Factory-Cognition Drama, Instinct's Shopping Push, Gemini 4 Argon | Will Bruey, Christophe Beck, Hassaan Raza, Connor Renton

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Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Get started today. Uh, great show yesterday. Uh, we, uh, put the timeline in turmoil with the MongoDB debate around the responsibility of CEO. I thought it was a really fantastic conversation. I came away like, wow, this is like an unfortunate situation, but a lot of cause for optimism.

Yeah.

And I think he summed it up well without going too aggressive, but let But he let his feelings be known. He passed the information through. Exactly, exactly. And I saw a lot of love for the clip. I saw a lot of people quoting the clip and say, like, oh, yes, OK, this confirms what my position was beforehand. So I thought that was cool.

This confirms my preexisting position.

Thank you.

Yeah, I suppose.

Thank you for confirming what I already believe.

Yeah, the timeline was also in turmoil over Kosla Ventures, Cognition Factory, we can go into that. There was one interesting thing that happened on the show yesterday that I didn't really— I started thinking about it after the show ended. So our first 2 guests were from NVIDIA and CoreWeave, and obviously those 2 companies work really closely together, and the conversations were sort of different. We were talking about security with NVIDIA, and then CoreWeave, of course, we're interviewing the CEO, so we're talking about the business overall and their transition from a rent-a-GPU company to more of a full AI cloud. They'll rent you everything you need. And it was interesting because I was remembering that there was— it was just like last year that NVIDIA was like, we're going to layer CoreWeave or we're gonna layer all the NeoClouds. We're gonna be the front door to compute with DGX Cloud Lepton. I don't know if you remember any of this, but this started back in like 2023.

Yeah.

Post the ChatGPT moment, Jensen comes out on stage at one of the keynotes he gives and he says like, this is the iPhone moment and we're going to aggregate all of the underlying compute and you're gonna be able to come to us and deploy whatever resources you are. And we're gonna compete with like AWS and Azure and GCP and we're gonna be a one-stop shop for this stuff. It's gonna be really important. And at the time I feel like people were, sort of like, whoa, okay, this is bold, but this could be really, really powerful because they have this odd tension between the neo-clouds where if you go in, you lose your connection to your customer effectively, and the margins could get compressed. You're in a much more competitive environment. And at the same time, if you don't go in, then NVIDIA can just say, hey, like, you know, all the DGX Cloud Lepton customers, well, we're gonna send 'em to the clouds that did sign up. And so you have this like tension. They really did, really did, it really did feel like NVIDIA had some leverage, biggest company in the world very shortly after, and obviously a very aggressive business. Like they're not just gonna be like, oh, that would be improper to compete.

Yeah.

But it played out very differently. And NVIDIA has become very friendly with CoreWeave and they both found their places where there's still little competition here and there, But I was just reflecting on how that journey came together, where that landed. And the long story short is that the DGX product, it came out and the reviews weren't like, OK, yeah, this is actually better than working with CoreWeave. And there were still so many benefits from going to a NeoCloud or even a true cloud provider. There was just more to do. NVIDIA made an acquisition. They bought Lepton, where the name came from, in April 2025, which sort of kicked most of that discourse off. The rumor was that they paid between $300 and $900 million for that. Can't believe it. And Jensen was like so gassed up on this. I loved his quote. He said, NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton connects our network of global GPU cloud providers with AI developers. Together with our NCPs, which is NVIDIA cloud providers, we're building a planetary-scale AI factory. That's what his tagline was, which makes sense. Like, there is a world where that would've played out.

That's not what happened. Can I pause for one second to talk about how we have failed so far to convince a lot of our friends not to call supercomputers AI factories, right?

If we continue to fail, they're gonna be like, it's a refinery. It's an AI offshore decker. It's an oil decker for AI.

Like, it's a chemical plant.

Yeah, for AI. Yeah, it's exactly what you want in your community for sure. Yeah. Yeah, rough.

Anyway, the risk of total failure in your backyard is low, but non-zero.

And then you have another person who's like, why did you say that? Yeah, ridiculous. I want to go back to supercomputers. We'll make it happen eventually.

Gabe says it's a data ranch, brother.

Data ranch. There we go.

Putting a data ranch in your backyard. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, at the time, there was a bunch of reporting, sort of like people familiar with the matter, the information got a scoop from a bunch of the NeoCloud compute providers saying like Lepton was a potential competitive threat. And if you refuse to participate, that creates a risk that NVIDIA could direct workloads toward competitors. And it was a bit of this tense time, but the end result was more balanced. So instead of layering their customers and trying to control aggregate demand, which would be really powerful if it happened, The product evolved into this unified AI platform, which is their words. But basically, it's between an actual like Expedia for GPUs and just a set of standards. So it's a bunch of proprietary software. It is sort of what makes up the CUDA moat. So everything from handling GPU node groups, interactive dev pods, distributed batch jobs, inference endpoints, storage, observability, reservations, more. So, All the things that you need to actually schedule, manage GPUs, you can run that. But you can still use your own hardware, do whatever you need to, have the relationship with the underlying owner of the GPUs. And so the rest of the NeoClouds are generally pretty safe. And so it was interesting because it was heralded as this like, oh, OK, things could get spicy. You could see all the NeoClouds really chirping at Jensen, Jensen really coming for the throat throat. Didn't really play out that way. But it does sort of go to show that Jensen does not take lightly to any whispers that the CUDA moat is going away anytime soon. Like, the ace is still up the sleeve, in my opinion. Like, they still have to do a lot of work because when SemiAnalysis actually demoed it, they were like, it's not working as well as some of the other systems. Like, if you were to put— I don't even know if NVIDIA Cloud Lepton is on cluster Macs, but—

It is.

But they would— at the time that they tested it, they were like, yeah, you're going to have a better experience if you just go direct to CoreWeave, Nebbia, the other ones that are in the platinum tier.

Yeah.

Overall, I think in many ways we've seen it's been very strategic to work with 50, 100 really, really, really smart teams that are going to have their own incentives to grow their businesses, grow their Yeah. —they're buying of NVIDIA products.

Yeah, and if you just use the framework of like, who was upset yesterday about CoreWeave launching their— what was the actual product called? CoreWeave Forge, which is their AI cloud, right? So they're just saying, hey, we got CPUs now, we got storage, we got tools to manage all of that. Who's really mad? It's only their direct competitors basically who are like, ah, now we got to catch up. If you're a CPU seller or you're a compute or a storage seller or something like that, you're like, great, I got a new customer, I'm happy. And then if you're a customer of CoreWeave, you're like, okay, I'm happy, I get more stuff.

Yeah.

And so it was yesterday's CoreWeave move was not particularly a, like a shot across the bow to anyone other than just like, hey, we know we're in a race with like 300 other NeoClouds. You see 'em on ClusterMax. We're going to do more to reach that diamond tier, which is what you proposed. But yeah, really, really remarkable margin expansion story. I mean, the depreciation story, like they beat the depreciation allegations pretty quickly, but that value of like dollar per watt is increasing really, really quickly. And so if they can get in line with the Elon and Jensen $60 billion a gigawatt, it's gonna be a very, very exciting business. It already is an exciting business.

Thank you.

But it was a fun conversation, and that's what my wheels were turning about yesterday. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go over to the timeline. You—

Is anything going on yesterday?

You said you wanted to get in the mud and wrestle with pigs, even though the pig likes it and you get muddy?

Yeah.

Okay, let's wrestle. Yeah. What are we wrestling about today?

Yeah. So we kind of caught some of this live at the beginning of the show yesterday, but the posts kept flowing yesterday. Yes. Really got people up in arms was Vinod coming in and saying you are a struggling second-tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation straight out lying about if Chris being Fired, I thought, would be below even you. Just like the most— the most crashing out on Matan's personal crash out.

Sure.

So crash out on crash out.

Sort of a 3-car pileup.

It only took about 20 seconds for people to put it together that Khosla Ventures is, of course, an investor in Factory and Cognition.

And like a pretty big one, right?

is funny enough an example that venture firms can have firewalls and individual people that have exposure to one company that might want to get involved with another company can still behave in a way that is ultimately ethical, right? I'm not saying that Vinod attacking his portco is, but—

Yeah. Was Keith still at FF when Cognition— when they did Cognition? I think he might have already been at Kosla potentially then. And so I think Keith might be the factory board member or something. I don't know. I just saw Keith coming to Matan's defense, right? Which is obviously the Kosla Ventures divide. But that's the nature of these partnerships. Sort of clear that Vinod's not using AI for these boats. Totally. Total all over the place grammatically.

Straight outlying. You are a competitor that is more unethical and lying.

That's not right. This was firing from the hip. He's down here just— But he's got to lay it down. He's got to lay it down. I mean, what this really could say is that even though you have an economic incentive to align with this person, You need to distance yourself from them because you know that they are in the wrong. Like, that's like the fact that Vinod has bags here and he's still posting this makes it more severe, right?

Like, yeah, but I, but, but I think it's— I think there is a chance that Vinod kind of forgot that. You know, you think that's not exposure? I think you got to put that at like 15%.

I just feel like, yeah, forgot. Is that possible? I don't know. I don't know what I mean. He's a multi-billionaire.

The economic— I mean, he was coming here. He was coming. He came on the show last week to talk about FOAF. FOAF.

He's clearly working more closely with another. Thank you, Dad. Was it called FA? I like that. I would Sign up for that. But yeah, he's clearly like on the board of that company and not on the board of Factory, because the really crazy thing is like, how did this not— how did this go straight on the timeline? Like, this should have been a text message, and maybe it was, but you're only talking about 2.5 hours. I feel like if a portfolio founder is out of control, you would text them and say, hey, you are in the wrong, you're about to get smoked. You don't have the leverage here. Like, you would say, hey, look, you're a second-tier competitor, and you're being unethical, and you're lying. So I think you should take the post down and apologize. You know, you would say that behind closed doors.

Yeah.

You would text that. You would not just go straight to the truth nuke from outer space, which is what Vinod did. It's the truth, right?

Well, I don't even think it's necessarily— I wouldn't call it a truth nuke because it's an ad hominem. Like, he just went directly at him. He didn't even talk about OK. Any of the facts.

Well—

So here's the thing. So Luke Metropoulos—

If he knows the facts are true, and it's— we don't disagree that it's a nuke, correct?

It's definitely a nuke.

It's definitely a nuke. The question is, is it a truth nuke, or is it an ad hominem nuke? And I think it might be a truth nuke, because I think, as an investor, you might actually know the truth of what happened. You might know, because he could go into Like the internal Kosla Slack or something and say like, "Who are the board members? Is this guy actually a board member?" You know, like like what what files have been shared from factory to our board? Oh, nothing relevant that would be useful to cognition. You know, he could have made that decision.

What are you what are you calling it, Tyler? Ad hominuk. Ad hominuk.

Okay, it's an ad hominuk. We'll leave it there. I think we we close that out.

But anyway, so Luke Metro said what I think everyone was thinking. Can we please not? Start Cognition versus Factory before we get a resolution to Rippling versus Deal. Great post. That being said, wildly different situation than Rippling versus Deal. When the Rippling-Deal drama broke, there was immediately insane, seemingly insane smoking guns that are getting worked out through the court system. But it was like Rippling had basically Like tricked deal in some ways, right?

Wait, really? Oh, I don't remember that at all.

Um, I mean, it's, it's sort of fuzzy at this point.

It was like a honeypot operation.

Yeah.

That is sort of a trick. That's sort of tricky.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, honeypot is a better way to—

I think that was like their term, right? They put the honeypot and this spy went for it.

My current, um, my current read is that CRO, you know, the advisor goes to Matan and says, I'm getting poached. And Matan says, you can't get poached. You're being fired for unethical conduct. But the firing happened days after he was notified that he was leaving for a competitor.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Keith said it is unethical per se to even interview at a competitor While attending board meetings and board dinners. And I read this and I was like, yeah, I think that's right. I think I agree with that. But then I was thinking about like, how would you do this? How would he have done this more responsibly if that's what happened? And I was like, so you have to resign Because you think that you should go interview at a competitor and then reach out to them. And it doesn't seem like that's the way things happen that often. I don't know. People, like, even direct competitors will maintain somewhat jovial interactions. Oh, how's it going? Oh, it's going great. Yeah, cool, man. And both parties are kind of just saying nothing.

Yeah.

But you are having like a conversation technically because you like bump into someone at a conference. You might both be on stage at the same part talking about agentic AI or something. I don't know. And then I was thinking about like, how does this rank if he was— if the new Cognition CRO, I forget his name, was on the— Chris Degnan. If Chris Degnan was on the— he was a board observer or board advisor. What's the terminology?

Advisor.

I think his only— from what I understand, his only technical title was advisor.

Advisor. OK. So I'm just thinking, like, back to your original frame of, like, is this more or less hardcore than before? And I'm thinking about, like, the Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt interaction, where, like, Eric Schmidt is on the board of Apple and being like, we're buying Android over at Google. We're launching Android over at Google. And Steve Jobs gets pissed. Yeah, uh, but it doesn't spill out on the timeline. Or that's where Steve Jobs—

another, another comp is like Mike Krieger. Oh yeah, uh, his involvement with Figma. Yeah, and resigned from the board, I think, a couple days before launching a competitor. Yeah, yeah. So again, this stuff has been happening, but the funny thing is to see this, like, whole— all this drama around companies that provide basically enterprise applications. When you look at what's happening on the research side where aggressive, constant aggressive poaching around truly companies developing truly novel IP that basically have no protections where you can work at a company for 5 years, learn a bunch about what they do, get poached and bring all of that know-how over to a new company within the same 24-hour period, right? And so I just don't— this whole situation, like an advisor that gets poached, doesn't feel like a big deal at all to me in the context of everything else that's been happening.

Yeah, yeah. It's just—

And ultimately, I think the story's over.

No, no, I think you're right. Yeah, it's different because the researchers do post, but they don't— They don't have like— they don't have as many interactions with VCs. So like there's, there's that back and forth about the 3 OpenAI researchers who were just fired, according to The Wall Street Journal, for sharing information. But like that doesn't reach the level of like board interaction, right? So you're not going to see board members, at least that I can tell, like doing drama about it. And even when the talent wars happen between Meta and OpenAI, like We were the ones that were posting the most, like, spicy stuff about it, right? Because, like, the board members, they don't necessarily have the same level of interaction with the researchers as the other board advisors. Yeah. And so I think this, this just gets a lot more personal, I think. Anyway, you want to close the book on this? Are you sure?

Miles says, I was there.

Okay, we're going back into the trough. Let's go back. Let's go back.

Let's go find the pigs.

Let's do it.

Miles says, I work with a company that's doing great by all definitions. Recently, one of its star executives was poached by an A+ company to lead a very popular product. Founders tried to retain him. They couldn't. So, they wished him well and began the recruitment process to replace him. The investors sent him notes thanking him for all his work. No temper tantrums or ethics debate— debates or Twitter name-dragging. Just grown-ups getting back to work. And, Martin over at a16z says, boring.

Yeah, but that's kind of what Miles is advocating for. He's like, these types of interactions should be boring, right? So I don't know. That's reasonable. Sean Maguire says, nice one from the cheap seats. You know 1% of the story. And Sean's really teasing something. He's like, there's going to be the files. There's going to be some crazy drop. There's gonna be another truth nuke. It's gonna be Truth World War III, something like that.

Yeah.

Um, but has he actually posted anything? Like, it feels like today is the day to like share the, uh, like the truth.

I hope everyone can, uh, sort it out behind the scenes.

Yeah, I don't know. Uh, yeah, he said he has a nuclear weapon. Yeah, that's a truth nuke. He has a truth nuke. That's what he's saying, a nuclear weapon on the timeline.

But he did come out and say Cognition is Infosys masquerading as Anthropic. And then, which is funny because Infosys does like technology IT transformation, which is in many ways what Cognition does. So, it But the only thing I would disagree with Sean on is I don't see Cognition masquerading as Anthropic.

No, not at all. You talk to Scott Wu, and he's like, yeah, we're providing enterprise value.

Automating code generation and business.

Yeah, yeah. It's not an Anthropic-like group at all over there. I mean, they take their business seriously, but that's not a uniquely Anthropic thing.

Well, and also, this would tell me that the 2— that factory And Cognition are going in very different directions.

Maybe.

He thinks the Infosys direction is bad.

Yeah.

And hopefully they can go in different directions.

That's great.

And maybe they could even work together at some point.

Ooh, okay. Yeah, and maybe you don't need the Snowflake CRO if you have discovered some fundamental thing, right? Like, the whole tease was like, we did something on the research side. But like, that doesn't matter if your CRO leaves, right? Yeah. Hopefully he didn't. Hopefully he doesn't even understand it. He doesn't even understand what's going on in the research department. He's like, I don't know. There's a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Just tell me who to call and sell it to. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Moving on. What's next? Bunch of people got. Slop ads from Instinct. They're upset. I'm putting on the steel man helmet because I think it's good.

Yeah, get the steel man helmet. But I would clarify, I don't think they're— I would be shocked if they're actually monetizing this already. It seems like it was just an experiment, right? Yes. Can we suggest products that people will want to buy? Because it would be a big— it would be a— I think everybody that— Noah's been very explicit that they plan to do this, right? They plan to— get deals with different retailers and platforms and be able to monetize the purchases that they draw. Yeah. Now, something I've always said, or at least said a lot in the last month or so, is that if you want to get to the point where you can have meaningful take rates, you need to be driving net new demand, right? So if I go to my personal agent and say, buy me this thing, right, the demand was created elsewhere, like that that it was generated with like advertisement or organic content or something caused me to want to go and buy it. And brands are not going to be standing up and lining up to pay big referral fees effectively when they already paid to create the demand elsewhere. Yep.

Yep.

And so, this instinct test is, hey, we have a— we understand this person. Let's basically suggest some products that they maybe weren't thinking about, but they would buy.

Like a phone charger. Like a power bank. Like a power bank.

Or some sunscreen.

I just saw 12 different screenshots that were all power banks. It is sort of universal. If you were going to blast, just blast that. I mean, we talked to Sean at The Ridge, and he's like, yeah, they just move. It's a good business. But I don't know. So we got to just figure out, like, are they actually monetizing this? Because Instinct is in a position where you could literally just go and set up an Amazon referral fee thing and start taking a cut. And websites have done that for a long time. Like, if you go to The Wirecutter, now owned by The New York Times, you will be able to click on checkout for a suitcase, for some sunglasses, for the best TV they have. And if you click on one of their partner sites, it puts a cookie there, and when you check out, they actually do make a referral commission. I would be surprised if Instinct wasn't monetizing that. But at the same time, I think they might not even need to because the scale of what they're trying to do is more just like understand the consumer and then have the next proof point for the next raise because obviously it's incredibly compute intensive. They're growing very quickly. They're gonna be raising very quickly.

Yeah.

And being able to go back to the next round of VCs and say, hey, we've actually tested e-commerce and it converts at 7 times the rate of Instagram Reel ads or whatever. And it's like, we have this much surface area and here's the response. And yes, there was a lot of feedback that was like, oh, this is slop. Who said it? Shop slop or whatever? Shop slop, Dave Morin called it from OpenCLaw.

Yeah, somewhat biased, right? He's running the open— like, he's running the foundation.

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

Which is like basically own your compute, own your agent. Don't get ads pushed to you. Have your agent be aligned to you. That's their stance.

I think the slop—

Here's the thing. Here's the thing.

Please.

If they can actually— give you a 10 out of 10 recommendation, people will love it, right? Like, when someone recommends you a product and you're just instantly like, yes, this is great.

Yeah.

That's a wonderful experience. The question is, how quickly can they get there? It didn't really feel like they were nailing it, but we don't know. Like, maybe people are sharing screenshots. Like, one of these was pretty cool. It was— They found like some Row loafers, which are generally— they generally sell out. They're kind of hard to find.

Yeah.

And so, it's possible this person didn't like it, but I think a lot of people would be like, cool, thank you.

You're like, this is the worst thing ever. And then you see one thing you like and you're like, meh.

Okay. I'm sold. No, the one that I saw that I thought was funny was Instinct knew that this guy had a 911 Targa.

Yeah, yeah.

And because they'd worked on some insurance stuff.

Yeah.

But the issue is that Instinct was like basically clocked like, okay, this guy's a car guy. I got to hit him with a bunch of car stuff.

Yeah.

And then it recommends a trickle charger, which 911s really don't need, especially modern 911s, and an indoor Yeah. To use inside your garage, which car guys I know would never use an indoor cover because— I said this yesterday briefly at the end of the show, but because if you have any sort of the— basically, like, the, um, the COVID against the paint can cause more damage than it just, like, sitting there, right? So you generally want it out of the sun, but, uh, but you're better off just, like, leaving it Especially because if there gets— if there can be any debris between the COVID and the paint, you get even more wear.

But you could imagine how that model evolves.

It knows about the user, but it doesn't know about what car people actually want, right? And so, they can probably get better data.

But it could learn, and in the future, it could recommend like a straight pipe exhaust system or underlighting or something that a car guy would want for their Targa, right?

Yes.

Exactly.

Spinners, as you always say.

Spinners. Spinners, or even just knobby off-road tires, an off-road kit, something like that. Yeah, with the Shop Slop screenshot here from Dave Morin, what sticks out to me is the fact that there's like 5 let's buy this buttons. I don't know, like, this seems like a normal e-commerce site, but the repetition there of all the calls to action is what's throwing me off and making this look sloppy. I don't know if that's what's triggering me, but the actual recommendations there of a couple of things—

Well, it's funny because this was always a historical concern with AI ads is the AI that you trust for information and to help you do things suddenly is like, come on, let's— I think we should buy this. Let's buy this. What do you think? Should we buy this? Right? And it's like, it ends up feeling a little— this feels a little bit pushy.

Yeah.

The other thing that stands out is, you know, they've taken a very UI-light approach, right? The NOAA has said you don't need new interfaces. You know, it has a computer, it has a phone number, it has a number that you can text, but I feel like they're gonna need to— they have to make interfaces, right? And this is one of the first.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, yeah, again, the challenge is like getting pushed products in text is just very, very, very, very personal. It's just very, very personal.

Yeah.

Right? And I think that a lot of e-commerce brands, you know, will use text marketing. I find that I'm like 1,000 times more likely to unsubscribe from text marketing than I am To— from email marketing, right?

Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it can be dangerous to operate on the previous era of, like, text message conversion rates and open rates because we have moved into a regime where my iMessage, at least, probably yours as well, has a number of folders for unknown senders, promotions, spam, transactions, and if it starts flagging Instinct or your AI agent not as a friend but as a promotions vehicle. It goes in that bucket and then the open rate goes way down. And this is what happened with like the newsletter apocalypse in Gmail where you got filtered off into a different section. You're not actually in the inbox anymore. And so that's pretty risky. I was demoing Dot yesterday and just had a phone call with it on the way home. was shopping and said, like, go find this pair of pants that I bought in my Gmail. Go find another pair in, like, a slightly different color. And it was hunting around and it was just like, nothing's in stock in your size, bro. And I was like, is there some, like, global pants outage or something? Like, what's going on? And it was like, no, this isn't like a conspiracy or nothing. But I was actually, like, kind of laughing back and forth.

You're not crazy. They're crazy.

It was a pretty delightful experience. But like my end result was like, I was like, I don't want you just to send me random stuff, but I do actually want you to check on this. So go create a background task to check like every day for this pair of pants and then just let me know if they come back in stock. And it's like, I'm expecting one notification sometime in the next few months for that particular pair of pants and then I can just be like, get it. Okay.

Yeah. But anyways, closing this segment out. Instinct is, as of I think last week, was like 13 or 14 people, right? Like tiny. They're shipping super quickly as a small team, experimenting. I think that's important. And they just hired our friend Ben from Coto, who was at Snapchat for almost a decade leading content and partnerships there.

Yeah.

He joined as the chief business officer at Instinct. And I think that that is gonna be a massive unlock for them. Yeah. There's so much that Ben can do.

Yeah. I do think that there is a—

To improve this experience. Totally. To make it more like an Amex-style experience. Yes. Right. Where it's very mass market and commercial, but they're trying to make it feel like elevated and, and put the, yeah, put the user first.

They might need to do a new pre-trained specifically on car guy data. To, uh, to really nail that, really dial that in. I think so. No, I, I think that there is a little bit of a gap between the ex-Twitter community, the tech people, the insiders who are like, I don't want a bunch of ads. And like, there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, like, I actually enjoy going through all the newsletters and sales in my email. I like the email, email, you know, promotional marketing materials. And I watch the ads on Instagram. I like them. I enjoy having products be shown to me in a certain place.

Yeah, there's some people that maybe they park their car on a public street, and then they go back to their car, maybe after going to a restaurant, and there's one of those business card ads, like, I will buy your junk car. You ever get those?

No.

In LA, there's people that they'll put a business card in your window socket.

I've gotten that business card, but for— Like gardening, or like, we'll trim your trees, like that type of stuff. I've never gotten an offer to buy my car.

Yeah, I've got the multiple times in LA, like, we buy junk cars. I'm like, wow, shots fired. I thought I was, I thought I was doing all right.

Yeah, it was kind of a, kind of a neg. Um, but yeah, I, I think a lot of people will, will, will be excited to have like the daily text of like the best product that they could possibly buy.

John says nobody on earth can do what Ben can change his instinct overnight. I agree.

No, sure.

I've had it. I mean, I've had a bunch of conversations with Ben about, about where consumer AI should go offline, and he's going to crush it.

Okay. So let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. The folks over at DeepMind picked the best day to launch Gemini 4 Argon when everyone's talking about factory and cognition, of course. But it did break through some really impressive benchmarks. Also some controversy over how much Google employees are using it internally to code. Of course, we'll need to see. The meme is, we're launching Gemini 4 Argon, and a group of people are talking about, did you see the factory guy calling out cognition guy? And then the Twittersphere goes, cool, and then goes back to the model agnostic, the enterprise model agnostic harnesses are fighting. And so, It is certainly a tough day to launch when there's a lot of drama on the timeline that is more engaging than the model wars. The model wars used to be the most engaging thing, but now the interpersonal board dynamics are clearly taking the lead. But what's going on with the naming schemes here? So OpenAI says—

All my tokens are gone.

That's pretty funny. So the naming schemes, OpenAI's in the solar system, you got Luna for the moon, Terra for the Earth, Sol for the sun, Astra for the stars. Anthropic is doing haiku, a Japanese poem, a sonnet— it's a 14-line poem— opus, major work, fable, moral story. And then Google arrives with Argon. Just look at the image. The word Argon comes from the ancient Greek word Argos, which means lazy or inactive.

Whew!

I think they're named after the element argon, and they're probably just gonna go down the list of elements, which is a cool place to pull from. But yeah, tech leaders, you gotta dig into these words. I keep saying this. Too many hubristic tales. I don't need any more Project Titan, Project— what was it? Behemoth. It's like, you look at it like, the untamable. Oh, you couldn't get it out. Interesting. What a coinkydink. Anyway, what else is going on in Gemini world? Anything? Yeah, employees are sharing some skepticism. We'll see. We'll see how it evolves, how they wind up using it, and where it goes from there. The most trusted rating agency for over 30 years, Egon Jones, is blackpilling, says it's over. Complete disruption of the economy is now all but certain thanks to AI. It has a community note now. Joe Weisenthal shared this, so I don't think it's fake news. But the purported Egan Jones Risk Commentary Number 22 does not appear on the firm's website. Okay. It might be entirely fake. They got him. Interesting. They got him. Got him. There's so much slop on the timeline, it's crazy. There was this fake— there was this fake New York Times article about a stock photographer that was put out of work. And I feel somewhat responsible for this because I was doing this bit like a year ago where I would take quotes from our friends and put them— just inspect element, no AI. I would just go and edit the HTML to put a Jeremy Gaffan quote in the Financial Times and then screenshot it and share it to be like, oh, it's like funny that one of their tweets is in the Financial Times. And then we got to the point where like we were actually commenting and we were actually in the Wall Street Journal with our— basically our tweets. and are joke posts. And so, things got very muddy there. And then people took the ability to instantiate these joke posts a little too far. So, you can scroll the timeline and just see community note after community note of fake news. So, be safe out there. A lot of info hazards, but this one isn't. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops Breaches. We got to talk about this house. We got to do another tier list. There's a house that's for sale in Los Angeles that is accepting OpenAI equity and Anthropic equity. And we need to do another tier list to decide whether or not it's a good house. Is it worth precious shares in Frontier AI, or should the humble AI researcher sitting on $30 million of equity in a Frontier lab. Sit this one out. So we have the Zillow here. I will pull it up, and I want Jordi to give me some tier list stuff. So 1210 Chicory Lane in Los Angeles, price cut, $4 million cheaper, a humble $30 million, 5 beds, 11 baths. Rate that ratio. 5 beds, 11 baths. Twice as many baths, having twice as many baths as bedrooms. Where does that fit in the tier list?

I think that's excellent.

That's excellent. A tier?

A tier.

A tier. We got an A tier for having twice as many baths. My man likes some extra bath.

The only thing is it's a lot of bathrooms for a third of an acre.

Okay, so third of an acre, 0.35, technically just over a third of an acre. Where do you put the acreage?

D tier.

Rough.

But that's just a personal thing.

It is.

Like, to me, like smaller house on more land.

Okay.

But there's going to be some people that are fired up on the view and they don't care that they can't really touch the earth anywhere on the Okay, we got some, we got some other stuff in here.

So, it's set at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. Where do you sit? Quiet cul-de-sacs. Are you a cul-de-sac guy?

Feng shui, not, not, can be rough on the feng shui side.

For defense purposes?

No, no, no, like trapped energy.

Oh, okay, okay, okay. So I'm hearing D tier?

F tier.

F tier for the cul-de-sac, okay. Cul-de-sacs, F tier.

Sorry, sorry, folks. It's fine.

Be honest, be honest.

I mean, the view is really incredible.

Okay, so the view.

The view is, the view is, um, S tier.

S tier. What about the 110 linear feet of 11-foot motorized glass walls that disappear, completely transforming the great room into an open-air retreat above the city?

I hate motorized glass.

Okay, what are we doing?

Uh, in—

What tier are you putting it in? Motorized, 110 feet of motorized glass walls.

My school is F tier. F tier? Wow. And I say this because I unfortunately have them, and you have to— you can only put this in F tier if you've been like late at night, you know, you're trying to like turn off the lights and I accidentally hit the motorized door button.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like literally middle of the night.

Okay.

Is it loud?

At least mine, you have to wait until they get to the end.

Like it's gas powered, so it needs to fire up a V6.

It's not super loud, but it's incredibly annoying when you're sitting there and suddenly your entire house is open air, you know, past midnight.

Okay. Lightning round. Formal dining room.

A-tier.

A-tier. Ocean-facing library office.

S tier.

S tier. 4 stone islands. Is that too many?

Maybe. Quite possibly. So we're putting it in C tier.

Okay. Lower level brings together media lounge and illuminated bar. Do you like an illuminated bar?

Not for me, but I think— Give me a tier.

Give me a tier.

B tier.

Temperature-controlled wine room.

If you turn it into a data center, I think it's A tier.

Okay. Cinematic theater.

Like Toby, look, he did cinematic theater. S tier, because I could say, hey, John.

Hey, because I'll be over using it. Okay. Glass-enclosed fitness studio. Do you like a home fitness studio?

No, I don't like working out at home.

So. F tier. F tier. Okay.

Working out in a gym, in a great gym is just a million times better. Okay.

We'll end with this one and I'm hoping for a good result. We're going with the 60-foot zero-edge infinity pool and spa that appear to dissolve into the hills, joined by multiple, multiple lounge and fire areas, a full outdoor kitchen and a flat lawn.

D tier. D tier.

What?

You said pools were S tier yesterday. The most elite setup for a pool is Basically, like, grass surrounding the full pool.

Okay.

And, and being able to go from grass straight into the water.

Okay.

It's obviously F tier.

Okay.

And anytime it's just kind of like a body of—

Grass to water is S tier. Out of the water and you're falling down the hill, that's F tier.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay. I think we clarified it. Well, well, agree or disagree with Jordi, make your call as long as you got $30 million in cash, OpenAI stock, or Anthropic equity, because the seller will accept equity as payment.

As much as I'm sure this is entertaining for our friend Will, who's in the waiting room. Yes, he's got more important things to do than he does. He does do a tier list. What's going on?

Will Brewie from Varda. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

Hey, it's not that I disagree with Jordi, it's that it's inconsistent. Oh, the, the pool inconsistency. You know, that infinity pool you just had?

Definitely S tier. Come on, guys. Yes.

No shot.

No shot. There's a bunch of houses in LA where you can get an infinity-style pool on a sprawling lawn with the same view. And I think— anyways, I think the house is dramatically overpriced. That's all I'm going to say. That's all I'm going to say.

But, well, more importantly, space manufacturing, space industrialization, certainly not overpriced. We're just getting started on the space manufacturing boom. Give us the latest. What's the latest in Varda news? What's the latest in space?

You guys, you guys know I only come on when it's gong-worthy. So today is the first flight. It's the first flight. There we go.

I didn't even get to say it yet.

What's the next stage?

We don't know what's happening, but we're excited.

Raise some money?

Awesome. Awesome. I love the energy. Love the hype. This is great, guys. No, so I come to you because today is the first flight of multiple commercial reentry vehicles in the history of—

I can't hear you. I can't hear you. I can't hear you over the sound of this gong. I have no idea what's happening.

Too much success.

I love it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. So I come bringing news of Series D. You might have saw that in the news this week. Currently—

Oh, baby.

Oh, more gong hits. I need them.

He's going to break the Oh my God. I appreciate it. I appreciate it.

We'll lock in. We'll lock in. Okay. Sorry. I just get excited.

I know. It's a lot to get over.

You know, we went from 5-bathroom houses.

You know, now we're on reentry vehicles. I don't know how you guys do the context switch.

I get it. I get it. Yeah, it's all the same world.

All right.

Why is it important? Why does it matter?

So it matters because we are now in a fleet mentality, which means that we can manufacture at scale. We've done proof of concepts. We've begun scaling over the last— couple of years. We've flown 6 of these vehicles. Today is 8 and 9 at the same time, which just means that, you know, we have the ability and the infrastructure to do a fleet rather than just one-off missions, which means significant unlock for microgravity manufacturing.

Well, how did that actually play out in the factory? Like, I remember touring the factory and seeing like it felt like an assembly line, but maybe like one capsule at one vehicle at a time? Are you just parallelizing and you have like multiple pods coming together piece by piece, or is there machinery involved now? Like, what did it actually take to go to, you know, this higher velocity?

Yeah, the assembly line is higher velocity for sure. The mission control is now parallel.

Okay.

Launch ops are now parallel. We have vehicles at the Cape and Vandenberg, multiple vehicles on a rocket. All the ground systems, a lot of it's digital and in software where we have to be able to handle data from multiple vehicles at the same time. They fly over a ground station. How do you tell them apart? How do you do mission ops with multiple vehicles? So this has obviously been done before in constellations, but never for reentry vehicles, you know?

Mm-hmm.

And so, like, if you think about Starlink or other constellations, hundreds, sometimes thousands of satellites, we are now able to do that not just with satellites, but with reentry vehicles. which has never been done before today, which is kind of a weird thing to say.

Yeah. I read some article about space launch capacity being extremely tight as a market. Jordi was even pitching buying future capacity and reselling it, trying to arbitrage something. But how much does that go into your fundraising plans? It's effectively your supply chain. You're going to need to buy launch capacity years out. How real is the crunch? Are you— I mean, we just saw Starship come back and be successful, so it feels like there might be a big unlock. Are we in a temporary period of a tight market or is it just going to be tighter and tighter and this is going to be core competency for you forever?

Yeah, I think it'll come in waves like any other market. In this situation, we got lucky because we have— we booked our flights. We took it. We also had that arbitrage idea. So we booked flights all the way out through 2029. So we have 7 already on contract for next year, 10 the year after that. and so on and so forth. So, you know, as one launch vehicle winds down like Falcon 9 and Starship winds back up to a microgravity manufacturing company, we treat launch like shipping. And so, you know, a lot of business— not a lot of business models are you talking to someone and be like, oh, FedEx has a new truck, what do you think? You know, it doesn't— it kind of is below the layer of abstraction for us.

Mm-hmm.

So as long as our— we have access to space and the COGS meet the value that we're generating, it's, it's G&A there.

So I think everyone's acutely aware of like how much space is booming. The best representation is just like SpaceX is a $2 trillion company IPO'd, the price held like it's, it's so real in everyone's face. I'm more interested in your view on what's happening in bio and the pharmaceutical industry because it feels like GLP-1s are really exciting. But there's also this sort of undercurrent of, you know, progress at Anthropic around the future of AI that we've talked to a ton of AI for bio companies that are doing molecule design, drug design. There's a lot of energy there that feels like it's going to get unlocked. How much— how important is that trend to your business? What are you— what's real there? What are you actually excited about? And then what are the timelines around that?

So I'm definitely excited about AI's contribution to life sciences and the biotech industry at large. It's a force multiplier. multiplier. It's also a great pairing with a company like Varda, where the aspect that we're offering is a low-gravity environment to create chemical outcomes that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do on Earth, period. So even if, you know, even if you can, or if AI does unlock the answer, if you will, to do something, you still have to go to space to get to microgravity. You cannot physically replicate microgravity or lower gravity on Earth. That's That's Einstein's principle of equivalence. And so I'm super excited about this, especially with respect to monoclonal antibodies and informing us which drugs make the most sense to crystallize in microgravity. So in the same way that this is acting as kind of a tide raises all boats in the biotech industry, that's also true for Varda, of course. And the lucky aspect for us is that that gravity knob is something we have a monopoly on right now.

Yeah. So— sorry, monopoly on gravity.

Let's give it up for that. I wanted to get like, how should space enthusiasts update their timelines after the last Starship launch and the success of that?

Yes, yes, a mark to market for enthusiasm. I would say pretty excited. Let's see. So, you know, sometimes I like to think back about like, okay, when was Falcon 9 at this level of maturity? And of course you can account for all these synergies at SpaceX and compounding interest of learnings that they've had since then. Going to orbit and landing, you know, this one technically landed in the ocean, but it was, you know, from a physics perspective, essentially the same thing as like, let's say, Flight 21. So you're kind of in the 2015 timeframe, if you will, in Falcon 9 years, if you want to mark to market that way. From an enthusiasm factor, I mean, I don't know, you saw those videos. They were awesome. It's hard to not be enthusiastic about the space industry after you see a skyscraper spitting out data centers into orbit. That's pretty effing cool.

Yeah. Yeah. Is there a risk factor to you that data centers crowd out or kind of, you know, like just drive up the price of launch? Because when it feels like the first Varda model was probably predicated just on communication, now there's this new entrant. How do you play nice with that? Is there actually a benefit to the launch market broadly as it becomes more competitive to having some diversity of revenue? How do you think about the long-term interaction between you and the space data center market?

Yeah, I don't think it's too different than any other infrastructure build-out in history. And what I mean by that is, you know, locomotives— hey, the killer app there was moving oil around or moving steel around.

For sure.

But, you know, there's no reason not to to scale up, we already have the operational leverage, um, from having that infrastructure exist.

Mm-hmm.

And once you show that the unit economics for any application, whether it be microgravity manufacturing or, yeah, uh, or data centers or anything else of that nature, um, there's really no reason not to take advantage of the rails that are already laid. Um, and so I don't, uh, you know, there might be some high-frequency noise in there, but other than that, the free market has shown that, uh, launch access to space, there's a lot of Application layers on top of that, data centers, Starlink, et cetera, pharmaceuticals. And so the word is out that money is to be made off our home planet, unfortunately. And so, or fortunately, I should say. And so therefore investment will go there to bridge the gap between known value and realized value.

Oh yeah, there's the— this is from the Starship launch, this one? Take me through—

This one is ours right here.

That's you?

This one is ours going up right now. We are about to see main engine cutoff of the second stage, and that's when both of our reentry vehicles will deploy from the rocket.

Wow. Take me through reentry specifically. It feels like that is the place where you've always been the pioneer, the leader, the most aggressive, advanced, pushing the envelope of like what the system was designed to handle. There were setbacks in the past, delays. There were landings in other countries. What is the current strategy? Have you found an equilibrium for how to bring something back reliably? Where's the right place to land? How has the— how has the actual reentry process evolved?

Let's see. So we're— this will be 8— this is vehicle 8 and 9. So we've flown 6 before. 5 of them we landed in Australia at our landing site with our partner Southern Launch. One of them we landed in Utah with our partner, the Utah Test and Training Range. It's kind of rinse and repeat now. We have an FAA operator's license, which means that if we're not doing dramatic changes to the operation— oh, here we go, baby. Sonic boom.

This is amazing.

Moment of silence for breaking the sound barrier.

Wow.

It never gets old, dude. It never, ever gets old. No, but back to the question of reentry.

Just asking serious questions.

You should be a streamer. I think a lot of people would watch you just like react.

That's crazy.

Let's get some W's in the chat for the sound barrier.

Another one.

So good.

Oh my God. No, but I mean, like, you know, it's been proven, you know, I mean, we've done it now multiple So it's really exciting. Yeah.

So does— so it sounds like Australia is not going to have a monopoly on landing these things. There's going to be different places. Is there any possibility of landing in the ocean for you? Is that like— did you cross that off as like not viable? Because it seems very logical. It's like the biggest possible target. It's international waters. But at the same time, like, you got to catch it and not let it sink. But what was the actual thinking between like, Like, why we haven't heard, like, oh yeah, Varda just lands in the ocean every time.

Yeah, so we land on land because it's— why put a boat in the assembly line is really what it comes down to. From a unit economics perspective, it's just cheaper to land on land. The reason why reentry in the past has been done in the water is just to absorb the shock load for astronauts. But since we don't have astronauts on board, we're moving inanimate objects. These are just drug molecules. I mean, you can drop a pill bottle on the ground and nobody dies. So let's drop a pill bottle on the ground because it's cheaper than dropping one in the ocean. It's really just as simple as that.

Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.

Very cool.

Jordi, anything else?

No. I mean, I'd like to see you drop something in the ocean to create some waves.

Well, I wanted to land one in the Taiwan Strait just to prove a point of what could be possible with the Varda technology, you know. I don't know if the State Department would have anything. Oh, by the way, I see you put $251 million Series D there.

What is it?

It is. I said we should just say $250 million, make it simple. But Delian wanted to get that plus 1 in there, so you can give him some shit next time.

OK, someone snuck in at the last second. Got room for one more.

Who got that last allocation? I thought we capped it.

Well, congratulations, and thanks so much for coming on the show.

Dude, great to see you.

Appreciate it.

Amazing progress. Our favorite part of the job is just seeing the progression across, you know, different, different appearances. And you guys are just, you know, it's amazing. Yeah. Thank you. Awesome.

Well, I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in person soon.

Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public investing. For those who take it seriously, they got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is the chairman, president, and CEO of Ecolab. Christopher Beck is coming in to the TVPN UltraDome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Hey, good to see you guys.

Good to see you too. Great to see you. Thank you so much for joining.

This is good. It's not even Friday.

I know. I don't know if you caught much of the last, uh, interview, but we're certainly acting like it's Friday. I did not. I'll check it out. We're certainly acting like it's Friday.

Yeah, it's Friday somewhere. Every day is Friday.

My dad's spending time in Korea the other day. They were talking on Saturday, it's the second Friday. Sunday, it's the third Friday. So it never stops. Yeah.

But first time on the show, would love for you to give us a little introduction on yourself and the company just to kind of set the table for the discussion.

Okay. Well, let me talk about the company first, which is way more important than just me. We're the world's water and infection prevention company. So we're solving big problems like water scarcity, small thing, making sure that we have enough water to survive and to grow for the years to come, making sure that food is safe, around the world. Not an obvious thing, unfortunately, when we look at what happened with Latios lately as well. And today, so looking at how do we make sure that AI infrastructure, which means microelectronics manufacturing, power generation, and cooling in data centers, is made in ways that are, well, good for people, good for the environment. Big topic right now. So that's where I'm spending most of my time. I was born in Switzerland and I've been living in 10 different countries. So I don't exactly know where home is, but that's where I am.

Great. I mean, water is a huge topic. We can go all over the place, but I'd love to know more concretely what products, services are actually relevant to the world of modern data centers. We've heard about closed-loop systems. There's filtration systems. There's a lot of different things that go on, but how do you fit in when we're thinking about a new powered shell coming online? a bunch of water-cooled GPUs going in that building. Where— when are you meeting the builder? How are you interfacing with them? What products and services are they using?

Well, things have changed quite a bit, as you guys know. So for a very long time, it was air conditioning, HVAC, air in another room. And that's what we were doing basically. So I was making sure that the whole cooling system, cooling towers, control equipment, remote monitoring, everything was doing well in order to keep the data centers running. That's changed the last 2 years in dramatic ways with Blackwell, with Vera Rubin, and all the new things that are coming up. Well, on one hand, you can't cool them with HVAC anymore. It has to be direct-to-chip cooling. And second, if you don't do it differently, it's using a lot of water. And that's a big deal. So what we've done is basically to invent technologies that are in a closed loop. Which is what we've done in most industries as well. And to say, well, you can have the combination of getting a coolant directly on every GPU anywhere in any rack in the data center to get into a CDU, a coolant distribution unit. We have coolant as well that are remote monitored so we can trace basically the quality of the coolant. Is it cooling as it should? Is there any risk as well to lose any cooling capacity as well? And the really cool news is that, well, you don't need any incremental water for it. So it's a closed circuit. You don't need incremental water. They don't have impact for the communities around. And the other good news is that ultimately you need less power to do it, which means more power to compute.

Yeah, of course. I'm interested in how you have been setting the company up to thrive in an era of the gigawatt compute campus era. I don't know what else to call it, but It feels like we're seeing projects in Abilene, huge campuses of buildings and buildings and buildings that go on for miles. And I'm wondering, is it enough to just vertically or horizontally duplicate your current solution set, or are you actually at a place where you need to build new systems that can handle the bigger buildings and the bigger networking fabric that's happening at these campuses? What has your solution been as the, as the actual campuses have gotten bigger?

Well, things evolve very quickly because the demand evolves quickly. The way chips are being produced evolves as well. So we're trying to stay ahead of it. We had the last few days, so we're talking about innovation with our team as well and saying, okay, now the next move is this direct-to-chip cooling, which is 3% of the data centers and water-neutral data centers in the country. We have 3 that are like that. So it's very early on that journey. But at the same time, as you mentioned, so with the gigawatt type of data center, we know that directed chip is right for the near future, whatever that means, 1, 2, 3 years. And it's to think afterwards, what is it going to be? So we're thinking about dual-phase. It's basically an evaporation of the liquids so close to the GPU, but it's thinking as well. So laser systems, for instance, to remove the heat from computers within the racks. That's a little bit more for the future. So we never stop. But for now, it's really scaling the direct-to-chip cooling. But the most important in a way right now, when I think about the next few months, even for that, so we're using kind of a coolant which has some chemistry in it in order not having fouling and all the crazy stuff that you might have in your car, for instance. And we're thinking, well, if we were to use nature, just water gives 17% more cooling power of it, but you get the fouling, you get scaling, you get the corrosion and all the stuff coming with water. So it's trying to find ways to get closer to 99% water, then to get to second phase, then to get to maybe light laser. That's the way we're thinking about it. That's data center. But what's important to keep in mind as well, well, you need to power those chips as well. That's electricity generation. That's the second user of water in the country after agriculture. And to produce the chips, which is where we're active as well. Sure, sure.

Yeah. What— how have you grappled with the, the AI bottlenecks, the bottlenecks to the buildout? You— sometimes it's good to be a bottleneck because that means the stock's going through the roof as demand— you can just raise prices so much. At the same time, you want to keep your customers happy. You want to keep the supply chain flowing. What have you had to grapple with on the supply chain, on your supply chain side, to make sure that when you get the call, you can deliver your products on time, on budget, within the expectations and to the quality that the buyer demands?

Well, it's the number one problem if we look at the 2 political parties today. So they don't agree on much, but on that they agree that they don't like data centers, which is a problem. For everything that we're talking about here, when you think about it, well, investments go through the roof. You know that. But 60% of the projects are being either paused or delayed. Yeah, well, that's a problem. So on one hand, so you have huge demand, and on the other hand, so you have huge slowdown politically for the for the most part. And it's really unfortunate what's happening here because in our country right now, so there is this. way of talking about technology and AI in negative ways. It's going to kill all of us. It's going to eliminate all the jobs. It's going to be impacting our power bills. I mean, all the stuff that are really dramatic, which is really unfortunate, but that's where it's going. And at the same time, locally in a community, in a village, in a city, nobody wants to have a data center.

Yeah.

So what's happening in our country right now, so we think that speaking louder will solve the problem. Well, that makes it just worse because the whole negativity is getting more prominent, which is a problem. What we do, and we've done that in many industries, is basically to get much closer to the community. It's to go to a city council. It's to call the neighbors. It's to be with the local politicians, the NGOs, all the people who really hate what's being done, and to listen to them and to share with them, okay, do you realize that we can have a data center that is going to use no water, which means less than a car wash in your own village there, your power bill might go down because you have the same infrastructure and you use more power through the same infrastructure. Okay, you don't need to be a genius to understand. So, all the cost is going to go down as well. And that's how we're making some progress. And one example is Minnesota and Texas. We've been working with the 2 states I took those 2 because they're kind of extreme, most liberal, most conservative. One way to simplify it. And interestingly enough, Minnesota hasn't gotten to a pause while Texas went. So in a way, I think we're finding ways. But have you been—

have you been surprised that the sort of tech industry saw that data centers were unpopular and decided to start calling them AI factories? Because I'm sure you work with like thousands of factories, actual factories globally that are actually producing, you know, wastewater.

They might have a smokestack or something. They're not the most aesthetic things. I would think you want to not go towards that.

The last thing you want to be. Yes. Thank you. Oh my God. Yeah. Well, I don't think it's the right thing and it's going— both sides are going so kind of against each other in crazy ways and thinking, well, if I spend more money against you, I'm going to convince you that you're wrong and that you're going to say yes to my stuff. That's where we are right now. That's the exact wrong way. And we're talking with the hyperscalers, the collocators as well, and to say, calm down, get closer to the folks in your communities, the schools, the churches, the NGOs, the communities. They're good people. They're like us. They're Americans. They want to have a good life in front of them. Speak less loud. Try to listen. Come with solutions. Technology is going to help all those things there. And for whatever reason, we spent 2 weeks in China a week ago. Well, 90% love it. Yeah. Well, that's exactly what the Chinese want us to slow down. You say, well, are we doing the right thing here? Well, maybe not. No, I completely agree.

Tell me about some of the other product lines. And I don't know if you have a strong thesis on this, but I'm very interested in desalination. I remember Blake Masters during one of his campaign runs—

Yeah.

—was talking about the future of California should be nuclear-powered desalination, because that would allow the Colorado River to flow back to Nevada and Arizona and sort of create this lush Inland area. And I was like, from a tech—

Sounds great.

From a technology perspective, it sounded doable on a long enough timeline. But I haven't— we talk to CEOs all the time. We haven't talked to that many people that are like, I'm going to be the one who's doing the megaproject on desalination. We've talked to plenty of people that want to do that nuclear. What is your view on desalination?

Well, it sounds great because obviously we're surrounded by water, especially when you're in California. We don't have that problem in Minnesota where I'm living. It's kind of far away from, from the sea. But desalination is not the solution for the future. It requires a lot of power to get it done. It needs to be close to the sea, obviously. Otherwise you don't get much saltwater. That creates geopolitical issues as well. Look at what's happening with the big oil pipeline in Saudi that got destroyed by the Houthis as well. Well, that's creating a big issue in the country. If it's water, which is the case in Saudi, by the way, you have another problem because you can cut the water access as well to big cities. There's a much simpler solution, which is to do what nature has always done. The concept of wastewater is just a wrong concept. It's an engineering— for an engineer like me, I'm an aerospace engineer, this is just a flaw. Nature has never done it that way. It's always in a circular way. It's in a lake, it evaporates, it goes to the clouds, it goes down, it gets filtered, you get to use it and all that. Whether we like it Well, the water that we're drinking today, well, has been through a human a few hundred days prior.

Don't overthink it. Just keep it cycling. Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Keep recycling.

With the fabs, we have that discussion in Taiwan, in Korea, here in the country. We have this art of putting those fabs in places where there's absolutely no water. Well, you need ultra-pure water for a fab. You're familiar with it. It's a million times more pure than the water you put in your own body in an injection. Well, that's hard to recycle to make sure that you get to the highest standard. We've developed those technologies at ultra-pure water level. Well, guess what? You recycle the water, you get higher purity water, which means that you can get lower than the 2 nanometers. And you get a higher yield as well. So from 50%, 60% to 80%, 85%. This is billions. Why wouldn't we do that? You don't need a desal plant to do that.

Okay, okay. Real rock star. Decelerate the desalination. He's a desal, desal, desal. That's what he is. I'll agree to disagree. I'm still optimistic, but you make a lot of good points.

Last question. I know we're over. And from my understanding, in many of the areas where there are proposed data center developments, the actual water infrastructure in those areas is terrible in that the local water utilities are actually wasting water, as in there's leaks because the infrastructure is old. They're underbilling for water because they don't actually have good systems to sort of understand flow. Is there not an opportunity for the tech industry to go and say to these local communities, hey, our data centers are very water efficient already. We're going to make a closed-loop system. It's going to be—

Yeah.

Use less water than a car wash. And you're also— we know that you're wasting a ton of water by having, you know, leaks and underbilling and all these different things. Why don't we invest a relatively more modest amount to actually just like upgrade the local water utility infrastructure in these areas that just don't have a lot of funding? Again, I've heard a lot of this through the grapevine, but it feels like you could come in and say, hey, we're going to give you $20 million to like upgrade your local utility to remove waste and help find leaks, et cetera. And then we're going to put this thing in that is going to use a little bit of water, But the delta will be significant. Just to be clear, it uses zero water.

So we're working with some companies not to be named. There's not so many of you thinking about data centers in space. Those data centers in space are not connected to a garden hose, obviously. So to get the water, it's 100% closed loop. So you need no You bring it once and it works forever. But the point you're making of saying supporting the communities, that's a good idea, but that has nothing to do with the data centers or providing water to it because you need zero, like 0.0. And that's important to keep in mind.

Yeah, yeah. And I know, but it's just like for me, there's like outrage around data center water usage and no outrage around just poor utilities, poor water infrastructure in these local often rural communities where no one for years has come in and said they just don't have the budget to invest, right? And tech companies—

This is a great idea. Yes, that's back to the point I was making before. It's to, to get closer to the local communities. Uh, it's not to spend billions on communication. It's to be closer to those guys. I mean, it's people like us. They want to have kind of a good community, good schools, live, uh, in great places, not having their water being Yes, we should help and we have to.

Love it.

Thank you so much.

All right, well, I think we solved it. We did it. We did it. We did it.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Have a great rest of your day. Great to meet you. Let's do it again soon.

Yeah, we gotta do it again soon. Great to see you guys. All the best. Happy Friday. Goodbye. I got a pitch for you, Jordi. You know how we mentioned the ultra-pure water that's used in semiconductors?

Fabs?

Yes.

I think you got to daily drive that.

I think so too.

$100 a gallon.

Actually, actually, no. No, you want the mineral content.

Oh, you want the mineral content.

Okay. You want the mineral content.

Okay, folks, then it's out. It's out. But you know who's in? Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And you know who else is in? The New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest will probably be there shortly. We got Hassan Raza, co-founder and CEO of Tavis, here with us for the first time on TBN. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

Hey, good. So nice to meet y'all. Excited to be on here.

Thanks for joining. Great to meet you.

Beautiful office. What is the car behind you? Is that a Corvette?

That is. It's an '85 Corvette. It's part of the History Museum. I spent the last couple of years restoring it. But we got a lot of vintage computers out here. If you've seen the EMPAD, they said it was one of the most powerful computers at the time. So it's a lot of fun.

I love it. I love it. Very cool. Tell us about what you're building. Tell us about Griffin.

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, Tablas in a nutshell, we're a research lab focused on human computing. So we want to deliver a future where using a machine will feel like talking to a friend or coworker. And today we released our biggest breakthrough model yet. It's called Griffin. It's a human interaction model, and it's the first model to pass a Turing test.

Did it actually pass? I'm looking at the data. 48% of testers, 26 out of 54, believed Griffin was a real person. That feels like you barely didn't pass.

Well, to be clear, before, the next best model had less than a 2% pass rate.

I'm not saying it's not amazing. I'm not saying it's not the best. It's not— I'm not saying it's not Stoda.

I think you're saying his job's not finished.

I'm saying his job's not finished.

Oh, 100%.

Well, there's also— well, there's also when, when you're getting asked, do you think this is an AI video? Like, you're also like playing— it's like playing rock paper scissors.

True, true. Okay, this is a good point. This is a good point.

You might want to do some—

you might, you might, you might have an instinct to do something, but you know you're being tested.

Yeah, so you're gonna look for— yeah, you're gonna kind of cheat. You're like looking for the details in the background, little aberrations. Okay.

We did, we did do like a human baseline as well. And so like we did that so that people who might have been like, oh, I'm being tricked. And like, you know, 15% of them thought that the real human was AI. And so we used all this in the study. And so this is like a— we have a lot of work to do.

Which one is the AI here?

It is the one, the one who's talking, the ginger lady.

You, you are AI right now.

Oh, I'm also.

Okay. Yeah, because I, because I was watching this and I thought the guy with the Rubik's Cube was AI. So you got— you fooled me. Yeah. You did it. Um, all right, so what, what, um, how are you gonna make money?

How are you making money on this?

We're commercial guys.

Yeah, I can imagine so many, so many things, but who's the, uh, what's the beachhead market?

Yeah, I mean, essentially, like, we use these models to power what we call, like, pals, right? Which is, like, AI employees, AI coworkers, AI companions. And so people are building ASRs, like, on Salesforce, that's powered by Tavis. Um, the continuing medical education, AI tutors, like AI healthcare workers, like all of these things where like you would normally need a human, like you need their EQ, you need their trust, you know, you need to be able to see. Well, there's like not enough of them. And like, those are the markets that we're going after and that are already using our model today.

Okay. So is this, is this a bet? Because there's been various attempts at making these kind of like live interactive video models that have frontier or near frontier intelligence. But oftentimes, if you're doing— I've seen people complaining or even film— there's viral Instagram videos where they're filming themselves doing a screening call for a company.

I've seen these.

And it's like, hello, how are you today? And it's very— and so, is the bet here that once the models are just way better, there will be exponentially more demand and consumers will stop being frustrated by them?

Exactly that, right?

Like, the thing is that essentially, like, the closer that we get to passing the Turing test, the more people— they know it's AI because it's disclosed, but they just don't care because it's like the most natural thing you could do is like instead of like trying to figure out what to prompt the machine or like what button to click or like you're like waiting for it to respond, it just feels like you're talking to another human. So you don't even think about it. You know it's AI. You don't even think about it at all.

Walk me through How you're grappling with the various debates of how this technology gets rolled out, the potential downsides. I imagine you're not going open wait, but is there a process to onboard a customer so that, you know, it's not literally just a scammer who's trying to get grandma to send a gift card or something?

Yeah, yeah. No. So with Griffin, we're doing an early research preview, so we're only releasing it to select testers. Um, and it's exactly for that, right? It is the first model and by far the largest sort of leap ahead in passing Turing tests. So we're like, we know we have to do more AI safety work, but if we want to do like proper disclosure work, make sure that the model always says that it's an AI and not a human. Um, and so we're working through those, uh, safety sort of testing, um, and do like safe releases. Um, so we're probably gonna be releasing it over the next couple months.

And then on the actual, like, you know, job's not finished, like where this goes. It feels like Turing test passed on, you know, basic Zoom call. Where do you want to— what, like, what capabilities do you want to unlock next? I can imagine, like, it's nice to be able to talk to somebody and it looks like they're on a video, but occasionally you'll want that person to, like, stand up and go get an object and show it to you. And I don't know if the model can do that yet. And there's, like, other things that happen in the course of a Zoom call. Where do you see this all going?

Right.

Yeah, I mean, I think what's really special about this model is that it is actually capable of doing a lot of these movements. Like, it won't get up and walk away just yet, though technically it's capable of it. But like, it's the small things, like it'll like shift around her chair, it can like, it can do gestures, it can like touch its face because it feels nervous. Like all these things that humans would naturally do, and it builds all this trust. But really what we're trying to go with this is like, how do we make these more capable? more capable employees, more capable assistants, more capable sort of coworkers? And then how do we make it so that the interface sort of disappears? Like you don't think about it and you're just asking it to do its work and it does. It just goes and does it. So that's like intelligence. And then there's like the Turing test naturalness.

Yeah, I can imagine virtual guitar tutor being a really hard benchmark.

I think, I think that's really good. So one of my— actually, one of my sort of use cases I want to unlock is like like teaching me piano.

Yeah.

Because it, it can see, it can already, it has perception.

Yeah.

So it can see and people are already using it to do sorts of training. So you can hold things up, you can, people are like our team and others, like they'll play chess with it and it's telling, it's like play against them.

Yeah.

So those are all things it can do. Um, but like piano and guitar, definitely difficult because it can't tell a difference between like different, like it is, it doesn't know the difference between different keys and stuff yet, but it'll get there.

Yeah.

Like all these things will get there. And so being able to have like a personal tutor, personal trainer for every single person is like, that's the dream.

Yeah, no, makes a ton of sense.

How are you like, am I right to assume that when, if somebody's like talking to a Pal, like a virtual coworker, and then that Pal is gonna go off and like do work in the background, let's say you have like, let's jump on a quick call, talk about the thing we want to do, and then the Pal decides to go do work. Will that workflow be model agnostic? Because there are a bunch of specialized models and frontier models that you can use to just run in the background and you don't need to really focus there. You need to focus on like the interaction collaboration.

Exactly. Exactly. So like the way we like to talk about it is like the Oracle and the Envoy. Like we're building the Envoy model. Like its job is to just have really great conversation, understand and simulate human behavior. And then whenever it needs to do something that it can't do in conversation, it goes off to the big the big model in the sky and goes, hey, let's, let's work together on this. Let's do this in the background. And so it can reach out to any tool, any model, and go do that work rather than this model doing everything. Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Very impressive stuff. And I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon.

Very cool. Have a great rest of your day. Great to meet you. Congrats on the progress. Drive, do some donuts in the Corvette next time you join. Yeah. In the lobby. Hopefully. Yeah, yeah. There's like a fundraising milestone.

Fantastic.

Great to, great to hang.

Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Let me also tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And our next guest, Connor Renton, is the founder and CEO of Brodie Rec League. Here with us on today.

There he is. There's Brodie.

What's going on, fellas? How are we?

We're good. We're doing great. We're doing great.

Look at that outfit. That's looking great. What is behind you?

Dressed up for you guys. What is behind you? This is, this is, this is our world, guys. Okay. So we're the largest basketball league in the world. We do 15 times more games than the NBA.

And for, and for us, for those at home, what is basketball?

Basketball invented in Canada.

That's the level. You're gonna have to dumb it down. Wait, really? Is it actually invented in Canada? Well, sir. Whoa.

I always kind of felt like I always was suspicious of that. Yeah. I never knew the truth. Interesting. Okay. So, saw this pitch whenever we started talking about having you come on the show, and John and I are not big traditional sports guys, but I've been thinking about this for years, like this kind of like league that's digitally native, that's capturing all these different moments, specifically because I think like bragging rights are like eternal, right? And so, it's like it's fun to go play pickup basketball or shoot around a soccer ball, etc., but like actually being able to capture that and go out and not just like compete compete to win in that moment, but to compete for eternal glory by, you know, getting the clip, you know, draining a 3 in front of your friends, et cetera. So yeah, very, very excited about the vision, but talk about where it's at today and where you want to take it.

Yeah, so I mean, it's funny, like in 1970 when Nike started, And Phil really started taking it off. When people would run, they would say, why are you training for the Olympics? And if I went to an LA Fitness or a YMCA or a gym and I'm putting my shots up, I'm in the lab super early, people are going to ask me, are you training for the NBA? There's no reason why if you don't play pro that your sports dream and your hoop dream deserves to just to die. And like I always say, if you're 19, you're in the NBA, you're a rookie. If you're 19 and you're not on the NBA, you're washed and you're on Polymarket betting your life away.

So like, yeah, yeah, we, we need a, we need a better—

Okay. But what, but like break down the actual product. Like where is it today? You're doing 15 times, you're 15 times bigger than the NBA already. But yeah, but like what, what is the experience today?

So it's a pro experience. Like Brody is the pro experience for the everyday athlete. We took what you know about beer league, what you know about rec league, and we stripped it all away. So it's full uniform, videos, photos, livestream, player clips. You get badges and earn rewards based off your play style. It's the closest thing you can get to a pro experience of actually being in the pros. And essentially just that pathway. If you want to keep playing that sport you love, you don't have to hang it up. Like, I think a lot of people don't play team sports and rec sports as they get older and they move to running or they move to high rocks or they move to Sure. Marathons, because the infrastructure to build team sports is— it's, it's tough. It's— you gotta, you gotta convince 10 dudes to show up. It's a lot easier to put on some running shoes and go and go play. But it doesn't mean that people don't want to play the game they love. That makes sense.

So we're—

yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so where, where, where is the line? I imagine that, uh, in order to get a team going, you still need someone with a lot of initiative. But what are you taking off their plate? I imagine you can take off scheduling, the software piece, but those jerseys, are you—

But it's not just scheduling, it's like the location.

That's what I'm saying, yeah. So what do you bring to bear?

Video, etc.

So we make it super easy. Like, if you ever try to play team sports and you show up to a gym with the basketball, if you're not one of the best players, it's gonna be hard for you to find that space on the court.

Sure.

So everything we built from super early on was How do we make basketball truly the most accessible sport? So you show up to a gym, you go on the Brodie app, we're going to find you a team, we're going to find you a captain, we're going to put you in that group chat, we're going to find the perfect skill level for you. So we've made it easy to play team sports in a world where it's incredibly hard. And it's like I said, everything from the full 12-week experience is all curated for you. So We're building this world for the athlete to live forever who wants to play forever. We're taking and stripping away everything that's really shit about trying to organize basketball as an adult, and we're making it happen for them.

I imagine.

What do you think your next sport will be?

Surfing. So we want to go really deep on basketball. I think basketball is a, like, I mean, I was a hooper growing up and I actually played a lot of rugby. Every venue we rent, we rent across 40 different locations today. Okay. They all have volleyball courts as well. Oh yeah. So we're building the infrastructure for any sport right now. It's just basketball.

Yeah, that makes total sense.

David in the chat says, what about orange slices? Do you guys supply orange slices or is that on the players?

That's on the players' moms still. Okay.

Stays with the mom.

Awesome. Yeah. Um, is it like, what, what, what cities are, are the best like player experiences right now? Like if somebody's watching and they, and they want to, they want to get involved.

So we're in Toronto, New York, Chicago, Boston, Vancouver, and Calgary up in Canada as well. Um, those are our big ones.

Sort of expanding downward. Uh, and monetization, I imagine that, uh, people are fine to pay like a league fee, Are you just charging players directly or is there a more complicated monetization scheme afoot?

It's, it's super simple so far. And that's sort of by design. Like every sort of semi-pro league, like think like Drew League, even like Unrivaled, these like new challenger leagues, they all require so much capital, so much sponsorship investment upfront for those leagues to actually run. Yeah, ours is like 100% the Barodi athlete and the player. Sure. So our model is super simple. It's a 12-week season. The player fee is paid and that's all we do. I think we're sort of laying up, though, this world that we've built into apparel, into sponsorships, into partnership deals, into bigger events like a marathon, like a HYROX event. But right now it's just weekly, super simple. And I think that's the exciting part about what we've got going on too.

Yeah. No, no. Well, let's hit the gong.

Yeah, let's go. I think I think at least a couple guys on the team should, uh, just gotta join the league. I think we're putting Tyler— Tyler, you're going to the league. You're going to the league. Um, no, but I'm, I'm like genuinely like, this is a really, really, really cool idea, right?

Also just a white belt company, you know? Yeah, yeah.

People getting together having fun. Um, and yeah, I'm so, I'm so glad you're building it. I do, I do hope that you expand it into surfing It's fine. That's just a— that's a— that's a— you can do that in like 10 years.

Racing?

No, but the beauty— so the beauty of motorsports is like, like drivers today, even if they're like total amateurs, effectively get this like pro-level experience that you're getting because they work with a team. There are— there is videos and photos and there's organizers and like it's all like sanctioned in different ways and there's And so, yeah, I think like part of what people love about motorsports as adults is you get that experience even if you're not— even if you're, again, nowhere near a pro level, you get to feel like you're a pro in many ways.

Yeah.

And it's funny that that hasn't come to these other games that are more accessible, that are more popular, that are played all over the world. And yeah, I can imagine that the Brody World Championship—

So they call it when it's not professional, It's professional-style recreational basketball. Do you think they should call it gentleman's basketball, like gentlemen drivers in racing? That might be the next thing.

Maybe that's like the senior class in 60 and up.

Oh, sure.

The real ball knowers.

Yeah, for sure.

That's right.

Awesome. Congratulations.

Yeah, really, really cool business.

Thanks, guys, for coming on the show.

And great to meet you.

Thank you. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, guys.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. There are, there's some drama, Jordi. We gotta talk about the drama. But Pop-Tarts has ended their Buzz Balls partnership. This is huge. But on the other side of things, there's more collabs happening because MrBeast Feastables partnered with Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda. Flavored sparkling water.

So, okay, so we kind of, we kind of ended up like net neutral.

We're net neutral. Yes, yes. It's reincarnated in some ways.

Yeah, it never really died. It never really died.

This has been reincarnated as the MrBeast Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda Flavored Sparkling Water. That is a long name for a product. Do you think this is going to fly off shelves? The MrBeast Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda Flavored Drink Water, sparkling water.

It looks like a nightmare.

Uh, peanut butter cup water is a crazy move, right?

Yeah.

But maybe that's untapped.

But maybe we're living in a crazy world.

Maybe it's the next coconut water. No one was drinking coconut water back when, you know, before, before it came to America. I don't know, maybe peanut butter cup water is the next thing.

Uh, Tyler, this is— this has got you written all over it.

Chug it off. Chug it off.

Friday challenge. Drink a 6-pack of Peanut Butter Cup water.

Would you rather drink the MrBeast Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup soda-flavored sparkling water or the Pop-Tarts Buzz Ball Frosted S'mores?

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