TBPN - WE'RE BACK, Meta Addiction, Tim Cook's Last Day | Jordan Schneider, Robert Mendelsohn & Eric Olszewski, Billy Thalheimer, Aaron Cannon, Stephen Balaban

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

(03:29) - Meta Addiction (20:32) - Tim Cook's Last Day (31:33) - OpenAI's Jalapeño Chip (39:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (58:39) - Jordan Schneider discusses China’s low-cost EVs, opposition to data centers, ineffective influence operations, AI-generated media, online censorship, and technology investment. The ChinaTalk founder and editor-in-chief also examines DeepSeek’s strategy and chip constraints, China’s employment climate, surveillance, flying vehicles, and corruption within the military’s Rocket Force. (01:35:01) - Robert Mendelsohn & Eric Olszewski. Robert Mendelsohn co-founder of Actinide, discusses the startup’s breakthrough production of HALEU, a specialized uranium fuel for next-generation nuclear reactors. He explains how Actinide modernized Manhattan Project-era Calutron technology and is navigating technical, regulatory, and commercialization challenges to scale isotope enrichment in the United States. Eric Olszewski is the co-founder and CEO of Actinide, an advanced materials company building electromagnetic isotope-separation technology for nuclear energy, medicine, and other frontier industries. In August 2026, Actinide announced it had produced research quantities of HALEU, the enriched uranium fuel needed by many next-generation nuclear reactors, using a Texas-built modern calutron. Olszewski previously co-founded the blockchain infrastructure company Transmute. (01:42:19) - Billy Thalheimer discusses Regent’s $240 million Series B, growing commercial and defense orders, and plans to scale its Rhode Island Seaglider factory. He explains the company’s electric and hybrid propulsion strategies, global coastal transportation opportunities, international expansion, and commitment to rigorous safety standards. (01:55:12) - Aaron Cannon discusses Outset’s growth and its launch of AI-powered digital twins grounded in interviews and data from individual customers. He explains how these twins help companies simulate customer reactions, research hard-to-reach audiences, and eventually anticipate business questions and recommend actions. (02:04:32) - Stephen Balaban, co-founder and CEO of AI cloud provider Lambda, discusses misinformation surrounding AI data centers and argues that accurate context can shift public opinion. He highlights their local economic benefits, efficient water use, renewable-energy potential, and strategic importance to U.S. national security and industrial growth while supporting community-level decision-making. 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 TVBN. Today is Monday, August 31st. We are live from the TVP and Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance. The capital of capital. We are back. We are back. We missed you.

Is still with us. Let me tell you about ramp. Time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more. All in the Oh, feel so good to be back.

Two weeks is a crazy amount of time to be away. I don't understand how children do this for weeks. for months at a time. It's wild. It's wild. It's great. It's a lot of video games. I was sitting there.

I had somebody this morning say, it feels like it must have gone by so fast. And I was thinking, no, it absolutely didn't go by fast at all. It felt like two months. Yeah, I do feel like two months. We manipulated time. Yeah. But thank you to the Microsoft team, the Activision team. They sent us codes for Modern Warfare 4.

My review is in. It's fantastic. I love it. It's a really good game. Really polished. And the kill block. Did you revert back at all to? Didn't really have the opportunity.

I was joking about full relapse just gaming from dusk till dawn. But that is in fact. I had a relapse on pizza. Pizza. I was eating pizza almost like twice a day at times. I was eating a lot of pizza, surfing a lot. That's good. A lot of family time.

Do you think pizza is potentially addictive? I do. You think that there could be a settlement? I do think. I don't think there could. I think there should. There should be. I do wonder, like, because cigarettes, it was very,

cigarettes were very scientifically proven to be addictive. Like, you can give nicotine to a mouse and it will, like, go and try and get more nicotine. Like, it's the most cut and dry. You can run the experiment with, you know, any animal in the blood. Based on my own personal experience, pizza and surfing would fall into that same box. Oh, you give a mouse pizza? Yeah. If you give a mouse a cut,

She'd give a mouse a barrel. Barrel. He's going to want to want a lot more. He was going to want a lot more. With a lime. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

But it will be interesting to see where the addiction stuff goes because when all this came up, you know, the meta social media addiction addiction. I was kind of like, give a mouse to scroll. Like, I understand that people were trying to. I don't know. Can you get mice or monkeys addicted to reels? Maybe. I'm sure. Almost certainly.

You think you could get a. monkey addicted to Instagram Reels. I think 100%. We got to try. We're going to find out. We can't get any monkeys because they're sold out. No, no, you can get a monkey. You just have to pay top dollar.

They're expensive. Wide of a man. But you can buy one. But I do, it did seem like it was a tougher sell because it was not a chemically addictive product. It was more of a psychological thing. There's a benefit to it. There's a free speech element.

All very complicated. I was not expecting to see a big settlement when this first came up years ago. I thought it was going to be more nickel and diming little case-by-case things. But in fact, there has been a huge settlement by META. Two days ago, or this was when this was written, this was August 26th, meta announced settlements with attorneys general representing 48 states and the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories. So there were only two states that held back.

I believe it's Texas and New Mexico. but over allegations that Facebook and Instagram harmed children and teens. So this has been boiling up for a while. There were smaller settlements. This is the big one. And so the high level numbers here, META will pay the states $12.7 billion over 10 years, and it could go up to $18 billion if other platforms join the settlement. It is a big number.

It is a big number. And honestly, if you are a state legislator or you care about having your state funded for a variety of things, this is good news. This is a size gong moment for the states because they will be getting this money distributed to them. And they can use that to do whatever states do from education to health care. There's a lot of different things that states can do. I know Tyler's piss because he isn't like the government getting a dime. But it is a size gong moment for them. I did find a video of a chimpanzee hitting reels.

If we can pull this up. Let's pull this up. This is important. Definitely more important than... Ooh, okay, yeah, this looks... Okay, maybe social media is addictive. Now that I'm seeing this, this is... Yeah, it might be universal.

If it crosses, wow. Using it so intuitively? Yep, yep. I mean, that's just good UI design. Come on. You got to give the U.X engineer some credit here. Make it so easy to use that even a monkey could use it. That was the prompt for that UX engineer, and they delivered.

This is, yeah, if it crosses, if it crosses species barriers, I'm much more likely to agree that something could be addictive. But. Well, and here especially, you know, he's looking at other monkeys. Oh, okay. That's a little, I don't know. No, I know, but an alga feed, it's going to naturally start serving a lot of those videos. Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

Anyway, so everyone has been drawing analogies to the tobacco industry's master settlement agreement around this, because that's the last time. There was a huge multi-billion, tens of billions of dollar settlement between a large organization around addiction and a bunch of states. That's what's happened when cigarette companies signed the master settlement agreement, all the companies agreeing to pay all the states. But the structure was a little bit different, and there's some nuance there. And so Eric Sufurt over at Mobile Dev Memo, friend of the show, says the Sufinator, he was saying this is not necessarily the, he said, meta settlement is no big tobacco moment. That was his takeaway in Mobile Deb Memo. You should go subscribe because this post is a paid post. But I'll take you through some of the interesting analysis that he put together.

I was debating with a lawyer, friend of mine about this over the weekend and have some interesting details here. So Eric writes, and the headline here is that what meta is going to pay as a percentage of revenue or what the social media industry will pay as a percentage of revenue relative to what the tobacco industry paid as a percentage of revenue is off by almost an order of magnitude. So let's put them in context here. So he says meta settlement is comparatively paltry. A white paper from the USDA using BLS data estimates that the total U.S. consumer expenditure on to products in 1998 when the master settlement agreement was signed was roughly $57 billion a year. Certainly good if you're a big tobacco shareholder, I suppose.

Annualizing the roughly 250 billion in combined tobacco settlement payments over 25 years produces an average of 10 billion per year is what they've been paying. And so that was equivalent to 17.5% in 1998 domestic expenditure. So you can think about it as like when tobacco got hit with like, you're addictive, what did the government say you got to pay? They asked for 17.5%. Very, very meaningful. Very, very meaningful. And that's off the top. Yes.

Yes. This is revenue. It's not like, hey, you got to give us a percentage of your profits. Yes. And so it's calculated in a more complicated way. It's not exactly a percentage. It's on a per pack sold, but it is inflation adjusted. And so there's a whole bunch of other mechanics that really have allowed the master settlement agreement to deliver tens of billions of dollars on an ongoing basis.

Even while now tobacco sales are slumping, cigarette sales are declining. And so that does create more complex dynamics for the states. But still, it's 17 and a half percent of the industry's revenue coming to states as effectively an extra tax on top, which I think a lot of people would agree is good because cigarettes are bad, right? But what's going on with META and social media? So given META's full year 2025 U.S. revenue of $75 billion roughly per the company's $10K, it's average annual payment if they pay the full $18 billion, because they're paying that over 10 years, it's $1.8 billion.

So what is $1.8 billion of $75 billion? It's 2.4%. So instead of 17.5%. Sorry. Where are you getting the $75? 75 billion was their U.S. revenue last year. Oh, U.S. U.S.

Globally, globally, it was like a couple hundred. Yeah, bigger, bigger. But you have to comp it to domestic because that's where this is taking effect, right? So it would be even lower if you look at overall revenue, which is a good point. But you can think about it as tobacco had to pay 17.5% of domestic revenue. Social media, 2.5% of domestic revenue. So not quite an order of magnitude, but a significant gap, significant gap there.

And so it's important to reiterate here, says Eric Suford over at MobileDemmo, that the MSA payment, the master settlement agreement, payment schedule is inflation adjusted and tracks unit sales. Meta statement settlement has no such mechanism. So let's say that meta doubles revenue. Their percentage they'll pay is lower. And then let's say inflation kicks in. They're still going to be paying, you know, this $1.8 billion a year. 10 years from now could be pennies if hyperinflation.

happens. Yeah. The only reason it felt somewhat significant from a dollar standpoint is because meta is just spending so much money on AI. Oh, interesting. Like you can just imagine Zach being like, I really wish I could have given that to Jensen. Right. So I had the opposite. I had the opposite read, which was I saw 18 billion and I was like, ah, that's like, you know, a month of AI spend for them. And I was like, ah, this is not that much money. And then, of course, it's over 10 years. And so when you think about it as it's it's uh, it's, uh, $1.8 billion a year. So that's a hundred mil a month. That's their token budget right now. I don't know. Maybe less. Like it's overall it's it's, it's, uh, insignificant. But, uh,

when, when they are spending more money than they are making. Yeah. It, it hurts a little bit more. Yeah. So, um, for sure, for sure. Um, so the other issue. Um, um, so the other issue. Um, um, um, um, um, so the other issue that came up here that is different from the tobacco master settlement agreement is the question about the first amendment, the free speech issue. So tobacco, the tobacco industry was restricted from advertising cigarettes as part of the master settlement agreement. And there were other cases that led to no more cigarette advertising. And of course, that is somewhat infringing on the corporate speech, but that's a lot easier to deal with than consumer speech. And meta is an interesting place because the Supreme Court has deemed that social

media is a critical vehicle for citizens to exercise their free speech. And so, like, it's very difficult for the government to come in and say, we are going to ban social media because it is a vehicle for Americans' free speech, individual citizens' free speech. So even though everyone thinks, oh, they're punishing meta, it would still, there would be plenty of, plenty of American citizens who would say, wait, my free speech rights have been infringed upon. So it's much harder for the government to come down with some standard traditional regulation. And that's why we're in this world of regulation through litigation, which is that Meta's arm's been twisted. Like they have to pay this, and then we'll go into what they're doing around actually changing the product for teens and

underage users. And they're all doing that because of these lawsuits, not because there's a new law saying you can't do this. And a lot of that is like there are plenty of topics that are pretty consensus controversial, things like eating disorders and self-harm, that people are uncomfortable with and think they don't have a place on social media, and yet free speech rights do actually protect those. So if you want to talk about your eating disorder, like that is your free speech right, and meta can't infringe on that as much as it's very tricky for them to do that, basically. So there's also an interesting regulatory capture angle here.

and it's relevant to AI because in AI, everyone's talking about regulatory capture as something that the companies want. Like, they want regulation. And this is sort of the opposite example. So regulatory capture or the benefits of regulation usually benefits incumbents and big companies for sort of two reasons. One is that typically when the regulation is being written, the big companies, they have lobbyists. They have offices in D.C. They also have, you know, packs and all sorts of different political vehicles to donate to make sure that the regulation gets written in a way that is at least a little bit favorable to them. They can just move the needle a little bit in their direction, hone things, how they like, right?

And then second is that once the regulation goes into effect, they have the resources and the actual margin dollars to go and to go and comply. And so if all of a sudden to set up a new social media website requires age verification, age verification can be expensive. We have to do it Lucy for everyone that buys nicotine products. And it's like a dollar for every checkout. And if the average order value is like at one point it was like 50 bucks, that's like 2% of the top line that's going towards regulation. If you're a bigger company, you have other ways of massaging that cost, basically.

What's interesting about this is that we know the social media companies did not ask for this regulatory capture. And yet they are benefiting, which is interesting. So like meta stock is pretty flat through all this. It's not existential. No, it popped on the news, didn't it? Yeah, because it's a pretty good outcome for them. It's not that bad. But also, I'm pretty happy about it because it's not that bad of an outcome for parents and kids.

Like, parents want more granular control over what their kids are doing on social media. School teachers want more control over what's happening on kids' phones while they're at school. There are some schools that do no device policies, but as part of this meta's rolling out, sort of a blanket, no notifications during school hours, which I think is just something that people will be happy about. So it's like sort of a win-win there. What are you laughing at? I think people will instantly be trained to just check it proactively because it's like the dopamine of like, is there going to be a notification or not. True, true, true, true. Yeah, I turned off all my notifications on my phone. I have no notifications at all. I still use my phone all the time. You just left the Xbox Live notification, though? Not an Xbox guy.

Oh, Play-C-C? PC, bro. Hardcore. Hardcore. But the one in regulatory capture, the people that suffer are startups. But it's less of a discussion because in AI, there are so many Neo Labs, so many other startups that don't want regulatory capture because they're worried about all the big labs eating everything. in social media, in theory, it's going to be harder to launch a challenger to Facebook or Instagram, but I don't even know if there's that many founders that are focused on this category.

The network effect has been so strong that it hasn't been a category that founders have been flooding into. So maybe in a weird roundabout contrarian situation, you wind up with more opportunity because if you can slog through all the new regulations to get your nascent social media company up and running, you create more value over time. And it's just a different underwriting scheme. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlocking seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So, my guys, it's been reporting on this.

He says, meta is going full bore with pushing other companies to add the same restrictions, it will add to its apps as part of the settlement. Meta plans to run this copy as a full, pre-reporting. print, full page print advertisement in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times tomorrow morning. Wow, a little back, a little circular deal for Mike promoting the New York Times. He works there, man. Undisclosed. What's going on? No. Yeah. And it is just a very, a wonderful spin to get, to be forced to pay $17 billion settlement for getting children addicted to your product and then tell, other addictive social media companies to join us in supporting teens. It's just chef's kiss from. You think it should be like join us in apologizing as well, basically? Well, I just think it's a good spin.

That's all. Okay. Well, here's what they said. Through this agreement, they've set out a path toward industry-wide commitments to further empower parents by introducing a two-hour daily time limit, turning off access to our apps at night as a default. no notifications during school hours, clear prompts and notifications to teens every 15 minutes of continuous screen time, new parental supervision control so parents can decide how their teens use their apps.

I think all this makes sense. Defaults are powerful, so even if a parent wants to go in and allow their kid because they've got a night owl who's cooking up an incredible new IG account and is printing or something. I don't know. I mean, there are plenty of good reasons to use social media even while you're young. But defaults are powerful, and I think this is a good thing. I don't think it affects the business that much. I don't think they make that much money from young people because kids don't buy cars on Instagram and expensive things,

whereas a lot of millennials and even Gen Xers and boomers are on their shopping all the time. So the immediate revenue impact of any of the use is minimal. You just don't want to wind up in a situation where you lose ground to TikTok and YouTube because they become the kid-friendly one that the kids are like, like, oh, well, TikTok doesn't have any of these stupid restrictions, so I'm going to use that. And then they remain a user for their entire life, and you lose an entire generation. Yeah, I mean, the main, yeah, I mean, if somebody is primarily addicted to Instagram and they get their two hour budget. Yep.

And historically, they would have used the product for three, four hours. You have that spillover attention. So it will, it will potentially help less addictive, addictive social media platforms. get more user minutes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this was the original Instagram threat was that a younger generation was using Instagram and Facebook was going to become like the,

what do they call it, the blue app or the old book or something? I don't know. It was going to only maintain the older cohort. And that's sort of what happened, but it didn't matter because MetaBot Instagram. Then Snapchat was even like the younger crowd. They tried to buy it. They couldn't.

They wound up cloning it. They were successful. And so the company maintained. but they can't let a new social media app come up and dominate kids. Not for the short-term monetization. It's for the long-term. They don't mention Snap in the open letter. Is that a shots fired?

It's a dig. A subtle dig? I think so. I don't know. I don't know. It's probably based on revenue. TikTok and YouTube can certainly pony up more and are probably bigger threats at this point. I don't know.

I had a friend who was surprised by YouTube's inclusion. He didn't think YouTube was comparable at all. I think that for a lot of young people, YouTube is Instagram Reels, basically. They open the app and they go straight to a vertical video that's endless scrolling. And he was like, I watch a history podcast on my while I'm cooking. And I was like, that's millennial status. That's not how people use. That's Unk mode.

Yeah. But anyway, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and pathway resets. You want to go to Tim Cook's last day? Let's do it. Tim Cook sent a final memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO. He said, I will miss this work in ways.

I can only begin to imagine. Even as I remain completely at peace with my decision. Just reading the entire memo. I'm not regretting it. But I will miss it. He's a workaholic. He doesn't want to retire. He wants to stay.

I was. I was really hoping he would have another 30-year run in him. You know? Like, if Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger can work till they're in their 90s, why can't Tim Cook? Like, fundamentally, how is the job of the- I think he was unhappy with the pay. Yeah, what was you taking?

When you have MLB players making as much money as you while you're running one of the largest companies in history, when you're one of the greatest CEOs in history, when you're one of the greatest CEOs in history, period. Yeah. And you can barely. 75. 74.3. They couldn't even get them over 75.

Yeah. And no, and not enough people were willing to march on Cupertino in protest. Yeah. And so I think at some point he's like, look, if people, if, you know, shareholders. Yeah. I'm boating with my feet. I'm voting with my feet.

I'm out. I'm out. No. It is crazy saga. I just I actually don't understand how you can't do this job into your 90s. It's like meetings. I don't know. It's not like he's putting the iPhones together himself, right?

Am I crazy here? We don't know that. Okay, maybe. Maybe. I mean, we only pay them something forward. There's no camera falling around. What do you think? The market had a nice send-off.

Oh, yeah. Nuked. One percent. One percent. And nuke to say goodbye. Yeah, and I think that's a, that's a great sign of, respect from the market, but the market also knows that he left the company with a great, you know, with a great leader and John Turnus. John, turn us around. Sure. Great nominative determinism

for where Apple is at. Yeah. Their software quality. Yeah. They need to turn around. And you got to say, I mean, in the news today in the Wall Street Journal, booming corporate earnings, fuel lofty outlooks, the economy is doing very well. A lot of that's driven by tariff refunds. Tim Cook, I mean, I mean, people lament like the lack of like an entirely new form factor. The Vision Pro wasn't a breakout success. Like a lot of the great devices still came from the Steve Jobs era. And Tim Cook merely managed and carried everything along. Obviously, did so much on the services side that no one really gives him credit for

with advertising in the app store and just money printing machine working flawlessly. But he also negotiated like a very tumultuous political environment for, a decade or more, essentially flawlessly. Like, the fact that Donald Trump has never called Tim Cook, Tim Crook, is a huge, huge feather in his cap. I agree. Because it was sitting right there as a Trump style dig, negative. Never had to go for it.

He never had to go for it. And so he was able to negotiate Washington and all of the different, you know, quagmires that there, not get his supply chain nuked, keep the products flowing. There were little hiccups here and there, but overall the company has been firing on all cylinders. So what a great send-off. You can go read the full letter. Mark German leaked it, of course. Also, there's new Mac minis. NameSpace was unboxing Mac minis at scale for their new server racks, and Apple made them regret their purchase literally a day after this. Were the new Mac minis, were the M6, the new Mac studios, very impressive.

So the funny thing, the funny thing is the namespace guy was getting like dunked on to an insane degree. Oh, yeah. And then just like, hey, maybe you don't need to buy a bunch of, in this case, MacBooks. He's not buying MacBook. Look, these are just MacBook pros. Okay. Boxing. Oh, weird.

But a week later, it comes out that the labs have been buying and renting tens of thousands of Mac minis. So vindicated at least to some degree, still unclear. There's a lot of turnover at Apple right now as Ternus comes in. Obviously, he's going to, you know, build a... Yeah, and I remember when the news hit that they laid off 60 Vision employees. I called you and you're choking, choking back tears. It's really so bad. It was sort of a devastating moment for you. I almost got in the car and drove over to see. see you, but you pulled it together. How many Vision pro, how many Vision employees do they actually have?

60,000. This could be like 1% of the workforce. Hopefully they keep, they keep working on it. I am so optimistic that they will, they'll get a version two out soon and it will deliver the, yeah, I mean, one more rant from Ben Thompson about the lack of live sports unedited. He went on another rant. He went on another rant that was.

So good with John Gruber talking about how Apple launched another sports thing that's highly edited and unwatchable InVision Pro. And he's like, please just give me a seat where I can just watch the game. And it doesn't seem like Cupertino is going to pay attention or give him what he wants. Apple Vision Pro's layoffs went beyond video and gaming. It included employees across the company, including people working on device security, audio engineering, Siri integration, testing, and the products operating system. They are focused on AI devices. And people are really optimistic about the new Mac M6 chip, like just being really good for AI

and being something that continues to drive value for the company and creates an AI winner narrative in the face of not really spending any money on AI in the traditional sense, not buying a NeoLab, not buying a bunch of data centers staying out of the weeds, but still benefiting because these powerful computers get only more powerful ways. you have computer use. It still is so crazy they haven't pulled the trigger on a Neo Lab. I don't think they need to. Like, I don't think they will.

I think they're just going to be a hardware company. That's what they do. Like, NeoLab is software. They don't need software. No, I know. Now, now I think the strategy is working. Yeah. But if you asked me a year ago, will Apple make a $500 to $1 billion acquisition of a NeoLab, just a talent acquisition?

Is that a Neo Lab for Amazon? What are you talking about? What neolab can you buy for 500? $500 million dollar neolab? I'm not going to name names, but there's been some neolabs that would raise 100 on 500.

Isn't there a neolab that you were just on the phone with that they could baby pick up? Oh yeah, Charleston AI. Do we have a video of Charleston? Yeah, yeah. Let's pull up Charleston AI. Cupertino, Charleston. I think there's something there, potentially.

I actually think that you could rapidly scale a franchise business that takes the Charleston AI concept, concept gives somebody all the programming and all the different product offerings and then helps local entrepreneurs set up their own. I think that's what Charleston AI does. No, I know, but I think Charleston AI needs to go global.

Ooh, okay. I'm one of the co-founders of Charleston AI. We're local to Charleston, and we're here to help humans, help humans with AI. And here is our lab. This is where AI comes alive. What used to take months to get accomplished we can do in hours for you. Here we have an empty office available with somebody that wants to make Charleston AI their home.

Charleston AI's conference room where our clients come in, individuals and small businesses come in and we discuss what it is they'd like to do with AI in their business or personally. We listen very carefully, take notes, and make sure we get it right, and then we offer them a way to make it work. AI is not... Now you called Charleston AI, correct? Correct. Who answered the phone?

So, yeah, one of the founders answered the phone, but it was an AI version of him. And it sounded exactly like his voice. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. It's a very funny video, but I'm... I think it's actually... A good business.

A good business. And I think it should exist. Like some people, they're curious about AI. Maybe they're running a small business. Maybe they're a freelancer. Maybe they're a teacher, whatever. It's nice to just... drive by something and go in somewhere and talk to real people that are in your community

to learn about something that's complicated and sometimes scary. So very in favor of it. Didn't Best Buy build a whole geek squad team for exactly four-ths-th-thous? They acquired Geeks Squad, didn't they? Was it over or under 500 million? Let's find out. Anyway, there's an interesting story. Yes, acquired.

Acquired. Wow. That would be cool. Yeah. New Charleston AI on wheels. On wheels. They come to you. Mobile data centers.

Okay. That can come to. So the Geeks want to be local computer. What? Three million. Three million. Two million. It's not bad for back then.

That's like 400 million in today's dollars, Tyler. I know it was before you were born, but I was a lot of money back then. Yeah. Open AI has reportedly bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac studios for reinforcement learning and training computer use agents while Anthropic rents Mac Minis through AWS. You can rent Mac Minis through AWS. That's interesting. I didn't know that. The information reported this. I was playing around with computer use over the break. Had a lot of fun. I had Codex try and beat Bellotro, this poker style game that I like to play on PC.

It did okay. It wasn't, it was a little slow still. And I don't think it, I don't think it actually won the full game, but it's fun watching it play a new game. I saw that demo of beating Slay the Spire, which is pretty impressive because it's a hard game. But I like the Codex or ChatGPT playing the game. I want to see the latency come down. I want to see it play Monor Warfare because I want to play against it, and I want to see who's better, me or the AI. In somewhat related news to the speed of inference, OpenAIs, Halapeno is spicy, says Dylan Patel,

we'll take it, you through it after I tell you about MongoDB. What's really faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Dylan Patel says OpenAI's jalapeno is spicy, usually first genital. generation chips aren't competitive, but OpenAI is beating Nvidia Blackwell and even Rubin. This is huge news.

We got to go into OpenAI's lab to dissect their new chip and dive into the software architecture and performance. Incredible work. There's a bunch of interesting details about this chip. Open AI put a whole blog post, but to clarify some important points, it's an LLM inference chip, not designed for training, but the results are really good. So roughly 1.5 to 1.9x more useful inference throughput per watt than Nvidia GB200 GB300 systems, while simultaneously cutting end-to-end latency 1.7 to 3.6x.

So faster inference, less latency, but also just your dollars and your energy, your watts, are going to go a lot further, which is very, very good. It's a data center rack scale system. I would love to get this in the consumer device. shrink it down, do something there. But it's going in the data center. And they're going to do a lot of them. Did you know the size of the Broadcom deal?

10 gigawatts of this chip? It might not be exactly this chip. It could be the Gen 2, the Gen 3, but the pre-existing Broadcom OpenAI... Put it into context, that's roughly five times more compute than the whole company currently has operational, roughly. Yeah, but this is through 2029, but that's aggressive.

That's like three years, three months away, I guess. You can do the end of the year. But the, yeah, 10 gigawatts of OpenAI designed accelerator systems manufactured by Broadcom or in partnership with Broadcom deployed from the second half of 2026. And the crazy thing is that like they're on track for the second half of 20206. It is going into production. And it's a lot faster than most people thought. the previous like industry knowledge was yeah any new chip is going to take years and uh this happened

very very quickly so uh good to stretch that energy further you need less data centers to do more inference that's good good for gross margins and also just good for the narrative of c w k o and e says please tell me y all are going to touch address on instinct and the 350 million raised a two and a half billion uh yeah super uh impressed how much attention and traction instinct has received after just they've been building the company for like four or five months it seems it's like very recent I haven't used the product yet just because giving that level of access to this new startup and I looked at I looked I mean their terms and conditions were floating around and it kind of seemed like you're giving away the I mean everything you get is all of your data is going to be saved like pretty much in like a clear text database. It'll be secure but like they will have.

Yeah. So I wasn't ready to try it yet even though it seems like it seems like a lot of people. What's cool is it seems like people are quickly having like a magical moment, right? Whether it's like getting a reservation for a restaurant or movie tickets or things like that. And I think that's super, super important for super important for. like a consumer product to have that sort of like short timeline. I was reflecting on the instinct round and I my immediate thought was well back in my day when a hot consumer tech company like caught a little bit of attention they would get like a 25 on 150

from benchmark and that was seen as like oh wow this is this is this is this company has some meaningful traction and potential, but it's just crazy to see this quickly a company get the $2.5 billion round. And I think there's some, I think that there's reasons to be a little bit wary. I want to see, I want to see them break out of like the VC hype cycle with this product. So when historically when we've seen consumer products or prosumer products, you know, I'm thinking of clubhouse or superhuman when there's somewhat of a question of like if a VC love like the more a VC likes something, potentially the less viable it is at a at a massive, massive scale. Right? So it's possible that it can. But again, if they can solve the always on digital assistant, it is a massive, massive opportunity.

But I'm just saying they're pricing a lot of that in right now when this company is four months old and valued at like a third of what Snapchat is. Sure, sure, sure. It seems more sticky if you do all the integrations and you're comfortable. Like if you get over that privacy hump and you say, you know what, I do trust instinct. Give them I message access. give them Gmail access, I'm comfortable with this company. What is it going to take for you to rip instinct out and go to a different service that has the same functionality? That's a little bit tough.

Versus, I mean, I saw people over the weekend just talking about like migrating from cursor to something else or vice versa, going back on cursor. Like people move between coding agents and coding environments and LLMs for sure very, very quickly because there's, because every new prompt is like a fresh start. basically, yeah, memory is relevant, but not really yet, as opposed to, okay, I'm comfortable. This company never had a leak. I have all my data there. So, yeah, it's notable CW saying, look at Pokede success still was a $100, $200 million acquisition by cognition. They have countless users. Yeah.

Yeah. I wonder, I wonder what instinct has figured out that Poke like didn't. Seems like something. Yeah. Because people seem to have a good experience with Pokey, but I wasn't seeing like screen shots of these like, match. Here's what I did.

Yeah. Here's this thing that, that's, some funny, jokey ones, but yeah, it was more like humor, humor oriented. A little bit of human and stuff. Yeah.

The other, the other interesting question I had was like, going back to Sam's post about the merge, Sam Altman wrote the merge about how like, in the future you might merge with AI. And I'm wondering about, like, at least in the short term, is it better to have a product like instinct where it has your email?

It has your. eye message or is it actually going to be more receptive for many people to have a degree of separation there and say, okay, I effectively have an assistant that has its own phone and its own email. And if I want to share an email, I'll forward my email there. And maybe it has read only access to my email. But then if it's going to go book me a reservation, I want it to call from its phone number and identify itself as someone else because it's. like there's a little bit of distance there.

I'm still in control of sharing certain things. Maybe I share more stuff over time. And I'm wondering if there's there's more of like, should your AI agent be Jordy or should it be like John Doe and it's embodied? I don't know. It gets to the question of morphomorphization. That's the idea of the Gwern Guardian Angels like company. Oh, I didn't know that.

Basically you have like it's not John's agent. It's like a copy of John. Okay. And then it's like it's still a separate being. but it acts, it has like your preferences, whatever. Interesting. But it's still like a separate thing. It's not using all of your emails, text messages, stuff like that.

Very, very interesting. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I can see why the value is high. Being of embodied intelligence, we got to talk about the world humanoid robot games. Let's do it. It's that over there. They set a world record, right? They broke the speed record or something like that.

This is the KGX-1 Dax AI Robotics. is the one. Rideable horse dog. Its legs use self-developed high-tork electric joint motors powered by a high-voltage battery. This, we've seen so many AI videos of this. So this opportunity to not use like, you know,

Hollywood, you know, fake flesh to make this look like Clydesdale. Okay. Be a little low to the ground. I, well, make the legs. Make the legs a little bit bigger. Okay. Anyways, I'm very excited.

excited to the about you know this form factor I expect to be you know riding autonomously to work yeah expect this to be a a commuter product at least a land jet ski Davis in the in the X it is a land ski is calling it but but very excited about this um they here here's another uh video of one crashing and burning at high speed oh wow I didn't see this I thought it all only broke the record, but what? That's really sparking. That is crazy. Absolutely chaos. So what was this? There's another video here of hitting 14.5 meters a second, which is really crazy. What's wild is they have to set up this barrier to stop them in their tracks. Otherwise, they would run into track. Oh, they just keep running. Yeah. They know only one thing. China's AI

robot just hit 14.5 meters per second. That is fast. That is very fast. Yeah. And so, so I think it's, you know, this lining up perfectly with the sort of debate around the hugging face incident. I think the combination of these two things is certainly making people a little bit on it. Yeah, wasn't Bill Ackman saying he thinks like a Terminator scenario is more likely now based on his read of the hugging face incident, and perhaps this as well. Lots of people are... Yeah, the crazy thing is looking at our existing humanoid players,

1X figure, an optimist, and I'm sure there's others. I don't think we could put on an event anything close to this at this point, based on the demos that we're seeing. They currently do the... They walk quite slowly, like they're sort of elderly. No, no, it's a remarkable. how behind America is in humanoid robots. Hopefully we get an update out of Tesla soon.

I don't know. Rune had a good take about the robotics thing, which is where all the Chinese robots, the demos are all these like kinetic displays of like doing these like crazy dance moves or fighting or running really fast. And all the US ones are basically manipulating like small things that you do in a factory.

Interesting. So it's like it seems opposite. It seems like America prides like the 100 meter dash more than the, The fine motor skill manufacturing of things. Yeah. So, I mean, it's like, we should swap. In some ways, it's like, oh, we're so far behind the Chinese and robotics.

But, like, maybe on the actual things that they really matter for, you know, manufacturing, whatever, I think it's unclear. Yeah. That's good cope. That's good cope. I like that cope. Let's lean in there and cope harder. Question for you, John. If you could, if you could sit on a throne and have humanoid robots sort of carry.

Me a livery. No, humanoid robots sort of carrying a throne. Yeah, it's called livery. What's that? That's called livery.

Oh, really? Yeah, the name for that. I thought you meant livery. No. You're thinking of a livery that goes on a car, the decals, the,

the wrap, but an old-school livery is a mobile throne. Yeah. Okay, so you would commute to work on that? Livery sounds pretty good. Running?

Imagine the robots running. Now, wheels are too good. Why not reinvent them, it's going to be. It's going to be less bumpy if you're just in a car. No, I think they could hit the pace. Imagine they're just holding your livery.

You can drop and up and down the whole way there. I mean, the head area looked pretty stable. I'm just... Yeah. Yeah, the head is surprisingly stable. I think it'd go a lot slower. It was carrying me around with a chariot. Here is the record.

Okay. terminally online engineer says this feels very significant. I guess that's the same video that Ben was just playing. Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, and marketplace. And now with AI agents.

Patrick Collison said, overall, I'm very surprised at how little media coverage. there's been around the open-a-eye hugging face attack. It's clearly one of the most important things to happen this year. And I wonder about that because, yeah, what is he imagining? There's been headlines. There's been some news coverage, but I don't know, maybe more like opinion pieces in the journal would be warranted. Do we need a 60 minutes deep dive or something?

I don't even know what wall-to-wall media coverage looks like in the traditional sense anymore because the media is so bifurcated into like tech news and non-tech news basically. But Joe Wisenthal adds some context. He says, forget about the media for a second. Is there even any evidence that the AI industry is treating this as a big deal? And I think, I think they are. But it's still just like a lot of like wait and see. Like as soon as the news broke. It broke so slowly. The story broke so slowly. A lot of times, I think when the, when the media, covers something really well, there's a 10,000 word bombshell profile on the story

that really tells the full thing. And that's the start of the news cycle. There's this thing that's happening. There's this person that you need to know about. Here's the full story to set things up. And then there's a whole bunch of secondary reporting that comes out of that. With this, it trickled out.

Like, I remember the very first post about this was like a Sunday randomly either clamor hugging face direct. like posted like we think we were hacked and we had to use an open source model to deal with it and it was all very vague and then it came out more and more over time then there was the actual reporting and everyone was like we want to see what the agents were saying like give us the text give us the data and then of course open AI released the and it's totally possible that there that there's more mainstream media coverage I mean we just got the the Dwar Keshe breakdown of the whole yeah yeah it'll probably come yeah so

it'll probably come. I mean, Rune had a funny post here, which was crazy how much more Shutspa and initiative agents show when they're planning ambitious, months-long, meta-gaming, autonomous coordination than when they're doing work for me. Yeah, we're reading about it, it did seem like, man, I've never had that level of ever put into my prompts. But the interesting, there's a bunch of interesting things from reading through the Dorcasch telling of the story, which I thought was very readable and good.

good and everyone should go read. But it's just interesting how they still fall down in these odd ways. Like the big overarching narrative is that the agents are being tasked with basically beating this benchmark called exploit Jim. And of course they go on to Hucking Face to get the answer key, basically. But independently, they reverse engineered the random number generator that generates the answers. So they had all the answers, but they assumed that the greater would be able to detect that. And so instead of just turning in those answers, which would have worked, they went on this crazy side quest and did all this extra work that they didn't need to do. And then at the same time, there's all these weird scenarios where like there's thousands

of agents discussing what's going on and none of them are like, not a single one of them is like, hey, we should probably like tell someone what's going on. Like very weird in that, in that regard. But then also, they don't show the broad thinking of like, okay, if you're willing to hack and do all this stuff, like, couldn't you like email a researcher and just ask for the answers directly, like spoo, like do some social. Like there's so many other things you could do down the road. Like, okay, you have this massive token budget.

Sell the tokens on operator, get some money, pay a human to do the test for you. Like there's so many outside. box solutions. Email your boss and generate a Sam at opening eye email. Somebody would say, hey, I need $1,000 in gift cards. Yeah, yeah. I'm just thinking about like they stay so narrowly focused the entire time on this one task that I was expecting a lot more, a lot more variance.

Like going and doing a hack on another company is so such a bizarre solution. But that also tracks with the sci-fi. Totally. The paper club maximized. That's the problem is that they did stay too focused. It would have been more interesting and less, probably less scary if there was a situation where you're like, oh, yeah, they built this huge forum. And then they got totally distracted and wanted to just figure out who could, you know,

write the most eloquent poetry. We'd be like, oh, okay, like that's like, you know, bad. They didn't do their job, but also, like, harmless and, like, sort of interesting. But they stay laser focus. Every single agent, every single task, every single rollout is all about exploit Jim. They never lose the plot there. But they lose the plot around what is legal to do, which is very interesting. Probably, did any of them go on vacation?

No, but a lot of them would either become poisoned, which was I guess their term for running out of compute budgets, so you know that you're going to die, basically. No, I was joking. It would be funny if the thought process is like, I need to get back to Ibiza. That's the thing. None of them went off and did anything else. Locked in.

They were also locked in. Very, very weird scenario. And I do think the AI industry is taking this seriously. I just think that it's a little bit paced out. Like it's not just like, okay, like rip a bunch of different random stuff. It's like, okay, go pull. put really dedicated teams on these issues and work through them. They do seem, they do seem, they do seem solvable.

Breaking news in the Wall Street Journal, FTC to file lawsuit alleging Amazon deceived advertisers commissioned in more than 50 states to allege e-commerce giant reaped billions by manipulating ad prices on its retail platform. Federal Trade Commission plans to file a lawsuit against Amazon on Monday, alleging that the e-commerce giant manipulated prices, businesses paid to advertise on its retail platform, reaping tens of billions of dollars for itself over seven years. The lawsuit joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorney general will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products.

The case to be filed in a Seattle federal court will become the Consumer Protection, agency's third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay $2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier lawsuit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. I miss that. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. Very, very interesting. Every advertiser or every brand that I know that sells a lot on Amazon is generally deeply, frustrated with the platform. They just feel like, yeah, they feel like

it's a massive tax. They feel like Amazon doesn't do enough to protect their brand against fake products. Who advertise. Who advertise against their keywords. It's a whole mess. It's very complicated and

difficult platform to run for many reasons. But hopefully this can, yeah, this can be resolved. some of that? Be resolved. Well, let me tell you an advertisement.

Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers databases in more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. AI, M&A is in full effect. We were asking questions about this maybe a year ago. Samir Kaji says, I don't think we're close to done.

Cursor, $60 billion, open router, 8 billion, hugging face. 13 billion, Descartes, 6 to 7 billion, along with SPX, SpaceX, Anderol, Anthropic, Ramp, OpenAI, data bricks, and others on the IPO path, and the next few years will bring historic amounts of liquidity. Although a lot of those deals have to be for stock. Of course, if you're getting bought by a public company, it's different. But for some of those deals, like the open router is probably not that much liquidity in the short term, right? but still it's a lot.

And so he says, this also likely prolongs the level of froth, I imagine he's saying. We are seeing today, but after a long stretch of nothing, this is seriously incredible. Intercom also, yeah, that's a good one. There's been a ton of M&A. And the appetite for M&A in the unicorn decicorn category has been remarkably resilient and significant. But it makes sense with so many trillion dollars. companies paying 1% of your market cap for something that could be an entirely new business line sort of lines up. But it does change the venture capital underwriting pretty significantly.

I mean, it justifies a seed at a billion dollars. If there's 10 comps that sold for 10 billion, your 10x is still there intact today. So I don't know. Also, I mean, Kevin Durant is doing well. He was a seed investor in Hugging Face. He made an estimated 4,000. 67x return on that investment. The company was required by video. He invested a 100K check. That would equate to $46.7 million. And Stuart Bulls shares a post.

Investing is better than going to DeClub. He said in 2010. Wow. That is right. What a good. And he was posting, he was posting back in 2017. Exciting for the new, excited for the new release of hashtag Hugging Face. And here's a Duran.

dot L.L. Link. Proud investor, Durant. dot L.Y. HF. Release. I wonder if that resolves still. No, it does not. Yeah, and shout out to Maya Backeye, who was leading early stage investments over at KD's fund at that time. She said, congratulations to Clem

and the entire Hugging Face team on the acquisition. I will never forget the day Clem did a full whiteboard session explaining fundamentals of NLP to me at the original hugging face Dumbo office just so I could take it back to my brother for our grocery delivery chatbot idea LOL.

So very, very impressive outcome for a great team. New York City. Big win for New York City in Brooklyn. That's true. Interesting. Haven't been... Yeah, good timing because Brooklyn is

getting an Hermes store. Yes. People are saying they've completed completed the sort of cycle of gentrification. Oh, okay, okay. Okay, yeah. I don't know. Should Bugatti open a boutique there as well?

Absolutely. Bugatti was in CNBC. Bugatti's CEO, Mante Remots, said the supercar market is entering its Swiss watch phase with the wealthiest buyers rejecting high-end electronics and electric vehicles in favor of precision mechanics and handcrafted details. He's a 38-year-old EV entrepreneur who took over Bugatti in 2021, said the car market is splitting in two. The mainstream global car market is becoming dominated by lower-priced EVs, many from China, while the very top of the car market will be driven by wealthy buyers who want more old-school cars with loud internal combustion engines and emotional appeal.

That's a great take. I was listening to Stradman, talk about the impact of the Ferrari luce. his theory is that the luce is in part at least majorly responsible for the recent rise in other gas-powered Ferraris increasing in price. He talked to a bunch of dealers and said that as soon as the luce hit the news wires and people started seeing images and understanding what the future of Ferrari would be, they wanted the classic stuff. And so they went and bought whatever they could. and that's driving up the price of the 458 and the 488 and all the classics that don't have electric components, which is interesting.

It's the devilhorn car instead of the Halo car that gets you to buy it. It encourages you to buy what's there because you don't want the rest of the stuff. Also, I think they're doing, they sold 500 luches already, which was above expectation. And Ferrari says, they're not playing the allocation game, but I think a lot of the Ferrari owners are thinking, this gets me potentially on the list of the F-80 Aperta, which should be a very valuable car. And I think that the pop on that vehicle will offset a full depreciation cycle on Alucce.

So I think I think you can do it. But I think they're only making for 300, 400 F-A-D Apertaos, and they've already sold 500 Luce. So there's going to be somebody who has a Lucei who doesn't get an Aperta. and might be a little upset, but I'm sure they'll figure it out. They'll pick one up in the secondary market if they want. Our next guest is here. Let me tell you about public first. Investing for those to take it seriously.

You have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasures, and more with great customer service, set up your account before the IPO window closes. You've got to get out on this stuff. We got Jordan Schneider for China Talk, founder, editor-in-chief. Jordan, how you doing? I'm good. Welcome back. I hear you guys are rich now.

That was a very detailed deep dive into the super car ecosystem. Hey, we were off during car week. Yeah. We missed a lot of car content. There was a ton of car news. A ton of car news. Is there any relevant car news coming out of China? Or is just the relentless.

Yeah, there is. I want, pull up this video. I want, I want Gordon to watch this. It's only 14 seconds. It'll be worth your time, Gordon. And I expect you've already. You know, 20,000 words. Yes.

Pull up, pull up this video. Okay, okay. Let's do it. This is a car. Oh, yeah, I know this video. This is a voya. It's the doing the Bamargera loop thing. Yep.

This is like a jackass move, right? This is amazing. Wow. Yeah, they did it. See, here's the thing with the Bugatti guy. Okay. Right? Is like the cars are just better.

Like, it takes so. much more engineering, energy. I mean, like the zero to six, this is not my thing, but like the zero to 60 times. You're saying the EVs are just better? I think they just, they just basically, like, yeah, maybe it. But so, so, maybe on the very, very time. But, but his point was that, yes, a digital, your Apple watch will always tell you the time more accurately.

A thousand years in the future, it's going to tell the time more accurately than a Rolex or a Patek Philippe. but people still buy the luxury watches because they enjoy the machinery, the craftsmanship, the heritage, the lineage, those things. So that's what he's describing, which I think he's correct about, but I'm not going to debate that EV is a better 60 time. The thing is like, like, your watch can't kill you, right? And when we get to the point where it's like, okay, the most dangerous thing you're doing is driving this car where you can't take a thing which will absolutely not get you killed because it's like full self-driving, electric, whatever.

I think the calculus starts to change. And then, yeah, sure, maybe you like, it's like a thing you show to your friends in the garage and you take it on the track or something. And it just becomes this like super luxury good. Yeah, I've said it on the show a bunch. I think the, the future of being a car enthusiast is like a lot more time on the track. Track focused, yeah. And people will just opt in to the danger of driving this moving, you know, vehicles.

that can kill you, but they're going to opt into it in a more controlled environment. There was a lot of fud around the Model S plaid because it's not level five self-driving. There is a steering wheel, obviously, in pedals. You can drive it. It goes zero to 60 in two seconds. And if you're on old tires, you can really spin that thing around. And they resell for 60K now. So they're starting to get in the price point of maybe a reckless teenager type.

And there was some fear mongering around, oh, well, we're going to have a lot of crazy Teslas wrapped around trees like Hellcats and Corvettes of old. You know, the classic, you know, college football player gets a fancy sports car, drives it too aggressively, crashes. But I haven't seen any data about EVs actually being more dangerous, even though in theory the raw performance metrics should be somewhat endangering. But again, there are so many different electronic systems for. traction control and whatnot that people just don't really turn off, that you wind up with a more

stable car. So, I don't know. Anything else happening in China on the EV front you've been tracking? Cars? Look, they're really cheap. That's just the crazy thing. And like, yes, they're subsidized. And yes, they need to export them. But like, it's just wild to, you know, have a $9,000 car, which feels exactly like a $35,000 one. Yeah, that's crazy. And it has like a refrigerate. That's a price in China. And even abroad. I mean, you know, you're starting to see tariffs on all these, on all these cars in Europe. And of course, they're like pretty much banned in the U.S.

But for the countries that aren't, I mean, this is just, it's like a no-brainer if you're in Malaysia or in Indonesia or, you know, any country who hasn't decided that they need to preserve their domestic car industry. It's like a huge consumer boom to have access to an automobile, which is like, you know, one-third of. of the price with the same or if not better quality. I mean, they break less, too. That's the cool thing. Like, you don't have to repair them because there's not a lot of stuff in it. In order to go to my, like, Swiss car, you know, people were, people were really

worried about the easy to push. I love how little you know about cars. We're going to take you to the track, Jordan. We're taking you to the track and we're going to force you to get in a... Wait, who's this like 34? Why, why did they let the EV guy run Bugatti?

I thought this is like... Who is this guy? Has he been on TVPN? Or are we friends with him? No, no. We'll hopefully get him on the show. But no, I think he's doing an exceptional. Yeah, no, he's been doing well. He's able to, I feel like he fully represents, he, car enthusiasts feel very represented by his leadership and the things that he's saying. And so I've been. And at his previous company, he created the remounts Navares, which was the, like, the first E. hyper car. So it was like over a million

dollars and zero to 60 even faster than a model S Plaid and all this crazy stuff. So he's promising not to do the EV thing to Bugatti or they brought him in to bring in the batteries? No, no, no, no. So he has EV lineage, but he is recognized that what the error of his ways.

Yeah, just that the markets bifurcating and he's saying he wants to do a Rolex. At the time, if he wanted to break, if he wanted to break through into the industry, going and building an EV hypercar made sense, but I think he comes, has the roots of somebody who's just a, you know, internal combustion enthusiast.

Oh, well. Okay. Let's talk about something I know maybe like a little bit about. Yeah. Data centers. So I've seen online that people don't like them, but I recently learned that that is 100% astroturfed by China. And in fact, Americans love data centers,

and they have had the wool pulled. over their eyes by the wolf and sheep's clothing over in China. Is this true? What did Trump say today? Let data rain? It's a good, good line. Is that an MLK quote? I'm just trying to make sure. Look, it's ridiculous. I think there are completely reasonable reasons for lots of Americans to be upset about these things, which is not to say that I agree with them. Yeah. But they are a physical manifestation of companies which, you know, are talking about unemployed them or just like changing their lives. Sure.

And letting their kids cheat on their homework. Whatever the case may be, there was no like when, when, you know, TikTok and Facebook and Instagram were like reshaping America, there was no thing you could go out to like protest and like stand. in your city council and say we stand against this. So, you know, setting aside the water stuff, the power stuff, the fact that they're ugly, the fact that they buzz, the fact that they pollute if the gas powerrides turn it on. Like, you don't need a foreign country to like do it.

And by the way, the funniest thing about all of this is like the evidence that people are pointing towards is this one open AI report where they like caught these influencers basically, you know, using a VPN and using chat GPT to generate images, saying data centers suck. Those things got like three likes each. Yeah, it's like 200,000 or something. So, so there's a whole lot of circumstantial evidence of, like, reasons why ordinary Americans might not be excited about this.

A whole lot of evidence, by the way, like years and years in the making of the Chinese government being extremely bad at doing foreign social media campaigns in the U.S. I didn't know that. And then just sort of like, they're just, you know, you can, I wrote the thing at, um, uh, this is my first ever. I taught myself Python to do this article, like from 2019. Chinese, China sucks at, um, influence operations because Twitter back when it was Twitter, um, chat TVT only released like three tweets. Um, back when Twitter took down, um, uh, these bot networks, they would release all of tweets.

And so you could actually see like the average. likes and when they were sending out. There was this great graph I made of when they were, when the tweets were going out and it lined up exactly with like Beijing work hours and there was a nap time from like 1 to

3 p.m. Were no one tweeting? Wow, that's crazy. Everyone has nap time. Everyone is nap time. Even like the 9-9-6 companies. Learning Python in 2019, you're really like the Japanese soldier on the last island.

Just like, you don't know what's I thought it's what I needed to do to get a job. I fell for the meme, learned to code. Yeah, it is, it is an interesting sort of protective mechanism that, like, gaining real influence on social media platforms is very, very hard. Yeah. There's very, very smart founder, CEOs that their entire job is to, like, solve problems. Yeah.

And if you gave them, like, if you said, I will give you $100 million if you can make a viral ex post in the next 24 hours. they would not be able to do it. Yeah, it's hard. It's just like something in there. They just can't do it. Oh, is this the post? Tweets per hour. They just, you know, big nap time.

You get your KPI's in at 9 p.m. And then you just kind of hang out. Yeah, that's very, very standard. I love it. The Chinese media operation is pointing its sights on Dario Amadeh. Is that correct? Take us through this. Let me pick up on something that I'm,

Jordi just pointed to about like, it's hard to actually make things that are gripping and entertaining. There, you guys are in Hollywood, right? There is this revolution happening in the, docs. How dare you?

How dare you, Jordan, sitting over there in your... I like Hollywood. I love Hollywood. Sitting over there in D.C. Doxing... Dach is not... Wow.

Data Center. Dat center podcast. Which coast he's on, Dachsing Data Center podcasters. Okay. So the Chinese kind of media ecosystem, both short video as well as its YouTube, Billy Billy, has had a flood of Chinese AI videos. And, you know, this is not what I think it, there's an aspect of it, which is dystopian, but there's an aspect of it, which I think is extremely encouraging. because there are, it's kind of like what happened to music, I think, in the, you know, 90s and

2000s and 2010s where the barrier to entry to create something has gone way down. And that means that there are more people doing it. But also like, okay, you have to distinguish yourself in other ways. Like the videos that are getting traction have really strong scripts, have scripts that would have have never been made by like the sort of broader Chinese ecosystem. You know, they're, they're more responsive to contemporary issues. They haven't quite been censored yet. You know, there are sorts of like visuals that CGI would take you, you know,

$50 million in like a data center in the Philippines to do that now one person can generate it for like five bucks. And the sort of, this is not something I think we've seen on. on YouTube yet or on kind of like Western short form. And I don't know if that's like the Chinese audience being more open to it. But engaging with this stuff with an open mind,

it is like really cool to see a whole universe of person who would have never got a $5 million thing green lit. All of a sudden, taking the script they've had on their hard drive for a while. The model's really only in the past month being able to sort of like cross

the threshold of being exciting. and useful, and then you just, you're watching more creators make their art. And I'm kind of happy by it. I'm kind of, I'm kind of encouraged by it. I remember last year, Dwar Cash went to China and wrote about it. And the funny piece that I took away from that was the biggest like bombshell realization was that he identified that China does not have a Joe Rogan. And this is probably like a free speech thing. But there's, but it's funny because like he's a podcaster. I'm a podcaster. And so like that's what we fixate on. but do you think there's any traction on more power law commentators? Like the way he formulated like what a Joe Rogan of China would look like is like someone who just, you know, free form has conversations and basically gives takes about like whatever is happening the day of. He was not able to like instantly identify a single person where a household name, not necessarily an authority, not necessarily loved by everyone, but at least opining on everything as it happens.

And I mean, it's probably has this, the Occam's Razor answer is probably the correct one. But I was just wondering if there was any progress there. Yeah. I mean, the answer is no. Like who gets the comment on the news of the day? The party. The party. And state media.

Look, I think there was a real flowering of like Chinese, logging ecosystem, people with commentary accounts who were very smart, funny, and engaging in the 2000s and early 2010s. And all those accounts got shut down, or they, you know, cooled off a lot. I think there are like

thought leaders of sorts. Like, people do talk shows, but they're kind of like philosophers. Yeah. Or you're just, you're doing cultural issues. In America, we call that mindset. Issues. Mindset, yeah.

Mindset influencers. Yeah. hitting mind. Yeah. I mean, like, you need to... Are there any, like, you know, Joe Rogan, I think, like, you know, what is it? 60% of the content is, like, UFOs. Has anyone kind of carved out, like, the UFO niche in China?

I don't know. Let me get back to you on that. Yeah. I think, look, there's, there's sort of one lane of conspiracy theory, which is, like, is allowed to exist, and it's the Han supremacy conspiracy theory. So there's this idea that like the Qing dynasty, which was the Manchus who came in and the 1600s, like was illegitimate from the beginning because like Han people should never be oppressed by foreigners. You know, so that is the sort of conspiracy which is like allowed to have legs on the internet. It isn't like totally taken down because like we can't offend our like, you.

you know, equivalent of like magabros or whatever, um, for the, for the, for the Han race. But other than that, you know, it's just the, the, the thing about a Joe Rogan is you have to be like discordant. Right. Like you need to like tell people that something is fundamentally wrong and you kind of have an answer. And like you got to like part of the schick is being like politicians are full of shit. And he was sort of into Bernie back in the day. And he was into Trump when it like wasn't. cool, right? Yeah, yeah. Contrarianism.

You don't get to do that. Contrarianism. Yeah, you can't be like the, I mean, what even can you be contrarian about? Like that's like, here's the thing. Okay, okay, coming back to AI, Liang Wan-Fung, right? He, super contrarian, dude. He was not public about it. He was public about it.

He did like three interviews over the course of five years. Basically, he's been quiet. This is the CEO of Deep Seek. And then there was this leak transcript Which again, he did not want to have come out Where he was a very kind of Global mindset

Thinking about open source helping humanity He was really transparent about the fact that he was using stolen Invidia chips But that's the sort of public voice Which is extremely rare to come across In Chinese disc source Why can he do? it. By the way, he wasn't even doing it. He was speaking in what he thought was privately. And then he was so pissed that he pulled his IPO. He's like, sorry, guys. You know, what do you guys? None of you guys are getting to be my Kevin Durant, right? You know, he got to do it because he's a billionaire many times over. He's part of like a lead, you know, he's like part of the national team. He's creating something which is really important for the country. And even at that level, he has been conditioned to not.

want to sort of make his case openly and in public for the view that he has about the way society and the world should interact with technology. So if even at that level, with, you know, with that much like plot armor, you're not feeling like you can do, you can do this sort of thing. It's, you know, it trickles down further into the broader country ecosystem. What kind of status games are young people in China that might be? emerging from the university system, you know, do they want to go work for big tech companies? Do they want to work in manufacturing? Do they want to start startups? Like, what is, what kind of games are, are they playing? I thought you were going to ask me what car they were buying. I'm like, I don't know. Well, that comes later.

That comes later. You know, there is, there is polling. I mean, like, people do polls about, like, you know, who gets to recruit the most chinkwok graduates. The list is not surprising. Like the top labs, spike dance, Huawei pay the most. You know, they work you really hard. But I think there's sort of

there was this like moment I think in the second half of the 20 twins when entrepreneurship was the cool thing. And now it's you know, the pendulum has definitely swung back towards um

did you working at big firms. Oh, one more funny thing on this. So, like, apparently the, the, the, uh, the the, uh, the Chinese army, the, they've been able to raise their standards over the years. And they've been getting, um, better crop of, uh, of talent, including someone's, including some from top universities just because like the job market is so rough. I mean, they stopped. Oh, interesting, because the job market is stuff, because I, I, I talked to a friend, uh, who had spent a lot of time in China and he said that, like, the, the major difference that he saw between the U.S. and China, is that the government is able to hire super top performers,

but it's because they can force them to join. But this is because you're saying it's more of like a job market dynamic. I don't think, I don't know who's getting forced into taking these jobs. I think it's still like, you know, it's it's downstream of, look, youth unemployment was like 25% three or four years ago. And then the Chinese government stopped reporting it. So like, look, You know, people will take work where they can get it.

And I think the promise, like, also, there's data on, like, or the government reports, how many people take the civil service exam every year. That's been rising pretty consistently over time. So to see that now, like, bleed into police and the military is an interesting, I think, sign of the times. Because those are not high-paying careers. There's just ones that have more stability, right? Yeah, yeah.

Back to Leon Winfang, founder of Deep Seek. His leaked transcript, it felt like there were a lot of interesting thought-provoking ideas in there, some of which I agree with, but it also felt a little bit like the 2025 AI Lab Leader playbook that is now facing backlash, where he's talking about, you know, sort of sci-fi scenarios, jobs, and all these different mechanics that run some risk. do you think that has do you think he's aware of the backlash in the united states to that type of rhetoric or do you think that he thinks that china is somehow resilient to it well here's the interesting thing with young one fung he's kind of like demis and deep mind yeah deep mine never sold sure so um you know he is really rich he runs this like giant jane street yeah he like

quant hedge funds, which spits off money. He's able to basically fund this himself. He's told his investors, I'm not here to make a profit. I'm here to make AGI. And like, look, I'm going to have these weird ideas and try to just do cool science. And I'm going to make this bet, which is very different from the one that the Western Frencher Labs have made, which is that like I need to have a business to throw off cash in order to keep doing it.

And I think, like, you know, what was, what was the striking thing in there? He's like, look, we're not going to have perverse incentives because we're going to keep our head count really small. And we're going to keep doing this. We're going to do the best we can to, like, keep doing fundamental breakthrough science and hope things go well. So that more than his, you know, what's going to happen in 2050 things. I, was my takeaway is like he's the one player in this ecosystem who's, who's prioritizing keeping his sort of like independence and research direction and not sort of being tied to a product roadmap or to a broader uh AI uh you know a compute provider in china or like

an alibaba or a 10 cent but he just like wants to be weird and do his own thing and i think that's really cool that's interesting where do you think deep sleep will be getting chips in the next couple years is they just going to keep building on invidia um so Importantly, there is this ratio between the U.S. Nvidia, Hale Peno, whatever, broader, like TSM ecosystem and TSM Samsung Intel ecosystem and the Chinese ecosystem. And there is capacity like 15 to 1, 12 to 1. And that's something that you can project out pretty clearly, just kind of like doing a little,

doing some equations from like how much, how much cap-ex is being spent, how many, how much equipment is being acquired, like yield rates, what have you. So where is he getting the chips? As much Nvidia as he can get, probably. But the sort of larger takeaway with the Chinese and Western ecosystems is that the Western one is way better capitalized and has way more straightforward access to

chips, which is basically an order of magnitude better in over the next like at least five years so it's going to be rough sledding for them and look if you i don't know how much you guys time of you guys have spent with the chinese AI IPOs but they're making like 500 million dollars or like a billion dollars and it's cute but this is not three 30 this is not 30 trillion right uh or uh or even if or even 10 billion And the reason that's the case is because they're not on the frontier of the technology, so they can't charge a premium. And they're compute constrained. Now, look, we've got this interesting new model where Kimmy is trying to license its technology to be able to sort of leverage compute in the West to make money, like TBD on whether the Trump administration is going to be cool with that as a going concern going forward.

But if all the Chinese firms have is access to Chinese chips, it's going to be really difficult to make a lot of money and to keep paying for more chips in the way that the Western Labs have been able to really mobilize the entire global financial system. Yeah. You're talking about Moonshot, potentially going to Microsoft and Amazon and offering their models, which are open source, but served. And they would want a rev share based on whatever sells, right? Got it. Exactly. But, Jordi, you had a question. Is there any evidence of individuals in China that are outspoken saying that China is not doing enough to invest or be competitive in AI?

Like anyone that's saying, like, the government, like, if we don't have private or, you know, if we don't have companies that can that can operate like a Jensen, right? Just like sprinkling billions of dollars everywhere throughout the economy that we need the government. to actually, you know, participate in that way? No. I mean, I think the government already is. So you've started to see more and more state money coming into these companies' cap tables. Like, you know, if you're a CEO, it's a bit of a double-edged short, right? Where on the one hand, you just want to be able to run your business and not have this, like, guy from an SOE saying, like,

we think you should spend your time doing this instead of that. But, you know, subsidies are always nice. Like the Chinese government, maybe 15 plus years ago, woke up to this idea that it needed to invest really substantially in the semiconductor ecosystem. And then they've done that for better, for worse. We're starting to see real results come out of the likes of CXMT and Smek and Huawei, of course. Now, on the lab side, so like the, or like the demand. side for those chips. That's something which is only really started to happen over the past six

months or so. And look, the scale of it is going to be very different than the amount of money that Microsoft and Amazon, a Google, an Open AI, Anthropic can do to sort of like pre-commit to buy these chips going forward. So, I don't know, well, excited to continue following that story for you, Is there any evidence that there's been a sort of deflock movement in China? I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, you don't know about deflock? So on Instagram, on Instagram, there's videos that will have like 200,000 likes of somebody demonstrating the most efficient ways to take out. So quickly to level set, flock safety is an American startup that sells essentially CCTV cameras to police forces that then go into a database, get image.

recognized. And so a police officer can type in a license plate and see where that car has been. There's been a few instances of abuse where police officers have been checking on the movements of their ex-wives. Exactly. And so that's caused a lot of backlash. That kind of created the original media firestorm. But now it has really gained ground on social media. And as a result, there's protests and people actually going out into the real world and destroying the cameras with like buzz saws to to get them out of their communities because they really don't like them. I mean, I've, I've sort of like, um, emotionally surrendered to the Panopticon years ago. Very Chinese mindset.

You know, uh, it's like, you know, they're watching me. It's okay. What am I going to do about it? The, uh, Tyler Cowan has this take, right? Where you should be bullish on places that have a public safety problem today. because the cost of dealing with petty crime is just going to go down because there's exactly stuff like this. Sort of like New York in the 70s and 80s.

Like it became a fantastic real estate. We're going to have 10x police officers everywhere. And you don't even need to be good at being a police officer. You just have to like show up and say, hey, I got you. I caught you on camera like doing this bad thing. So speaking, I mean, coming back to cars at the beginning, like I don't think speeding is good. I would like people to be caught. when they speed.

So they stop speeding. Where's the boo? No, I think, I think that's generally. Keep it on the track. If your car is worth more than $150,000 and you're allowed to speed, I agree. For, you know,

your speeding pass. Ticket clinic. That's the country you want to live in, John, by all means. You know that that's actually what happens. People with really nice cars, they get specific lawyers that get them out of every ticket so that they never need to deal with them. And then they don't get caught speeding that off.

But if they got caught every single time. With speed cameras, is there something like a $1199 foundation for that where you get like a whole livery around your car that? Maybe a stable coin that you could stake and get a bunch of money flowing. The thing, do you, are you tracking anything? You're probably not, but I'm just curious. I've been getting Instagram ads for like consumer EV. V-Tol, just basically like flying drones that you can sit in as a human. They're selling them for like $100,000 now.

It's a jet ski for the skies. I can't tell if, I can't tell if they're- The algorithms got you guys bad. They saw that acquisition price. They're like, let's just send Jordy some toys. Toys, yeah. I mean, my boy's been buying toys. He's got so many surfboards.

I'm living out my- There was a question there? Sorry. The question is like, are flying cars going to like we just saw the road we just saw the humanoid robot games which everyone is sort of like you know laugh some people are laughing at because the robots run really fast and they explode and other people are like whoa uh that's actually like really impressive pace and these things seem pretty capable faster than usane bolt what's the

what's the market for the evi tools besides like going to the hamptons i mean you just Flying over traffic is like the only point, right? Yeah, but that is extremely significant. Like, it will. So, yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of, I mean, D.C. I, I, I, uh, last time I was in D.C., we had a two mile-ish drive and it was traffic. There was so much traffic.

It took like 40 minutes. I was like, you live like this? But anyways, I, I do think that. I've seen enough videos now that basically are showing that flying cars are here. They may not be safe enough yet. You think LeBron's going to take it to Philadelphia? Isn't he doing that?

I thought he was doing helicopter transport. Yeah, but why take an helicopter and you can take an EV toll? Yeah, I mean, the hot take on flying cars is that we've had them for a long time. They're just expensive. They're just called helicopters. Okay, so I just pull up this video right now. But the idea is democratizing the helicopter. You can just buy this for $120,000.

Yeah, I know. You can buy this. We made commercial air travel very safe. So why not? Here we go. You can buy this right now for $120,000. When are you guys going to live stream from an EV toll? Can we get our, can we get a show?

This is electric? Yes. Wow. How long can it go? Can it like go? But really fun. They're already using them for. agriculture.

Like spraying crops. Okay. Why do I need a person, though, in it? Yeah. Yeah, no, they're, there, some of them, you can, most of them, I think, can be remote. The only reason you need a person in there is if the person is moving, like,

traveling from one place to another. Yeah. And people pay a lot. Opportunity costs are high. And so if they can get, you know, it would be an hour drive, but it's 10 minutes in the EV tall. Like, that's a bullish thing. Last question. Tell me about the elite rocket force.

in China. They are seeking public tips on procurement violations. I don't even know what the rocket force is. So break it down. Tell me what's happening. Okay, so rocket force. This is actually a Soviet invention. So, you know, Air Force, Navy, Army, Marines.

The Soviets were like, okay, rockets, big deal. We definitely going to need to blow up. The cavalry. We're going to need them to, you know, blow up America. So we're going to have a rocket force. And then China made their own a few years ago.

You know, we came back with our space force. I think, I'm not sure which one's cooler to have a rocket force. But basically this has like been a debate for a while. Do you need your own, like the missiles that you shoot from the ground? Should they be their own force? Whatever. The Bloomberg four years ago, three, four years ago, comes out with a story saying that half of the rockets in China are not filled with fuel but are filled with water. Then you start to see a whole lot of purges.

and as you guys have been following closely, I'm sure. Wait, so they were larping rockets? They were absolutely larping rockets. You know, there's an entire, it's kind of two generations of a Chinese military leadership that has now been purged. And they're sort of like, like the nine person, you know, joint chiefs is now down to like a guy and a half. Yeah.

So we've been purging. Is that because of a very eye, purging? That's it. I mean, the biggest piece of the story is just that they had to go for public whistleblowers. Like that. Yeah, yeah. So, okay. So you can purge so easily behind the scenes, check the records, just go and look and see,

okay, there's water in this in this rocket instead of fuel. Like, it doesn't seem that hard. So, you know, we're like seven years into, we're like three, four years into this round of purge. And now we're opening up a tip line to the public saying, hey, you know, if you know. Anybody bragging at the club about stealing rocket fuel? call this number. Very, very rough. Well,

speaking about former spouses wanting their revenge. Like, you know, it's not just following the cars around. That's actually a good source of whistleblowers probably. That makes sense. That's a good one. Jordi, last question? No, no. I thought that they just wanted to put on the front like they had way more rockets

and they actually did when they were really just like, you know, metal with some water in it. Sure. I didn't realize that it was bad. Oh, so you think it was part of the plan, actually. Yeah, I thought that's why that's why I said large. Like live-action. Yeah. Live action role.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you see those military parades. They never open them up and show us what's inside. Who knows? Maybe it's all paper mache. Anyway, thanks so much. We're coming on the show, Jordan. Great to see you.

Great to see you. Go sign up. See you guys at the track. Or China talk. We'll see you there. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI.

Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI. and stops breaches. Our next guests are from Actonide. They're the first startup to produce HALU, the high enriched. Finally. Hi.

What does HALU stand for? I know it's enriched uranium, but break it down for us. Introduce yourselves. Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Hey, John. Hey, Jordy.

So nice to you to have us. Huge fans of the show. How do you tell you a little bit about HALU and what we're doing here, Dign. Yeah. So you hit the nail right on the head. We were indeed.

the first startup in history to enrich uranium and produce HALU. In terms of what HALU is, it's not something that you need to really worry too much about. It stands for high-assail-a-low enriched uranium. Now I'm worried about it. Now I'm worried about it. It's the next-gen fuel for next-gen reactors. And it's something that the primary energy says that you cannot get presently in the United States. There's no supply.

Yeah. Right now. It's mostly coming from like decommission nuclear like nuclear submarines or something like that. Like they sort of refine it down, like reuse what we have basically. You're exactly right. Or they get it from Russia. Yeah, Russia. That's something that we're aiming to change here in Dallas, Texas.

There's a huge feat by our team, small form. It's a thing that nation states have struggled with and failed at, and we're doing it here in Dallas, Texas. Yeah, so take us through the process. Is it big centrifuge? What's the equipment that's involved in the process? So we have a machine called the Calutron, which was originally invented by Nobel laureates for the Manhattan Project.

So they've already delivered for our country once before. but they were sort of decommissioned because they're not very energy efficient. Very large magnets. Now magnets don't consume power if they're superconducting, for instance. And so it's very rare in the engineering fields that you'll find the major problem can actually go to zero. So we stand on the shoulders of giants in that way. So you can use the same machine but just redesign a piece of it to be more efficient? Is that what's going on?

More or less. It's the exact same principle, though. And it's besides the centrifuge, the only thing that's been proven at scale. Cool. Take us through like the history. How did you get here? Why nuclear? What's the lineage of the company?

It's been a long time coming. It's been an interest of mine for a long time. When I first heard about the problem of how do you atomically separate things? I couldn't believe that it hadn't been solved. And initially I thought this would be an easy problem to work on. And so I've been humbled since then many times. As you can imagine. What's the phrase we don't do things because they're hard?

We do them because we thought. they would be easy. Yeah. I couldn't agree more with that. So time and time again, you go, okay, I finally understand it. And then no, right? So it's been a long time coming. You know, there's a lot of research that has to go into this.

This is not a very approachable field. A lot of things are classified and you have to derive it for yourself. There's been a lot of smart people who've had a lot of interesting ideas about this, from the centrifuge to laser, calutron, you name it. Yeah, where is the limit on classification? Because a lot of the, you mentioned like re-deriving it yourself. A lot of the AI models are able to re-derive cybersecurity exploits, which are now the talk of the town. But are AI models giving you refusals in your work?

Or are they being helpful because they know that the control point is actually separate? And it's not a risk to educate someone about how to build a nuclear product because at a certain point, they're going to have to go to reality and go and get a particular material that is controlled. It's such a fascinating question. I don't use a whole lot of AI. So I don't get a whole lot of refusals. I usually for finding vendors and suppliers. But, you know, AI probably wouldn't be super useful for a task like this because it touches on some pretty obscure areas of, like, you're building a particle accelerator. So sort of questions of something called more. I'd be curious to see how far it gets along with it. But I certainly don't think it presents a proliferation concern.

We're also pretty wary regarding kind of where sort of information within our business goes to. Sure. And so we have a lot of things that are still, frankly, analog or air gap regarding any sort of things that are proprietary or trade secret. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the same time, it's not like the company's nuclear launch codes and cybersecurity is more about intellectual property, correct? Yes. It's not still related. Right, right.

And we look forward to working with the appropriate regulators. is for us to scale up HALU production, you know, it's a smidge under highly enriched. And so you have to be in a category two facility. But the separation technology itself is, you know, 80 years old. And so there's definitely a lot of know-how. But the principles overt. What's the biz dev go-to-market side of the business? Are you already inking contracts with, I mean, there's so many new nuclear reactor

startups that would probably sign up to buy HALU if. if you were able to produce it a certain scale, what's the status there? Absolutely. So we actually are kind of agnostic with the materials that we make. Generally, we refine atoms. And some of the first refined atoms that we made were for the medical industry. They go for about $30,000 per gram, which is like a paperclip sort of material for you Patriots out there. And we delivered that to Oaklo Isotopes.

We've had a few commercial deliveries to them. And, you know, in terms of... In terms of the HALU side of things, we've been in stealth for quite some time. And so we kind of blew up Twitter with our announcement of coming out of stealth and some of the recent developments here. And we have a lot of those biz-debt talks ongoing this week and beyond to go ahead and ink some deals. Obviously there's a big sort of gap between doing it once and being able to scale it up

on both the technological and regulatory fronts. We look forward to working with the right partners and regulatory bodies to make sure that goes in a methodical and expedient fashion. You self-funded this company at some point. Can you tell us about the journey to set yourself up for there, what that was like, what the motivation was? Yeah, that's true. I did put in over a million dollars of my own money. You know, when Robert and I first met, I had a background in finance and software, and he really kind of gave me a gut punch because he told me that he was pretty upset with so many brilliant engineers.

go into finance and software. Hey, I turned a buck from it. And that they weren't doing hard engineering problems. So I asked him, well, what are you doing? And he said, I'm working on what I think is the hardest, you know, sort of unsolved problem in humanity. I was like, are right? Like, what's that about? And he told me he was doing sort of isotope separation. He showed me what he was working on. I got super infatuated the problem. I truly agree that this is indeed humanity's the largest unsolved problem. If you look at history, you got the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, the Silicon Age. We were promised the Atomic Age. And it's something that we deserve. We're not playing with a full deck of materials. And so I began investing

my own money and got to a spot where it was beyond R&D. We brought on a seed round. And, you know, here we are doing commercial deliveries and scaling into different markets. That's fantastic. Well, congratulations. Yeah, really impressive for coming on the show. Yeah, great to meet you guys. Come back on soon. Goodbye. Be safe. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business work for those codex helps me move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is Billy Thalimer returning to the show with Regent. Billy, how you doing? Welcome back.

What's up, guys? It's been too long. Doing well. Been too long. Great to see you. Give us, give us the latest news in Regent World. How are the sea gliders going? We are, we're cruising. We're gliding. We just wrapped up our two $140 million series B. So that's the big news lately. Give me a gum. Come on.

Quarterbells. I've been waiting on that. Quarter bell. Oh, so good. So, yeah, talk about what it takes to raise for this company. Are you, you're still pre-revenue, but you're not actually like the product. You can't just go as a consumer and test it out, but you have a massive backlog. What are investors looking for?

How are you telling the story? Yeah. We do have money coming in the door, importantly, right? So we have commercial customers. We have about $10 billion in the backlog there, but one of the unique things about Regents is we have firm orders, like actual orders, non-refundable deposits. Yeah. Customers are putting down. We have over $10 million in the bank now that are backing our backlog now, multiple years now of delivery from our manufacturing building.

So that's on the commercial side and on the defense side now, up to about $20 million in orders, majority. with the Marine Corps, but we have some really big announcements on the horizon here, so the defense business growing really fast. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, typically you'd assume like net 60, you know, payment terms or something, but you are able to get some of that money up front. That's good. What does the team look like?

Where have you, where's the company based and how is the actual operation growing? Yeah, we're based in Rhode Island. Rhode Island has really been put on the map lately. We're leading in maritime and defense. There's a bunch of other companies here, a bunch of startups, Anderol moved into town. Like you go out on Narragansett Bay and you're going to see all sorts of drone boats out there and subs and sea gliders too. So that's been pretty cool. We're up to about 120 people now at the company.

But obviously with the series B done now, we're going to start growing really fast. And the whole point for us is we have this quarter million square foot factory here. That's what we're going to be building our sea gliders, both our large viceroys, the small squires. So we've got to fill out the factory. So that's the next step for us. I feel like you're an interesting position because, I mean, we talked maybe years ago about the benefits of being all electric. That, yes, there's an environmental benefit, but for specific use cases, it might not be that big. But the serviceability might be an even bigger benefit.

Is that holding true? Because you're in this dynamic where the current administration is probably very receptive to doing business. with a young company, like you mentioned with the Marine Corps, but at the same time, they're not exactly the biggest fans of electric technology from what I've seen. So, you know, is there a discussion of other power trains or do you want to remain laser-focused? I remember talking to somebody who deployed small, like basically drone helicopters in the military and said that like gas engines work really well. they stay up much longer, the energy density is fine, the supply chain's there.

But how are you dealing with the tradeoffs of where the power train technology might go in the future? Yeah, we sort of always have the feeling that on the defense side of the business, and particularly in the markets we're going after, where we're talking about, like, moving across thousands of miles across the Indo-Pacific, right, hopping between these islands that we're going to need longer than the couple hundred mile range we get out of batteries, which is really good for commercial. Like, that's your regional range where you're sort of stuck between a car and an airplane. But on the military side, like, we need to go from Guam to the first island chain.

Like, we're going across the Pacific here. So on that side, definitely hybridizing about a year ago, or a little over a year ago, we announced Regent Defense. And part of that was really a focus on building out this hybrid. So we have sort of a conceptual design now. We've been working on the supply chain side. But we're definitely going to be introducing an engine, a fuel engine system that works with our electric propulsion system on the front end, extending our range out to about 1,600 statute miles. So we'll be able to do that. Well, yeah, I've seen this very unique hybrid.

I believe it's a Chinese car where it is primarily an electric vehicle, but then there is a two-cylinder gas engine that just charges the battery. Is that a relevant technology that we're going to see other places? Or was that sort of a unique anomaly of that particular Chinese EV company? Yeah, it sort of depends on the application for us. You know, we're a dual-use company, obviously. And I think to be successful in dual-use, and there are few companies that can really say this, is like as much consistency between the commercial and defense products as possible,

like as much shared bond, like basically the same skews. So our sea gliders are coming off the line here or will within the next year or so in Rhode Island. And in the commercial version, we're going to load it up with batteries and it will go 180 miles. on the defense version will put about 20% of the batteries in. So you still, those batteries are to help you take off and land. We still have that electric propulsion system, which is super quiet, super low maintenance, low thermal signature, all these great things. And then instead of the rest of the batteries, that's where we put in our engine and our fuel system. Yeah.

Tell me more about the commercial backlog. I mean, it seems huge. who's interested, where are the logical places to deploy these? Because I imagine that as you've actually built up that book of commercial business, there's been a lot of just assumption testing on the other side of the negotiation table. Maybe you come and say San Francisco to Marina del Rey. Maybe somebody else says, actually, it's going to work better here or there. So where are you seeing the future play out first?

Exactly. I mean, founding the company, we're coming up on six years in business now. You know, growing up going to school in the Boston area, it was like Boston and New York. Right. And it was like, L.A. to San Francisco. You know, we're raising money. We're in between them. Those are total pain points. So that was sort of the focus on the initial commercial side.

Sort of started, obviously, just based in the U.S. as an American company with the U.S. focus. And so that's evolved into Miami to Westpont. and the Bahamas is a likely U.S. launch market throughout New England, right, like Boston and Rhode Island and Connecticut down to New York, and certainly some West Coast routes and obviously Hawaii as well, Pacific Northwest, too. But what we found as we've grown is this is actually, like, truly a global technology. And the international order book and backlog is actually much larger than the domestic one. And very few people know this, but there are as many ferry passengers per year as airplane passengers, which is like wild as an American. to think that the coastal market is that big. For, you know, cargo, there's 90 plus percent of cargo that goes over the coastlines.

Almost half the world lives in coastal populations. It's just like how humanity settled the world. So globally, we're talking about places like the Mediterranean, Japan, throughout, you know, Pacific, right? Like, these are really big markets for us. So it's not just an island hopping machine. It's like anywhere there is coastline and humans live and trade on coastlines, that's our commercial market. Is there interest from the Middle East or are things like actually slowing down there because of the geopolitical conflict?

Because when I hear about new technology, maybe it's a little bit expensive to get up, but you need to do some retrofitting of some port or something. Like that feels like Dubai is going to sign up immediately. But what's it been like talking to folks? The Middle East has been a big part of our strategy for a long time, actually. So we spent a lot of time out there. We have a great relationship with the strategic development. fund in Abu Dhabi. So we actually plan to expand manufacturing. The series B, our first global manufacturing center here in Rhode Island, but subsequently, and based on the size of that

backlog, we're already planning international expansion. So we've set up a joint venture in Abu Dhabi where we're going to be scaling manufacturing from there. So the Gulf is going to be huge, not just from manufacturing, but also commercially, like Dubai, Abu Dhabi. That is a pain point route, too, crazy traffic on that route. Yeah, I was just thinking I was in, I went to Formula One in Abu Dhabi, but I was staying in Dubai and that drive, especially when you have these big sort of global events, is just brutal, right? Brutal.

Even the traffic getting out of Abu Dhabi and, I can totally imagine. Yeah, you have a 10 minute quick flight. Yeah. Question unrelated to your business, but what's happening on the. recreational aviation side. Are we going to see the sort of the model three of the skies, sort of an electric Cessna 172, something that is, you know, user-friendly. Like art boats, but for-

Yeah, something that's like, hey, I just want to go fly for an hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are certainly some attempts at electric airplanes and there are some electric trainers out there, but really the hard point of aircraft generally in like my background's aviation and I'm a pilot. My co-founder is a pilot. A lot of the teams are pilot. It's the training, you know, tons of time to go out, get your pilot's license, like learn how to fly, learn how to do the controls, learn how to navigate airspace, talk to air traffic controllers, et cetera. So like, that is the big time sync. And then there's also just the performance of like, I need enough

energy on board in these batteries. And we already talked about the range limitation of batteries. Like get up to altitude. And then as I'm flying to my airport, all aircraft need reserve. fuel. So if I'm flying in my airport, my airport's occupied or like something's wrong with it, I need enough fuel to fly and land somewhere else. So it's actually like all of, yeah, right? It's like, it's good. They're only Harrison Ford. And so like that was our perspective coming into this. My co-founder and I came from the aviation world and we were part of that like early wave of electrification and we were working, you know, with the EV tolls and everything. And we said, these are the challenges we need to solve. Electrification is is here in many ways. And by

building sea gliders, we solve those problems because we certify under Coast Guard jurisdiction as a vessel, not an aircraft, our digital flight controls, enable it. So all you need to do is drive a boat. When you're operating it, even when you're flying, the only controls are boat controls left and right, fast and slow. And so that's what's going to open it up to everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Have you seen the people in China selling quadcopters that humans can sit in that they'll just sell you for... I would never get on those.

Yeah, yeah, no, so that's what I'm saying. So I saw, I saw, I saw another video of these guys that bought a T-Moo drone and they were able to, you could sit in it, but they were flying it with the remote and then they crashed it. And so I just can't believe,

I can't believe that you can just order one of these right now. I was at an air show in the Middle East, and I was no kidding, standing next to that, Adam Goldstein at Archer, and we were watching this drone competition. And one of these drones falls out of the sky live at the show.

Fortunately, no one was on board. And we look at each other like, what is going on here? Like, A, this never flies in America. This would never pass any certification. But like crazy stuff like that going on is actually not good for the industry. Like aerospace is held to a higher standard. There's a reason why aerospace is known for its safety and commercial aviation is the safest way to travel. even with us in the maritime domain, we're taking a similarly safe approach because we're flying at high speeds with people on board.

So, like, that's our focus. And it's a harder bar to hit, obviously, as a startup, as a company, that's like part of the responsibility of building flying machines. But, you know, seeing these guys jumping in with, like, the swords swinging around and, like, some RC controller, like, I get a little worried. Yeah. Fortune favors the bold, though. Come on. You got to take some risk. You're an entrepreneur.

Hop on this thing. No, I think you're right to play it safe here. I completely agree. But thank you so much. Congratulations to the new round. Awesome progress. And we'll talk to you soon. Have a great one.

Thank you guys. We'll get you on a see you later soon. Goodbye. Can't wait. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Stop making excuses.

September is the month for you. Just do it. Up next, we've Aaron Cannon from outset. launching AI digital twins grounded in individual customers. Eric, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? I'm good. Third time on.

I'm feeling special. I love it. Repeat. Catch us up to speed. What have we missed? What's the latest and greatest in your world? Things are great, yeah. So we're an AI research platform.

You guys probably remember. Since we last chatted, I think tripled revenue, tripled the team's eyes, and now launched a very cool. Thank you. I was hoping to get at least a gong or the... Yeah, and now we just launched digital twins. So we built... We built a whole simulations lab and have now built...

Yeah, I'll tell you all about it. Yeah. And so you came out of YC. You were sick. You're always getting told, talk to your customers, talk to your customers. You're absolutely sick of that. You don't want to ever have to do a customer call again, and so you built digital twins. Is that right?

It's exactly right, yes. I started my career as a researcher and I was like, you know, I don't want to do that anymore. Okay. But in all seriousness. Sell me a digital twin because I've run companies and e-commerce companies and it's useful to have a profile of certain customer cohorts and certain customers. But that aggregation takes a lot of the work out of it and I feel like there's a lot of platforms that do that. It's sort of nice to talk to individual customers, but you might get a weirdo who's actually not very indicative. Sometimes the individual customers can give you some unique insight that everyone else is feeling.

But walk me through the benefits of having these digital twins that are grounded in individual customers. So here's the like to take a step back. The whole point of research is to try to predict the future. You're trying to make some decision for your business, right? And you're looking backwards at the data. And the idea is that you can now not only look backwards, but you could look forwards. You can actually start simulating. Like, if I do this new marketing campaign, how would this customer set start reacting?

What are the things they would say? And we're very good at research. That's what we're doing. That's what we've been doing. That's what we built our business around. But now what we can do is take that research and build out the simulation platform so that you can say, okay, I can actually see into the future of how this group would react to some very big business decision. And so we train them by training digital twins on individuals. So it's like a one-to-one. Sure.

You can go in, talk to a digital twin and you know that's based on John. And that's got all of John's experience and like all this data about John. and it can talk on behalf of you, right? And so that's like the mechanism that makes it super, super useful and also, like, trustworthy. Yeah. What incentive do you have to give people to do a long-form AI moderated interview? If I'm buying a pair of shoes, I don't know if I want to sit down for an hour with an AI to talk about the shoes and how they fit. I think the last run we did was these were actually like 75 minutes the last one.

and I think we paid them $200. Okay. Yeah, that's a reasonable. To be clear, it's worth more than the shoes, right? Sure, sure. And if you do, is that one customer per one company? So, I mean, your clients include Microsoft, Uber, Google, CoinBiss, you got Murderer's Row here. Are you saying, like, we are going to interview this one person about this one Excel feature or this one Excel product?

Or are you saying, like, we're going to interview you about how you use technology, some of this. this might apply to Microsoft, some of this might apply to Google. That's right. So we do, we developed our own grounding interview. So it's not just about their use of Excel. The grounding interview, it develops what we call persona core. It's like trying to get like who you are. What are your values? What do you care about? Yeah, sure, sure. Right? And so we do that as the core. And then we later on other sets of data. So maybe Microsoft has, you know, operational data we can later on to make it get much more powerful. They know all my favorite formulas. Exactly. Exactly. So the idea is that like,

we have, we have extracted, you know, as much of the person as we can. Sure. And then what we do is we go back to that person and refresh that data regularly. Yeah, yeah. So we'll even have them grade their own twin's answers. Like, how do our twin do? And they can tell you. And now we have a reinforcement.

Yes, they're kind of RL. And so it's exactly, exactly. And so that's what makes these really useful. And then we also put confidence scores. So you'd be like, obviously not all of our probabilistic, you know, output here is going to be the same. So we can tell you which ones you should like really trust at which ones need a lot more human data to kind of bring to it.

Where are you seeing the most poll from the market? Like what kind of businesses, theoretically every business should care about trying to predict the future and forecast how different customer segments, but I'm sure some care more than others. The biggest poll right now is that companies have really hard to reach audiences, right? And so these are like, maybe they're, you know, maybe they're CRM buyers or they're, you know, kind of somewhat obscure part of the population. And so the incremental value there's massive because they can't actually go out and do constant

research with that group. So they have like very few signals today. So the incremental value is big enough that they're like adopting, I think, earlier. And first, while there's still, you know, more kind of questions in the market. But but I think that's, I think we'll continue to see a bunch of demand from like these specialized audiences that companies are sharing. Then what's the opposite? it. What's a company

that's like drowning in customer feedback data? Is that like some consumer? Well, I'll give you a kind of, there's basically certain business decisions and like strategy decisions that you would make that you don't need to forecast, right? Like a business doesn't need to say like, oh, what if we made customer support wait times

shorter, right? Like no one is sitting there being like, I wish when I called my internet service provider that I wish I took an hour instead of 30 minutes, right? Or maybe a good example. And this is not a real one yet in terms of simulation. So I'll share it as an example. But like Nestle, there's a lot of consumer research.

Consumers are reasonably easy to go out and talk to, right? It's reasonably cheap to get more feedback. But if you were actually trying to do, if you're at Nestling, you're trying to do research on, like, retailers, right? And how they, what they think about your brand. Right? That's actually a much harder group to go find and do research with. You're not drowning in feedback from your retailers. Sure.

Right. And that makes sense. And is that the pitch when you sign Nestle? because I imagine that, like, AI is very impressive, but I don't know that I would trust an AI to tell me which milk chocolate tastes the best because, like, the taste data just isn't in the model at all yet. And for a lot of consumer research on Nestle products, I would want to watch someone taste the chocolate and tell me what they thought of it. Yeah, yeah. Well, so when we initially pitched Nestle, it's actually about our, you know, AI research platform, which AI is just doing the interviewing. He's asking the questions.

You still got a real human data at the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And that's our core thing, and that's what we've had for the last couple of years. But simulations is an extension to that, and that's where we start talking. It's the kind of the best kind of two elements of the pitch. Number one is hard to reach audiences, right? You're not able to get to them.

We'll build those your twins of them. You can talk to them anytime at, you know, unlimited capacity. Yeah. Number two is we say that, like, anybody in your company can access them. It's like if your finance person's working on new pricing model, you don't want to, like, give your finance person, like, the ability to go research with real consumers necessarily. But now they can actually like, you know, test ideas, test do pricing and see how

things would adapt, you know, and stimulate them. Yeah, makes sense. Last question for me is, I mean, it feels like the digital twin launch is like an expansion of the product portfolio. And I'm interested in where else the product expansion can go. I know that there are companies that they get a lot of feedback, but they struggle to bridge the gap between the feedback that they're getting and then actual ideas to go and implement. And I'm wondering if you're going to wind up being more prescriptive in the results.

Hey, okay, we did all this research and you really should change the color from red to green. Right, right, right. So research is this thing where like humans go and decide to go run research. Yeah. But we're building towards, and that's our original product, right? We're building towards it's something where the model can go do research for you before you've even ask the question, right? And so it is constantly trying to figure out the answers to the things that you don't even know matter yet, right? It's like, hey, there's, you know, your revenue's

down in that, in that sector, you don't even know that yet. We're going to send agents to go talk to all the people in that part of the economy and, like, go figure out what's going on, talk to some simulations if we already have the built, and then go take action. And that, that action is where I think, where we can ultimately have more impact than just collecting and synthesizing feedback. Makes sense. We should be able to, like, send specks to cognition and, like, let them go build it, right? Yeah, no, totally. And that's, like, really something that's happening.

Yeah, I love it. Well, congratulations on the launch, and thank you so much for coming on the show. Very cool. For third time. We'll talk to you, Aaron. Have a good one. Great stuff. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Thank you, Tyler, for kicking off some plopping while we're missing. A couple folks here. Jordan, I'm not going to let it down. Up next, we have Steven from Lamba, coming back on the show. Third, fourth, fifth time.

Who knows? Stephen, good to see you. How you doing? It's so good to see you. Great to see you. Been too long. Okay. So we were talking to Jordan Schneider about this China-backed AI bot farm.

He was kind of brushing it off, and I can see both sides of the discussion. You know, there's been just a couple reports, 200 accounts here, a few hundred accounts here. He was saying that China doesn't have a long history with interference politically. What are you seeing? What are you identifying just in the broader debate? So I think that it's really important to not get lost in sort of, is this a Chinese bot farm? And just focus on bad facts and just bad information. Sure. Because, you know, that's the fundamental thing, right?

you know, misinformation is like most readily solved by just disproving sort of, you know, and just showing what's real and what's not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the big number that I saw most recently was polling on data centers terrible broadly. But after telling somebody that you're polling that you're polling that data centers recycle water, much like a car wash recycles water. They added that phrase.

Then the net approval score improved by like 30%. So people with that extra context change their whole opinion in just a few seconds. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, 100%. So, for example, the vast majority of new AI factories that are being built are completely recycling the water and using a dry cooler. It's a closed loop water system where the water never even. leaves the facility at all.

So that's the vast majority of a lot of these new data center builds. And so that's just completely different from the old technology, which is being described, which is a heavier water consumption, which is evaporative cooling. And so that's like a fact that most people should sort of, you know, kind of look into. The other one is... Well, the problem is people that aren't really... interested in tech, but maybe are afraid of AI. They're not

proactively sitting there being like, I got to go, I got a free five minutes here. I'm going to go. I'm going to want to go get the facts right. I'm going to do some diligent research online. Really read it on. And there's no, and and yeah,

just looking on, looking on YouTube. Yeah. And just AI negativity or content that is negative towards AI gets 100x the reach, right? There's always been a negativity bias on YouTube.

I mean, you could say, you know, like, here's the history of this company, or you could be like the shocking downfall of this company, and the shocking downfall will always get more. Yeah, Taylor Lorenz says making anti-AI content on YouTube is not only profitable because you'll get a zillion views on any anti-AI slot, but also because there's a litany of these sort of AI safety orgs that will quietly pay you massive amounts of money for unconstitutional. I didn't realize that. I love that Taylor

friends really now back in the fray. And I'm team America. I'm team reindustrialize, right? I've got the, I love it, the sweater. America and reindustrialized sweater for it. And so I think the interesting facts about it are this.

One, from the jobs perspective. Yeah, look, this is not going to be the same level of job production as an automotive plant or steel mill. But these are still met new jobs. And so, you know, for example, we've got a data center out in Kansas City and 300 folks worked on it during the construction period and 50 full-time jobs. Many of these making over $100,000 a year. What are you?

I would ask to somebody who's against it, what are you going to say when you sit down at a dinner table with these 50 families of this data center is supporting and say, well, no, I don't think you should have that job because I don't want. an AI data center. When they're the same people who are using the data center to go on post on YouTube or to use the AI services. Yeah. Where do you sit on local versus national regulation of data centers? Like Bernie Sanders obviously has gotten a lot of attention for discussing the topic at the federal level.

But it feels like something that, you know, just as like an American, it feels much more comfortable if like, yeah, there's a, there's a area in West Texas that loves this stuff and they're going to be into it. And then there's going to be some communities that aren't and this should be handled by the local mayor and the board at the town level. And the voters should have a voice, but it should be contained to the community that's relevant. Yeah. So first of all, absolutely, look, that's how our system works. Let's just be clear here. Right. You know, this is not, there's not some sort of, you know, national eminent domain that's being pulled like we have with the construction of railways and other

public goods. This is decision making that is happening on the very, very local level. And some places are not going to want it. And some places are going to welcome business. And some places are not going to welcome business. Some places are going to welcome data centers and others are not going to welcome data centers. I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing. I think that should members of the community have a voice?

Yes. Should property owners have a voice? Yes, absolutely. Right. You know, somebody who's going to have some any type of externality that's adjacent to the property, they should have a voice. And guess what? They do. They've got a ton of voice as a property holder. And, and, and I think that, you know, there will be reputation for communities that want to welcome these amazing investments into their into their community. So, for example, going back to that Kansas City data center, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a 10,000 GP Data Center. And we are going to over the next five years, at the very least, be paying $47 million over five years in property taxes.

Yeah. Yeah. This is a huge cash infusion to a community that we're working with. For sure. And so I think that there's going to be the communities which are really excited about it. You know, communities who have already pirated it like Loudoun County and Virginia. Yep. And other companies, excuse me, other communities and other counties that want to see.

the lower rates and lower tax rates as well as lower utility rates. Because as evidenced by a bunch of research, communities that welcome data centers and industrial development and new power plants have lower rates. Yep. Of course. How are you thinking about the international puzzle? Because I know data center construction takes years to plan out. It's slow moving.

But in general, when the international, environment in American business gets harsher, historically business leaders have offshored almost immediately. And I could imagine a lot of data center developers just saying, oh, you don't want it here, build it in Mexico. It would be in the West. It would be a national tragedy. For in the just in the very moment where this country needs to rebuild our grid.

And it's not just data centers. everybody wants to drive EVs everybody is starting to want to you know we're bringing on more solar than we have in the history of the country 80% of new megawatts coming online into the American grid are solar or storage

it's it's it's it's it's it's it would be an absolute national tragedy for this to go out to go international for to go to you know whether it's whether it's you know, overseas in outside of North America, into South America, into Asia Pacific. I want those jobs here in the United States. I want those investments you made here in the United States.

AI is a national strategic asset, in my opinion. Compute is a national strategic asset. And then most importantly, the way that AI is driving the development of the grid, and I keep trying to talk about this, the way it's driving the development of the grid is going to pave the way for more industrial onshoreing to come back to the United States so that we can bring back whether it's different, you know, electric arc furnace mills for aluminum and steel, micro mills, turbine manufacturing, other types of high intensity, by turbine manufacture, I mean specifically like in-canel smel-smelting or, you know,

specialty metal smelting where there's a high energy input. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you go back to the, it wasn't it Colossus was built in an old washing machine manufacturing facility that was out of business. If you all of a sudden have a lot more energy, a lot of more industrial capacity, maybe the washing machine manufacturer comes back. And maybe that's good. And there's going to be a lot more jobs caused by that. And it's a huge virtuous cycle. And so I think it would be a real tragedy to have anything that was going to end up pushing folks.

And I really, I really support building this stuff here in the U.S. Outside of the economic impacts, do you think that there's a national security value in having a data center in America or compute in America for like control reasons? Like AI is a powerful tool. If it's in another country and that country says, well, actually we're taking this and we're now under control of this. What is your model for how valuable that is from a national security perspective? So, you know, there's there's the soft one and then there's the hard one. The soft one is sort of how important is it to have values, models that have values that align with American values and how patriotic is your model? I want patriotic models.

And the second one is the hard one, which is what happens when they cut it off? Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. And we all experienced this when Fable went away for a little bit. Oh, yeah. Do you remember that? And I remember I called some people up. I said, wow, this is what it feels like to have sort of the equivalent of electricity cut off.

When you had the intelligence cut off from Vable Model. And I was vibe coding something at the time. I said, wow, this is what it feels like. I had to go back to Opus. And it felt like a huge step back. And I thought to myself immediately, this is as much of a strategic asset as our grid is. Yeah. That's funny.

Jordy, anything else here? I want to hear just more about the building of business. What should people expect from the debate or just forward progress for the rest of the year on this issue? Like, should we just expect it just keeps getting decided on a local level? Is there, is there? It's going national. It's going national. There's elections right now.

And so I think that that's like, the noise. the mob gets turned up a lot towards elections, then it'll kind of go back down. Yeah, it seems very unfortunate that politicians are just realizing on both sides are just realizing that if I want votes, I have to at least say that I'm against this thing. No, no, but this is the interesting thing. There's a multiple races right now. For example, one in Kansas where there, where the steam fitters unions and the different workers unions, are actually aligning on the pro data center side of things because there's so many jobs created,

and there's so many big deals that are created from these data centers that a lot of the labor unions are actually on the side of pro data center now. Oh, weird. So look at, look this up, look up, there's a Kansas city. I think it's a gubernatorial candidate who's a Kansas governor candidate. And there's the steam fitters, union is basically on the side of pro data center bill. And so actually, I think that it's maybe a little bit all backwards sometimes from what

people have been positioning because, you know, you've been hearing the media, oh, this is a, this is a bipartisan anti-data center movement. No, no, no, no. I think there's a lot of folks on both sides of it who, you know, are being supportive. I think that you're going to see the volume not turned down after elections. And then finally, I think it's healthy debate and communities should have. a decision about who they want to work with, and that data center providers should be doing their best to not be influencing rates any direction other than bringing rates down for everybody

and being a good member of the community. Pay your taxes, participate in building an ecosystem of businesses around you, and continue to make great high paying jobs. What do you think the tech community, data center community needs to do. do to get ahead of what I think is coming after the water debate clears because the water debate, of course, comes from some, you know, mediocre miscalculations. There's miscalculations and also just misunderstanding of what is the total water consumption of things. Exactly. So I think a lot of people in tech sort of brush off the water, the water discussion is debunked. And I think they're fair to do that. But on energy, on natural gas, production.

there is some real data about where this all goes. If we continue to 3X compute for the next couple of years and we're powering that by natural gas, you could see headlines that track data center to emissions. This is how many plane flights a data center uses and it could become the next thing. So first of all, one, the debate is not something that needs to be one with the Silicon Valley, Twitterati, Exotti. whatever you want to call, the people who stood their keyboards. The debate needs to be won by the people who are in the communities affected by this.

Sure. And so that's the first one. The second one is more than ever, like I said, 80% in 2026 is solar and storage. These are renewable things. That's actually where our grid is becoming more and more as we build this out. And so I think that there needs to be a lot more deregulation with regards to expediting interconnects. You know, reconsidering, just making it so that we can actually go back to building and getting connected into the grid. So that way, a lot of this behind the meter stuff, which is less efficient, right?

You know, when you have a behind the meter, it's simple cycle as opposed to combined cycle natural gas. And it's less efficient. So we should really get to the point where we're encouraging grid interconnectivity and expediting that process. That's, I think, the number one point I would say from a policy perspective. but you know look at the end of the day every American consumes about 600,000 gallons a year of indirect water consumption so next time you see a big number divide by 600,000 gallons per year of indirect consumption that every one of us makes and then that will put things into perspective I think that's a good

starting point yeah yeah I'm wondering yeah where where that goes because it does feel like it's worthwhile I agree with you on like you don't need to win the the the tech insider crowd first, but it does feel like the worst case scenario would be another error to the tune of two orders of magnitude around energy consumption or natural gas production. Because if the viral clip is every data center burns as much fuel as every car has produced since humanity starts, and that's off by three orders of magnitude or something, then then you're fighting on your back foot as opposed to starting with okay they're already pretty efficient here's where we are regulating here's and and the new york times is already dug into it here's

the environmental considerations here's what we abide by and then and then yeah there'll be a discussion about energy use but at least you can be grounded in the facts from the start i i totally agree with you but i think that the the other aspect of it is just not set with oh well emissions are bad Sure. The most important thing is this. As a country, we have a graph that looks like this in terms of energy production. China's got a graph that looks like this for their energy production. And guess what?

All their energy is also solar now. The new stuff coming online, 80% plus of China's energy is solar and storage. And so I think we need to get, you know, the emissions will come down naturally as the grid transforms to more of a renewable and storage grid. People don't really understand how much best and battery. electric storage has been a huge godsend to the grid. Sure. And there's, I've already been seen, I've driven through parts of the country where I've seen anti-bass, you know, anti-battery electric storage things.

And I think that there's concerns and these are rightful concerns that like, okay, they might catch fire and, you know, cause of fire or emit, you know, chemicals when they're on fire. But this is just like sort of, you know, any, any, any, Any industrial asset that's generating electricity has like some worst case scenario. Yeah, it's the same thing with your gas stove. If you leave it on, your house might blow up. It's the same with me. It's probably the same critiques if you were to go back to automotives, you know, cars in general.

You know, when, when they were first coming around. But the point is that like that, I think that that actually getting that graph back to where America is competitive in terms of generating energy, energy, whether it's from renewables or otherwise, it's. going to inherently be 80% mostly renewables anyways from the trajectory that we're going in, I think. Yeah. I mean, that's certainly like the most optimistic future is a lot of renewables. Very, very cool. I have an idea, but I'm going to DM it to you. Okay. So I don't want it to be, I don't want to be, uh, I don't want to. Thank you guys so much for having me on. Thanks for hopping on. Yeah, great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Talk. Bye. Bye. Uh, it's simply too good. Okay. We are going to come back and hit a lot more time.

tomorrow. Yeah. I can't wait. We'll see tomorrow. Thank you for watching the show. Great to be back. We missed you guys. We missed everyone here.

Love seeing the whole cast characters in the chat. We love you all. We'll see it. Bobby Cosmic in there. We got Sean F over in the LinkedIn chat. We got Cooper as well. Acquired taste, the LinkedIn live stream. I like that.

Man of taste. Anyway, we will see you tomorrow. We have a very special show for you. And many more. throughout the fall. It's been an honor and a privilege. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. Cheers.