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

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

(01:32) - NVIDIA Moves Up the AI Cloud Stack (09:54) - Factory-Cognition Drama (23:17) - Instinct Pushes into Shopping (35:23) - Gemini 4 Argon (44:45) - Will Bruey discusses Varda’s transition to operating a scalable fleet of commercial reentry vehicles, supported by a $251 million Series D and launch capacity secured through 2029. He also explains how microgravity can advance pharmaceutical manufacturing, why reusable launch infrastructure will expand the space economy, and how Varda has made land-based reentry reliable and cost-effective. (58:16) - Christophe Beck, chairman, president, and CEO of Ecolab, discusses the company’s work addressing water scarcity, infection prevention, food safety, and sustainable infrastructure. He highlights closed-loop, water-neutral cooling systems for AI data centers, advocates recycling water rather than relying on desalination, and urges technology companies to work closely with local communities. (01:16:20) - Hassaan Raza discusses Tavis’s Griffin human-interaction model, designed to make communicating with AI feel as natural as speaking with a person. The Tavis co-founder and CEO explains its potential to power AI coworkers, tutors, healthcare workers, and companions while emphasizing careful safety testing, disclosure, and gradual release. (01:24:49) - Connor Renton discusses Brodie Rec League, the world’s largest basketball league, which provides everyday athletes with a professional-style experience through uniforms, livestreams, player clips, statistics, and rewards. He explains how the platform simplifies joining and organizing recreational basketball while outlining its player-funded model, expansion across North American cities, and potential growth into other sports. TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.comCodex - http://openAI.com/codexFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today's Thursday, October 1st, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. He's used corporate cards, Belpay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Get started today. Great show yesterday. We put the timeline in turmoil with the Mongo debate around the responsibility of CEO. I thought it was a really fantastic conversation. I came away like, wow, this, you know, this is like a unfortunate situation, but a lot of cause for optimism.

Yeah. And I think he summed it up well without going too aggressive, but let, you know, pass 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, like, okay, this confirms, like, what my position was beforehand. So I thought that was cool. This confirms my preexisting. Yeah, I suppose.

Thank you for confirming what I already believed. Yeah, the timeline was also in turmoil over coastal 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, I, I started thinking about it after the show ended. So our first two guests were from Nvidia and Corweave, and obviously those two companies, like, work really closely together. And the conversations were sort of different.

We were talking about security with Nvidia, and then Corweave, 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 it was just like last year that Nvidia was like,

we're going to layer Corweave or we're going to layer all the neoclouds. We're going to be the front door to compute with DGX Cloud Leptin. I don't know if you remember any of this, but this started back in like 2023, post the chat chagipit 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 going to be able to come to us and deploy whatever resources you are. And we're going to compete with like AWS and Azure and GCP. And we're going to be a one-stop shop for this stuff.

And it's going to 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, uh, the neoclouds where, uh, 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 Leptin customers, well, we're going to send them to the clouds that did sign up.

And so you have this, like tension. They really, 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 going to be like, oh, that would be improper to compete. But it played out very differently, and Vidiya has become very friendly with CoriWeave, 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, like, the DGX product, it came out, and the reviews weren't like, okay, yeah, this is. actually better than working with CoreWeave. And there was still so many benefits from going to a neocloud or even a, you know, 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 $300,900 million dollars for that. And Jensen was like so gassed up on this. I loved his quote. He said, NVIDIA DJX Cloud Leptin connects our network of global GPU cloud providers with AI developers, together with our NCPs, which is the NVIDIA cloud providers. We're building a planetary scale AI factory.

That's what his tagline was. Which makes sense. There is a world where that would have played out. That's not what happened. Please. Let's talk about how we have failed so far to convince a lot of our friends not to call supercomputer. AI factories. Yeah.

Right. If we continue to fail, they're going to be like, it's a refinery. It's an AI offshore decker. It's an oil decker for AI. It's a chemical plant. Yeah. For AI. Yeah.

It's exactly what you want in your community. For sure. Yeah. Rough. Anyway. The risk of total failure in your backyard is low, but non-zero. Yeah. And then you have another person to sell.

He's like, wait, 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.

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 refused 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 Expedia for GPUs and just a set of standards. So it's a bunch of proprietary sites. software. It is sort of what makes up the Kuta moat. So everything from handling GPU node groups, interactive devpods, 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 like you know, pretty safe. And so it was interesting because it was it was heralded as this like, oh, okay, things could get spicy. You could see all the neoclouds like really chirping at Jensen, Jensen really coming for the 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 Kuta Mote is going away anytime soon. Like he's like the ace is still up the sleeve in my opinion. Like, they still have to do a lot of work because when semi-analysis actually, like, 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 Leptin is on Cluster Max, 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 CoreWeave, Nebius, 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 buying of NVIDIA. Yeah. And if you just use the, if you just use the framework of like who was upset yesterday about CoreWeave launching their, what was the actual product called? CoreWeForge, which is their like 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, 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. 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 new clouds.

You see them on ClusterMax. We're going to do more to reach that diamond. tier, which is what you propose. But yeah, really, really remarkable margin expansion story. I mean, the depreciation, 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 Elon and Jensen 60 billion a gigawatt, it's going to be a very, very exciting business.

It already is an exciting business. But it was a fun conversation. And that's what my wheels were turning about yesterday. Let me tell you about console. Console built A.A. Agent. There are 90% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access, requests, and password resets. Let's go over to the timeline. 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. What really got people up in arms was Vinod coming in and saying you were 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 crashing out on Maton's personal crash. out. Sure. So crash out on crash out violence. It's a three-car pile. It only took about 20 seconds for people to put it together that Coastal Ventures is, of course, an investor in factory and cognition.

And like a pretty big one, right? But is funny enough an example that like 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, like, ethical. Yeah. Right. I'm not saying that Fnode, you know, attacking his portco is. But 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 Maton's defense. Yeah. Right? Which is obviously the coastal ventures divide, but that's the nature of these, of these, these partnerships. Sort of clear that Vinod's not using AI for these posts. Totally. Total all over the place grammatically.

Straight out lying. 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, 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 Venoed has bags here and is 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 think that's what happened. I think I got you got to put that at like 15%. I just feel like yeah. I forgot. Is that possible? I don't know. I don't know what I mean he's a multi-billionaire the the the economic I mean he was coming he was coming he came on the show last week last week to talk about Faf, foe, Foe. Foe. Foe.

He's clearly working more closely with another Thank you, Tyler. Was it called Faf? 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 two and a half 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

to your 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. You would text that. You would not just go straight to the truth nuke from outer space, which is what Vinod did. It's a truth. Well, I don't even think it's necessarily, I wouldn't call it a truth nuke because it's an ad hominit. Like, he just went directly at him. He didn't even talk about any of the facts. So here's the thing. So Luke Metro came in. If he knows, if he knows the facts are true, and it's cool, we don't, 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 a ad hominem nuke.

And I think it might be a truth thing 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 hominuke. Ed hominuke. Okay, it's an ad hominuke. We'll leave it there. I think 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 a Rippling had basically like tricked deal in some ways. Wait, really?

Oh, I don't remember that at all. I mean, 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.

Well, yeah, honey pot is better right in. I think that was like they were their turn. Right? All this being said, the honey pot and the spy went for it. My current, my current, my current read is that CRO, you know, the advisor goes to Mataun and says, I'm getting poached. And Motton 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, 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, 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, so the, you have to, 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, it doesn't seem, it doesn't seem like that's the way things happen that often. I don't know. People, people, like, even direct competitors will maintain, you know, somewhat jovial, you know, interactions. Oh, how's it going? Oh, it's going great. Yeah. cool, man.

And both parties are kind of just saying nothing, 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 with the terminology?

I think his only, from what I understand, his only technical title was advisor. Advisor, okay. 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. But it doesn't spill out on the timeline. Or, or, you know, another comp is like Mike Krieger.

Oh, yeah. His involvement with Figma. Yeah, yeah. And resigned from the board, I think, a couple days before, like a day before launching a competitor. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, again, this stuff has been happening, but the funny thing is to see this, like, 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 like truly like companies developing truly novel IP that basically have no protections where you can work at a company for five 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. And ultimately, I don't think, I think the story's like over. Like I think it's, it. No, I think you're right. It's, yeah, it's different because like 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, uh, there's that back and forth about the three open AI researchers who are 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 happened between meta and open AI, 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. So I think this just gets a lot more personal, I think. Anyway, you want to close the book on this? Are you sure? Miles says, I work with the company.

Oh, 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-plus 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 grownups getting back to work. And Martin over at A16C 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 McGuire says, nice one from the cheap seats. You know 1% of the story. And Sean's really like teasing something.

He's like there's going to be the files. There's going to be some crazy drop. There's going to be another truth nuke. It's going to be truth World War III. Something like that. Yeah. But has he actually posted anything? Like it feels like today is the day to like share the truth.

I hope everyone can sort it out behind the scenes. Yeah. I don't know. He said he is 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. He did come out and say cognition is infosis masquerading as anthropic.

And then, which is funny because Infosis does like technology IT transformation, which is in many ways what cognition does. But the only thing I would do. disagree with Sean on as I I don't see cognition like 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 library, but all over there. I mean, like they take their business seriously, but that's not an anthropic, that's not a uniquely anthropic well, and also this would tell me that the two, that factory

and cognition are going in very different directions. Maybe. thinks the infosis direction is bad. Yeah. And hopefully they can go in different direction. 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 marketplace, and now with AI agents. Moving on. What's next? A 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, yeah. Get the steel man helmet. I'm going to 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 has 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 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.

And so this instinct test is, hey, hey, we have a, we understand this person. Let's say, let's basically suggest some products that they may be worn thinking about, but they would buy. And like a phone charger. Like a power bank. Like a power bank. Or some sunscreen. I just like, I saw like 12 different screenshots that were all power banks. It's like, it is sort of universal.

Like if you were going to, if you were in a blast, just blast that. I mean, I mean, we talked to a shot at the ridge. And he's like, yeah, they just move. Like, 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 wire cutter 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 a net, have the next proof point for the next raise. because obviously it's incredibly compute intensive. They're going to be growing very quickly. They're going to be raising very quickly. And being able to go back to the next round of ECs and say,

hey, we've actually tested e-commerce and it converts it seven times the rate of Instagram real 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's

that it's shop slop or whatever? Shop slop. Dave Morin called it from Open claw. Yeah, somewhat biased, right? He's running the open, like, he's running the foundation Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. Sure. Which you know, is like basically own your compute, own your agent.

Yeah. Don't get ads pushed to you. Have your agent be aligned to you. That's their stance. I think that overall, here's 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 you, 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, 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. And you're like, this is the worst thing ever. And then you see one thing. You're like, and you're like, yeah.

Okay. No, the one that I saw that I thought was funny was instinct knew that this guy had a 9-11 target. And because they'd worked on some insurance stuff. Yeah. But the issue is that instinct was like basically clock like, okay, this guy's a car guy. I got to hit him with a bunch of car stuff. Then it recommends a trickle charger, which 9-11s really don't need, especially modern 9-11s, and an indoor cover to use inside your garage, which car guys I know would never use an indoor cover

because it said this yesterday briefly at the end of the show. but because if you have any sort of the basically like the cover against the paint can cause more damage than it just like sitting there right so you generally want it out of the sun but but you're better off just like leaving it especially because if there gets if there can be any debris between the cover and the paint you get even more aware and you could imagine how that's like it knows about the user but it doesn't know about what car people actually want to be. want, right? And so they can probably get better data. It could recommend like a straight pipe exhaust system or underlighting or something that a car guy would want for their target, right? Yes. Exactly. For spinners, as you always say. Spinners or even just knobby off-road tires, a, 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 a, the fact that there's a

like five 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 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 like,

I think we should buy this. Totally. Let's buy this. Yeah. What do you think? Should we buy this, right? Yeah. And it's like, it ends up feeling a little, this feels a little bit pushy.

Yeah. The other thing that stands out is, 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 going to need to, they have to make interfaces, right? And this is one of the first.

Yeah. And then, yeah, again, the challenge is like getting pushed products in text is just very, very, very, very, very personal. Yeah. And I think that a lot of e-commerce brands, you know, will use text marketing. I find that I'm like a thousand times more likely to unsubscribe from text marketing. than I am to, from email marketing. 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 I message 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 and 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 and 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, but, 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 and stop. 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, 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. Yep. And they just hired our friend Ben from Koto, who was at Snapchat for almost a decade, leading, like, content and partnerships there. He joined as a chief business officer at Instinct. And I think that that is going to 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 and make it more like an Amex style experience, right? Where it's very mass market and commercial, but they're trying to make it feel like elevated and put the user first. They might need to do a new pre-trained specifically on Car Guy data to really nail that, really dial that in. No, I think that there is a little bit of a gap between the X, 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. Yeah. There's some people that, you know, maybe they park their car on a public street and then they go back to their car, maybe after going to a restaurant. There's one of those, like, um, business card ads. Yeah. Like, I will buy your junk car.

You ever get, you ever get those? No. In L.A., there's people that, like, they put a, they'll put a business card, like, in your windows, like, I've gotten that business card, but for, like, uh, 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 L.A. They're, like, we buy junk cars.

We buy. I'm like, wow, shots fired. I thought I was doing all right. Yeah, it was kind of a nag. But yeah, I think a lot of people will be excited to have like the daily text of like the best product that they could bet that they could possibly buy. John says nobody on earth can do what Ben can change its instinct overnight. I agree. No, true.

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, unlocked seamless real-time experience and new value with Cisco. The folks over at DeepMind picked the best day to launch Gemini for 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 4RRR. Gargon and a group of people are talking about, did you see the factory guy calling out cognition guy? And then the Twitter sphere 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 a lead. but what's going on with the naming schemes here so opening eyes says all my tokens are gone that's pretty funny uh so the naming schemes uh opening eyes in the solar system you got luna for the moon terror for the earth's soul for the sun astra for the stars anthropic is doing haiku a japanese poem a sonn 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. I think they're named after the element argon and they're probably just going to go down the list of elements, which is a cool place to pull from. But yeah, tech leaders, you've got to dig into these words. I keep saying this. Too many,

too many hubristic tales. I don't need any more project, Titan, project. What was it? Bohemoth. It's like, you look at it like, the untamable. Oh, you couldn't get it out. Interesting.

What a coinkie dink. 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 now. Joe Wisenthal 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 farm's website. Okay, it might be entirely fake. They got them. Interesting, they got them. They got them. 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 to 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 basically our tweets and our 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 open AI 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 new, in a frontier lab, sit this one out. So we have the Zillow here. I will pull it up, and I want you already to give me some tier list stuff. So 1210 Chickory Lane in Los Angeles, price cut, $4 million cheaper, a humble $30 million,

five beds, 11 baths. Rate that ratio. Having 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.

We got an A tier for having twice as many baths. I don't know. I like 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. Point three five 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 that are that are fired up on the view. And they don't care that they can't really touch the earth anywhere on the property.

Okay. 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? Fung-shu 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 for the cul-de-sac. Okay, cul-de-sac's 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 S-tier.

S-tier. What about the 110 linear feet of 11-foot motorized glass walls that disappear completely transforming the Great Reefense. into an open-air retreat above the city? I hate motorized glass walls. Okay. What are we doing? What tier?

Are you putting it in? Motorized 110 feet of motorized glass walls. In my experience, F-tier. F-tier. And I say this because I unfortunately have them. And 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, yeah. You're like literally middle of the night. Okay. Is it loud? At least mine, you have to wait until they get to the end. 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.

Four 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 tear. Give me a tear. 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. Yeah. Using it. Okay. Glass and Closed Fitness Studio. Do you like a home fitness studio? Uh, no, I don't like working out at

home. So. F tier. F tier. Okay. Working out in a gym and a great gym is just a million times better. Okay. Well, end with this one. And I'm hoping for a good result. We're going to going with the 60-foot, zero-edge infinity pool and spa that appear to dissolve into the hills joined by multiple lounge and fire areas, a full outdoor kitchen and a flat lawn. D-tier. D-tier? What? You said pools or S-tier yesterday?

The most elite setup for a pool is basically, like, grass surrounding the full pool. Okay. And being able to go from grass straight into the water is obviously F-tier. And any time 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.

Yeah. Okay. I think we clarified it. Well, agree or disagree with, Jordy, make your call as long as you got $30 million in cash, opening ash 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 way. He's got more important things to do. He does.

Listen to me, do a tier list. What's going on? Will Brewery from Mavarda. Welcome back to the show. How you doing? Hey, it's not that I disagree with Jordy. It's that it's inconsistent. 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 L.A. where you can get an infinity style pool on a sprawling lawn with the same view. And I think, anyways, I think the houses, dramatically overpriced. That's all I'm going to say.

That's all I'm going to say. But 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 know I only come on when it's gongworthy. So today is the first flight. There we go. We don't know what's happening, but we're excited. You know 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 re-endent. History. 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, okay, okay. So I come bringing news of Series D. You might have saw all that in the news this week. Okay. Currently, Oh, baby.

Oh, more gong hits. I need them. He's going to break the gong. I appreciate it. We'll lock in. We'll lock in. Okay. So, I just get excited.

I know. It's a lot to get over. You know, we're going for five bathroom houses. You know, now we're on reentry vehicles. I don't know how you guys do the context switch. I get it. all. 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 been

we've begun scaling over the last couple of years. We've flown six of these vehicles. Today is 8 and 9 at the same time, which just means that, you know, we have the ability in 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. 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. 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 for 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 re-entry vehicles.

And so like if you think about Starlink or other constellations, hundreds, sometimes thousands of satellites, we are now able to do that, just with satellites, but with re-entry vehicles, which has never been done before today, which is kind of a weird thing to say. Yeah. I read some article about, like, space launch capacity being extremely tight as a market.

Jordy was even pitching, like, 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. Like, 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 the 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 seven 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 about 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. So as long as our, we have access to space and the cogs meet the value

that we're generating, it's, it's a G&A there. So I mean, I think everyone's a acutely aware of like how much space is booming. The best representation is just like SpaceX is a two trillion dollar company, IPO, the price held. 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 GLP1s 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 important is that trend to your business? 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. 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 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 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 Vardo, 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. It comes to do a monopoly on gravity. Let's go. 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. 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 that SpaceX and

compounding interest of learnings that they've had since then. I'm 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 time frame, 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? The data centers crowd out or kind of, you know,

like just drive up the price of launch? because when it feels like the first VARTA 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 to any other infrastructure build out in history. And what I mean by that is, you know, at locomotive,

of, hey, the killer app there was moving oil around or moving steel around. But, you know, there's no reason not to scale up. We already have the operational leverage from having that infrastructure exist. And once you show that the unit economics for any application, whether it be microgravity manufacturing or data centers or anything else of that nature, there's really no reason not to take advantage of the rails that are already laid. And so I don't, you know, there might be some high frequency noise in there. But other than that, the free market has.

has shown that launch access to space. There's a lot of application layers on top of that, data center, 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 this from the Starship launch, this one? take me through This one is ours right here This one is ours going up right now We are about to see Main Engine cut off at 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 is the how is the actual reentry process evolved let's see so where this will be eight and this vehicle eight nine so we've flown six before five of them we landed in Australia at our landing site with our partner's southern launch one of them we landed in Utah with 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

moment of silence for for breaking the sound barrier it never gets old dude it never ever gets old no but back to the question of reentry asking serious questions you should be a you should be a streamer I think I think a lot of people would watch would watch you just like react that's crazy let's get some Ws in the chat for the sound barrier

yeah another one so good no but I mean like you know it's been proven you know I mean we've done it now multiple times so it's really exciting yeah So it sounds like Australia is not going to have a monopoly on landing these things.

There's going to be a 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 sank. But what was the actual thinking between like why we haven't heard like, oh yeah, Varda

just launched it. just lands in the ocean every time. Yeah, so we land on land because it's, why put a boat in the assembly line? Sure. It's really what it comes down to. From an unit economics perspective, it's just cheaper to land on land.

The reason why reentry in the past have 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. Jordy, 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 straight just to prove a points of what could be possible with the Marnet technology, you know?

But, 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. Yeah, it is. I said we should just say 250, make it simple, but, you know, Delian 1.000. wanted to get that plus one in there. So you can give him some shit next time. Okay. Someone snucking 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. Great to see you. I appreciate it. Amazing progress.

It's like our favorite part of the job is just seeing the progression across, you know, 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 good one. Go bye. 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 for the TVPN Ultrodome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Good to see you guys. Good to see you, too. Great to see you. So much for doing. This is good. It's not even Friday. I know. I don't know if you caught much of the last interview, but we're certainly acting like it's Friday.

We're certainly acting like it's Friday. It's Friday somewhere. Every day is Friday. Oh my God, spending time in Paris. 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 in the show, would love for you to give us a little introduction on yourself and the company, just as 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 had 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 lettuous 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. So he's 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 right now. Great. I mean, water is a huge topic. We can go all over the place. But I'd love to know more concretely. what product 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 power shell coming online, a bunch of water-cooled GPUs going in that building? 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 now. So for a very long time, it was air conditioning, HVAC, air in a data room. And that's what we were doing, basically, so it 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 or running. That's changed the last two years in dramatic ways.

So with Blackwell, with Vera Rubin and all the new things that are coming up. Well, on the one hand, you can't cool them with HVAC anymore. It has to be directed cheap 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 enclosed 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? So 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 They 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 they 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 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 center in the country, we have three that are like that. It's very early on that journey.

But at the same time, as you mentioned, with the gigawatt type of data center, we know that directed ship is right for the near future, whatever that means, one, two, three 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 are close to the GPU. But it's thinking as well as a laser systems,

for instance, to remove the heat from a, from computers within the racks. That's a little bit more for the future. So we never stop, but for now, it's really so scaling the direct-to-cheap 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 core, for instance. And we're thinking, well, Well, if we were to use nature, just water, you have 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 use of watering the country of their agriculture. I need to produce the chips, which is very reactive as well. Sure, sure. Yeah. How have you grappled with the AI bottlenecks, the bottlenecks to the buildout? Sometimes it's good to be a bottleneck because that means the stocks going through the roof is 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 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 two 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. 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 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. 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 so 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 hates 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. You don't need to be a genius to understand.

So how 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 two states. I took those two 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 it's hard. 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 globally that are actually producing, you know, wastewater. They might have a smoke stack or something. They're not the most aesthetic things.

I would think you want to not go towards that. It's 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 so 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 all 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 case. 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 two 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. 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 was talking about the future of California should be nuclear power 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 technology perspective, it sounded doable on a long enough timeline. But I haven't, we talked 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 mega project 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 of usually it was 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 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 salt water. 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. It gets used it and all that. Whether we like it or not. 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. You know, 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. Or 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 two nanometers. And you get the higher yield as well, so from 50, 60 percent to 80, 85 percent.

This is billions. Why wouldn't we do that? You don't need a diesel plan to do that. Okay. Decelerate the desalination. He's a desal. Decell, desal, desal. That's what he is.

I'll agree and disagree. I'm still optimistic. But you make a lot of good points. Last question. I know we're over. In many of, 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 like actually wasting water as in there's like leaks because the infrastructure is old. They're under billing

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, use less water than a car wash. And we know that you're wasting a ton of water by having, you know, leaks and under-billing 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 us. So thinking about data centers in space, those data centers in space are not connected to a garden holes, usually, so to get the water up there. It's 100% closed loops, so you need no water. You bring it once and it works forever.

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 get closer to the local communities. 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 in great places, not having their water, being wasted, and all that.

Yes, we should help, and we have to. Love it. Thank you, sir. All right. I think we solved it. We solved it. We did it. We did it. Thank you so much for coming out on the show.

Have a great rest of your day. Great to meet you. Let's do it again soon. Yeah, we got to do it again soon. Great to see you guys. All the best. Happy Friday. Goodbye.

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Ray is Capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest will probably be there shortly. We got Hassan Razah, co-founder and CEO of Tavis, here with us for the first time on TBPN. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey, good.

It's so nice to meet you all. I'm excited to be on here. Great to me. Beautiful office. What is the car behind you? Is that a Corvette? That is. It's an 85th Corvette.

It's part of the, I'm going to spend the last. couple years with storing it, but we got a lot of vintage computers out here. If you've seen, damn bad, they said it was one of the most powerful computers at 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, Tab is a nutshell. We're a research lab focuses on human computing. So we want to deliver a feature where using a machine will feel like talking to a friend or coworker. And today,

we release 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 stodah. I'm saying jobs not finished. I'm saying jobs not finished. 100% Well there's also 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 You know you might want to do something 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

Yeah exactly so 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 who's talking, the ginger lady.

You, you are AI right now. Oh, I'm all. Okay. Yeah, 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. All right.

So what, how are you? You're going to make money on this. We're commercial guys. I can imagine so many things, but who's the, 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 co-workers, AI companions. And so people are building ASCR. It's like on sales source website.

The N.A.S.R. that's powered by Tavis. It's a continued medical allocation, 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 need to be able to see, but 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, you know, frontier or near frontier intelligence. But oftentimes, like if you're doing, you know, I've seen people complaining or even film, like there's viral Instagram videos where they're filming themselves doing like a, like a, a,

screening call for for a company and it's like hello how are you today you know and it's like it's very and so is is the bet here that like once the models are just way better there will be like 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 pass on the turning test the more people they know they know it say i 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's a prompt the machine or like what button to click or like you're like waiting for it to respond it just it just feels like 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 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 like that. So with Griffin, we're doing an early research preview. So we've only releasing it to select testers. And it's exactly for that, right? It is the first model and by far the largest

sort of leap ahead in passing Turing test. So we're like, we know we have to do more AI safety work, but we want to do like proper disclosure work, make sure the model always says that it's an AI and not a human. Yep. And so we're working through those safety or testing and do like safe releases. So we're probably going to be releasing it over next couple months. And then on the actual like, you know, jobs not finished like where this goes, it feels like touring test passed on, you know, basic Zoom call.

Where do you want to, like what capabilities do you want to unlock next? I can imagine like it's good, 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? 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. It won't get up and walk away just yet. The technically is capable of it. But like it's a small thing. Like it to 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, like how do we make them more capable employees, more capable assistance, more capable 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 does it. So that's like intelligence and then there's like deterring cuts naturalness. Yeah, I can imagine virtual guitar tutor being a really hard benchmark. I think that's really good. So one of my,

that actually one of my sort of use cases that I want to unlock is like teaching me piano. Yeah. Because it can see, it can already, it has perception. 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.

But like piano and guitar definitely difficult because it can't tell a difference between like different, like, it doesn't know the difference between different keys and stuff yet. But it'll get there. 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 sense

How are you like am I right to assume that when if somebody's like talking to a pal like a virtual co-worker 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 is like the Oracle and the Envoy. Like we're building the Envoy model. Like its job is to just have really great conversation to 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 model in the sky and goes, hey, 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. Yeah. I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon.

Very cool. Have a great to meet you. Congrats on the progress. Drive, do some donuts in the Corvette next time you join. Yeah. In the lobby. Yeah. Yeah.

There's like a fundraising milestone in the lobby would be great. Fantastic. 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. And our next guest, Connor Renton, is the founder and CEO of Brody Rec League here with us on today. There he is. There's Brody. What's going on?

fellas how are we we're doing great we're doing great outfit that's looking great what is behind you dressed up for you guys yeah this is this is this is our world guys so we're the largest basketball league in the world we do 15 times more games than the NBA and for us for those at home what is basketball basketball invented that's the level you're gonna have to dumb it down wait really is it actually invented can no yes sir I always kind of felt like I always I always was was 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 fun to go play, pick up basketball or shoot around a soccer ball, et cetera. But like actually being able to capture that and go out and not just like compete to win in that moment,

but to compete for eternal glory by, you know, getting the clip, you know, draining a three in front of your, 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, I'm in the lab super early, people are going to ask me, are you training for the NBA? Like, there's no reason why if you don't play pro that your sports dream and your hoop dream, does. 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 bed in your life way. So like, yeah. Yeah, we need, we need a better way. Okay, but what, but like break down the actual product? Yeah. Like, where is it today? You're doing 15 times, you're 15 times bigger than the NBA already. But, yeah.

But like, 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 the way. So it's full uniform videos, photos, live stream, 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.

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 marathons. Because the infrastructure to build team sports is it's tough. You've got to convince 10 dudes to show up. It's a lot easier to put on some running shoes and go play. But it doesn't mean that people don't want to play the game they love.

That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So where is the line? I imagine that 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.

wear piece, but those jerseys. 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 as 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 going to be hard if you find that space on the court. Sure. So everything we built from super early on was how do we make basketball truly the most like accessible sports. So you show up to a gym, you go into Brody 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 a 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 and 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

infrastructure for any sport. Right now it's just basketball. Yeah, that makes 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 player's mom still. Okay. Stays with the mom. Awesome. Yeah. Is it like what what cities are the best like player experiences right now?

Like if somebody's watching and they want to they want to get involved. So we're in Toronto, New York, Chicago, Boston, Vancouver and California. up in Canada as well. Those are our big ones. Sort of expanding downward. And monetization, I imagine that 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 super simple so far. And that's sort of by design. Every sort of semi-pro league, like if you think like Drew League, even like unrivaled, these like new Challenger leagues, they all require so much capital, so much sponsor. sponsorship investment upfront for those leagues to actually run. Yeah. Ours is like 100% the Brody 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 high rocks event. But right now it's just weekly, super simple. And I think that's the exciting part about what we got going on too. Yeah. No, no.

Well, let's hit the gong. Yeah, it's good. I think, I think at least a couple guys on the team. He's got to join the league. Tyler, Tyler, you're going to the league. You're going to the league. No, but I'm like, genuinely, like, this is a really, really, really cool idea, right? Also just a white pill company, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, people getting together. And, yeah, I'm so glad you're building it. I do, I do hope that you expanded into surfing. It would be cool. That's just a, that's a, that's a, that's a, you can do that in like 10 years. Racing, maybe. 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. Yeah. And, like, it's all, like, sanctioned in different ways. Sure. 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 the Brody World Championship. So they call, when it's not professional, it's professional style recreational basketball, do they think they should call it gentlemen's basketball, like gentlemen drivers in racing?

that might be the next thing. Maybe that's like the senior class in the 60 and out. The real ball, the real ball noers. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Congratulations. Yeah, really, really cool business.

And great to meet you. Thank you. We'll talk to you, see. Thanks, guys. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-on-one intelligent cloud provider.

Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically take scale of scaling, monitoring, and security. There are some drama, Jordy. We got to talk about the drama. But Pop Tarts has ended their Buzz Ball's partnership.

This is huge. But on the other side of things, there's more collapse happening because Mr. Rees Feastables partnered with liquid death peanut butter cup, soda flavored sparkling water. Okay, so we kind of ended

out like net neutral. We're net neutral. Yes, yes. It's reincarnated in some ways. Yeah, it never really died. It never really dies. This has been reincarnated as the Mr. Beast's Leak, Mr. Beast 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 Mr. Beast Feastables, Liquid Death, peanut butter cup, soda-flavored drinking water, sparkling water? It looks like a nightmare. Peanut Buttercup 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 it came to America. I don't know. Maybe peanut butter cup water is the next thing. Tyler, this has got you written all over it. Friday challenge. Drink a six pack of peanut butter cup water. Would you rather drink the Mr. Bees Feastables liquid death peanut butter cup soda-flavored sparkling water or the Pop-Tarts buzzball?

Frosted Smoors We love you Buzzball Leave us 5 stars at Apple Podcasts and Spotify Bye tomorrow