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>> You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, March 9th. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, Temple of Technology, Fortress of Finance. Ramp.com. Time is play safe, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh we have a fantastic show. We were able to get Alex Epstein to come down to the Ultradome in person on short notice to get us up to speed on what's happening in the oil markets. Of course, oil is all it's uh it's gushing all over the timeline, all over the Financial Times, all over the Wall Street Journal.
Uh as part of the >> and Alex had a feeling that oil would be important in the future when he wrote the book Fossil Future.
>> Yes. Which we have right here uh which if you haven't given it a read, go pick a copy up uh and stay tuned for him joining us at 11:00 today. Let's pull up the Linear lineup and tell you who we have coming on the show today. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Now >> we have Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross uh over on Eon Systems. He went very viral over the weekend for connecting a biologically derived fruit fly connectome >> to a MuJoCo physics simulated body. Uh and uh we're going to be talking all about simulating fruit flies.
>> Yes. >> And what will come after that. And we're also going over Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Julian, >> which we're going to call you. >> Coco. Okay. Uh Disney might like a word. They have IP in that space in particular, but we'll see. >> But do they have it in the enterprise? >> I don't think so. Um uh Julian's joining from Sequoia Capital. Owen McCabe from from Intercom, our partner, is joining because they just raised a massive round 200.
>> And Michelle Volz is launching PAX VC. She's uh she left Andreessen Horowitz, I think about a year ago. and has been uh is now launching a new early stage fund. Uh anyway, let's go through the timeline and see how people are processing the news of the Strait of Hormuz and the oil price spikes. Uh we >> Fox News this morning, they were saying >> just basically their advice to the to the captains was to man up >> and just send it. >> Send it. Send it. That seems crazy. >> Effectively their advice I'll read, please stay safe. Um >> I'll read the actual quote. Uh, a guy Brian said, "If you want to diminish the Iranian threat, if you want to make sure this ends with complete capitulation, show some guts and go through that strait."
>> That seems very, very risky right now. Stay safe out there if you are on a shipping vessel. Um, do whatever is responsible. There are some crazy twists happening. Uh, so apparently ships in the Gulf are declaring themselves as Chinese vessels to dodge attack. This is from the financial the Financial Times. At least 10 vessels have changed transponder messages in an apparent attempt to avoid becoming targets. Uh, a clutch of vessels trapped in the Gulf under enemy fire are adopting a tried and tested ruse to avoid attacks. They're changing flags. Uh, using transponders to declare themselves to be Chinese. Um there's there's always been a very odd uh like just like tug of war between how ships identify themselves because often for tax reasons they're bought in one country operated by individuals from another company but they fly a different flag to be able to go from one place to another and it's all based on like the port systems. I don't fully understand it but it is very interesting. Uh, at least 10 ships over the past week have altered their destination signal to read Chinese owner, all Chinese crew, or Chinese crew on board. About 1,000 ships are currently shut inside the Gulf and its immediate surroundings with a cumulative value of $25 billion.
>> And I I don't know if you've seen some of the the maps that show the strait where it looks like nothing is actually moving through. I think in actuality a number of the ships are actually turning off their transponders so you can't see the movement uh because they're basically moving a little bit going through the strait. >> Mhm. >> And then uh turning back on again.
Well, there are there are plenty of uh outlets that are covering the uh the Iran conflict in detail. Um we of course will be focused on the the business and technology impacts. I wrote about uh what oil uh what what oil prices mean for the AI buildout and data centers. It's just sort of interesting to dig into the deeper supply chain of artificial intelligence. Um, but there are some posts that we should go through around the oil story. So, crude oil is five standard deviations above its 50-day moving average. Statistically speaking, this occurs every 9,500 years. So, the last time would have been about 6,000 years before Moses parted the Red Sea. Imagine what that did to shipping in the area. Fanciful. Um, what else is going on? Uh, Kobe letter has been posting a lot about oil prices. US oil prices are now expected to rise above $100 a barrel this month. That already happened. Uh, this was posted on March 6th. Uh, with markets pricing a 66% chance that it happens. The last time oil prices were above 100 was July of 2022.
>> Let's pull up this clip from Land Man. >> I haven't seen Land Man. Have you watched it? Is it good? Let's uh >> Well, >> you want oil to live above 60, but below 90. >> Mhm. >> And don't get me wrong, we're still printing money at 90. But gas gets up over 350 a gallon, it starts to pinch. It hits 100, every product in America has to readjust its price. $78 a barrel, that's about perfect. You know, brings enough profit to keep exploring, but it don't sting as much at the pump. Unless, of course, you're in California. I mean, they tax the [ __ ] out of it out there. It could be $45 a barrel and it's still $4 a pump. I don't know how those son [ __ ] do it out there.
>> It's movie day. >> 2020 TVPN again. >> A barrel of oil is worthless. This place became a ghost town. >> And nobody's immune. >> Kids have to quit college. >> Trucks get sold or repoed. >> Uh we can pause it now. We got we got the gist of it.
>> Yeah. Uh well, this is the largest. How how old were you when you discovered that gas is really expensive in California? Not just because there's a lot of demand for it.
>> I mean, I discovered it when I was filling up in Montana and it was like $2 a gallon and it's like $5 a gallon here. That was pretty wild. Um the the the first major gas price shock that I noticed was Hurricane Katrina in my life. I think it was in high school because I was too young to >> I was talking about I was talking about just the fact realizing that it's so expensive because of the taxes that California puts on it.
>> Yeah. Because it's nice to drive around here. Put the top down. The weather's good. So they're like, "Yeah, you're going to pay you're going to pay more for the joys of driving an a a an internal combustion engine car." No. Uh the price in California is is aggressive. I don't know the structure of the prices though. Is it percentage based or fixed? because that affects how much the price will move based on oil price shocks. So because if the price per barrel doubles but the but the tax is flat, you don't feel it as much here as you do other places. So I don't know. Anyway, >> I'm pulling it up but you can run through
the largest supply shock by a factor of four. So the Hormuz blockade, which is current, uh 20 million barrels were lost in supply. The Iranian revolution in 1978 was 5.6 million. The Yom Kippur war embargo in 73 was 4.4. The Iraq Kuwait war was 4.3. In 1990, the Iran Iraq war in 1980 was 4.0. And the Ukraine Russia invasion in 2022, which is the last time that oil spiked over $100 a barrel was 1.3. So, an absolutely huge supply shock and um I'm sure um it will have a lot of implications all over the economy. Uh with triple-digit prices, here's what's going to happen now, says Policy Tensor. Markets will scream when they open tomorrow. VIX will surge to levels beyond what we saw in April. The sell-off will continue for some time as intermed as intermediaries shed risk. And the markets are red. They have been screaming today. Uh the VIX futures curve already has inverted bid up by dealers looking for insurance. This predicts a massive sell-off. The pressure on this captured White House now uh the the pressure on this captured White House now begins in earnest. That's sort of oddly written. Anyone can tell them that if this persists for very long, it will destroy the Trump presidency and gut the GOP for a generation. And the controlling factor here, as I have told you over and over again, is that the United States does not have the military means to reopen Hormuz. Uh there's no military solution in sight. This means that not only does Iran have the strategic upper hand now, it means that Iran enjoys unam the unambiguous strategic advantage. Uh all they need to do is keep the thing closed until he capitulates. I put my neck out far to call this advance. And uh someone told him yesterday I was in the minority, perhaps even a minority of one. No longer. I was correct. Just calling a shot. Uh the blob heads and scribes were incorrect in their assessment of the strategic situation and now markets will price to reflect reality.
And we were uh we briefly touched on Scott Sumner's blog post on Substack at the end of uh Thursday's show, maybe Friday's show. We didn't get a chance to read it. I actually read through it uh earlier today and it's pretty interesting. It it basically makes the case you know it has a very uh controversial title says freak out and and and the and the thought is that like he's doom posting maybe it's about AI maybe it's about uh this particular conflict he is more just reflecting on this dynamic between when the market freaks out it acts as a moderating effect to policy and so uh he gives a number of examples around like tariffs >> or more specifically the admin >> yeah yeah like like the uh tariffs caused this massive circuit breaker 5% sell-off in the market and then that was internalized and and very quickly adjusted and there were a whole bunch of different carveouts to sort of like create soft landings. And so he's actually and what what he's getting at is that after the fact a lot of people say look you didn't need to freak out because the taco happened. Trump always chickens out. The the the actual proposed policy effect didn't go into didn't go into effect. And his point is that uh well it's precisely because people freaked out that it didn't go into effect. So freaking out is good in Scott Sumner's mind at least. Uh anyway, I love this. Uh
>> Yeah, we have a solution. >> We have a solution. If if you're feeling the pain at the pump, pivot and get a horse at oil at 110. The urban horse is the only option. Pulling up to the gas station on a horse is is truly elite. I I do want to know what's the TCO on a horse with the food and the stables versus you know just keeping a what is that a Ford Taurus in your I don't know that's something else uh uh you know in your garage. The horse really mogs at the gas at the gas station in particular right because it's just making everyone feel so stupid.
>> Yeah, we got to go back. One horsepower is all you need. Um, uh, Nick Carter says, "Seeing a lot of non-process trusting panickins on the TL" and and then he followed up by saying, "That's what I thought because the oil prices spiked up and then they fell down and we did not get $120 uh a barrel oil. We got exactly 100, which was still >> not like it's way way way too early to celebrate or anything."
>> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Uh uh there's an interesting uh uh chart here, a really shocking chart from Oliver Grobe. Unreal numbers about Germany's uh nuclear power generation. So if you scroll down, look at this curve. This is truly the uh the the bell curve meme or something like that. JP Morgan estimates that had Germany not phased out nuclear power, the country would have generated 50% less electricity from fossil fuels and 84% less electricity from natural gas in 2024. Electricity prices in Germany would have been around 25% lower and the country would have imported half as much electricity and just complete rise and fall of nuclear power generation in Germany. One of the craziest graphs. You don't see graphs like that very often in new technologies. Typically you see S-curves or you see exponentials. No one considers the the models get better and then they get dumber. That's certainly the funniest outcome. Yeah.
>> Um very very rough. Uh Goldman Sachs sent a note to investors saying if oil prices increase by $10 and remain elevated for three months, US year-over-year headline CPI inflation would likely rise from 2.4% in January to 3% in May. Those are small numbers, but we're looking at a oil price increase of maybe $30, $40 over uh the the baseline, uh potentially higher. We don't know where oil is going to land. Um and so you have this weird tug of war right now with the Fed where uh if if oil prices go up, inflation goes up, the Fed has a mandate to curb inflation, that means higher interest rates. At a time when the labor market is shedding jobs, you would expect a Fed rate cut or or a lot of people are are optimistic about a rate cut. Trump certainly wants rate cuts. Um but if inflation is climbing, there's really no solution other than keeping rates high or or even raising them further. So a real jam in terms of federal man monetary policy, Fed monetary policy. Uh here's Art Cashin at the opening bell. This is a historical video. When was this? This was a long time ago. Let's play this clip.
>> This may be it. Uh, first let me start out. Murator Salo Thomas essay. And you know that's the gladiator salute. We who are about to die salute you. So it's going to be a tough morning. This may be it. >> We are about to die. >> Salute you. >> Insane. insane aura for, you know, CNBC really doesn't get enough credit for being so innovative in terms of broadcasting and entertainment. Uh, really some of the some of the greatest clips. >> I love one of the one of the top comments. This is an old clip. >> Yeah, obviously. >> Brother, >> 480p. It's probably from the '90s. Um, uh, so Zero Hedge says, uh, you know, with oil at 111, total panic. and mimetic cisphus shares a clip says half of this site for the last week has sounded like this. Let's >> producers are telling me there is breaking news. The Asian financial markets have just opened to a huge selloff and we're going to switch to that story right now. Good. I'm glad I'm here. Your thoughts, Tracy Jordan, on how this is going to impact Wall Street. Larry, I'm not an expert, but I do have a strong opinion. New York as we know it will no longer exist tomorrow. producers are telling me there is.
>> Is that from 30 Rock? That's so good. >> That's so funny. Oil came way came way in from its overnight highs, says Joe Weisenthal. The quote post is >> Chris Paul hits a huge three to cut down the lead to 42. >> Absolutely absolutely brutal. So, uh, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern, small and mediumsized businesses. Stop making fun of >> We're somewhat of a modern business. Small and modern. >> Small and modern. It's modern. Let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, >> uh, we got to give you a shout out to George Kurtz for, uh, the Mercedes performance yesterday. >> Oh, yeah. One, two. One, two. >> Really good. George Kurtz on. >> Would you look at that? Take the stake in the team. Suddenly they're at the top. >> Yeah, he's on to something.
Um, well, uh, the, uh, my essay this morning was titled, "Why is no one talking about oil?" Uh, of course, everyone is talking about oil. Uh, oil discourse gushed onto the timeline this weekend. uh crude prices spiked to nearly $120 a barrel as a broadening war in Iran threatens both transportation routes and production. The geopolitical and economic analyses are flowing. But what does this mean for AGI timelines? And a lot of people in in the AI world are sort of tuning all of this out because they see recursive self-improvement, AGI, ASI, the buildout as more important. And I just wanted to sort of reality check the AI supply chain to understand how does oil actually affect data center construction, AI production, token pricing, like is there any effect? My conclusion was that it's it's very moderate, but there are some interesting effects in the financial markets that are probably the bigger takeaway, but it's still interesting to hear about like yes, oil actually does is used in the production of AI at least a little bit. Um so uh power has been at the forefront of the AI push back like everyone's worried about these local energy prices these electricity prices increasing near the data centers but and it's been it's become like a political issue but pain at the pump might become a bigger story as gasoline prices spike and that has been pain at the pump oh it's been the most tangible sign of inflation it moves so quickly you know one one jitter in the economy
>> It's a huge component. You know, people on the coast, people in tech don't have a good sense for this, right? If gas gas, for a lot of people, gas could quadruple and it wouldn't they wouldn't really notice it.
>> But if you actually look into the average American how gasoline fits into their budget, it's a meaningful component of their monthly budget. So, they feel it super intensely. Variable cost. There are there are so many different ways where a lot of Americans go on driving vacations that obviously is directly impacted by gas prices. And then also just psychologically there's there's something about filling up at the gas tank where you see the number ticking up and you're doing that on a every week basis or so that it's just so visceral. It's this thing that you have to stop and then go experience and watch the money flow out of your account like in real time. It's very it's very visual. It's very interactive.
>> Yeah. I remember I remember I I I must have been probably 18 at this point where I would just go and I would like for a long time I just put I'd like you know prepay for a certain amount I let's see how much I got >> and I felt like really like I felt like the king of the castle once I just put my card down and let it run up and see how far it go.
>> Uh no no totally. So uh pain of the pump's been like a big uh broad economic issue. so visceral like the actual phrase has a lot of power in politics and in uh like attack ads like your gas prices are going up under this person that's why you got to vote for me this is this is common um but in AI circles the discussion's been much more focused on RSI now is the new acronym that everyone's focusing on not AGI AGI is here we know artificial general intelligence we passed the Turing test the models can do things generally intelligently uh but can they recursively self-improve. Are they RSI? Are we in RSI now? Is it a coming? Is this going to be a fast takeoff? Is this going to be a slow takeoff? Well, something's taken off. Um Dylan Patel said, "Being in SF is like being in Wuhan right before the pandemic. Something is happening. It's going to hit everywhere, but so few people know it." So, he's sort of echoing that something big is happening mentality. This idea of like recursive self-improvement, being AGI pilled. Um, lot of a lot of smart people agree there's definitely something happening. There's still this question of like what is sticky? What where will diffusion take longer? What will be sort of AGI resistant or ASI resistant for a variety of reasons even if they're completely uh irrational and you could get a better thing from a computer, but people like the human version or whatever. The irony is that that uh George Hotz hitting the timeline to raise money makes me more bullish on acceleration. Yeah.
>> Right. Because if not, he's obviously not a historically been a huge fan of venture venture capital. >> Well, he's not raising from traditional VCs. He said he he specifically said he wants to raise from like uh like basically like friends and family type of round. He does want 20 million. We have this in the timeline somewhere. Where is this post from George? I'll pull it up if you want. Tiny Corp. He said that he's raising $20 million to buy a building. He's he's going to buy a building. Here it is. If so, he said, this is from Tiny Corp. Uh the makers of Tinygrad and the Tiny Box. If Tiny Corp was raising $20 million at $200 million valuation, who'd be interested? Business model is basically this. Buy an 11.5 million building with 5 megawatts of power. Link in our Discord. Uh, wait for AMD to launch the RDNA 5 96 gigabyte cards mid 2027. Pre-order 3,000 cards. Hopefully, we can negotiate for $2500 each. Build 500 $20,000 tiny boxes with six of the cards in in each box. Run all the Chinese LLMs. Make $600,000 per month revenue selling tokens on OpenRouter. Market depth is there. This is 1% of OpenRouter. uh improvements to tiny yield revenue improvements. Due to how power is priced in Oregon, it's only like $50,000 for the electric bill before the four megawatts before uh they price for peak, not usage. We get like 3 cent kilowatt hour power, three cents per kilowatt hour. We can also make $100,000 per month leasing collocation space to comma building and cards paid off in three years max. in investment made back low risk of being undercut since we're using consumer GPUs and running the cheapest colo you can believe if someone chill wants in I do it I'm not going to fake hype I'm not going to hype fake tech but demand for tokens is going to skyrocket look at the open claw install numbers with crazy good optimizations we could potentially get 3x more from the machines and we have electricity three for 3x more machines 5.4 for revenue per month, then continue to scale from there, custom chips, etc. He's starting a Neocloud. Are you starting a Yeah, he's going to be serving tokens. Um, so that was that was, you know, incredibly bullish. You know, demand is definitely there. Uh, at the same time, he he sort of took the other side of like this is different, this is crazy. He says there's no AGI, there's no magic threshold. You guys see auto research change the random seed from 42 to 137 and OMG it's AGI it's over. Yet you critique the junior engineer for the same stuff. The cost of development is falling. Overpaid engineering struggles to compete. That's the story. And he says humanity has been recursively self-improving for centuries. So everything new is old.
>> I don't know. I obviously have a huge amount of respect for George, but at the same time >> saying there is no artificial general intelligence when you're also arguing that engineers are struggling to compete >> with new technology that is replacing them. >> This how is this not >> artificial intelligence competing with >> Yeah. So, so I think he is he is agreeing with that. But it's that it's that uh there is an immense amount of of desire for this binary moment. This is the singular. This is API. This is ASI. The RSI is here. This thing is happening right now and there's before and after and everything has changed. And and and he just doesn't see it that way. I think I think he sees it much more like the internet, the mobile phone, like other technologies that have been rolled out, electricity. Yes, there is like a before and after, but you can only really, you know, define the period by maybe a decade and you need a few decades to understand that moment. It's very hard to go back and you know there is like the iPhone moment and there is like you know the first launch of I don't know AOL like I don't even know I don't even know what the iPhone moment of the internet was just because it was sort of a slow roll out. Anyway, uh live GPU clusters. Um where's Jordi going? Oh, you're moving the goalpost. Okay, Jordi's moving the goalpost. Where are you moving the goalpost to? >> Just over here. >> Okay, but why is there a reason? >> I mean, after you move, George is moving the goal. >> Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. He's moving the goalposts.
Uh, so I said, uh, you know, it's clear that the AI industry, uh, continues to grow and continues to need more and more power and compute, as we've seen from George H. Hotz's new project. Uh, that means large data center campuses. Uh but if they're not in uh random office buildings that George is picking up for on the cheap, uh they're probably going to be built with construction equipment. So what does this mean? They they don't just drop from the heavens. Uh they require building which requires oil, but how much oil and is oil a serious and is a serious oil shock enough to impact the AI buildout in a meaningful way? Uh spoiler alert, basically no. But um live GPU clusters in the United States do not use much oil directly. uh only 0.6% of US electricity in 2024 came from petroleum. We're much much more dependent on natural gas. Something like 42% of US electricity is natural gas. And so uh America ramped up natural gas production significantly over the past two decades. A lot of that was in reaction to the the wars in the Middle East. Hey, we need to be less dependent on uh on foreign oil. We need to be energy independent. And so you have the fracking boom, the natural gas boom, and that's where a lot of our fossil fuels come from today. I believe um data centers only consume a single-digit percent of US electricity. So you're looking at 6% of a few percent like the actual impact. So the short-term impact of high oil prices should be very limited on AI. Um building out new capacity is much
>> That said, it's worth noting. I think I think it's something like Qatar produces something like 20% of the world's liquefied natural gas, right? So, >> but not for us. >> Yeah. Not not for us. So, we're in a good spot, but this is going to impact >> the data center buildouts or or active data centers across the rest of the world if this continues.
>> Yeah. So, um when you're talking about building new capacity, building new data centers, oil is a little bit more involved. So, uh, diesel powers, trucks, trains, boats, barges, generators, pumps, compressors, excavators, and tons more construction equipment. Petroleum is also broadly used for plastics, polyurethane, and solvents that all work their way into the data center supply chain. Um, the biggest problem is delaying already tight schedules because of narrowly available components going out of stock. So the price of oil goes up. There's one marginal factory that can't produce one ingredient that goes into the rack and and that slows things down. You you have to wait a week while you find another supplier. That that stuff can add up to just a little bit of a delay. Uh this happened during COVID and the AI industry was already experiencing something similar with transformers. And so you don't want products getting stuck in transit or going out of stock. Um, but the bigger problem and the one that people should be talking about and I think you were debating with Dan Primack at Axios about this is macroeconomics. So higher prices, higher oil prices lead to higher inflation. If the Fed has to raise rates to control inflation, capital formation for mega projects gets a lot harder. So JL has this estimate, the next 100 gigawatts of data center capacity could require about $870 billion of new debt financing. And so using this rough number, every extra 50 basis points of borrowing cost on 870 billion is 4.35 billion in annual interest expense. And so that's a I don't know if that's a huge squeeze on cash flow, but it's certainly a squeeze on cash flow. Uh if you're a hyperscaler and you're going gigalong AI capex now and you're like, "Yeah, we're going to do 200 billion this year. We're going to do 500 billion next year or whatever across a couple companies." um you start looking at interest expense bills that are already huge, but then they're going to go up by five billion or up by a full more a full extra billion just with a 50% bas 50 basis point increase half a percent. So half a percent uh change in the Fed funds rate can echo through even a quarter percent could probably could probably be amplified into you know a multi-billion dollar uh like cost line on your on your balance sheet or on your income statement um as you're servicing that debt. Overall higher oil prices do make the AI roll out harder but not really for existing AI capacity. I wouldn't expect token pricing to change based on the price of oil. Um, but there is this more there's this bigger question of macroeconomic resilience during a time where our largest tech companies are digging through the couch cushions to find every penny to win the AI future. Uh, Middle Eastern investors pulling back, I agree with you. I do think that this is a significant risk. Uh, because if they pull back on big big investments makes these mega rounds more difficult. Retail investors could fly to oil stocks or defense stocks if they think that this is like going to be a thing for months and months and months. um it could all flip if there's a quick resolution though, which is what I'm hoping for. Uh but if things continue, the AI industry uh walks an even tighter tight rope. So
>> Yeah, I mean the the big question right now is the hundreds of billions of dollars of of sovereign AI projects in the Middle East, right? I think a lot of those people are going to be like, do we want to send you know billions of dollars of of GPUs >> over there? And then also the money coming here is another thing where you might want to spend it elsewhere.
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Have you been noticing that it's been hotter in Los Angeles? I have >> downtown Los Angeles is forecasted to approach 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday and Friday in March >> which is why >> not good >> we're going to do the weather segment >> new segment for you today we're doing >> the weather on TVPN we have our very own Ben >> we have Ben >> Hello guys how are you >> we're doing great tell us about the weather >> what's happening
>> Well I want to start off by saying as you can see the weather today for the low low of today is going to be 75 degrees Fahrenheit up there high of 100° F down there. But there's something I actually wanted to point out that I saw and I thought that was quite interesting. >> As you can see up here, there's a localized low pressure area up there and a localized high pressure area right down there. If you can see that right there, >> the issue with that's not normally an issue and not a cause for concern and it's not very common for this time of the year. However, today later in the afternoon, these two areas are going to collide and they're going to hit each other >> really. >> And what that's going to cause is a barometric pressure inversion. Okay, >> it might sound a little bit scary, but I guarantee there's no cause for concern. All that means is that hot air rushing in from the west is going to collide with that cold air rushing in from the east, and it's going to cause a bunch of turbulence in the sky, moving all the air waves around and oscillations in the sky. However, I want to add one more point. A byproduct of this effect is that all that humidity that dropped after that hot air moved to the bottom is going to raise up because the water cycle, you know, evaporation and stuff, it's going to raise up into the sky into those clouds. It's going to cause big clouds in the sky and eventually all that water is going to fall down onto the ground. We're going to have big rain later in the afternoon.
>> Wait, it's actually going to rain in LA. >> Yeah, I it might sound crazy, but I just want to for all you guys at home, I definitely try to step outside with a jacket today. Maybe a hoodie just in case the rain comes. Don't try to be a big shot. >> I'm I'm fact-checking you right now. Uh, and the weather app says it's going to be sunny all week. Is this just complete fake news? >> My team Those are the numbers my team gave me. I don't >> This is complete fake news. No, no, no. >> This is the fakest news I've ever >> heard. All that the transatlantic >> current John I'm I don't trust your app. I trust the weather. >> Apple says it's not going to rain the entire month. >> Zero transant. Did you look at the transatlantic current? >> No. The transatlantic >> precipitation zero in today. Zero inches on Wednesday. John, you're really going to you're really going to trust you're really going to trust an application >> that was probably vibe coded yesterday over Ben >> who's doing the weather. >> How did he get here? What happened here? >> Yeah, I got >> No, if you look right there, you can see a localized high pressure area. That's a localized >> This is an overeager weatherman who's just looking for drama in the most boring weather market in America, which is Los Angeles. I think I think this is the most important story. >> Look at the world. >> This is ridiculous. >> You guys can look at the jet streams. They're coming in from the west. >> I don't want to hear any more mumbo jumbo about jet streams. Get out of here. You're done. >> Great work, Ben. >> Thank you, Ben.
The fake news weather will return. Maybe never. Who knows? Let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multiream, go to restream.com. And let me also tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro with a more capable baseline. And it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single future, or bringing creative projects to >> This is the future of the weather. You have a weatherman who gets into a live altercation with one of the other hosts >> who's just constantly fact-checking. >> It's on site next time, Ben. It's on site. If you pull up with some fake news on TVPN's weather report, it's on site. >> Ben, you crushed it. >> Good job.
So, it is it's not Adam Smith's birthday. It's the 25th anniversary of the publication 250th sorry 250th anniversary of the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Tyler, you have a copy. >> I I have two of our copies here. I didn't bring So, yeah, usually I have them with me, but I didn't bring mine to work because we have a we have a few here. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously. Uh for those who don't know, uh give us the pitch for Wealth of Nations. Why should people read Wealth of Nations in 2026? >> Yeah. I mean this is kind of the OG uh you know economics book right >> was it it was so based like put it into like AI terms is this like situational awareness type of >> this is like attention is all you need >> it was like the ChatGPT moment for capitalism >> basically yes but I I would like to uh you know I have a few quotes I would like to read >> okay >> uh let me open >> let's see it's a big book it's like 800 pages and it's really really dry I mean it reads like it was written 250 years ago. >> Okay. So, this is I I think this is kind of one one of my favorite quotes. Yeah. Kind of the you know seminal. >> Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. >> Mhm. >> He generally indeed neither intends to promote public interest nor knows how much he he is promoting it. >> Yes. >> He intends only his own gain. >> Yes. And he is in this as in many other cases led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. >> Yeah. Rational economic actors, homo economicus thinking of the the the the value for society is created by rational self-interest. Sort of the spin on like greed is good. It was like he was like an OG of that of that thesis. The greed maxer. Uh yeah, productive labor, efficient markets, uh free markets, don't hold gold, don't control trade. An important read in 2026, somewhat heretical. There are many people that disregard that book. Maybe they should not. Maybe they should give it a crack.
>> I think it's evergreen. I think it's evergreen. I mean, there was that debate over like Tyler Cowen over the weekend and somebody was taking shots at uh Stubborn Attachments for being like not like not advancing the the discipline of economics. And my push back to that was that I actually think it is incredibly it's just a fun read. It's like really well written and it's very entertaining and it's very thoughtful. But it's particularly interesting to hear someone sort of just rehash the tenants of liberal democratic capitalism in 2020. I think you read it in 2023 2022 something like that. But like like there there there are a lot of voices out there who are anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and Tyler Cowen is just retreating to like a time-tested, time-honored uh economic philosophy that is deliberately not revolutionary. And I thought that it was a great book for that reason. And that's why I recommend uh Stubborn Attachments to so many people and so widely. Um, but uh if you want to crack open the real the real the real hard stuff, pick up a copy of The Wealth of Nations. Why is one of those copies so much smaller? Is the font size just smaller? >> Uh, yeah, it's super small. It's also two columns. >> Oh, two columns. Wow. Yeah. If you can
Get through that, you're truly, you're truly elite in the global economy. What does the timeline have to say about the masterwork that is turning 250? It's now needed more than ever, says the Washington Post. On March 9th, 1776, four months before the American colonies broke with Britain over the issue of taxation, a little-known Scottish thinker published a long, dense book with an unpromising title. Shots fired. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 250 years later, Adam Smith is by any objective measure easily the most widely cited and widely quoted economist who ever lived. Astonishingly, his work still frames the central questions we face, not just about free markets, trade, and capitalism, but about the nature of human society itself and even what it is to be human at all. Smith was born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland.
Educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford, he initially made his name not as an economist but as a moral philosopher. His first published book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, offered a radical theory of how we form moral judgments. Radical because it derived the creation of moral values not from scripture or divine grace, but from human sympathy and mutual regard. The Wealth of Nations, as his second major work came to be known, was an extension of that project. The book is not, as sometimes believed, a hymn to greed, a paean to market fundamentalism, or red-in-the-tooth claw capitalism. It was an attempt to understand how a commercial society could generate prosperity without collapsing into corruption. This 250th anniversary is not a moment for hagiography. It is an opportunity to recover a way of thinking that is directly relevant, indeed urgent, to the economic, social and political challenges we face today. Begin with trade. In his own time, Smith's great target was mercantilism, or what he called the mercantile system. The idea that wealth consists of hoarded bullion and that trade is a zero-sum contest. Governments granted monopolies, imposed tariffs, and manipulated commerce in the purported pursuit of national strength. Producers were widely protected, consumers often ignored altogether. Against this, Smith...
These days, we should have Tyler just do a speed reading of the Wealth of Nations live on the show, as long as...
Speedrun. Yeah, Wealth of Nations speedrun, any% glitchless. You need to do glitchless though.
Glitch for sure. A glitchless run is the only way we can do it. No glitching. No AI summaries. I think that would take you...
Probably five days. It's so dense.
Have you seen how fast you can rip a Rubik's cube? This edition is 480 pages around.
Oh, yeah. I guess you don't have to read all the footnotes and stuff. You can kind of skip through it, but it is a thick book. But the way it's written is just really not fun to read. It reads like it's 250 years old. It's not like a page turner.
Well, we need to talk about the wealth...
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We need to talk about the wealth of Sundar Pichai.
New pay deal worth up to 692 million. Is this 10 times what Tim Cook's making? No, it must be over time, right?
I mean, Cook's making around 70 a year.
So, if he works for 10 years, he makes what Sundar makes in three.
There's going to be a conversation.
It is. I mean, but this is what we've been...
We've been advocating for this, so this is good. Yeah. No, no, we're in support.
Google has increased Sundar's potential pay to 692 million over the next three years. You know that Tim Cook dropped this in the Apple board members group chat as soon as it hit. He was just like, 'Dude, this is a cool article. You should read this.'
Drops it in. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
The bulk of his package comes in performance units with a target value of 126 million split evenly into two tranches. The PSUs are valued by the parent company, blah blah blah. It could pay out as much as twice the target, a quarter billion, if it outperforms significantly, or nothing if it lags behind.
Pichai will receive Waymo stock with a target value of 130 million and 45 million in Wing Aviation. That's their...
Platform. Again, both can pay out up to 200% of the target.
You got a lot of incentive pay. Like if he delivers and the company does well, he should be richly rewarded. Barron's was writing about the death of the Mag 7. Mag 7's over. Up and down Wall Street, the Mag Seven era ends. Barron's is calling it. They said stick a fork in it. Turn out the lights. Hasta la vista. Say it any way you'd like. The simple truth is the Mag Seven trade is over. Fini. I love Barron's writing. Dead. The collective stock market outperformance of those seven tech icons, Alphabet, Amazon.com, Apple, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Tesla, is now a thing of the past. The group may still do okay and some of the individual stocks may even kill it, but the slam dunk, set it and forget it, run circles around the market era of the Mag 7 is gone with the wind. Recall that BofA Securities analyst Michael Hartnett coined the term Mag 7 in 2023, pretty recently, referring to the 1970s John Sturges western gunslinger flick, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai. Have you seen Seven Samurai?
Have you seen The Magnificent Seven?
No, the movie. The movie. The western.
Production team. Has anyone seen either of those movies?
I think we watched them in school.
Seven Samurai. You're saying you didn't watch them, you studied them.
I haven't seen them in a while.
Which ones have you seen, Tyler?
Seven Samurai. It's a great one. It's a very good movie.
Anyway, Barron's is bearish on the Mag Seven, but...
It does sound like cope. I think the Mag 7 will do.
It's like the largest and most profitable companies in history that stand to benefit.
Yeah. The actual argument was the growth to value narrative, the loss of cash flow as they increasingly invest in capex, that the financials will look very different. There'll be margin compression, that type of thing. It's not an unreasonable take, but it is just funny the way it's written.
Anyway, Sundar Pichai took over as CEO in August of 2015. He's going on 11 years in the seat. Google's market cap has increased almost sevenfold, from half a trillion to 3.6 trillion, briefly topping 4 trillion in January. This surge has made the Indian-born 53-year-old former McKinsey consultant a billionaire. He joined in 2004 and made his name developing the Chrome browser and leading the Android division. He had been criticized for being too slow to adopt AI at the search giant, allowing OpenAI to release the first hit product, ChatGPT, in late 2022, but has since bounced back, releasing cutting-edge AI models and integrating the technology into its dominant search engine. Yes, he's done very, very well on that front. Pichai has also navigated a duo of antitrust cases brought against Google's search and app store businesses, avoiding the worst-case scenario of forced breakup. A third lawsuit is pending against the advertising network. Tyler, do you think that DeepMind counts as RSI capable at this point? Recursive self-improvement. So there was a take on the timeline where basically someone was making the argument that xAI is cooked because while Anthropic is using Claude to build Claude and OpenAI is using Codex to build Codex, so both of those leading private AI labs are recursively self-improving, xAI was using Claude Code to build Grok, and so they don't have the same flywheel of the tools that build the tools that build the tools.
I think they have access to Claude Code, but then they still have access to Codex.
Okay. So you can... it's kind of like, do you count that as RSI because it's not like really internal?
But is Gemini... that's the question?
I'm sure people at Gemini are using Gemini. I mean, there is a Gemini CLI. People don't talk about it as much. I mean, the model is very good, right?
It would be interesting. I feel like we don't get as many little data points from the Gemini and DeepMind team because it's a public company and they need to, you know, maybe break out financials at some point.
I think like vague posting is probably, you know, more heavily looked at.
Exactly. Exactly. Because it's totally possible that they're doing the same thing. I mean, Demis has been extremely, just very clear about the path this goes, and he's very AGI-pilled. He understands the exponentials and whatnot. So he's certainly messaged it at a high level without actually saying, you know, definitively yes, like we are at a point where we're not writing any code by hand, that type of phrasing that you see in the RSI crowd.
Anyway, Pichai last got a stock award in December of 2022 worth 218 million, which was structured in the same way. His earnings are topped up by his personal security costs, which rose to 8.3 million in 2024. Earlier in the week, he sold 32,500 Class C shares at an average price of $300, worth roughly 10 million. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates that he has sold about 650 million in stock since becoming CEO. They still own, along with his wife, he owns 1.67 million shares of Google worth half a billion at the latest stock price. And Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page still control the company through their ownership of super-voting Class B stock, which gives them 56% of decision-making power. Interesting. I think you got to give Miami...
He sold 650 million of stock.
No, no, no. He sold that, but he's...
Oh, and he only owns half a billion. So yeah, he's sold more than that.
Say hopefully he put it all into Shiba, but he's getting topped up and he's diamond handing.
I know. I'm just saying. I'm just saying looking at the stock chart since 2015 when he became CEO, would have done pretty well just to not do anything and trust his own process.
Hey, hey, hey, maybe he has an amazing car collection or something. You know, there's a lot of...
Rotate into metal. You can't drive a Google Class A share.
You can't sleep on a bed of Class C shares, Jordi. You got to get liquid. Um, no. You got to give Miami Tech its due because everyone's saying, 'Oh, Miami Tech, they don't have any startups. There's no funding there. Miami Tech isn't panning out.' Well, Google now counts as a Miami Tech company because the Google founders bought houses there. You also got to count Meta as a Miami Tech company because Mark Zuckerberg has a house there. So you put Meta and Google, that's like 6 trillion dollars in market cap for tech companies. I count it. I count it. Anyway, moving on...
Owner of Four Loko is exploring a sale of a storied alcohol brand, sources say.
Wow. Let's dig into this, but first let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending, now with AI. And let me also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So...
The parent company of Four Loko, the canned alcoholic beverage that became a college campus sensation in the late 2000s before being reformulated under regulatory pressure...
Is exploring... I cannot believe they nerfed Four Loko.
Like you can just imagine the trajectory of the United States if it hadn't been nerfed.
Yes. It was so bad. It was so...
I thought people were having like heart attacks.
Yes. It was terrible. So Four Loko was...
A 24-ounce can, so twice the size of a normal alcoholic beverage.
Trey, the birthday boy, says it was amazing.
It was amazing. Okay. Now we have Buzzballs. That's true.
So Four Loko, the original formulation was twice as big as a normal can of Bud Light or Miller Lite or Coors Light, your normal beer, something that you would grab. So it was two drinks that way, and then instead of it being 3.2% alcohol or 4.5% alcohol, it was like 10% alcohol. It was the strength of like wine almost. And so a single Four Loko was like four or five beers in one can. And then they also added like 200 milligrams of caffeine. So you would become incredibly intoxicated and inebriated, but then also incredibly stimulated from all the caffeine. And that spelled doom for many people. People would be very high-functioning but completely inebriated and discombobulated. And so they would, you know, get into all sorts of trouble, whether it was behind a motor vehicle or...
It was the discombobulator. It was also wildly illegal from an FDA perspective. You can't mix alcohol and caffeine in a single product. That's just a rule that they chose not to follow, and they figured out how to make it. And then the FDA eventually gave them a warning letter, and they pulled the caffeine out, and that of course killed the viral sensation that was Four Loko. But apparently the company continued to sell products that were compliant with the current FDA regulation.
Yes, the nerfed Four Loko continued to sell. They're looking to and potentially will capture somewhere around 400 million on the sale. The brand value. So people, it's hilarious that they're working with JP Morgan on this. That's wild. So Fusion Products is the owner of the brand. They're working with JP Morgan on the sale process. The potential sale underscores how ready-to-drink beverages have emerged as a growth category in an otherwise sluggish alcohol market. US beer, wine, and spirit sales declined in 2025. We've talked to a number of guests about the declining alcohol sales as folks move over to more functional beverages.
Here's what the CMO had to say: For over a decade, our sales have been leading the flavored malted beverage market by embracing bold innovation, unconventional marketing, and a risk-taking attitude that delivers results year after year.
I guess they kept building. They also own...
The parent company also owns Mama's Pirate Water...
Boss Tequila and Just Earthquake.
Earthquake seems like something you definitely want...
From the makers of Four Loko, Earthquake.
Pirate Water is a wild name for a brand too. I mean, it's a distinctive can. It looks remarkable. It jumps off the shelves. When the Four Loko nerf went into effect and they pulled them from the shelves, because before they reformulated without the caffeine, they had to pull them from the shelves entirely, they were a hot commodity and folks would go around stockpiling them before they were banned. And they were one of the most guarded resources on all of college campuses.
Earthquake is just a can that's just 10% alcohol.
Never quake. Anyway, in 2010, the FDA sent warning letters to caffeinated alcohol beverage makers, including Four Loko, saying that the caffeine in their products constituted an unsafe food additive. So the FDA has specific categories for regulation around what is an alcoholic beverage, what is a caffeinated beverage, and never the two shall mix. So they don't let you put these two things together. Of course, vodka Red Bull was the precursor to this, where folks would order a Red Bull and then they would put vodka in it, I think, at a bar, which is made at the time of sale. And so that was legal, I believe. And this might be fake news, but I remember hearing a story that at one point Red Bull was sued because a gentleman had purchased a series of vodka Red Bulls, become incredibly inebriated, gotten behind the wheel of a car, gotten into some sort of accident, and wound up in front of a judge. And the argument was that he wanted Red Bull to be held liable for his actions while inebriated behind the motor vehicle. And his argument was that it was only because of the product Red Bull had been mixed with the vodka that he made the decision that he was alert enough, stimulated enough from the caffeine to get behind the car wheel in the first place. And this might be apocryphal, but the story goes that Red Bull made the argument that the caffeine actually made him more capable to drive, not less capable to drive, and actually increased the safety of the driver and the vehicle, and so they were held not responsible. But I don't know, that's just like an old wives' tale in CPG. I don't know if it's true. Anyway, let's move on to Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. And let me also tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.
So, we're all preparing for the singularity. What is this? Doing dishes. Just like, oh, if you're doing dishes, you're not worried about Dylan Patel's viral post saying that being in SF is like being in Wuhan right before the pandemic. Something is happening. It's going to hit everywhere, but so few people know it. And that is the question of are we in a software-only singularity where the dishwasher is life as normal. And every time I go to the COVID analogy, I start a clock because I remember tracking COVID in January, and I remember the viral post biology posted in February going viral, and then in March the NBA shut down, and in April everyone was locked down. And so every time I see one of these, it's like COVID. I'm like, 'Okay, let's see what it's like in eight weeks.' Like, eight weeks is not that long. In eight weeks, if I go outside and things look radically different and you talk to random people and it's wildly different, then we're like, 'Okay, yes, that analogy was correct.' But if it's more like in eight weeks we're like, 'Oh, yeah, the technology is getting more exciting and tech companies are changing and the market's moving, but the dishwasher is unaffected. The pizza place on the corner is unaffected.' That's always how I... I just think people underrate how crazy a global plague was. Like it's literally like a once-in-a-100, the most insane thing ever. It's the craziest change to literally everything, from the sports that you watch. You couldn't go to the movie theater. You couldn't go to dinner. Like everything was changed for like a full year. It was like complete upheaval in our society. It might happen, but eight weeks... eight weeks is a little fast for me.
And if you live in LA, you'll probably still be able to go to the beach, I think. So...
But maybe not. Maybe everything's...
I did have a funny moment yesterday. I was telling you, but I'll share it again. I was talking with my car detailer, who's become a dear friend, and he was telling me that the people in my area cancel their appointments at a much higher rate than the people in the rest of LA. And he was talking about running analytics on iMessage. And I was like, 'Oh, how do you do that?' And he's like, he's fully running OpenClaw. So he's now using OpenClaw to run his car detailing business. He's like, 'Yeah, just always running in the background.' To him, he was like, it's some combination of having like an EA or a COO. It's like helping me manage the calendar, helping with comms, helping me make smarter decisions on routing and scheduling and all these things.
So, when you book a detailing, meaning that this gentleman is coming to your house and cleaning your car...
You send an iMessage to him. Correct. And that is what is so interesting about OpenClaw, is that there were probably a thousand companies that were like, 'We're vertical SaaS for auto detailing. You got to do everything over email.' And they just got eaten alive because people use iMessage, and iMessage has been this closed ecosystem that private companies could never access before. But it makes so much sense for him to say, 'Hey, run through all my iMessages.' And if I'm talking to my friends about the F1 race, just discard that. But if I'm talking to a client about potentially booking a detailing, put that in a spreadsheet, organize that, and then run some analytics and tell me what the patterns are. And that's just something that should have been SaaS for a decade, but Apple has a walled garden that has now been smashed down by OpenClaw. And I think it's really cool. And I think that's what we're seeing the first use cases for OpenClaw. It's like things that could not happen for business reasons, for logical reasons, sometimes for legal reasons. If you're talking about downloading illegal films, like the Napster analogy. But a lot of times it's just Apple didn't want to do a deal to integrate iMessage into Salesforce.
The way to break down the walled garden was just to have a digital guy...
Basically. Yeah. Who just combs over all this.
So, is that a new type of software that should have existed that now is unlocked? Is it disruptive? Like it's not like he stopped using his previous CRM, probably didn't have anything. So now he has something.
Yeah, he's pretty tech-forward. He's tried every single SaaS tool that there is. But like at the end of the day, having like a digital guy that has access to all of your tools...
Is just a much better experience.
And so I want to know what his bill is this month. He said he's spent a decent amount on...
I want to know what it is this month, and then I want to know what it is in like a year, because sometimes the maintenance of these systems can be really, really big. And then there's the question about are we going to see per-token deflation, or are prices being artificially held low because of competitive dynamics? So in a year, will he be spending more or less? Will he still be getting the value? These are all interesting questions, but I'm just excited that a digital product now exists that could not or didn't exist before, and that feels incredibly positive and cool. So very exciting.
Anyway, we have our first guest of the show in the Riverside waiting room. Let me tell you about Console.com. Console builds AI agents that handle 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Doing really well. Thank you, John. Thank you, Jordi.
Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the virality. For those who haven't followed along so far, can you introduce yourself and the project broadly? And then I have a ton of questions, but I'll let you kick it off with an intro.
Absolutely. So, quick background on myself. Originally from New York, undergrad at MIT, studied physics, electrical engineering, computer science, math. PhD in physics, Harvard.
Was there anything you didn't study? You studied everything.
Didn't study the humanities.
Considered going to Cambridge to study chemistry and biology for a while. Just started, was told physics is a game for the young. So stayed in the US, did my PhD in physics focusing on AI and nanotech. I've started, invested in, advised, managed dozens of companies at this point. I've had a number of exits, and at this point most of my time is focused on smoothing out the singularity, as you guys were just discussing. So most recently, as you were gesturing, a company that I helped found, Eon Systems Public Benefit Corporation, just announced what we've been characterizing as the first multi-behavior upload, if you will. More on that in a second, of a fruit fly, which we think is a major step forward for the field. And quite frankly, in an era when I do another podcast, the Moonshots podcast with my friend Peter, I talk all the time about tiling the Earth with compute. Right now, all of this AI infra buildout that we're doing to the tunes of trillions of dollars of capex, all of this is going to artificial minds. And Eon is playing, I think, a very important role in doing some early pioneering experiments and developments to try to level the playing field of the future. Not just artificial minds playing on all of this trillions of dollars of infra and data centers, but enabling emulations and, if you will, uploads of human minds, non-human animal minds at the moment, starting with fruit flies and aspirationally working towards mice and humans, and getting the brains of a variety of human and non-human animals to operate in the cloud.
So walk us through the fruit fly experiment. Why was it so exciting for you?
It's really interesting if you think back. Remember back with the launch of ChatGPT, that was just a side experiment. That wasn't the main focus of OpenAI at the time. Some have characterized that as an 'unhobbling,' if you will. GPT-3, the leadership of OpenAI thought at the time, was sort of the main entree, if you will. Similarly, within Eon, I don't mind saying this was more of a side project. We thought it would be somewhat interesting to the world, but I think the level of response and virality probably even took most of Eon by surprise. So this is a video demonstration of an internal project to take a bunch of building blocks that were already sitting around for the past one to two years and put them together for the first time. So one of these was a paper that a senior scientist at Eon, Philip Shu, published in Nature in 2024, demonstrating that just from an emulation perspective, that you could take the FlyWire, which was a well-funded project to capture the connectome of the fruit fly brain, that you could emulate certain circuits within the fruit fly brain. We've had that for a year and a half or so. Another project, Neuromechfly version two. It's an excellent project to be able to formulate simulations in realistic mechanical environments of fruit flies. Another project from Ozcan to formulate coordinated motor actuation of fruit flies, and then AI. So in summary, Eon was really the first to put all these building blocks together that were sort of lying around. This is actually a tiny subset of what Eon's working on. Eon is working on scanning the connectomes of human and non-human animals at scale and achieving whole-brain emulation, which is the holy grail of the field. There have been many projects in the past that have attempted human whole-brain emulation. Eon is leveraging advances in AI, expansion microscopy, a variety of other techniques, but it was really just putting the pieces together. So we're quite, quite honestly astonished by the level of interest in just this one demo.
I love it. I have a million questions. Let's start with the I/O, like the inputs and outputs. Like what are you simulating? When I pull up The Sims, that is somewhat of a simulation of a human, you know, a basic for loop over a bunch of random probabilities to say, are you hungry? If hungry, eat, go over to the stove, cook food. That's obviously nowhere near the level of detail at which a human operates. Is there an abstraction layer here where the output is quantized to things that you would think a fly would do, like move a wing, or are you operating at the level of like choose to fly? At what level of abstraction is the fly's output happening?
Yeah. This is what I was gesturing at a moment ago. So there's a paper by Ozcan et al. that bundles motor actuations in terms of high-level representations.
So a lot of people, sort of the people who got perhaps most excited in the neuroscience community about this video, some of them I think didn't bother to read Ozcan's excellent paper. So a lot of this is why I'm saying a lot of the pieces were sort of lying on the ground waiting for us to pick up, and these abstract motor...
Do you need a system prompt? Like do you need like an initialization function, or once you synthesize the connectome, synthesize the connections in the brain, things just start firing? Do you have to trigger something to start the process of consciousness or whatever you call whatever the fly is doing?
No system prompt needed. On the other hand, in the early days of ChatGPT, before instruction tuning, there was no system prompt either. In the days of early language models, no one had thought of prompt engineering. So it's entirely possible that maybe in the future, some sort of prompt engineering equivalent for whole-brain emulation will be essential. But at the moment, there's no direct analog of that.
Help me compare some of the scales that we're talking about on complexity of a fly, complexity of a mouse, complexity of a human. I imagine that we're on some sort of exponential here, but how many orders of magnitude in complexity, size, number of neurons, something like that, whatever the metric is, how far away are we from humanity?
We're many orders of magnitude away. So the canonical estimate for the human brain is, depending on how you count brain cells, and there are multiple types of brain cells, call it order of magnitude 100 to 200 billion cells in the brain. We're many, many orders of magnitude away from that. So this isn't going to happen immediately. We're not going to get human whole-brain emulation immediately. On the other hand, I think it's important. I think back to the early days of driverless cars and autonomous vehicles. And what the world is missing right now is, I think, sort of a scale or a framework for starting to think about what that future looks like. We're at the earliest stages of that, call it level one or level two uploading. A lot of people even get triggered by the term uploading. They prefer something else. And I think we need to start having these conversations in a critical, thoughtful way and start to define what is a framework for multiple levels of fidelity for uploading or emulation, or maybe we come up with a new term. But right now we're starting that discussion and we're trying to do it in a thoughtful, responsible way.
So you like the term uploading because you did not choose a random structure or an average structure of this particular fly's brain. You chose the exact structure of a particular fly's brain.
This is a very expensive structure of a very particular fly's brain. This was the structure was again captured through the FlyWire project at great expense.
Mhm. So that's like a clone, digital twin type of thing, right? Is that...
Aspirationally. I mean, again, we're at the earliest stages. I don't want to oversell. This is just a prototype, and quite frankly, this is a sliver of everything that Eon is working on. The fact that we were able to put a few of these pieces together, build a prototype with relatively small effort, suggests that, you know, we talk in the AI community all the time about overhangs. Many people thought that the arrival of large language models was in some sense a technological overhang, that we could have, one could imagine a thought experiment. Could we have had large language models 20 years ago if we simply knew what we should have been building? I think probably...
I thought we were very GPU-gated on that.
Well, GPUs were being spent on video games for the first few decades. So we could have in principle, like Markov models. We knew how to build Markov models. I was building Markov models in the 90s and early 2000s.
It just feels like even if you try and port back frontier models now to a, you know, 1080 Ti, which was a graphics card for gaming, you're going to have a bad time.
Well, I mean, with the rise of SLMs and some of the amazing deflationary properties of algorithmic progress in SLMs, I think we will find ourselves in the world in the next two years where some of the earliest PCs could probably have hosted non-trivial conversations with an LLM. There's just that much algorithmic progress.
Extremely bullish for Apple anyway, not to put it in hardware terms. What do you want to do? What do you want to do next? Like where do you go from here?
More flies or straight to mouse?
It's such a profoundly interesting question. So Eon is beginning fundraising. Eon wants to tackle both mice and men. And I think the timescale will be determined by both technical capability increases and also fundraising abilities. So I think it's an interesting time. I like to say on my other pod that the singularity looks like all sci-fi tropes happening everywhere all at once. And one of these sci-fi tropes is most definitely mind uploading. And I'm doing my best vis-a-vis Eon Systems to push that part a little bit to the left so that the AIs don't have the Dyson swarm all to themselves.
Interesting. Architecturally, what does the neural network look like that you've built for the fly? Is it similar to a large language model, like transformer-based architecture, or are you a beneficiary of 'all you need is attention'? Totally unlike the transformer?
Totally unlike the transformer. So transformer architecture, if you subtract off the encoder and decoder layers, comes in many variants, but the most vanilla variant looks like alternating linear and attention layers. So totally unlike the transformer architecture. At least if you look at it, it looks a little bit more like a graph neural network, but really that's such an AI way of framing it. It looks like a leaky integrating-and-fire, LIF, model that we've had for decades from the neuroscience world. So it's just a graph of nodes that have leaky integrate-and-fire dynamics and they're firing at each other.
So what does that tell you about the nature of synthetic human intelligence? Like do you think that there is a path to human-level AGI that does not involve the transformer and instead falls along your path and your architecture?
Oh, sure. Well, first of all, I would argue we've had AGI for at least six years now, five to six years at the very latest, since summer of 2020 when OpenAI published their 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' paper.
I would argue that was an AGI. So I think there are many ways. My bet is there are many ways to achieve generality of intelligence. I published a paper a number of years ago arguing that not only is intelligent behavior a general process, I went further and argued that it is a general physical process, that you can even formulate intelligent behavior in pure thermodynamic terms. So my bet is intelligence is this very, very general effect and lots of ways to implement it.
Interesting. So you've mentioned AGI six years ago, singularity here, and you're smoothing it. Do you have other sort of binary benchmarks that you're looking towards, like ASI, recursive self-improvement? Are any of these terms useful to you?
Oh, we're already there. I mean, we're already in the era of recursive self-improvement. All of the frontier labs are pretty public about it. At this point, I'm looking past the singularity. I spend most of my time on bets for what the post-singularity world looks like. So Eon is one of those bets. Another bet, I have a company, Physical Superintelligence, that's trying to solve all of physics with AI and doing an amazing job. I just wrote a book with Peter called 'Solve Everything,' arguing that entire disciplines are going to get steamrolled by superintelligence and that what matters now is what disciplines we aim the superintelligence at.
Interesting. What decisions do you make in your personal life, in the way that you live, that are based around your beliefs around technological progress?
There are a few that come to mind. So one is I'm hoping not to die. It would be a shame if I died sometime soon and got to miss the most exciting developments.
That's what gets the applause.
That's great. Yeah, that's a white pill.
White pill. Very good. Brian Johnson thanks me in advance. But I think also, I mean, there are so many other angles. Another is not trying to bet against the collective intelligence of the market. I've had a number of friends who thought they could outsmart all of the AI algo traders and day trade, and when they inevitably fail, they attribute it to bad luck or something other than just fundamentally betting against progress and betting against AI intelligence. So trying not to make the mistake of betting against the collective intelligence of civilization and AI capabilities. I also am trying to make bets assuming that the AI capabilities keep increasing to the point where they're ontologically shocking and trying not to duplicate effort of frontier labs. And I think that's perhaps something I don't see enough of in the venture community. So many new startups being formed now just aren't being ambitious enough. I have startups that are newly formed or recently formed that are literally trying to grow new islands and new coastlines with AI. That would have been unthinkable years ago. I have that with physical AI...
Or are they just dreaming them up?
It's with AI reaching into the physical world to steer ocean currents and grow new islands and new coastlines. That would not have been possible a few years ago. That's now starting to become possible. I have a startup that's working on solving interspecies communication, starting with dogs.
That would not have been possible a few years ago. So I spend a lot of my time thinking about what the post-singularity state of the world looks like and how to smooth that out and bring it here sooner.
Yeah. What does the post-singularity world look like where you are able to upload yourself? I assume that feels like there's a copy of Alex in the cloud and then you still exist not in the cloud. How do you think that that interfaces?
In my mind, if we wind up having the copy question come about, that's almost a failure mode. Speaking for myself, I don't want a copy of myself. I want myself. And Hans Moravec and others have written about this. What I would like to see in the space and what Eon is working toward, at least aspirationally, is this idea of a continuous transfer of consciousness so that it really is you. It's not a copy of you. It's not a low-fidelity facsimile of you. It should be a better, expanded version of you that's still you. And whether that looks like moving from what Eon's doing right now with fruit flies to maybe replacing a single cell in a brain at a time, invasively or non-invasively, with a substrate-independent or substrate-migrated implementation, some variant of that I suspect is where all of this will go. So that you never have to worry, is it really myself or not. It will by construction be yourself. And I'm not sure of the precise timetable, but I think five, ten years from now, I think the world will see market progress on the problem of not just whole-brain emulation, but also transfer of human intelligence to new substrates.
That's very exciting. This is very new sci-fi corner. I love it. Every sci-fi trope everywhere all at once. Time travel. Good framing. Is time travel on the table? We don't know yet. So, it's an interesting question. We don't know whether the physics of our universe are compatible with, I think, what most folks would construe as time travel. There are versions of temporal non-locality that are consistent with the physics that we have right now, but not in a useful way that would be worth filming a sci-fi movie over.
What about faster-than-light travel?
We don't know yet. It's the same problem in some sense, exactly the same problem as time travel. We don't know whether the physics of our universe will ultimately allow that.
Because it seems like if we don't get FTL, it's going to be a boring travel to go to another solar system.
I will say this. I think the odds are pretty good that AI in the next few years will tell us whether the laws of physics of our universe are compatible with that or not and help us solve this. One of the reasons why I helped found Physical Superintelligence is to discover any such laws.
Very cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, great to meet you. Congratulations on the progress. Fascinating stuff. Thank you. A lot of questions. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one.
Let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, whether it's code, Codex, or a sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with Figma. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Charles Lamanna from Microsoft. In the research radio, now he's in the TV room. Charles, how are you doing?
Good. Thanks for having me on, guys.
Thanks so much for coming on the show. Why don't you give us a little bit of an introduction on yourself and then we can get into the news.
Sure thing. I'm on the product and engineering side at Microsoft. My team builds out things like agents, a bunch of the platform work and our business applications and some low-code stuff. So, a bunch of odds and ends.
And what's the latest and greatest in your world?
Yes, a lot of big news today. So, today we announced Copilot cowork, which really takes Copilot beyond chat. So, it can take actions and automate tasks and pick delegation. Basically, we had some new agent capabilities in the Office apps and a bunch of agent management solutions.
Yeah. How are you thinking about the OpenClaw boom, people writing code locally versus Microsoft has Azure? Like it's so easy to throw everything in the cloud. And I feel like one of the barriers that a lot of people have is like, do I need to go get a Mac Mini? Can I just delegate to the cloud? Some of the apps don't just by default build an app in the cloud or they don't have functionality. How are you feeling about that trade-off these days?
Yeah, I mean we're super excited by OpenClaw and all that means. I think it's like the resurgence of the PC. Like what's the best thing you can give an agent? A computer, you know, let it run the apps, let it log in as you, let it message you. I think like a Windows PC in the cloud is probably the main way people will ultimately use something like OpenClaw at work.
Yeah. How do you think about model selection? Obviously, Microsoft has a time-honored partnership with OpenAI at this point, but you know, Microsoft has their own AI lab and you can get pretty much any model on Azure. Do customers want to pick models? How do you think about what is the best tool for the job in the products that you're building? But then also, how much do you want to give to the user? Because there's sometimes when I go into a chat app and I'm like, I just want auto. You should be figuring this out. I know the details of Pro versus thinking, but I don't want to think at all.
Yeah. So, that's one of the things that we think is super important for Copilot and a lot of our products is the fact that it's multi-model. And the reason is because the best model for a given kind of task is not always the same and it's not even the same from month to month or quarter to quarter. Like if I look at Microsoft 365 Copilot, chat is like the main way people interact with it. Our auto router is going to put you in OpenAI models because that's what we think works best with our work grounding in our work context. But then if you go to cowork, the new announcement today, and you fire off a task and you want it to run for a long period of time in the background, use a bunch of tools, maybe generate some code, use like the terminal and stuff, that uses the Claude family of models. And I go to Copilot one place and get both. And then we're going to keep adding more models, models like from MAI and other places where it makes sense, but it's really about the experience the user wants, not so much picking exactly the version or the type.
Yeah. How have conversations been with business leaders in terms of deploying a product like Copilot cowork? Because the ramp-up for software engineers was smooth and everyone was aware of it, tracking everything and going from, you know, better autocomplete to agentic coding was pretty intelligible at every step of the way for most software developers. But for someone who's lived their life in spreadsheets and email and maybe not really thought about building automations all that often, what does actual deployment of these tools look like?
Yeah, it's such a great question because I think there's like two pieces to it. The first is you have IT teams which are nervous if you imagine every single employee spinning up a whole bunch of agents that can create documents, send emails, run workflows. So they want to make sure they have the right governance and controls in place. That's why another big part of the announcement today was something we call Agent 365, which makes it easy for IT teams to manage and deploy agents from Microsoft and other companies. So that's one part. And then you have the end users. How do you teach a typical Excel or PowerPoint or Outlook user this idea of agentic working? I mean, even in coders, it's taken time and it's probably not fully diffused. So that's the thing that we think we're in a really unique position at Microsoft in terms of being able to do because we can bring things like cowork to users where they already spend their time inside of the Office apps, inside of Windows, and increasingly inside the Copilot app. And we can present it in a way where it's digestible to hundreds of millions of Office users, not just tens of millions of coders.
Is the majority of your business model still seat-based at this point? Because I imagine that there will be a transition at some point. How much of that transition is already happening?
Yeah, we're still very seat-based on like the M365 side, but like the good news at Microsoft, we kind of know how to do consumption businesses because we got Azure, we got a bunch of other very large capacity businesses. So the fact that we have user licensing and then consumption and pay-as-you-go licensing for capacity all integrated with one commercial kind of vehicle with customers, we think we're in a pretty good position to make that transition over the next couple of years.
There was some chatter on X this weekend over how different labs are pricing tokens and plans potentially to take market share from each other. There's a little bit of a capital fight playing out. How are you communicating? More specifically competing with the application layer. Yes. Yeah. And so my question is how are you talking to business leaders, CTOs about how they should think about forecasting token budgets and spend and compute budgets? If they're used to, okay, I have licenses and licenses maybe go up in price and my headcount goes up and I'm used to that. But all of a sudden it's like, well, everyone's paying $200 a month, but they might be $5,000 a month in a couple months, but also the models are getting cheaper and the inference is getting cheaper and the capabilities are going up and it's very hard to predict. What are you telling to business leaders and CTOs?
Yeah. So the first thing is you have to embrace this technology otherwise you're going to be left behind right now because the productivity gains are just so significant. And if you go talk to a coder and you told them, hey, I'm going to take away like GitHub Copilot and the agent coding capabilities, they'd be like, I refuse to work in this environment. Like it's just inhumane almost. So I think the same type of thing is going to happen for all information work, all Office work. So nine months from now, I think if you went to somebody and said, we're going to take away your agentic tools like Copilot cowork, they'd be like, no way. I'm not going to go back to the old way of working. So I think the first is there's a degree of inevitability because the benefit is so large and there's such strong pull from the end users.
That said, everybody has budgets. So what you're going to see and what you're already starting to see is a bunch of controls where IT teams can start to manage exactly how many tokens or how much dollars each user can spend. And they're going to allocate that in a way based on where they think they're getting return and diminishing return. And it'll probably be like an expense report approval hierarchy type thing. So you'll see all of that show up, but part of just doing work now is you need a token budget. That's the future of how we think about how you budget for a team or a department.
Where do you have any exciting case studies on the non-software engineering agentic work side of the business? Because when agentic coding came to software development, you know, there was a shift in a lot of software developers' workflows where they went from writing a lot of code to reading a lot of code, reviewing PRs. They started operating at higher and higher levels of abstraction, but the decision what to build, how to prioritize things, how to build features, there's still conversations and software engineers are still doing work. What does that look like in the context of a finance department or an operations department or a sales group? Like when the rubber meets the road, where are you seeing like, okay, this is ready, this is the next sub-area or category that will really, really benefit from the productivity gains from agentic workflows?
Yeah, I mean a general thing and then maybe a more specific thing. What we're seeing is like how do you measure productivity is itself a challenge. I mean this predates AI, but lines of code, number of pull requests, number of bugs fixed. I don't think I've ever heard a good engineering leader say that's how I measure the success of my team, right? It shows up in other ways. Do you have a great product people love? Is your cost structure good? What's your install base look like? So I think we have to get better at capturing that final business outcome because that's what's going to get the CFO to open up the pocketbook and continue to invest in more tokens and more AI. So if I go then take that and apply to kind of other disciplines, like what you don't want to say is, oh, our sales people send a lot more emails or our finance professionals create a hundred more spreadsheets. Like that's more like of a nightmare scenario for AI.
One billion spreadsheets per company. No, no, I mean yeah, we saw someone on the timeline say that their token budget went way up but their revenue didn't go up and so they're like, I don't know if it's worth it. Like you got to show results.
Exactly. So that is what the question is going to be everywhere. But the good news is engineers historically have resisted clear measurement of impact because you know there's a little bit of art to it. But like sales professionals or finance professionals or customer service and support reps, they are so metric-driven. Like if I'm a sales rep, what's my quota? What's my attainment? What's my revenue per head? Every single sales department has all of those things instrumented. And we've seen with M365 Copilot, we kind of did a bunch of experiments and we published a white paper on it, like an almost 10% increase in revenue per seller just by giving them the family of M365 Copilot tools and things like our sales extension. Like that's real dollars in the bank. Same thing for like back-office finance processes. We've seen people use like our agents to do like accounts reconciliation and we have like a great case study we did there where it was like 30% of all back-office finance was automated out by this thing. So those are examples of real top-line and bottom-line benefit. And that's what everybody's going to be talking about the next couple of years. It's not going to be, you know, emails, documents, files, etc.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean you're in a high-level business role yourself. I find myself doing a lot of like knowledge retrieval, deep research reports, but have you personally been using an agentic, I mean this product specifically in your day-to-day? Like even as something as simple as like a... Sam Altman told us that he has a self... like he has some sort of like to-do list that does itself or something. I still don't understand exactly what that product is, but how are you using these tools these days?
Yeah. So for like Copilot cowork for example, I've loved that. Like my favorite magic moment has been around calendar management. I was telling the story to someone like I go look out three months in the future and try to see, you know, how crazy does my calendar and travel look like. And I was able to decline 17 meetings for me.
Okay right there. Nothing gives me more joy than declining a meeting. You sold me.
Yes. And I say like I went to Outlook and just saw all the meetings disappear and it was like such a serene moment for me. And like it did a deep analysis. It went and said like who's my manager, who do I work with, am I optional or required, what's the topic and it recommended the 17 and I went through all 17, said you know what, decline, and it was right. I mean so like that's one thing that I use it for. Like another thing that I like right now is, I mean I'm an engineering background so I'm not going to go create the most beautiful content all the time. So I use it now to pull together information, design docs, meeting notes and then go create either like architecture diagrams, presentations or spreadsheets or docs. And I mean I know it's just more doc generation but it's very much more kind of like fire and forget. So it works really well.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean even if it's just like the bones of a PowerPoint presentation with the actual data prepopulated that would just previously be a lot of copy-paste. Go run this analysis, copy it over, make sure it's the same font. Like there's so much grunt work that can be automated with these tools. I'm super excited for that. Where do you see the design PowerPoint generation tool use? I mean, people have been talking about like it's hard to create an RL environment with a verifiable reward around a great PDF, but it's easy to do that with coding. Do you have like an internal data set of like the best PowerPoints ever created that you're like RLing against or where do you see that going?
Yeah, I mean I think that is something that there's a little bit of taste in all of this because like depending on the company, some companies like lots of infographics and lots of colors. Other companies like super fact-based, no images. So like, you know, there's a little bit of an eye of the beholder, but absolutely we have a very robust harness and like gym environment where we're able to quickly evaluate models, prompts, tools, and our own like fine-tuning efforts to see if it's producing better content. So I think like this, like PowerPoints, Word documents, spreadsheets, it's going to be like code and you're starting to see it already, but it's going to be like code for sure.
Yeah. I mean a lot of these things are like XML under the hood anyway and can be puppeteered like code anyway. Well congratulations on the launch. Jord, I hope you don't mind. I've been calling Copilot Coco. Coco. So I think hopefully you like it. Yeah, it's a very cute name. But congrats on the launch and great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon.
Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. There's an interesting data point from Apollo featured by restructuring here. AI is making starting a business easier and the numbers confirm it.
Did you see this? Weekly business formation is exploding higher. So, previously... This matches what the Collison brothers said when they were on the show. They're seeing not just more business formation, but businesses growing faster.
Is this... it could be that AI is actually making businesses harder to start, but Stripe Atlas is making it so much easier that we're seeing an upward trend and it's fighting back against AI. No, of course. These are multiplicative very clearly. But Stripe Atlas does make it very easy to start a business. US business applications jumped insanely after the COVID pandemic. In 2019, we were seeing about 60,000, 70,000 new business applications, I think a four-week moving average. We've been over 120K for years now. And AI seems to be driving that trend upwards by about 20% over the last two years, which is great news. More small businesses. They are extremely edifying, extremely valuable. I highly recommend.
We got another white pill. Give it to me. The data center buildout has allowed Loudoun County to lower property taxes by 38% since 2010, translating to average savings of about $3,400 per year for homeowners. This is great. Love it. What's happening here? Data center square footage in the millions has gone from 5 million square feet to 40 million square feet. That's a huge jump.
Yeah. So, this is like Northern Virginia, this is like AWS East One. Okay. Yeah. So homeowners are paying, they went from 1.2% of whatever their house is. So if they have a million dollar house, they will be paying $12,000 a year and now they're at 0.8% property tax rate because they're taxing those data centers. This is the easiest solution to every AI problem. If the companies are profitable, tax them. We already tax every business, we tax them by default. If somebody makes a lot of money on an AI stock, tax it as capital gains. You get the money. The money shall flow. And so good news for the folks over in Loudoun County.
Jacob says, America once named things plainly: place, trade, surname. You had Business, International Business Machines, Long Distance Telephone, Studebaker, Studabaker, and Bethlehem Steel. Steel. That International Business Machines logo goes hard. Is this real or is this like a reimagining of what the IBM logo could have been? Because I love this logo. What a very cool thing. That is apparently the original IBM... original IBM logo. Wow. We don't know how to make logos like that in this country anymore. Seriously, I mean that's what kicked all this off. Somebody was upset about the granola. America's innovation slowdown is primarily due to the amount of Lord of the Rings that founders have to flip through before identifying a name they can raise off of.
No, you can just start a company and name it International Business Pro. Whatever you want to do, just name the company exactly that: Technology and Business Programming Network. It's that easy. In other news, 2 Chainz... 2 Chainz revealed he was an early investor in SpaceX. This is huge. He says it just felt like I got in like early Bitcoin. There are some crazy early SpaceX investors. I don't know what Elon was doing with that early roadshow. We know some of these folks. Very cool community of early 2 Chainz. Get me 2 Chainz. 2 Chainz got in at some point. And Gabriel over at OpenAI says 2 Chainz is about to be 3 Chainz.
Well, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Cure any agent. Let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Hopefully, we'll be seeing SpaceX there soon. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Can you imagine 2 Chainz and Elon ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange? I can. I hope it happens. Well, we have our next guest in the Restream. Julian Beck from Sequoia Capital, his partner there. Welcome to the show, Julian. Good to meet you.
Hey guys, how you doing? Nice to see you. We also hope we can ring the bell very soon.
Holy, holy logo mog. Yeah, holy logo. Few of those companies. I do. We're partnered with Cisco. Thank you for backing them early, making TBPN possible through your 30 years ago. Paved the way. Since this is the first time on the show, why don't you give us just a brief backstory on yourself, how you wound up at Sequoia, what you focus on, what your day-to-day is like.
Sure. So first, thank you both for having me. It's an honor to be here. I know you had a lot of my partners as well. So we're very excited to be on the show. My name is Julian. I'm a partner on the team. I'm based in London, but I spend a lot of time going back and forth to spend time with the rest of the team in California. And I started as a founder a very, very long time ago in high school. Built companies in hardware before, and so that's why I've been investing mostly in software for most of my career. Yeah.
Well, you were like burned out. I got to get out of... Are you thinking about going back to hardware? Is software dead? What are you thinking?
Yeah. Well, I mean, two things can be true at once. I think hardware is really interesting. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about physical AI. Sure. But at the same time, I've been investing for the last 10 years in application software. So I want to remain true to that. And this is kind of the things I've been spending time on recently.
