years, I'm assuming that people came out seeing your success being like, oh, we're going to do applied intuition for xyz. And then you're probably sitting there being like, well applied intuition is applied. I mean that's the normal competitive situation. But has your vision always, you know, we're not a me, we're not a meek company. You know, we're like, we're like street fighters. How long you been doing this? Don't let the suit, don't let the suit suit. I come from Detroit. Brawler. Yeah, exactly. No, but how much? Eight years. Overnight success. Yeah. Yeah. I'm assuming your vision always was, was massive, but, but now, you know, seeing the, the technological advancement. Yes. Are you discovering new markets every month? Yeah, I think the, the core hypothesis that we had, the core like, you know, quantum of idea that we had was we saw Tesla emerging. This is 2016, 2017 and like, oh, the car is going to be a software thing. Yeah. And we just don't know what that means, but we ultimately want to participate in that. So I, you know, I grew up in Detroit. My co founder grew up in Detroit. Our. We're a family of automotive folks. My parents in factories, his parents and engineers. I went to the General Motors Institute. So we saw, you know, I worked in factories for a bunch of years and so you just, you just see the car business and you're like, this business is going to change. Change. I think that was the very vague, rough idea. Yeah. And then the product strategy over eight years has been let's build all these products to make cars more intelligent. We got into defense about a year after we started. So now very early on, you know, it's not random like General Dynamics and General Motors, their, their technical headquarters are like, you know, five minutes from each other. So you were dual, you were dual use from almost really? How worried do you get for founders that are here that are not. That aren't dual use? Given your experience working with the government? I'M just trying to eat. I don't know about their businesses, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, but good luck. But I imagine like if you had started out and you were just doing defense and you was autonomy and it was, yeah, whatever. Eight years ago you were just doing automotive. Yeah, we're doing just automotive. I think, I think it's, you know, it's that there's a, our company values, these values that run the company, but they can all be reduced to two words. Radical pragmatism. Yeah. The automotive specifically and defense are anti cyclical. Sure. Yeah. So you know, it helps like that's not random. So, so I think, I think it's positive. I think just for us the problem space in a car and a tank are actually surprisingly similar. Yeah. They're both human operated. They both are large machines that are electromechanical and then now are becoming more software. I think if I'm a defense only company, I think it's, I think it might be easier to be a commercial company to come in defense than a defense company got to commercial. Sure. The main reason is in the commercial ecosystem you got to fight the globe. You gotta fight everybody. And it's not about, I know the DoD procurement methodology and therefore I get a big contract. It's like I have to have the best product, has to be priced the cheapest that it can be bought globally. Yeah. Because otherwise I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna win. I think, I think for us the transition into defense being from Michigan, I mean take home, you know, the, the tank and automotive, the, where they build tanks and the Detroit arsenal. Yeah. Literally a mile from where I grew up. Wow. Crazy. General Dynamics. Three, four miles. I mean Detroit is a defense ecosystem. It's the building. How do you. So you, you're clearly much more focused on existing form factors. Right. Cars, tanks, things like that. Drones. Drones. When, when I'm sure you been approached by humanoid robotic companies. We have. Look at this, this guy. You're, Are you a plant by one of our investors? Who is it? Josh Wolf or who earlier? No, but, but I, I, I'm curious to think, you know, hear about how you're thinking about these new form factors. We don't know at all how they're going to play out. So we have been, we have been approached by I would say three humanoid companies now who've said hey, can we use the tooling, can we use some of the technology? I think for us we like to enter markets where there's a bit stability and maturity because you don't want to build a bespoke thing for company A. And then it's, you know, bespoke company. We're product company, we're not a service company. Yeah. Humanoids will get to that. The macro thing that you're tugging on is actually this abstraction from hardware software. There is a company actually that, that's like applied in the past, which is Microsoft. Microsoft started as a tooling company. Yeah. Then got into operating systems and then got, got into applications. But they did it all on the PC in the 80s. We're doing it on the vehicles in the, you know, 2000s. But it's the same thing. It's, you're abstracting away from the hardware that exists in a car or you know, whatever truck, commercial truck. The Humanoid is similar. There's a hardware software bifurcation that's going to happen. How do you, how do you, how do you balance that? Wanting to be a part of the, the sort of evolution of these new form factors but not over invest too early is like that's a billion dollar question. I think most companies we have. Mark Andreessen is our first investor and our largest shareholder and he's our sole official board member. Oh, nice. So Mark's been with the company a long time and Mark has this great line which is companies are almost always too early. And that's super counterintuitive because you always think, think, don't be late. Don't be late. Actually the mantra everyone should be saying is don't be early. Don't be too early. Yeah, don't be early. And so I think that I say like right now is the best time to get into self driving. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Because all the technology is kind of figured out. So now you're going to enter against a Waymo or an, against a Tesla with none of the cost of the 15 years and you to take all of these engineers who are at work, Waymo and a Tesla and you recruit them and you build some crews with all the, all the tribal knowledge of what works, what doesn't work and they get to work with you. Yeah, tribal knowledge, it's like actual hard tech. And so they now know, you know, it's like building the first web application in the mid-90s. That's a miracle. Today junior high kids build web apps as a part of their class project. Autonomy is going to be the same way human and robots are the same way. It's just the time factor we're looking at. So if you're trying to monetize that's the business we're in. You know, that's what commercial. The world is private business. You have to find where's that meniscus line and as soon as something becomes mature enough, because you also can't be too late. Yeah, you're too late. Then there's a bunch of players in the ecosystem, actually. You know, you talk about defense tech. My actual fear for a young defense tech company isn't can you make it a commercial? I think you can build a very viable, vibrant, defense only company. Yeah, it's just there's a lot of defense only companies now. Yeah, totally. And suddenly, you know, the pricing pressure goes down because you're the fourth company that's doing the same thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, I can't wait for the next season of BattleBots. I'm sure kids will be building all sorts of crazy autonomous solutions because there's so many open source packages that they can piece together. I'm a surprise. By the way, the new spending bill allowed for like $500 million of autonomous systems. A lot of people said that felt low, but we had Sean McGuire on the show earlier and he was like, well, it's not low if that's the starting point. And we go up from there, which is I don't generally use proxy, I don't use dollars as a proxy for importance. The deep seq outcome is a very clear example that you can do a lot with limited resources. I think the more important message, broadly speaking, is autonomy is where, you know, AI meets the war fighter. That mess. I mean, I've seen, I keep saying that again and again. I want, you know, trademark, copyright, whatever it is. The. But the point being is like it's the thing, the teaming aspect of the war fighter with the machine. That's the future. How we get there, that's all details. But we all have to agree that that's what we got to get to. If we agree to it, then we can figure out the, you know, reconciliation specific bill. Well, all that'll get shaken and shaken. Totally. I don't think enough people still agree that that of that vision of the future, it really does feel like of the other there's probably 20 other line items where autonomy will be stuffed in, but it won't be headline autonomy spend. Yeah, yeah. And I think like, you know, even applied for our company. We don't cast ourselves as an autonomy company. We cast ourselves as an intelligence company. Sure, sure. Vehicle intelligence company. Right. And so like why do we do that? Because autonomy is, is a, is a component of Intelligence. Yeah. It's kind of like saying that, you know, is the government funding enough engines? It's like, well, the car business that we're really talking about. Yep. The engine is a very important aspect of the car, but you're funding actually the larger industry. Well, thanks so much for stopping by. I know you gotta run. This is a lot of fun. We'd love to have you back for a much deeper dive on the company. This is great. This is great. We'll reach out. Talk to you soon. Bring in our next guest. Welcome to the TVPN live stream. How are you doing? How is your, how is your Hillen Valley experience? Been some good entertainment. Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the show. Nice to meet you. John. Pleasure. Would you mind introducing yourself for the stream? For the viewers who are watching, Justin Fisher Wolfson, one of the founders of 137 Ventures. Fantastic. How would you describe your fun, what you do for anyone at home? So I mean we started the business back in 2011. I used to be a founders fund. Yep. Left when we sort of had this belief that companies were going to stay private longer. Yep. And that if that happened, you know, founders, executives, all the early employees were going to end up wanting some liquidity because you know, your life is different when you're 35, when you're 25, when you're 45, like people's needs change and so we kind of built the business on that premise and, and we've continued to expand. Like once you've got great relationships with the founders, you can do some primary investing, help people run tender processes for all the employees and yeah, it's kind of where we built it. Hot take. It's a finance, it's finance with a deep understanding of venture and the founder. Absolutely. Right. I mean ventures, finance. I mean I'm not sure all the venture people necessarily, but, but it's not, it's sort of, it's a different product in the sense of like a. Okay, we're going to give this entrepreneur money set and forget, you know, kind of bet on them versus like running like a firm and like built like it's financial services at the end in some way. I think, I think you're right. Like we're trying to build long term relationships with people. Right. Like we were early investors in SpaceX and like we've continued to invest with them for the last 15 years. Right. I mean we've done something similar with Anduril. Right. Like we're just, we're trying to build long term relationships with great companies and continue to invest in whatever way we can. Yeah. So bit of a hot take is, is the Lina Khan effect on M and A markets good for your firm? Because it leads to companies staying private longer because they don't get acquired? I think. Well, so I think there's this like, misperception that US government policy is the thing that drives the M and A markets. It definitely is part of it. But like, like, go back, it was a good excuse for the last couple, you know, few years. Like that wasn't what blocked, like the Figma deal. Right. Like that was the Europeans. Right. So like, just because America's like, great, anyone can buy anything. Like, the companies that are buying other companies are global and they're regulated globally. Sure. And so like, just solving it in the US is not going to actually solve the M and A problem that you're describing. Yeah. So like, do I think less M and A is sort of good for us on the margin? Sure. Right. I mean, like it's, you know, like it's, it's. But even the IPO market's kind of closed, so companies saying private ultimately means that they, they end up taking in more investment in the private markets. Yeah. And I think at some point the great companies that mean they get cash flow positive, they don't need primary capital anymore. Yeah. Right. So that leads you to these liquidity events, tender events for employees and like that's how we've scaled over time. Do you buy that idea that like Elon Musk kind of ran the AB test with Tesla and SpaceX, had a great experience at Space X, didn't have a really great experience in the public markets at Tesla. I mean, fantastic stock performance, but like headaches. And so the takeaway was, hey, maybe stay private longer and then other founders kind of learn that lesson as well. Is that reasonable? I mean, I certainly think Elon had a better experience in the private markets than the public market. But I mean, personally, I think, I don't want to speak for him, but like, I get the impression that he, you know, he really appreciated all of the retail investors who supported him and the company and his vision of where the company could come from. And like, that's actually like an incredible thing. Like there's so many small investors across the country who believed in the company and, and then because of that, actually made huge sums of money. Yeah, right. By being an investor. And so like, I think he actually really does care about those people because they were there for him when in summer, sex. Other people weren't yeah. In the private. In many ways your guys's model is not. You're not like, oh, I'm so annoyed this company that was in our portfolio went public. It's like you win and kind of either situation. Yeah. I mean look, ultimately I think LPs do need dollars back. Right. Like you can't have a system where like all you do is take money from people, give it to other people and then like it's worth a lot more but no one ever gets any money back like that. That system will ultimately break. Yeah. But you know, I think if you're right about the companies and you're compounding over a long period of time, like that's, that's ultimately the goal. So you get a little more leeway when that happens. Yeah. Yeah. Do you, do you have a take on the new permanent capital vehicle that thrive put together? It's kind of interesting story that we haven't seen a lot of VCs do that but obviously Warren Buffett's famous for it. There's a lot of other folks that have built these holding companies. We've seen more just different strategies in venture. I would say you have continuation vehicles, you have growth stage, almost private equity type deals happening. Like, like what, what is exciting about the new era of VC in 2025? I mean we've looked at some of these permanent capital vehicles. I think they're interesting. I think they solve certain problems. I think they create other problems. Problems. Right. Going back to the liquidity point. Yep. It's permanent capital. It's like it makes it hard to get. Yeah. It makes it hard to get the money out. But they, they do solve certain issues and I think it's really nice as an investor to be able to take a really long term view on things. Yeah. And not get caught up in the market cycles. Like the trick is like just like even that your conversation about applied intuition. It's like if you can just be in this company for a really long period of time, like who cares what multiples are to today? Yeah. I care whether or not the, the fundamentals of the business 100x over the next 10 years. Y who care. Even the multiples are terrible, then it won't matter. Right. Like so that's. Yeah. It does seem like there's a shift. I mean the, the, the. I don't know who came up with the idea of a 10 year life cycle for a fund. It seems arbitrary. It seems like they were just like, yeah, like make it double digits, make it a round, nice round number but now it does feel like VCs are starting to think, oh well, like there's extension periods, there's continuation vehicles. Maybe we should be thinking, thinking in 20 year cycles. 25. Look, it turns out everything is historical and structural. Yeah, right. The reason it was 10 years is that the. So, so you go back to like when we started the business in 2011, right? Yeah. The first company that really kind of stayed private for a really long time was like Facebook. Yeah, right. Like that was sort of the, that was sort of, that wasn't even that long. It wasn't the time. But back then, right away with Google and, and like these companies went public so early time blue liquidity was like, you know, I think probably four or five years back then when we started 137 and 11, it was like six or seven years. Yeah, it's now like 12 or 13 at this point. So like people pick 10 because they couldn't conceptualize the companies would still be private 10 and they like, they like doubled it and rounded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And so now what's happening is like no way this company is gonna be private 10 years. This is super safe. Exactly. And then, and that's, and that obviously that broke the system. How, how, how early do you try to identify these companies? Right. Because once you have a generational company in the portfolio and you plan to help support all the shareholders over numerous years, it doesn't matter exactly when you get in. But I'm assuming that other now even growth stage investors are looking for you guys for signal in some way or another to kind of just given the track record of 1 through 7. I mean for us I think we're looking at companies that are kind of post product market fit and that are, that are scaling the business. And the thing that's sort of changed if you look at the last 20 years or so is that there's really no, there's really no cap. Right. Like it used to be that a billion dollar company was like an incredibly huge outcome. And like honestly there's a, there's there's hundreds of those companies in the private markets now. And so like for us it's really just this question about what, you know, can the investment hit our cost of capital and if you have, you know, you have an opportunity to invest, Even like take SpaceX at 350, it's like if you can believe that's a trillion dollar company, like that can still be a great investment. Like sure, it's a big number or whatever but like it doesn't really matter where you are. It matters where you're going. And that's, I think, the thing that is different in the private markets or really even look at the public markets. I mean, look at the valuations on Nvidia. I mean, that's a, that's an incredible growth story in the public markets. Like. Yeah, yeah, you don't see that at that scale usually, but I mean, look at Google, look at Apple. Right? I mean, like, look at all of the, all of the major tech companies. Like, it's. Yeah, it. The opportunity is much bigger than people imagined. Yeah, that's true. Any other questions? Fantastic. We'll let you get out of here. Thank you so much for this whole thing on. It's. It's. We're happy to help. Help make this thing possible. You guys have done quite the job this year. I hope, I hope you make it back next year. Oh, absolutely. Back. Thank you. This is great. Cheers. Thanks so much. Let's. Let's get Ryan Peterson in. Yeah, well, yeah, we have Zellerfeld. We. I think we should bring in Cornelius real quickly. Do five minutes. We need to go into lightning round, folks. We got a bunch of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lightning round. Cornelius, we got to talk about. Let's, let's talk about the chain real quick and the fit, because it is one of. Every time I see him, he's dressed fantastically. You're probably. Pull. Pull this up. This is happening. Zellerfeld. Thanks. Yeah, obviously, as I'm from Zellerfeld, you can put your shoes on the desk if you want. If you want to put it up for the audience since you are in the shoe business. There we go. There we go. Right on the desk. Look at this. Made in 3D printed shoes in the US so so far we have done most of our production in Hamburg, Germany. Okay, so that's where we started. But obviously, obviously, like a huge part of our market right now is. So we are just bringing that back. We had 200 printers in Hamburg, Germany, and now we are bringing 2,000 printers here to the US printing millions of pairs a year. Amazing. Insane. Insane. Where's the demand coming from? Outside of the tech community, it's mostly fashion. Guys. I don't know if you have seen, but we are printing shoes now for Nike, for Louis Vuitton, for there even. Like lots of celebrities are wearing our shoes all the time. Drake did a huge cowboy boot with us because he just. That's amazing. He just bought a Texas. In Texas. A ranch. Sure. There we go. Some cowboy boots. So just make it. What have you learned from. I mean, we read a story in the Wall Street Journal recently that Nike was having trouble. Nike was having trouble using robotic automation to assemble shoes and meld the upper with the soles because there's so many different sizes. It feels like a unique case for 3D printing. But is there any hope to iterate on your product to a point where there are multiple materials? Yes. Also multiple colors? I think previous experiments often failed. Mostly because everybody is trying to make the same product as before. Just assembled by robots kind of. But you need to think about it from first principles. 100% that makes sense. And then you can do even crazier stuff that traditionally wasn't done in performance footwear or so so all of a sudden with 3D printing, every shoe can be custom made. So when you think of performance, you know, everybody talks about, I don't know, I think Nike's mission statement is, goes something like making every athlete's dream come true. Yeah, but like if you think about it, lots of those brands, like they have custom fitted shoes for those performance athletes. But what about the kid on the schoolyard that just wants to kick some soccer, for example? And all of a sudden with 3D printing, you can get those kids the same custom fitted experience like a pro soccer player. And when you think of not just performance footwear but even anyone, I think what will happen is, I mean I wear this, this is happening cap because printed shoes will be on every foot. Foot. Yes. And a big reason is because all of a sudden you can do stuff like, I don't know, every shoe fits whatever design. So right now, so talk about the time. Today, shoes are made in factories far away from the end consumer. Yep. They get made, they get sent. Eventually they get to the consumer, whether it's through retail or online. Talk about kind of like what is the actual activity? Know where is the printing going to happen long term? Is it is. Could we get to a point where Nike decentralized? Yeah. Could Nike in a retail store, could somebody design a shoe and print it in real time? Is that where we're going? So basically, basically what's going to happen is you will have farms all over the world, maybe a little bit like Coca Cola has bottling plants all, all over. And then what's going to happen is you buy a shoe, for example, on Zelafield.com and depending on where the end consumer is, that's where the production job is going to get to. And then what I fucking love is that people are now buying shoes on zellerfeld.com and basically few seconds later the printer starts printing and you can have a custom fitted shoe, I don't know, two days later. And that is completely changing the game. And without usually in footwear you have cycles, production cycles and marketing cycles of 18 months and longer. So you need to make the commitment in the factory in Asia 18 months before, but you don't even know how many will sell. So what's great here is that on demand production basically changes that completely and it can still be as quick as Amazon. Yeah, no, it's such an interesting story just given, you know, we've studied how Nike just struggled to bring back shoe production with, with one of the most advanced manufacturers in the world. But again it was because they were just taking the, the traditional way shoes has like 14 parts or something like that. Trying to make it with a robot. And I think what you're doing with shoes we can apply to so many other categories in terms of. Thank you for stopping by. We'll let you get back out there. Yeah, yeah. Come back on the show soon. Have you full deep dive. Should we bring in Augustus Ryan Peterson? Let's do Ryan Peterson told. Unless Ryan Augustus was on the schedule. Augustus, do you have to go or can we do Ryan for five minutes? Okay, hold on for a minute. We got Ryan because I think he has another call. We'll bring you in 10. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, we're still live. Ryan Peterson, welcome back to the show. Third time treated like cattle. Yes, I know it's really rough. Sorry about that. We're. We're not able to. You're still iterating. We're learning. But how has your Hill and Valley experience been? How's your time in D.C. been? That's great. It's great to be in the capital. Yeah, I haven't been here since January 6th. No, I'm just kidding. Bad joke. But yeah, I mean, you're in a very interesting business. Obviously in the news, everyone has called you, you've done mad money. Wall Street Journal's calling you the most boring business that we need to know about or something like that. What is top of mind? What are you telling lawmakers that could change or could, you know, improve to like, what does a great outcome here look like in the next couple years? What's your stump speech right now? In a couple years? Yeah, yeah. I mean, what's next couple of years? You worry about the next couple of weeks. What's on your mind? I don't think anyone cares what I think. I told Them tariffs should come way down. Okay. Yeah. What we've seen in our Data is a 60% decline in freight from China to the U.S. yeah. Can you unpack that? I heard something about like the freight rates are actually high because they're not even, their ships aren't even moving. Is that right? No, rates are pretty reasonably low right now. There's a risk of it going higher. Like I think it'll be a first class problem. If they undo the tariffs and a lot of volume comes through, then it goes high, Then you'll see this. But if you're willing to pay the tariff, you have a really high margin. You can get stuff out of China. Right now. There's a little bit. So like, so you've had a 60 decline in bookings of ocean freight from China, the U.S. okay. That's resulted in 25 decline of sailings. Sure. Ocean carriers. Yeah. 25 of the ships are not sailing. Yeah. So like it's a little bit harder to get certain service. Got it. Because like ships are getting canceled. It's actually made Black sport more valuable because if you're booking directly with an ocean carrier, they might cancel the sailing. Yep. Yeah. We'll find you a different one. Yeah. That's the value. Some level, Some of this, like helps us a little bit. But I'm very worried for our customers that those are their businesses. 60 decline. There's a lot of companies just deciding, opting out of the system. Yeah. And they can't, they can't necessarily move to a new manufacturer. Small business. They, they didn't spend enough at the inauguration because the exemption. What, what's been, what have you been hearing on the ground in China? It's, it's, it's hard to. 60% reduction in freight coming out of China is very bad for China. Right. Like the, the, the sort of, the party can kind of spin that however they want. They have a lot of control over. Very bad for China, you're saying? Yeah, yeah. Very bad. Very bad for China. And in an economy that was already bad bad in an economy that had extremely high youth unemployment. Have you heard anything from the, you know, all the different groups that you interact with on that side of the pond? Definitely bad. I mean, it's bad for both parties. You know, you kind of have a game of chicken and there is an outcome where the cars crash into each other and everybody dies. And so you hope somebody swerves and gets solved. I, my view of it, I don't have a lot of like inside intel here. It's certainly Bad for factories. I just think China can withstand a lot more pain than America just due to the, the way like the last hundred years of Chinese history, they like, what is a couple percent of GDP decline? Like, oh my God, look at the history they've been through. They're ready for warlord era. Yeah. Like all these different famines and things that like pain built into the culture. These are kind of. Yeah. This would be a pretty small amount of pain for them to bear. American side, we're kind of soft. There's a lot more feedback mechanisms here. Yeah. Trump, I, I had to say, is like an iron will on a lot, you know, a lot of people. I don't like any of the tariff policy. There's other policies. I, you know, not what we're gonna talk about right now. But I don't like any of any about the tariff policy. And yet got to have respect for this guy who's like, the whole world is. It's everyone against Trump. Yeah. And he doesn't care. Yeah. I would have this power. We, We've, you know, heard rumors that, that there's, you know, there's obviously just been a constant rumor mill rumors moving the market trillions of dollars, you know, in seconds. But is there any sense of optimism on the ground with, on the, with the, with the politicians that you've been seeing this week? I, I've. There's. Let's just say there's a sentiment that tariffs. The tariff with China at 145 is not sustainable. It's not where they meant to be, not where they want to be, that it will come down. But there needs to be renegotiation around that. Unclear to me what they think the triggers are. So therefore the timeline for when it would come down. Yeah. Or what it comes down to. Because on the day of the reciprocal tariffs on April 2, when it was announced, China was at 54%. And that was already a shocker. Like, that was the top of the list and the worst in the. Yep. Yeah, kind of. That's gonna. And that's on top of the prior Trump administration. The oil stuff. You mentioned Venezuela. So like now that seems Queen. You're like, oh, let's get to 54. Well. But was also really bad for companies. So if we play this out and there does wind up being a re. Industrialization, more American manufacturing, maybe it's an automated facilities. What does the future of flexport and logistics look like? Is it more trucks and trains and automated trucking? What are you thinking about in like 5, 10 years? Just to Power a more efficient logistics system in the domestic. Lower 48. Oh and domestic side. Yeah. I mean we acquired convoy. Sure. So we have a truckload business. We do about 200,000 truckloads a year. Yeah. That is 98% automated. Really? Wow. 98% of the loads nobody does anything. Wow. On the same side. 2% need to have an exception. Managed. Yeah, yeah. So that is probably going to. Yeah. Scale that thing like crazy. But by the way, the truckload business, if the tariffs keep going where they are, that's going to collapse too. I mean because. Yeah, yeah. What are you trucking? You're trucking stuff that came off a boat. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they're not. This idea that's going to like lead to this manufacturing boom is kind of fake. Like I heard from a senator yesterday that said they do a lot of, they have a lot of auto manufacturing in their state that all the auto manufacturers have told them that if they don't get an exemption on parts they're going to go under. Well they got an exemption on parts this morning. Okay. Or yesterday. So hopefully these feedback loops are working and we don't just like kill. I knew that was going to happen because you're like they're not going to let all the auto machine manufacturers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's a bad situation, chaotic time. If you have your you know, team in Washington you can get, get stuff done and if, and if you're, you know, even if you employ 100 people you can't. It's hard to get your. You're still a tiny business in the eyes of everyone else. I mean we were talking Sean, Sean Frank had an interesting kind of policy, you know, recommendation or idea which was like, like basically take what I would have to pay in tariffs and make me invest it here in the U.S. sure. So I can basically buy some time. Don't just come down with a, you know, just absolute hammer because I can't like I can't set up a factory in three months even if I wanted to spend you know, a billion dollars. Yeah. They announced today that they would do allow you to expense 100% of CapEx if you're building a factory. This could be really big like first year straight line. Depreciate the entire amount of the build out. So you know more policies like that might industrialization. Can you paint me a picture of who the, who the major power players are in D.C. are there trade organizations that are doing stuff here? We've seen some of the different like the longshoremen's union. Are they. Do they have a view on this? Are there different organizations and leaders who are championing these causes, representing business? Yeah. It seems like you are honestly one of the champions of like the E commerce community. Trying to do that in many ways. On behalf of our customers. Yeah, on behalf of your customers. But are there other more official organizations? I'm sure there are. Nrf. Yep. National Retail Federation is typically the main channel for this. There's a few others I'm not the. That familiar with. Sure, sure, sure. The big CEOs are going direct. I mean, you've seen this. Yeah. They were all at the White House. Yeah, yeah. The. But yeah. Not really much of a voice for small business stuff there. So we're trying to do that. I'm sure there's all kinds of lobbyists. You mentioned the longshoreman. So the ILWU is the West Coast Sports Union. They came out opposed to tariffs last week. Okay. ILA endorsed Trump and they have not come out. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. ILA is the east and Gulf coast ports. Yeah. Yeah. The ones that went on strike last September. Yeah. But much less effective. Yeah. But isn't there. Aren't they much less affected because it's not trade with. With a lot of trade. No, a lot of. A lot of the east coast trade comes through the Panama Canal. Sure. Or through the. It used to be through the Suez, but around the Cape of Africa right now. So. Yeah. I mean they got to be opposed to this. It's bad for their business. But T.R. trump, you know, is the talk around the Panama Canal beneficial to trade long term if that happens? Whatever Trump was talking about, like taking more control there, not letting China grab it. That is. So it felt like it kind of fell out of the news because the tariffs are so bigger. The crazy thing about Trump is that a lot of these stories of things that he's done or said or actions would be like the story of a year. Yeah. Like a normal jamming days. No, no. Yeah. 20 current things at once. Yep. The media can't keep up. The Democrats definitely can't keep up. None of us can keep up. Yeah. It's wild. The Panama one was. They're trying to get them to the. The two port. The ports on either end. It's not the canal itself, but the ports on either end owned by Li Ka Shing. Sure. Hong Kong based. Okay. Yeah. Which is made in Hong Kong. He went to sell it. The Chinese blocked the sale. Interesting. Which I think I've seen that the Trump administration argued that the very act of the Chinese being able to block the sale is a potential violation of the treaty by which the US Handed over the Canal Zone to Panama. Now they're threatening maybe we'll invade Panama again and take it over. I don't think anyone wants to see that happen. Okay, that's interesting. It doesn't. I don't think from an efficiency standard that's. We don't need another. I'm sure there's national security stuff's going through. What have you heard about even I saw a story about iPhone suppliers not being able to get equipment out of China. Did you see anything about that? Oh, is that. Is that not even surprising? I didn't follow it very closely. Yeah. Not sure. Yeah, no, just kind of an interesting, you know, there's, there's, you know, the idea that we would decouple even the iPhone supply chain from China without fresh sort of inward pressure from a couple of things I heard here in D.C. is that they, like senior people shall not be named. Have said that 145 is a decoupling rate. If they understand that that at that tariff level these economies will decouple. And that's evidence now with the 60 decline in bookings, like basically instantly and that that's not where they want to be. They do not sure it's more strategic to decoupling in a dramatic fashion on such a short time scale, etc. So I think that that speaks to like and Trump has said as much that they're going to lower the tariff rates. It's just a question of when and how low do they go is the big. Those are massive variables. My view is that when it needs to happen almost right away, I don't like they last a couple. If they wait a couple months, I think you're going to have huge fallout and damage to the economy and small business going, getting wiped out down in employment and all that stuff. Inflation, how low? I don't really have a good read on that. Like, at what level is. No one's going to tell you. Honestly, I'm like, Bloomberg asked me this morning what level. I'm like, zero percent. Don't ask me. So I don't know what level it needs to be for business. I don't think anyone really knows, though. Like, these models are super complex. Yeah, totally. And there's all these second and third order. Yeah, it's really hard to predict. We'll have to keep tracking it. And then you have, like, what's the dynamic by which Trump can walk this back. Sure. Like, I think he needs a scapegoat. Yeah. He needs to find someone and blame them. Blame them. We should find somebody from the event. There's got to be. There's got to be one guy probably here. Delian. Delian. It's your fault. You got. You got to do something for the country like. I'm only interested in space, actually. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I want the terrace to end so you can get a good night's sleep. Yes, you deserve it. Anyway, let's bring in Augustus Derico. Welcome to the stream, Augustus. Third time another third timer on the show. Augustus, how's it going? Welcome. How you doing? First of the hair is looking amazing. Thank you for the weather. It's fantastic. Not too hot, not too cold. I feel like you pulled some strings. Pleasure's mine. Yes, exactly. We got here and we were like. I was making a joke. I was like, wow, our politicians, the swamp would set up in one of the nicest climates I've been in in a while. I was like, it's normally terrible here on like. We're here on like the one nice week of the year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With. With big fluffy cumulus clouds. Beautiful cumulus clouds. Should we want. Yeah. You've been. Have you been. You've been here in D.C. a lot less than random state legislature capital. Yeah. I mean, for those that don't know, there were. We're up to 33 states opposed to weather modifications. Wow. However, 18 of those bills were either dropped, amended to carve out cloud seeding and still ban chemtrails, which is gonna be crazy because those bills will pass and then people will still see chemtrails. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or Montana. Great case we showed up there. We're like, hey, clouds eating is pretty cool, huh? Yeah. And they funded a program. Oh, that's great. So yeah, we'll be expanding there. But the folks in D.C. that we met with, they all are way more level headed and just say like, hey, we're not going to concern ourselves with all Ql seems like a great water supply tool. We'd love to start working on report language, etc. Etc. Yeah, that makes sense. How much. How much is water scarcity a factor and reindustrialization. I mean we even last week we were talking about how the oil. Oil. The water demands of oil production and just how absolutely insane they are. Not to mention they end up with a bunch of water that they don't really know what to do with. Trying to Evaporate. But how much is that a kind of a factor? And what kind of conversations have you been having here at the event? Yeah, you know, Jensen gave his speech earlier today. Right. And I think a lot of people intuitively. Yeah, sorry. A lot of people intuitively talk about how energy is this, like, fundamental primitive in all industrialization. So are critical minerals. So is now intelligence and human capital. Water, because nobody has ever had any ability to like, work on it and provide new supply has kind of just been this assumed limitation. It's going to be necessary to produce more. Should we want to build up this industrial base, should we want to increase AG production, particularly like the tmc, the TSMC plant in Arizona? Nobody knows where the water for that's going to come from. Really? Yeah, yeah. Like, you need it to come from either the mountains in Flagstaff or the Colorado River. And the only way to get it, there's cloud seeding. There are crazy stories about the water at tsmc. If it's slightly saltier, it affects like, the yield of chips and stuff. It's like total alchemy. Oh, yeah, no, yeah, yeah. It's like there's all these aerospace parts. CP talks about this all the time. Like. Yeah, like there's some parts made in Michigan. Yeah, okay. That people C3PO anyway. And it's like. Yeah, there's like a little bit more of whatever in the water in Michigan. And without it, then you can't make like the lubricant. Same thing with the tap water. New York makes the good pizza and bagels, right? Is that the rumor? Gordy won't touch it, but, yeah, he's not a fan. Not a fan. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. What you bring us into some of the other conversations that you've been having here at the event. What. What's exciting? It. It. Yeah, walk us through that. Yeah. I mean, I think for one, deepening our collaboration with the Middle East. Right. Like, it's no secret people talk about the Trump admin and how close they are to mbs, to the Emirates and otherwise. I think that because that country is very seriously, like, enacting this vision for a crazy future for greening Saudi Arabia, for billions and billions poured into AI1. They're a great capital partner for a lot of, like, the tech ecosystem that wants to like, grow out of its nascency and deploy. But also I think they like, make us look in the mirror about what's possible. So talking to people that have been doing work there, that's exciting. Talking about how we're collaborating in the Middle East. That's a big deal. What's the name of that, like, regulatory portal? You, like, submit a paragraph and it's like, get rid of this regulation, please. Oh, Doge. No, no, no. Bitcoin. It's like the. It's like the FTC has something and you just go like, get rid of this. And if they accept, you just tweet at Elon. Actually, if you want Gary Tan, that doesn't usually. Exactly. If you get it approved, they name the like new regulation after you. Okay, so you want to do that. That's good. Speaking of like national regulation, is there any. Obviously the first time we met, you talked about China planting trees and terraforming the Gobi Desert. Is that. Is there any world where that becomes like a national policy or do you still need to go state by state? No, dude. So Secretary Burgum gave these great remarks this morning about how all of our federal lands should be considered a national asset. That makes sense. Totally makes sense. And we probably have. I think of federal lands as like the forests and like, you know, Yosemite. But there's probably federal land that's desert, right? Yeah, no, there's tons of tons. Tons, yeah. Millions upon millions. Why don't we just convert this into the next Yellowstone? Exactly. Create a Yellowstone club, like next Yellowstone, which would be sweet. Or also more timberlands, which you can harvest farmland. Yeah, anything. So like all of that or just give it to Teddy and have him tear it all up and strip mine it or something. That's also fine with me. As long as you have a proportionate amount of new Yellowstones. Wait, who's Teddy? Feldman. Oh, Feldman. Okay. Yeah, yeah. From Durian. Yeah, sorry. Gundo brain. Yeah, yeah, everyone's on first name basis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really not doing a lot for the listeners at home. Might not be familiar with the inner workings of the Gundo politics. Where are you headed next? Back to the Gundo. I get on a midnight flight back to Gundo. I'm going to interview a bunch of scientists. And then I get on a midnight flight tomorrow to Florida. And then on Sunday I go. By the way, most brutal flying midnight, you land at like 3:00am it's the worst. Then you're back on an overnight. And the overnight to Florida is terrible cuz only 5 hours. Can't even get a full night's sleep. You get cooked. Well, I did. Salt Lake to D.C. this morning. First of all, flew into Dulles. Huge mistake. Yeah, but that's one upside. My row was empty. So you laid down that's great. Okay, good. Hopefully you can get some sleep. Hopefully you can make it through those flights. We appreciate you stopping by. Thanks so much. This is great. Always good to have you on. Sure, of course. Thank you. You can take this whole 10. There you go. Enjoy. Anyway, should we bring in the next guest? Who do we have? I know we got a couple folks here. Let's bring them down. How you doing? I met you the last Hillen Valley. Welcome. Welcome to the stream. Would you mind doing an intro for the. For the viewers. Introduce yourself the company. What do you do? How are you? Hillen Valley. Yeah. Grab. Grab like this and then just hold it like you're giving a speech at the most important event. Event at Hillen Valley. Awesome. Well, thanks again for having me. Good to see you again. So I'm JC Ptech. I'm the founder and CEO of Fuse. Yeah. A fusion company working to accelerate the worst transition to fusion energy. Yes. While also safeguarding humankind. So it turns out if you try to create an artificial sun on earth in a bottle and use a lightning bolt to implode a pellet of fuel, that's really useful also to ensuring the safety reliability of our nuclear arsenal. Yep. And so we're, you know, very committed to continuing to help the US modernize its nuclear arsenal and being offering radiation. Yeah. As a service. Yep. Yeah. When we talk, it was fascinating because you were much more commercialized than most other nuclear founders that you talk to who are more in the. Let's get all these approvals. Let's build a big thing. What has that commercialization been like? And can you concretize the actual product that you're selling and to who? Yeah, yeah. So we have customers both in US government and two public companies. Sure. And we've built two machines that are operating today. One is the world's highest power energy delivery system. We call it Titan and we publish. It's one terawatt, but for a billionth of a second. One terawatt, wow. But for a billionth of a second, it's 20% of the whole world power production. But it's just for billions of a second. Yes. And it's not a fusion machine. It's just an energy delivery system. But it creates pulses of radiation that are so intense and then you can expose electronics or materials and see how they behave. Okay. So you're creating hostile environments similar to what would happen in human made hostile environments and expose electronics materials to those types of radiation, whether it's X ray neutrons and see how they Would behave. Behave. That's really critical to ensuring reliability, safety of critical assets in space. Interesting. As well as now conventional systems. And I don't know if you saw last week, but there was an announcement that the US will be spending 946 billion over the next 10 years to modernize the arsenal. And it's 25% increase in budget since 2023. So it's a big deal. Yeah. And by producing this radiation and reducing the dollar per rad and you know, the availability of radiation, we can, you know, save taxpayers billions of dollars while offering radiation as. Yeah. Talk about the energy requirements of re industrialization, which is the theme of Hill and Valley. I think a big question is like, okay, where's, where's the power going to come from? Even if you're not looking at AI or a lot of the conversations that you're having here around with some of these bigger companies that want to come back to the US but want to make sure that they're able to have the energy and infrastructure to actually thrive here. Yeah, it's a really challenging problem. I love the quote from Jensen today where 1 gigawatt is like $60 billion and it's the annual revenue of Boeing that's clearly not going to work out very well. The good thing about fusion, and the first thing I'll say, which may be a bit controversial, but fusion is still like, we're still far from commercializing it, so it's still probably going to take a decade or two to actually put electrons on the grid. But it's still really important and we can't afford for another country to get there first. But the good thing about fusion is that it's location independent, so you can put it anywhere you want. Right. The fuel is hydrogen, which can be found in seawater. So you can literally take a data center and build a fusion plant right next to it and not have to integrate with the grid. And I think fusion being safe, clean, abundant, on demand, makes a really appealing case for industrials because you can build a power plant right next to your industrial plant, whether it's data center, steel factory, glass factory, et cetera. And when you think about the changes that have happened and over, you know, industrialization, you know, there's been no new nuclear facility built in decades. So the workforce it actually knows how to build is gone. Yeah. Whereas like China is building dozens of plants and we've seen satellite imagery recently that's become open source on exactly our footprint of our facility being built. And so we just cannot afford for China to Become for fusion what Saudi Arabia has become for oil. Yeah. And that's. So is that, is that the long term business plan for you? Like find commercial applications today that, that advances the R and D pipeline for ultimately. Q greater than 1 fusion production. That can be grid scale. Yeah. Great. So. So you know, q greater than 1. All this stuff, it's great, like pat on the back. Good for you. You may do it. But ultimately it's how much does it cost? Yes. Q Engineering or. Yeah, well. Q Commercial. Q Commercial, I guess. Right. And also reliability. Like if fusion is not a baseload power, which means it's running 99.9% of the time, how is it really competitive as other sources? So you're doing one billionth of a second now and you need to get to 24 7. Yeah. Which means you're just 10 doubles away, I guess. Well, we just need to increase the rep rate. So we'll still be pulse but increasing the repetition rate. And that's the thing with fusion because even helion is like pulsed. Right. That's, that's the idea. And our pulsar today actually operates at 0.1 Hz frequency. Okay. But we still blow up the chamber and that's still something to work on. But the good thing is, you know, the way we say it is radiation as a service. As we're getting paid today to produce more radiation. The cheaper the radiation, the higher our margins and the more we fire, the more money we make. So we're getting paid to optimize our radiation service. And radiation is ultimately energy. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so we're getting, you know, we're building a sustainable business to get to the sustainable future that we all want. And there's a massive multibillion dollar business to be built along the way, which is what a lot of our investors on the road. That makes sense to get this. Yeah. Where is the business now? How many employees? How big? Yeah, so we have around 50 people now. We've got a couple millions in revenue. Awesome. We're on active contracts supporting very rare for fusion companies. Congrats. Yes. Very cool. Yeah. Thinking outside the box. And so we're still, we're still humming. Well, good luck to you. Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you have a fantastic rest of Hill and Valley on the floor. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see you. We'll see you later. Anyone else? Yeah, Eric Tornberg wants to stop by. Group chats. Eric, get in here. Get over here. I. I have a bone to pick with you. I saw you you posted that you started a new group chat, and I'm not in it. Worry. I was so looking forward to getting added to something where a bunch of people are yapping and I have to put it on mute because. Yeah, no, I learned my lesson. The next one. I'm yapping so egregiously that I definitely get in the hit piece. You will. You'll be. You will be invited. You know, they can kill Chatham House, but they can't kill the idea. It's going to resurge again. Of course. It's still. Yeah. It's still running. You know, even if the world had a nuclear war. Yeah. Mark Cuban and Brian Goldberg would still be there. Yeah. Have we gotten to the bottom of who Ben Smith is? It sounds like a generic name. Sounds like a fake alias. It's something that you see on a lot of fake IDs from, you know, high school students that are trying to buy beer. I'd love. I don't want to. I'm not a big fan of doxing, but I'd love to get to the bottom of this. Man, really, is Ben Smith, who, you know, docs the group chat. Yes. That doesn't mean that we should dox him, but I want to know personally. I'm not going to share. Yeah, no, I agree. Who is. Who is Ben Smith, really? I think he's saying anon for now. Okay. I want to respect that. Yeah. I want to. You know, he's very kind. I follow the paradoxical commandments. You know, even if people don't. Even if people dox you, don't dox them back. Don't dox them back. That's. We'll keep his identity private. But I do know that, as an anon, he did publish the steel dossier. Oh, yes. While he was at Buzz buzzfeed. And I also know that he apologizes or he almost regrets it. Okay. Which to me is as good as an apology. And I believe that. That people can grow and change. And so I'm proud of him. Okay. Because. Yeah. Any other lessons from the. From the story, from group chats? Where's the future? What. What's next? Well, I think, you know, I got a lot of people emailing me, being like, you know, people like, I play pickup basketball with that. Don't even know. Being like, how could you. Platform Tucker Carlson. Oh, yeah. Like, how could you do it? Like, how? And I'm like, I'm sorry. You know, first off, I regret to inform you, Tuck Carlson's pretty big already. Yeah. And also, it's a private group chat. So I'm not sure exactly. Exactly how I'm platforming Tucker Carlson, but. So a lot of people are angry that people are getting together and having conversations. But, you know, we're gonna keep doing it. Yeah. We're gonna keep doing it. Not leaving. The goal was to have a left, right, exchange. And we're gonna keep. That was the original. We're gonna keep trying to. To make it together. I invite more of my friends. Yeah. On the left and the right to. To be a part of it. And you haven't gotten any emails. Well, how could you? Platform Mike Cuban. But no, I didn't. I didn't give us that. But I got DMS every day while Chain the house was going of like, why is Mark Cuban here? It's good. It's an anti echo chamber. And how does he have so much time to chat every day? And my theory is that the. The pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is being a poster. Yes. Once you've truly made it, then you could just post all day. We have this ongoing fight with Antonio Garcia Martinez, who now we should call Antonio Grafton. Gracias. The. The Valor guy. Because he's always getting mistaken for him. Oh, yeah, it is. It is funny. He should just own it. Just rename Gracias. Because they're like, great speech today when he did the Doge thing. Oh. He's like, what? Talk to him. Yeah, you should have him on it and just like, talk about that. Yeah, we should have them both on. Yeah. Thinking about doing. Yeah. You know, you get both of the, you know, both apologies on both the three roms. There's four Kevin Jackson. We're gonna get all that. Yeah. So we have this bit with Antonio where he's like, as soon as I'm rich, I'm getting out of this. Like, as soon as I'm richer. And he just. As soon as I'm like, you know, much richer. I'm getting out of group chats, I'm getting out of Twitter and of course, you know, Marc address in the group, all these other people who you have done phenomenally well and are just posting all day. And he's like, enjoy. They're like, you'll never leave. This is the best. Yeah. In fact, you'll step it up. You'll step it up. So I think the demand is there. I think the supply is there. And we're going to. We're going to keep doing it. Yeah. Do. Do you think these. So I. I have to say, I mean, I think people don't realize like how much work everybody whatever four years ago was like everybody should have a community and then you had companies making slacks or discords or things like that and it just takes like a massive amount of work to sustain chats like not we talked about last time you're on the show the sort of like admin lift. Like there's a software solution but then there's like cultivating and there's like selecting like who should be in a group and all the these different things and it's actually makes so much sense to have a third party like do that not have it just be on one member who one day they might wake up and they don't want to do it anymore but should the group die it's like no the group should be able to live on and so having a. What's the ideal size? Are you Dave Morin had path it was 150. What's that Dunbar's number? I think Chatham House got up to like 330. What are your best practices? Chasing that too big I think you know dozens of spin off groups have formed and there's like 10, 20, 30. Yeah you know I think it's a, it's a good question. I will say I'm a bit of a street group Chatter Sriram and ASC these are academics, you know rigorous operation they have community managers. I'm excited to lead co lead this operation with it with a niche now that Sriram has left and so I'm excited to get support on the moderation side and to come back out you know so this is a blow to Chatham House but we will be back rebuilding. We're rebuild, rebuilding Mark you still see Brian. They pop up. Yeah yeah I'm doing the show I'm like what are they fighting about? We should probably talk about it on the show. Yeah, exactly. I'm willing to say publicly that you know so nobody kill except this a non guy Ben Smith who I I'll get to bottom at some point but outside of that you know but I will say even before that it was getting too big. Sure. And I will also say that on the record that nobody killed Chatham House but Brian Goldberg did kill Chatham House a little bit. I love Brian Goldberg. Yeah I actually learned a lot from sharing like his business experience and I, I, I was unaware of him as a founder or a business operator before and and the other, the other names were kind of okay I already know their, their bit and I know their no no I so it wasn't how outspoken he is. He's also a media tycoon. Exactly, yeah. In the women's space. Yeah. I own fashion magazines. I own fashion magazines. I don't. I don't know. I was like, how did tariffs affect your business? He's like, well, we have some advertising. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He broke that down very. He's brought a lot to it and. Yeah, very cool. Anything else? What are you. What's exciting so far about Hill and Valley? Is it nice to. It must be nice to be in an event or like a social community thing that you didn't put together. Yeah, yeah. And I was just at the American Diamond Summit last month. Y. That was fantastic too. And this is also fantastic. I mean, I think it's just amazing how big this space is. I will say it's like. And you guys have covered on the show, but it's like this is like the new Silicon Valley. And I feel like when Paul Graham made that Palantir tweet, it was like a clash between sort of old Silicon Valley and new Silicon Valley. And it's interesting to just sort of see not just the new people that have emerged, but sort of the new ideas around building companies. Like, it's not just sort of make something people want and just talk to customers and just build something in a day. And I feel like maybe he's right. Maybe there'll be a cracked founding team. Ex Andrel X Palantir Digital Ads Digital ad startup One thing that we had, Mike Solana earlier on the show and. And he was basically talking about how, like, Ezra Klein's whole abundance theory and ideas, like, a lot of the stuff that he had, you know, was like, oh, these were Silicon Valley ideas, like this idea of charter cities and energy production and all these things. So I think we're all on the same team. That's what I just appreciated about Hillen Valley. Like, the number one person on the hillside of the event that gets brought up is Richie Torres. And I think people associate a lot of these different characters with the right, but so many of these issues are just American issues. Matt Iglesias, who was a Chatham House member for, I think a Woman week before he decided to leave, and I'm a fan of, he tweeted a platform for the New for the Democratic Party. And David Sachs, quote, tweeted and said, this is conservatism. So there does seem to be a lot of convergence. I love what Derek and Ezra are doing with abundance. Sort of bringing free market economics to the left in a way that is palatable and accessible. It's more nuanced than that, of course. But yeah, there seems to be a convergence happening. And if we have sort of both parties, you know, being more moderate, moving to the middle, you know that I think the future of American politics is something I'm calling like far centrism or alt center. I like that. Just. Just the most extreme centrism. This is the future. Yeah. Just being really extreme about it. Unless. Unless there's representation by both houses. We have a split. Split House and Senate. I'm not happy. Yeah. Anyway, it is. It is really interesting. It's fun. How much time are you expecting personally to stay in Washington? A lot of places you could be spending time. Is it an area that. Well, we. We. I'm, you know, is my second week on the job. We have a robust DC operation and I want us to tell that story a bit more and help. So we're going to do a policy podcast. And so I want to spend more time here and also bring on people who are really at the intersection of. It does seem like it's really like we were talking. Talking about this, like lobbying adjacent VC activity, introductions to people on Capitol Hill. That feels like it definitely fits into the interest in machinery. Totally of like, hey, if you're doing enterprise sales, like, they'll set you up with a bunch of people. PR was often something they were very, very good at, even hiring. You know, find your VP of engineering doing some light lobbying. Maybe not being a lobbying firm or. But introducing to the right things, making sure if there's a government relations or organization, you know how to build it. And I love that we're all so collaborative on this because it just moves the whole industry. Like we have same crypto policy, sane AI policy, sane policy across. It just helps everybody. So that's a place where we all get to bring together. One thing I also just want to say is Gavin Newsom's another example of somebody trying to move to the center. Yeah. And you know, bringing on Charlie Kirk and Extreme Centrist podcast. Let's make that thing Bar Center. Bar Centrist. And I hope that it works out. I hope that it helps. Helps him in the primary. Yeah. It seems like he's better off for every American. If there's more like unity across the aisle. I just want to know. I just want to know what. What pointing next? Yeah, the next coinage leak it. Announce it on tv. Always be coining law is very important. No, but I mean American dynamism is. Is no longer contrarian. Yeah. We saw this. Remember Hereticon this year was like the least contrarian person I saw was wearing a. Like make America great again. Yeah. Beyond that, everybody was doing nuclear. That was no longer contrarian. Yeah. So it's just like a big thing I'm trying to figure out while we're here is like, you know, what is the thing that nobody's talking about today that will be, you know, maybe the entire subject matter of the Hill and Valley or the. Or, you know, the next American dynamism summit in a couple years. 101. Just chat with yourself. Group chat. Dynamism. Exactly. Well, whenever. Whenever Catherine or whoever on team has it will be on tvpn. My last thought here is, is it feels like group chats with people that you don't know that have differing beliefs are the antidote to GPT4 0,100. Agreeing to whatever. You're totally, totally. It's like you go on chat. GPT highly disagreeable. You know what, boss? Like you were 100%. Everyone else is wrong. You are right. You go to group chat and it's a way to get. It's like you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. You're wrong. No, no. Yeah. Make disagreements great again and yeah, hopefully we can continue to be in these spaces. Yeah, that's a great place to end the show. Thank you for watching. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the stream. We'll be. Be posting a ton of clips and we will see you tomorrow or Friday depending on when we get back to la. Talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you. Thanks.