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Jordi Hays
Co-founder & Co-host, TBPN

Timeline Mud Wrestling, Apple Play Coming to Old Porsches, SI Domain Debate

📅 Oct 01, 2026 TBPN 95 MIN 7793 VIEWS 279 SEGMENTS · 6 SPEAKERS
00:01:32 NVIDIA Moves Up the AI Cloud Stack 00:09:54 Factory-Cognition Drama 00:23:17 Instinct Pushes into Shopping 00:35:23 Gemini 4 Argon 00:44:45 Will Bruey discusses Varda’s transition to operating a scalable fleet of commercial reentry vehicles, supported by a $251 million Series D and launch capacity secured through 2029. He also explains how microgravity can advance pharmaceutical manufacturing, why reusable launch infrastructure will expand the space economy, and how Varda has made land-based reentry reliable and cost-effective. 00:58:16 Christophe Beck, chairman, president, and CEO of...

What Jordi Hays said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Jordi Hays discussed Nvidia's DGX Cloud Lepton, noting it evolved from a competitive threat to a unified AI platform, with Nvidia buying Lepton in April 2025 for $300-900 million. He analyzed the Venode-Cognition-Factory dispute, calling Venode's post an ad hominem attack and suggesting he may have forgotten his investment exposure. Hays critiqued Instinct's AI shopping recommendations, saying they need to drive net new demand and avoid being filtered as spam. He interviewed Christophe Beck of EcoAB, who said 60% of data center projects are paused or delayed, and that direct-to-chip cooling uses zero incremental water. Hays also spoke with Hassaan Raza of Tabis about Griffin, which passed a Turing test with 48% of testers, and Connor Renton of Brody, the largest basketball league with 15 times more games than the NBA.

Key takeaways

  1. Nvidia's DGX Cloud Lepton evolved from a competitive threat to a unified AI platform, with the Lepton acquisition in April 2025 costing between $300-900 million.
  2. EcoAB's Christophe Beck said 60% of data center projects are paused or delayed, and direct-to-chip cooling uses zero incremental water.
  3. Tabis' Griffin model passed a Turing test with 48% of testers believing it was human, up from less than 2% for the next best model.
  4. Brody is the largest basketball league in the world, doing 15 times more games than the NBA, with a simple player-fee model.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$300-900 million Reported price Nvidia paid for Lepton in April 2025 price 5:51
60% Data center projects paused or delayed metric 1:07:16
48% Testers who believed Griffin was a real person in Turing test metric 1:19:00
15 times More games than the NBA metric 1:26:52
13 or 14 people Instinct team size as of last week metric 34:33
17% More cooling power with pure water vs. coolant metric 1:04:41
3% Data centers using direct-to-chip cooling metric 1:04:41
251 million Varda Series D round commitment 57:51
2029 Varda has launch flights booked through this year timeline 50:46
40 different locations Brody rents venues across these locations metric 1:31:19

Chapters

  1. 0:00Nvidia DGX Cloud Lepton evolution
  2. 11:36Vencode-Cognition-Factory dispute
  3. 25:04Instinct AI shopping recommendations
  4. 37:01Gemini Argon launch and naming
  5. 39:53LA house tier list
  6. 47:07Varda space manufacturing interview
  7. 1:00:09EcoAB water and data centers interview
  8. 1:17:45Tabis Griffin Turing test interview
  9. 1:26:41Brody basketball league interview
  10. 1:34:57Pop-Tarts and Mr. Beast collabs

Questions asked in this interview

11
  1. 47:22Why is it important? Why does it matter?
  2. 49:28So, this has obviously been done before in constellations, but never for re-entry vehicles, you know?
  3. 50:46Uh we treat launch like shipping and so you know a lot of business not a lot of business models are you talking to someone like oh FedEx has a new truck. What do you think?
  4. 1:07:16Do you realize that we can have a data center that is going to use no water, which means less than a car wash in your own village there?
  5. 1:13:18This is billions. Why wouldn't we do that?
  6. 1:20:31I mean, essentially like we use these models to power what we call like pals, right?
  7. 1:22:24And it's exactly for that, right?
  8. 1:23:29And then how do we make it so that the interface sort of disappears?
  9. 1:26:44What's going on, fellas? How are we?
  10. 1:28:13And if I went to an LA Fitness or a YMCA or a gym and I'm putting my shots up, I'm in the lab super early, people are going to ask me, are you training for the NBA?
  11. 1:30:22So everything we built from super early on was how do we make basketball truly the most accessible sport?
Jordi Hays 0:00 ↗
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Great show yesterday. We put the timeline in turmoil with the MongoDB debate around the responsibility of the CEO. I thought it was a really fantastic conversation. I came away like, wow, this is like an unfortunate situation, but a lot of cause for optimism. And I think he summed it up well without going too aggressive, but you know, pass the information through.
Exactly. And I saw a lot of love for the clip. I saw a lot of people quoting the clip and saying like, oh yes, like okay, this confirms what my position was beforehand. So I thought that was cool.
This confirms my pre-existing. Yeah, I suppose. Thank you for confirming what I already believe.
Yeah. The timeline was also in turmoil over Coastal Ventures, Cognition, Factory. We can go into that.
There was one interesting thing that happened on the show yesterday that I didn't really, I started thinking about after the show ended. So our first two guests were from Nvidia and CoreWeave, and obviously those two companies work really closely together, and the conversations were sort of different. We were talking about security with Nvidia, and then CoreWeave, of course, we're interviewing the CEO. So we're talking about the business overall and their transition from a rent-a-GPU company to more of a full AI cloud. They'll rent you everything you need.
And it was interesting because I was remembering that it was just like last year that Nvidia was like, we're going to layer CoreWeave, or we're going to layer all the Neoclouds. We're going to be the front door to compute with DGX Cloud Lepton. I don't know if you remember any of this, but this started back in like 2023 post the ChatGPT moment. Jensen comes out on stage at one of the keynotes he gives and he says like, this is the iPhone moment and we're going to aggregate all of the underlying compute and you're going to be able to come to us and deploy whatever resources you are and we're going to compete with like AWS and Azure and GCP and we're going to be a one-stop shop for this stuff and it's going to be really important.
And at the time, I feel like people were sort of like, whoa, okay, this is bold, but this could be really, really powerful. Because they have this odd tension between the Neoclouds, where if you go in, you lose your connection to your customer effectively, and the margins could get compressed. You're in a much more competitive environment. And at the same time, if you don't go in, then Nvidia can just say, hey, you know, all the DGX Cloud Lepton customers, well, we're going to send them to the clouds that did sign up. And so you have this like tension. It really did feel like Nvidia had some leverage, biggest company in the world very shortly after, and obviously a very aggressive business. Like they're not just going to be like, oh, that would be improper to compete.
But it played out very differently, and Nvidia has become very friendly with CoreWeave, and they both found their places where there's still a little competition here and there. But I was just reflecting on how that journey came together, where that landed. And the long story short is that the DGX product, it came out and the reviews weren't like, okay, yeah, this is actually better than working with CoreWeave. And there were still so many benefits from going to a Neocloud or even a true cloud provider. There was just more to do.
Nvidia made an acquisition. They bought Lepton, where the name came from, in April 2025, which sort of kicked most of that discourse off. The rumor was that they paid between 300 and 900 million dollars for that. And Jensen was so gassed up on this. I loved his quote. He said, 'Nvidia DGX Cloud Lepton connects our network of global GPU cloud providers with AI developers together with our NCPs, which is Nvidia Cloud Providers. We're building a planetary-scale AI factory.' That's what his tagline was. Which makes sense, like there is a world where that would have played out.
One second. Talk about how we have failed so far to convince a lot of our friends not to call supercomputers AI factories. Yeah. Right. If we continue to fail, they're going to be like, it's a refinery. It's an AI offshore derrick. It's an oil derrick for AI. Like, it's a chemical plant. Yeah. For AI. For AI. Yeah. It's exactly what you want in your community. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Rough. Anyway, the risk of total failure in your backyard is low, but non-zero. Non-zero. And yeah, and then you have another person who's like, wait, why did you say that? Yeah. Ridiculous. I want to go back to supercomputers. We'll make it happen eventually. Hopefully. Gabe says, it's a data ranch, brother. Data ranch. There we go. Putting a data ranch in your backyard.
Yeah. But yeah, I mean, at the time, there was a bunch of reporting sort of like people familiar with the matter. The Information got a scoop from a bunch of the Neocloud compute providers saying like Lepton was a potential competitive threat, and if you refuse to participate, that creates a risk that Nvidia could direct workloads toward competitors. And it was a bit of this tense time, but the end result was more balanced. So instead of layering their customers and trying to control aggregate demand, which would be really powerful if it happened, the product evolved into this unified AI platform, which is their words, but basically it's between an actual like Expedia for GPUs and just a set of standards.
So it's a bunch of proprietary software. It is sort of what makes up the CUDA moat. So everything from handling GPU node groups, interactive dev pods, distributed batch jobs, inference endpoints, storage, observability, reservations, more. So all the things that you need to actually schedule, manage GPUs, you can run that, but you can still use your own hardware, do whatever you need to have the relationship with the underlying owner of the GPUs. And so the rest of the Neoclouds are generally like, you know, pretty safe.
And so it was interesting because it was heralded as this like, oh, okay, things could get spicy. You could see all the Neoclouds like really chirping at Jensen. Jensen really coming for the throat. Didn't really play out that way. But it does sort of go to show that Jensen does not take lightly to any whispers that the CUDA moat is going away anytime soon. Like he's like the ace is still up the sleeve in my opinion. Like they still have to do a lot of work because when SemiAnalysis actually like demoed it, they were like, ah, it's not working as well as some of the other systems. Like if you were to put, I don't even know if Nvidia Cloud Lepton is on ClusterMax, but at the time that they tested it, they were like, yeah, you're going to have a better experience if you just go direct CoreWeave, Nebius, the other ones that are in the platinum tier.
Yeah, and overall, I think in many ways we've seen it's been very strategic to work with 50, 100 really, really, really smart teams that are going to have their own incentives to grow their businesses, grow their buying of Nvidia.
Yeah. And if you just use the framework of like, who was upset yesterday about CoreWeave launching their, what was the actual product called? CoreWeave Forge, which is their like AI cloud, right? So they're just saying, hey, we got CPUs now, we got storage, we got tools to manage all of that. Who's really mad? It's like it's only their direct competitors basically who are like, ah, now we got to catch up. If you're a CPU seller or you're a compute, a storage seller or something like that, you're like, great, I got a new customer. I'm happy. And then if you're a customer of CoreWeave, you're like, okay, I'm happy. I get more stuff.
And so yesterday's CoreWeave move was not particularly a shot across the bow to anyone other than just like, hey, we know we're in a race with like 300 other Neoclouds. You see them on ClusterMax. We're going to do more to reach that diamond tier, which is what you proposed. But yeah, really, really remarkable margin expansion story. I mean, the depreciation story, like they beat the depreciation allegations pretty quickly, but that value of like dollar per watt is increasing really, really quickly. And so if they can get in line with the Elon and Jensen 60 billion a gigawatt, it's going to be a very, very exciting business. It already is an exciting business, but it was a fun conversation and that's what my wheels were turning about yesterday.
Let me tell you about Console. Console builds agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go over to the timeline. You, you, anything going on yesterday?
You said you wanted to get in the mud and wrestle with pigs, even though the pig likes it and you get muddy. Yeah. Okay, let's wrestle. Yeah. What are we wrestling about today?
Yeah, so we kind of caught some of this live at the beginning of the show yesterday, but the post kept flowing yesterday. What really got people up in arms was Venode coming in and saying, you are a struggling second-tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation. Straight out lying about if Chris being fired, I thought would be below even you, just like the most crashing out on Matan's personal crash out.
Sure. So crash out on crash out violence of a three-car pileup. It only took about 20 seconds for people to put it together that Coastal Ventures is of course an investor in Factory and Cognition.
And like a pretty big one, right? But is funny enough an example that like venture firms can have firewalls and individual people that have exposure to one company that might want to get involved with another company can still behave in a way that is ultimately like ethical. Yeah, right. I'm not saying that Venode, you know, attacking his portfolio is, but yeah.
Was Keith still at FF when Cognition, when they did Cognition? I think he might have already been at Kleiner potentially then. And so I think Keith might be the Factory board member or something. I don't know. I just saw Keith coming to Matan's defense. Yeah. Right. Which is obviously the Coastal Ventures divide, but that's the nature of these partnerships.
Sort of, he sort of clear that Venode's not using AI for these posts. Totally. All over the place grammatically. Straight out lying. You are a competitor that is more unethical and lying. That's not right.
This was firing from the hip. He's down here just, but he's got to lay it down. He's got to lay it down. I mean, what this really could say is that even though you have an economic incentive to align with this person, you need to distance yourself from them because you know that they are in the wrong. Like that's like the fact that Venode has bags here and he's still posting this makes it more severe, right? Like.
Yeah, but I think there is a chance that Venode kind of forgot that he had exposure. I think you got to put that at like 15%.
I just feel like, yeah, I forgot. Is that possible? I don't know. I don't know what I mean. He's a multi-billionaire. The economic.
I mean, he was coming here, he was coming, he came on the show last week to talk about.
He's clearly working more closely with another.
Thank you. Was it called FA? I like that. I would sign up for that. But yeah, he's clearly like on the board of that company and not on the board of Factory because the really crazy thing is like how did this not, how did this go straight on the timeline? Like this should have been a text message and maybe it was, but you're only talking about two and a half hours.
I feel like if a portfolio founder is out of control, you would text them and say, hey, you are in the wrong. You're about to get smoked. You don't have the leverage here. Like you would say, hey, look, you're a second-tier competitor and you're being unethical and you're lying, so I think you should take the post down and apologize. You know, you would say that behind closed doors. Yeah. You would text that. You would not just go straight to the truth nuke from outer space, which is what Venode did.
It's a truth, right? Well, I don't even think it's necessarily, I wouldn't call it a truth nuke because it's an ad hominem. Like, he just went directly at him. He didn't even talk about any of the facts.
Well, so here's the thing. So Luke Metro, if he knows the facts are true, and we don't disagree that it's a nuke. Correct. It's definitely a nuke. It's definitely a nuke. The question is, is it a truth nuke or is it an ad hominem nuke? And I think it might be a truth nuke because I think as an investor you might actually know the truth of what happened.
You might know because he could go into like the internal Kleiner Slack or something and say like, who are the board members? Is this guy actually a board member? You know, like what files have been shared from Factory to our board? Oh, nothing relevant that would be useful to Cognition. You know, he could have made that decision.
What are you calling it, Tyler? Ad hom. Ad hom. Okay, it's an ad hom. We'll leave it there. I think we close that out.
But so Luke Metro said what I think everyone was thinking. Can we please not start Cognition versus Factory before we get a resolution to Rippling versus Deel? Great post. That being said, wildly different situation than Rippling versus Deel. When the Rippling Deel drama broke, there was immediately insane, seemingly insane smoking guns. Yep. That are getting worked out through the court system. But it was like Rippling had basically like tricked Deel in some ways, right?
Wait, really? Oh, I don't remember that at all. Um, I mean, it's sort of fuzzy at this point. It was like a honeypot operation. That is sort of a trick. That's sort of tricky. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, honeypot is better. I think that was like their term, right? They put the honeypot in this.
My current read is that CRO, you know, the advisor goes to Matan and says, I'm getting poached. And Matan says, you can't get poached. You're being fired for unethical conduct. But the firing happened days after he was notified that he was leaving for a competitor. Yeah. Yeah. And.
Yeah. Keith said it is unethical per se to even interview at a competitor while attending board meetings and board dinners. And I read this and I was like, yeah, I think that's right. I think I agree with that. But then I was thinking about like how would he have done this more responsibly if that's what happened? And I was like, so you have to resign because you think that you should go interview at a competitor and then reach out to them. And it doesn't seem like that's the way things happen that often. I don't know.
People like even direct competitors will maintain, you know, somewhat jovial interactions. Oh, how's it going? Oh, it's going great. Yeah, cool, man. Like, and both parties are kind of just saying nothing, but you are having like a conversation technically because you like bump into someone at a conference. You might both be on stage at the same part talking about agentic AI or something. I don't know.
And then I was thinking about like how does this rank if the new Cognition CRO, I forget his name, was on the, Chris Denon, you know, if Chris Denon was on the, he was a board observer or board advisor. What's the terminology? I think his only, from what I understand, his only technical title was advisor. Advisor. Okay.
So I'm just thinking like back to your original frame of like is this more or less hardcore than before? And I'm thinking about like the Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt interaction where like Eric Schmidt is on the board of Apple and being like, we're buying Android over at Google. We're launching Android over at Google. And Steve Jobs gets pissed. Yeah. But it doesn't spell out on the timeline. So that's where Steve Jobs.
Another comp is like Mike Krieger. Oh yeah. His involvement with Figma. Yeah. Yeah. And resigned from the board I think a couple days, like a day before launching a competitor. Right.
So again, this stuff has been happening. But the funny thing is to see this like whole all this drama around companies that provide basically enterprise applications. Mhm. When you look at what's happening on the research side where aggressive, constant aggressive poaching around like truly like companies developing truly novel IP that basically have no protections where you can work at a company for five years, learn a bunch about what they do, get poached and bring all of that know-how over to a new company within the same 24-hour period, right? And so I just don't.
This whole situation like an advisor that gets poached doesn't feel like a big deal at all to me in the context of everything else that's been happening. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, and ultimately I don't think, I think the story is like over. Like I think it's.
No, I think you're right. It's different because like the researchers do post but they don't have as many interactions with VCs. So like there's that back and forth about the three OpenAI researchers who were just fired according to the Wall Street Journal for sharing information, but like that doesn't reach the level of like board interaction, right? So you're not going to see board members, at least that I can tell, like doing drama about it.
And even when the talent wars happen between Meta and OpenAI, like we were the ones that were posting the most like spicy stuff about it, right? Because like the board members, they don't necessarily have the same level of interaction with the researchers as the other board advisors. Yeah. And so I think this just gets a lot more personal, I think. Anyway, you want to close the book on this?
Are you sure? Miles says, I work with the end of the trough. Let's go back. Let's go back. Let's go find the pigs. Let's do it.
Miles says, I work with a company that's doing great by all definitions. Recently, one of its star executives was poached by an A+ company to lead a very popular product. Founders tried to retain him. They couldn't, so they wished him well and began the recruitment process to replace him. The investors sent him notes thanking him for all his work. No temper tantrums or ethics debates or Twitter name dragging. Just grown-ups get back to work.
And Martin over at A16Z says, boring. Yeah, but that's kind of what Miles is advocating for. He's like, these types of interactions should be boring, right? So I don't know. That's reasonable.
Sean Maguire says, nice one from the cheap seats. You know, 1% of the story. And Sean's really like teasing something. He's like, there's going to be the files. There's going to be some crazy drop. There's going to be another truth nuke. It's going to be truth World War II. Something like that. Yeah.
But has he actually posted anything? Like it feels like today is the day to like share the truth. I hope everyone can sort it out behind the scenes. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, he said he has a nuclear weapon and yeah, that's a truth nuke. He has a truth nuke. That's what he's saying. A nuclear weapon on the timeline.
But he did come out and say Cognition is Infosys masquerading as Anthropic. And then which is funny because Infosys does like technology IT transformation which is in many ways what Cognition does. But the only thing I would disagree with Sean on is I don't see Cognition like masquerading as Anthropic.
No, not at all. You talked to Scott Wu and he was like, yeah, we're providing enterprise value, automating code generation and business. Yeah. Yeah. It's not an Anthropic library at all over there. I mean, like they take their business seriously, but that's not an Anthropic, that's not a uniquely Anthropic.
Well, and also this would tell me that Factory and Cognition are going in very different directions. He thinks the Infosys direction is bad and hopefully they can go in different directions. That's great. And maybe they could even work together at some point. Ooh. Oh, okay. Yeah.
And maybe you don't need the Snowflake CRO if you have discovered some fundamental thing, right? Like the whole tease was like we did something on the research side, but like that doesn't matter if your CRO leaves, right? Yeah. Hopefully he doesn't even understand it. He doesn't even understand what's going on in the research department. He's like, I don't know. There's a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Just tell me who to call and sell it to. Yeah.
I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Moving on. What's next?
Bunch of people got slop ads from Instinct. They're upset. I'm put helmet. But I would clarify. I don't think they're, I would be shocked if they're actually monetizing this already. Seems like it was just an experiment, right? Yes.
Can we suggest products that people will want to buy because it would be a big, it would be a, I think everybody that, Noah has been very explicit that they plan to do this, right? They plan to get deals with different retailers and platforms and be able to monetize the purchases that they draw. Yeah.
Now, something I've always said or at least said a lot in the last month or so is that if you want to get to the point where you can have meaningful take rates, you need to be driving net new demand. Right? So, if I go to my personal agent and say, buy me this thing, right? The demand was created elsewhere, like it was generated with like advertisement or organic content or something caused me to want to go and buy it.
And brands are not going to be standing up and lining up to pay big referral fees effectively when they already paid to create the demand elsewhere. And so this Instinct test is, hey, we have a, we understand this person. Let's basically suggest some products that they maybe weren't thinking about but they would buy and like a phone charger, like a power bank, like a power bank, or some sunscreen.
I just like, I saw like 12 different screenshots that were all power banks and it's like it is sort of universal. Like if you were going to blast just blast that. I mean, yeah, I mean we talked to the shot at the ridge and he's like, yeah, they just move, like it's a good business, but I don't know.
So we got to just figure out like, are they actually monetizing this? Because Instinct is in a position where you could literally just go and set up an Amazon referral fee thing and start taking a cut. And websites have done that for a long time. Like if you go to the Wirecutter, now owned by the New York Times, you will be able to click on checkout for a suitcase, for some sunglasses, for the best TV they have. And if you click on one of their partner sites, it puts a cookie there. And when you check out, they actually do make a referral commission.
I would be surprised if Instinct wasn't monetizing that. But at the same time, I think they might not even need to because the scale of what they're trying to do is more just like understand the consumer and then have the next proof point for the next raise because obviously it's incredibly compute intensive. They're going to be, they're growing very quickly. They're going to be raising very quickly.
And being able to go back to the next round of VCs and say, hey, we've actually tested e-commerce and it converts at seven times the rate of Instagram or whatever. And it's like, we have this much surface area and here's the response. And yes, there was a lot of feedback that was like, oh, this is slop. Who said it's shop slop or whatever?
Shop slop. Dave Morin called it from OpenClaw. Yeah. Somewhat biased, right? He's running the foundation. Oh, sure. Claw. Sure. Which you know is like basically own your compute, own your agent. Yeah. Don't get ads pushed to you. Have your agent be aligned to you. That's their stance.
I think that overall, here's the thing. Here's the thing. If they can actually give you a 10 out of 10 recommendation, people will love it, right? Like when someone recommends you a product and you're just instantly like, yes, this is great. Yeah, that's a wonderful experience. The question is how quickly, how quickly can they get there? It didn't really feel like they were nailing it, but we don't know. Like maybe people are sharing screenshots.
Like one of these was pretty cool. It was, they found like some Rothy loafers which are generally, they generally sell out. They're kind of hard to find. Yeah. And so it's possible this person didn't like it, but I think a lot of people would be like, cool, thank you.
You're like, this is the worst thing ever. And then you see one thing you're like, and you're like, okay, I'm told. No. The one that I saw that I thought was funny was Instinct knew that this guy had a 911 target. Yeah. And because they'd worked on some insurance stuff. Yeah.
But the issue is that Instinct was like basically clocking, okay, this guy's a car guy. I got to hit him with a bunch of car stuff. Then it recommends a trickle charger, which 911s really don't need, especially modern 911s. And an indoor cover. Yeah. To use inside your garage, which car guys I know would never use an indoor cover because I said this yesterday briefly at the end of the show, but because if you have any sort of the basically like the cover against the paint can cause more damage than it just like sitting there, right? So you generally want it out of the sun, but you're better off just like leaving it.
Especially because if there can be any debris between the cover and the paint, you get even more aware. But you can imagine how it knows about the user, but it doesn't know about what car people actually want, right? And so they can probably get better.
They could recommend like a straight pipe exhaust system or under lighting or something that a car guy would want for their target, right? Yes. Yeah. Or spinners as you always say. Spinners or even just knobby off-road tires, an off-road kit, something like that.
Yeah, with the shop slop screenshot here from Dave Morin, what sticks out to me is the fact that there's like five let's buy this buttons. I don't know. Like this seems like a normal e-commerce site, but the repetition there of all the calls to action is what's throwing me off and making this look sloppy. I don't know if that's what's triggering me, but the actual recommendations there of a couple things.
Well, it's funny because this was always a historical concern with AI ads is the AI that you trust for information and to help you do things suddenly is like, come on, let's like, I think we should buy this, you know, let's buy this. What do you think? Should we buy this? Right? And it's like, it ends up feeling a little, this feels a little bit pushy.
The other thing that stands out is, you know, they've taken a very UI light approach, right? Noah has said you don't need new interfaces. You know, it has a computer. It has a phone number. It has a number that you can text. But I feel like they're going to need to, they have to make interfaces, right? And this is one of the first. Yeah. And then.
Yeah. Again, the challenge is like getting pushed products in text is just very, very, very personal. It's just very, very personal. Yeah. Right. And I think that a lot of e-commerce brands, you know, will use text marketing. I find that I'm like a thousand times more likely to unsubscribe from text marketing than I am from email marketing, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, it can be dangerous to operate on the previous era of like text message conversion rates and open rates because we have moved into a regime where my iMessage, at least probably yours as well, has a number of folders for unknown senders, promotions, spam, transactions. And if it starts flagging Instinct or your AI agent not as a friend but as a promotions vehicle, it goes in that bucket and then the open rate goes way down.
And this is what happened with like the newsletter apocalypse and Gmail where you got filtered off into a different section. You're not actually in the inbox anymore. And so that's pretty risky. I was demoing DOT yesterday and just had a phone call with it on the way home and was shopping and said like, go find this pair of pants that I bought in my Gmail. Go find another pair in like a slightly different color.
And it was hunting around and it was just like, nothing's in stock in your size, bro. And I was like, is there some like global pants outage or something? What's going on? And it was like, no, this isn't like a conspiracy or something. But I was actually like kind of laughing back and forth.
And it was hunting around and it was just like, nothing's in stock in your size, bro. And I was like, is there some like global pants outage or something? What's going on? And it was like, no, this isn't like a conspiracy or something. But I was actually like kind of laughing back and forth.
Crazy. They're crazy.
It was a pretty, it was a pretty delightful experience. But, uh, but but like my end result was like I was like, I don't want you just to send me random stuff, but I do actually want you to check on this. So, go create a background task to check like every day for this pair of pants and then just let me know if they come back and stop.
And it's like, I'm expecting one notification sometime in the next few months for that particular pair of pants and then I can just be like, get it. Okay.
Yeah. But uh anyways, closing this segment out.
Instinct is as of I think last week was like 13 or 14 people, right? Like tiny. They're shipping super quickly. Yeah.
As a as a small team experimenting, I think that's important.
Um, and they just hired our friend Ben from COTU who was at Snapchat for almost a decade. Yeah.
Leading like content and partnerships there. Yeah. He joined as a chief business officer at Instinct and I think that that is going to be a massive unlock for them. Um, there's so much that Ben can do.
Yeah, I do think that there is to improve this experience and make it more like an AMX style experience, right? Where it's very mass market and commercial, but they're trying to make it feel like elevated and and put the user first. They might need to do a new pre-train specifically on car guy data to uh to really nail that, really dial that in. Um, no, I I think that there is a little bit of a gap between the ex-Twitter community, the tech people, the insiders who are like, I don't want a bunch of ads. And like there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, like I actually enjoy going through all the newsletters and sales in my email. I like the email, you know, promotional marketing materials and I watch the ads on Instagram. I like them. I enjoy having products be shown to me.
There's some people that, you know, they maybe they park their car on a on a public street and then they go back to their car, maybe after going to a restaurant, there's one of those like um business card ads like I will buy your junk car. You ever get You ever get You ever get those?
No. In LA, there's people that like they put a they'll put a business card like in your windows. Like I I've gotten that business card but for like uh like gardening or like we'll trim your trees like that type of stuff. I've never gotten an offer to buy my car.
Yeah. I've got the multiple times in LA that like we buy junk cars. I'm like wow, shots fired. I thought I was thought I was doing all right.
Yeah, it was kind of a kind of a neg. Um, but yeah, I I I think a lot of people will will will be excited to have like the daily text of like the best product that they could be that they could possibly buy.
John says, "Nobody on earth can do what Ben can change his instinct overnight." I agree.
I've had I mean, I've had a bunch of conversations with Ben about about where consumer AI should go offline and uh he's going to crush it.
Okay, so uh let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value at Cisco. Uh the folks over at Debbine picked the best day to launch Gemini for Argon when everyone's talking about factory and cognition of course, but uh it did break through some really impressive benchmarks. Uh also some controversy over how much Google employees are using it internally to code. Of course, we'll need to see. The meme is we're launching Gemini 4 Argon and a group of people are talking about did you see the factory guy calling out cognition guy and then the the Twitter sphere goes cool and then goes back to um uh the the the model agnostic the enterprise model agnostic harnesses are fighting uh and so it is certainly a tough day to launch when there's a lot of drama on the timeline that is more engaging than the model wars. The model wars used to be the most engaging thing, but now the interpersonal board dynamics are clearly taking a lead. Um, but what's going on with the naming schemes here? So, OpenAI says all my tokens are gone.
That's pretty funny. Uh, so the naming schemes, uh, OpenAI is in the solar system, you got Luna for the moon, Terra for the earth, Sol for the sun, Astra for the stars. Anthropic is doing Haiku, a Japanese poem, a sonnet, it's a 14-line poem, Opus, major work, Fable, moral story. And then Google arrives with Argon. Just look at the image. The word Argon comes from the ancient Greek word argos which means lazy or inactive. I think they're named after the element argon and they're probably just going to go down the list of elements which is a cool place to pull from but uh yeah tech leaders you got to dig into these words, man. I keep saying this. Too many too many hubristic tales. I don't need any more Project Titan. Project uh what was it? Behemoth. It's like you look it up like the untameable. Oh, you couldn't get it out. Interesting. What a kinked dink. Anyway, um what else is going on in uh in Gemini world? Anything? Yeah, employees are sharing some skepticism. We'll see. We'll see uh how it evolves, how they wind up using it. um and and where it goes from there. Uh uh the the most trusted rating agency for over 30 years, Egan Jones is uh blackpilling says it's over. Uh complete disruption of the economy is now all but certain thanks to AI. Uh it has a community note now. Joe Wisenthal shared this so I don't think it's fake news, but uh the purported Egan Jones risk commentary number 22 does not appear on the firm's website. Okay. It might be entirely fake.
They got him. Interesting. They got him. They got him.
There's so much slop on the timeline. It's crazy. There was this fake uh there was this fake New York Times article about uh a stock photographer that was put out of uh work and I feel somewhat responsible for this because I was doing this bit like a year ago where I would take quotes from our friends and put them just inspect element, no AI. I would just go and edit the HTML to to put a Jeremy GFON quote in the Financial Times and then screenshot it and share it to be like, "Oh, it's like funny that one of their tweets is in the in the Financial Times." And then we got to the point where like we were actually commenting and we were actually in the Wall Street Journal with our basically our tweets and our joke posts. Um, and so things got very muddy there and then people took the uh the the ability to instantiate these these joke posts uh a little too far. So, uh, you can scroll the timeline and just and just see community note after community note of fake news. So, be safe out there. A lot of info hazards. Uh, but this one isn't. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, we got to talk about this house. We got to do another tier list. There's a house that's for sale in Los Angeles that is accepting OpenAI equity and Anthropic equity and um we need to do another tier list to decide whether or not it's a good house. Is it worth precious shares in frontier AI or should the humble AI researcher sitting on 30 million of equity in a in a in a frontier lab uh sit this one out? So, uh, we have the Zillow here. I will pull it up and I want Jordy to give me some tier list stuff. So, uh, 1210 Chory Lane in Los Angeles, price cut, $4 million cheaper, a humble $30 million, five beds, 11 baths. Rate that ratio. Twice as many baths. Having twice as many baths as bedrooms. Where does that fit in the tier list?
I think that's excellent. That's excellent. A tier. A tier. A tier. We got an A tier for having twice as many baths. My man likes some extra bath. Uh the only thing it's a lot of bathrooms for a third of an acre.
Okay. So, third of an acre. 35 technically. Just over a third of an acre. Where do you put the acreage? Uh D tier. Rough. Well, that's just a personal thing. It is you like to to me like smaller house on more land. Okay. But but there's going to be some people that that are that are fired up on the view and they don't care that that um they can't really touch the earth anywhere on the property itself.
Okay. We got some we got some other stuff in here. So, it's set at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. Where do you sit? Quiet cul-de-sacs. Are you a cul-de-sac guy? Um, feng shui. Not not uh can can be rough on the feng shui side for defense purposes. No, no, no. Like trapped energy. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, I'm hearing D tier. F tier. F tier for the cul-de-sac. Okay. Cul-de-sac's F tier. Sorry. Sorry, folks. It's fine. Sorry. Be honest. Be honest. Uh I mean, the view is really incredible. Okay. So, the view the view is the view is um S tier. S tier. What about the 110 linear feet of 11 ft motorized glass walls that disappear completely transforming the great room into an open air retreat above the city? I hate motorized glass walls. Okay, what are we doing? Uh in what tier uh are you putting it in? Motorized 110 ft of motorized experience. F tier. F tier. Like and and I say this because I unfortunately have them and you have you can only put this in F tier if you've been like late at night, you know, you're trying to like turn off the lights and I accidentally hit the motorized door button. Yeah. Like literally middle of the night is loud. At least mine you have to wait until they get to the end. Like it's gas powered so it needs to fire up a V6. It's not super loud but it's it's incredibly annoying when you're sitting there and suddenly Your entire house is open air, you know, past midnight.
Okay. Lightning round. Formal dining room. A tier. A tier. Ocean-facing library office. A uh S tier. S tier. Four stone islands. Is that too many? Maybe. Quite possibly. So, we're putting it in C tier. Okay. Lower level brings together media lounge and illuminated bar. Do you like an illuminated bar? Uh, not not for me, but but I think I think Give me a tier. Give me a tier. Uh, B tier. Temperature controlled wine room. Uh, if you turn it into a data center, I think it's a tier. Okay. Cinematic like Toby. Look, he did theater. Uh, S tier cuz I could say, "Hey, John." Hey, because I I'll be over using it. Okay. Uh, glass enclosed fitness studio. Do you like a home fitness studio? Uh, no. I don't like working out at home. So, F tier. F tier. Okay. Working out in a gym in in a great gym is just a million times better. Okay. We'll end with this one and I'm hoping for a good result. We're going with the 60-foot zero-edge infinity pool and spa that appear to dissolve into the hills joined by multiple multiple lounge and fire areas, a full outdoor kitchen, and a flat lawn. D tier. D tier. What you said pools were S tier yesterday. The most elite setup for a pool is basically like grass surrounding the full pool. Okay. and and being able to go from grass straight into the water is is obviously F tier. Okay. And anytime it's just kind of like a body of water. Grass to water is S tier. Out of the water and you're falling down the hill, that's F tier. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I think we clarified it. Well, well, agree or disagree with Jordy. Make your call. As long as you got 30 million in cash, OpenAI stock or Anthropic equity because the seller will accept equity as payment. Fast. As much as I'm sure this is entertaining for our friend Will who's in the waiting room, he's got more important things to do than he does. Let me do a tier list. What's going on? Will Bruey from Varda. Welcome back to the show. How you doing?
Will Bruey 46:40 ↗
Hey, it's it's not that I disagree with Jordy, it's that it's inconsistent. You know, the the the pool inconsistency, you know, that infinity pool you just had, definitely S tier. Come on, guys. Yes. No shot. No shot. There's a bunch of houses in LA where you can get an infinity style pool on a sprawling lawn with the same view. And I think anyways, I think the house is dramatically overpriced. That's all I'm going to say. That's all I'm going to say.
Jordi Hays 47:07 ↗
Um, but well, uh, more importantly, space manufacturing, space industrialization certainly not overpriced. We're just getting started on the space manufacturing boom. Give us the latest. What's the latest in VA news? What's the latest in space?
Will Bruey 47:22 ↗
You guys, you guys know I only come on when it's gong-worthy. So, today is the first flight. The first flight of we don't know what's happening, but we're excited. Some money. Awesome. Awesome. I love the energy. Love the hype. This is great, guys. Um, no. So, uh, I come to you because today is the first flight of multiple commercial reality history. I can't hear you. I can't hear you. I can't hear you over the sound of this gong. I have no idea what's happening. Too much success. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, I come bringing news of uh Series D. You might have saw that in the news this week. I'm currently Oh, baby. Mark hits him. I need him. He's going to break the gong. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. We'll lock in. We'll lock in. Okay. Sorry. I just got excited. I know it's a lot to get over. You know, we want five bathroom houses, you know, now we're on re-entry vehicles. I don't know how you guys do the context switch. I get it. I get it. Yeah, it's all uh All right. Why is it important? Why does it matter? So, it matters because we are now in a fleet mentality, which means that we can manufacture at scale. We've done proof of concepts. We've been we've begun scaling over the last couple of years. We've flown six of these vehicles. Uh today is eight and nine at the same time, which just means that um you know, we have the ability in the infrastructure to do a fleet rather than just one-off missions, which means uh significant unlock for microgravity manufacturing.
Jordi Hays 49:02 ↗
Well, how did that actually play out in the factory? Like I remember touring the factory and seeing like it it felt like an assembly line but maybe like one capsule at one vehicle at a time. Are you just uh parallelizing and you have like multiple pods coming together piece by piece or is there machinery involved now? Like what did it actually take to go to you know this higher velocity?
Will Bruey 49:28 ↗
Yeah, the assembly line is higher velocity for sure. The mission control is now parallel. Launch ops are now parallel. We have vehicles at the Cape and Vandenberg, multiple vehicles on a rocket. Um, all the ground systems, a lot of it's digital and in software where we have to be able to handle data from multiple vehicles at the same time. They fly over a ground station, how do you tell them apart? How do you do mission ops with multiple vehicles? So, this has obviously been done before in constellations, but never for re-entry vehicles, you know? Um, and so like if you think about Starlink or other constellations, hundreds, sometimes thousands of satellites. Um, we are now able to do that not just with satellites but with re-entry vehicles which has never been done before today which is kind of a weird thing to say.
Jordi Hays 50:08 ↗
Yeah, I read some article about um like space launch capacity being extremely tight as a market. Jordi was even pitching like buying future capacity and reselling it trying to arbitrage something. But how much does that go into your fundraising plans? Your it's effectively your supply chain like you're going to need to buy launch capacity years out. Uh how real is the crunch? Are you I mean we just saw Starship come back and be successful. So it feels like there might be a big unlock. Are we in a temporary period of a tight market or is it just going to be tighter and tighter and this is going to be core competency for you forever?
Will Bruey 50:46 ↗
Yeah, I think it'll come in waves like any other market in this situation. We got lucky because we have we booked our flights. We took it, we also had that arbitrage idea. So we booked flights all the way out through 2029. So we have seven already on contract for next year, 10 the year after that and so on and so forth. So um you know as one launch vehicle winds down like Falcon 9 and Starship winds back up to a microgravity manufacturing company. Uh we treat launch like shipping and so you know a lot of business not a lot of business models are you talking to someone like oh FedEx has a new truck. What do you think? You know it doesn't it kind of is below the layer of abstraction for us. So, as long as our uh we have access to space and uh the COGS meet um the value that we're generating, it's it's a G&A there.
Jordi Hays 51:29 ↗
So, I I think everyone's acutely aware of like how much space is booming. The best representation is just like SpaceX is a $2 trillion company IPOed the price held like it's it's so real in everyone's face. I'm more interested in your view on what's happening in bio and the pharmaceutical industry because it feels like GLP-1s are really exciting but there's also this sort of undercurrent of you know progress at Anthropic around the future of AI that we've talked to a ton of AI for bio companies that are doing molecule design drug design uh there's a lot of energy there that feels like it's going to get unlocked how much how important is that trend to your business. What are what's real there? What are you actually excited about and then what are the timelines around that?
Will Bruey 52:18 ↗
So, I'm I'm definitely excited about um AI's contribution to life sciences and the biotech industry at large. It's a force multiplier. It's also a great pairing with a company like Varda where the aspect that we're offering is a low-gravity environment to create chemical outcomes that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do on Earth period. So even if you know even if you can uh or if AI does unlock the answer if you will to do something you still have to go to space to get to microgravity you cannot physically replicate microgravity or lower gravity on Earth. That's Einstein's principle of equivalence. And so I'm I'm super excited about this especially with respect to monoclonal antibodies and informing us which drugs make the most sense to crystallize in microgravity. So, in the same way that this is acting as kind of a tide raises all boats in the biotech industry, that's also true for Varda, of course. And the lucky aspect for us is that that gravity knob is something we have a monopoly on right now.
Jordi Hays 53:14 ↗
Yeah. So, sorry on gravity. Let's go. Let's give it up for that. Um I I wanted I wanted to get um like how should um space enthusiasts um update their timelines after the last Starship launch and and the success a mark a mark to market for enthusiasm. Uh uh I would say pretty excited. Let's see. So, you know, sometimes I I like to think back about like, okay, when was Falcon 9 at this level of maturity? And of course, you can account for all the synergies that SpaceX and compounding interest of learnings that they've had since then. Um, going to orbit and landing. Um, you know, this one technically landed in the ocean, but it was, you know, from a physics perspective, essentially the same thing as like let's say flight 21. So, you're kind of in the 2015 time frame, if you will, in Falcon 9 years. um if you want to mark to market that way. From an enthusiasm factor, I mean, I don't know, you you saw those videos, they were awesome. Uh it's hard to not be enthusiastic about uh the space industry after you see a skyscraper uh spitting out data centers into orbit. That's pretty effing cool.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh is there a risk factor to you that data centers crowd out uh or or kind of, you know, like just drive up the price of launch? Because when it feels like the first Varda model was probably predicated just on communication. Now there's this new entrant. How do you play nice with that? Is there actually a benefit to the launch market broadly as it becomes more competitive to having some diversity of revenue? How do you think about the long-term interaction between you and the the space data center market?
Will Bruey 54:53 ↗
Yeah, I don't think it's too different than any other infrastructure buildout in history. And what I mean by that is um you know locomotives, hey the killer app there was moving oil around or moving steel around. Um but you know there's no reason not to scale up. We already have the operational leverage um from having that infrastructure exist. And once you show that the unit economics for any application whether it be microgravity manufacturing or yeah or data centers or anything else of that nature um there's really no reason not to take advantage of the rails that are already laid. Um and so I don't uh you know there might be some high frequency noise in there but other than that the free market has shown that uh launch access to space there's a lot of application layers on top of that data center Starlink etc pharmaceuticals um and so uh the word is out that money is to be made off our home planet unfortunately and so uh or fortunately I should say and so therefore um uh uh uh investment uh will go there to bridge the gap between uh known value and realized value.
Jordi Hays 55:53 ↗
Oh yeah, there's the uh this is is this from the Starship launch? This one? Um take me through this one is ours right here. This is uh this one is ours going up right now. Um uh we're about to see main engine cut off of the second stage and that's when uh both of our re-entry vehicles will deploy from the rocket. Wow. Uh take me through re-entry specifically. It feels like that is the place where you've always been the pioneer, the leader, the most aggressive, advanced, pushing the envelope of like what the system was designed to handle. Uh there were setbacks in the past, delays, there were landings in other countries. Um what is the current strategy? Have you found an equilibrium for how to bring something back reliably? Where's the right place to land? Uh how has the how's the the actual re-entry process evolved?
Will Bruey 56:48 ↗
Uh let's see. So we're this will be eight and this is vehicle eight and nine. Um so we've flown six before. Uh five of them we landed in Australia at our landing site with our partner Southern Launch. One of them we landed in Utah with our partner the Utah test and training range. Uh it's kind of um rinse and repeat now. Uh, we have an FAA operator's license, which means that if we're not doing dramatic changes to the operation Oh, here we go, baby. Sonic boom. Um, moment of silence for uh for breaking the sound barrier. It never gets old, dude. It never ever gets old. Um, no, but I back to the question of of re-entry. Just asking serious questions. Dude, you should be You should be You should be a streamer. I think I think a lot of people would watch would watch you just like react. That's crazy. Let's get some W's in the chat for the sound barrier. So good. Oh my god. Um, no, but I mean like you know the it's been proven, you know. I mean we've done it now multiple times. So it's really exciting. Yeah.
Jordi Hays 57:51 ↗
Uh, so does uh uh so it sounds like Australia is not going to have a monopoly on landing these things that there's going to be a different uh places. Uh is there is there any uh possibility of landing in the ocean for you? Uh is that like did you cross that off as like not viable? Cuz it seems very logical. It's like the biggest possible target. It's international waters, but at the same time like you got to catch it and not let it sink. But what was the actual thinking between like like why we haven't heard like oh yeah VA just land just lands in the uh in the ocean every time. Uh yeah, so we land on land because it's why put a boat in the assembly line is really what it comes down to. From a unit economics perspective, it's just cheaper to land on land. The reason why re-entry in the past has been done in the water is just to absorb the shock load for astronauts. Uh but since we don't have astronauts on board, we're moving in objects. These are just drug molecules. I mean, you can drop a pill bottle on the ground and nobody dies. So let's drop a pill bottle on the ground because it's cheaper than dropping one in the ocean. It's really just as simple as that. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Very cool. Uh, Jordy, anything else? Uh, no. I mean, I'd like to see you drop something in the ocean to create some waves. Well, I wanted to I wanted to land one in the Taiwan Strait just to prove a point of what could be possible with a technology, you know, but uh, you know, I don't know if the State Department would have Oh, by the way, I see you put 251 million Series D there. Yeah, it is. Um, I I I said it should we should just say 250, make it simple, but you know, Delian wanted to get that plus one in there. So you can give him some next time. Okay, someone snuck in at the last second. Got room for one. Who got that last allocation? I thought we capped it. Well, congratulations and thanks so much for coming on the show, dude. Great to see you. Amazing progress. It's it's it's like our favorite part of the job is just seeing the progression across, you know, different different appearances and you guys are just um you know, it's amazing. Yeah. Thank you. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in person soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Public Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is the chairman, president, and CEO of EcoAB, Christopher Beck is coming in to the TVP Ultra Dome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Christophe Beck 1:00:09 ↗
Hey, good to see you guys.
Jordi Hays 1:00:10 ↗
Good to see you, too. Thank you so much for joining here. This is good. It's not even Friday. I know. I don't know if you caught much of the last uh interview, but we're certainly acting like it's Friday. We're we're certainly act we're certainly acting like it's Friday. Yeah, it's Friday somewhere. Every day is Friday. My god. Spending time in Korea the other day. They were talking on Saturday. It's the second Friday. Sunday it's the third Friday. So it never stops. Yeah. But uh first time on the show. would love for you to uh uh give us a little introduction on yourself and the company just as kind of set the table for the discussion.
Christophe Beck 1:00:48 ↗
Okay. Well, uh let me talk about the company first, which is way more important than just me. Uh we're the world's water uh and infection prevention company. So, we solving big problems like uh water scarcity, small thing. Um making sure that we have enough water so to survive uh and to grow uh for for the years to come. Making sure that food is safe. uh around the world not an obvious thing unfortunately when we look at what happened with Listeria um lately as well and today so looking at how do we make sure that AI infrastructure um which means microelectronics manufacturing power generation and cooling in data centers so he's made in ways that are well good for people good for the environment big topic right now so that's where I'm spending most of my time uh was born in Switzerland and I've been living 10 different countries so I don't exactly know where home is, but that's where I am right now.
Jordi Hays 1:01:43 ↗
Great. Uh I there I mean water is a huge topic. We can go all over the place, but I'd love to know more concretely. Um uh what what what products services are actually relevant to uh the the world of modern data centers. Uh we've heard about closed loop systems, there's filtration systems, there's a lot of different things that go on. How do you fit in when we're thinking about a new power shell coming online, a bunch of water cooled GPUs going in that building? Uh where when are you meeting the builder? How are you interfacing with them? What products and services are they using?
Christophe Beck 1:02:18 ↗
Well, things have changed quite a bit uh as you guys know. So for a very long time it was uh air conditioning, HVAC, um the cool air in a in a in another data room and um that's what we were doing uh basically. So was making sure that the whole cooling system, cooling towers, control equipment, remote monitoring, everything was doing well in order to keep the um the data centers are running. That's changed the last two years in dramatic ways uh with Blackwell, with Vera Rubin and all the new things that are coming up. Well, on one hand, um you can't cool them with a track anymore. Uh it has to be directly chip cooling and second um if you don't do it differently, it's using a lot of water and that's a that's a big deal. So what we've done is basically to invent technologies that are in a enclosed loop which is what we've done in most industries as well and to say well you can have the combination of um getting a coolant directly on every GPU anywhere in any rack um in the data center uh to get into a CDU a coolant distribution unit. Um we have coolant as well uh that are remote monitored so we can trace basically the quality of the coolant is it cooling as it should. Is there any risk as well so to lose any uh cooling capacity as well and the really cool news is that well you don't need any incremental water for it. So it's a closed circuit you don't need incremental water they don't have impact for the communities around and the other good news is that ultimately you need less power to do it which means more power to compute.
Jordi Hays 1:03:52 ↗
Yeah, of course. Um, I'm interested in how you have been setting the company up to thrive in an era of uh the the the the gigawatt compute campus era. I don't know what else to call it, but it feels like we're seeing projects in in Abilene uh huge campuses of buildings and and buildings and buildings. They go on for miles. And I'm wondering is it enough to just uh vertically or or horizontally duplicate your current solution set or are you actually uh at a place where you need to uh build new systems that can handle the bigger buildings and the bigger networking fabric that's happening at these campuses. Uh what has your solution been as the as the actual campuses have gotten bigger?
Christophe Beck 1:04:41 ↗
Well, things evolve very quickly because the demand uh evolves quickly. The the way uh chips are being produced evolves uh as well. So, we're trying to stay ahead um of it. We had the last few days. So, we're talking about innovation with our team as well and saying okay now the the next move is this direct to chip cooling um which is 3% um of the data centers and uh water neutral data center in the country. We have three um that are like that. So it's very early um on that journey but at the same time um as you're mentioning so with the the gigawatt type of data center we know that direct to chip um is right for the near future um whatever that means 1 2 3 years and needs to think afterwards what is it going to be so we're thinking about dual phase it's basically an evaporation so of the liquid so close to the the GPU but it's thinking as well so laser systems uh for instance to to remove the heat um from uh from computers within um the rack. So that's a little bit so more for the future. So we never stop but for now it's really so scaling um the the direct to chip cooling. But the most important in a way right now when I think about the next few months you know even for that so we're using kind of um a a coolant which has some chemistry in it in order not having fouling and all the crazy stuff that you might have in your car for instance. And we're thinking well um if we were to use nature just water you have 17% more cooling power um of it but you get the fouling you get scaling you get the corrosion and all the stuff coming with water. So it's trying to find ways to get closer to 99% water
Then to get to second phase, then to get to maybe light laser. That's the way we're thinking about it. That's data center. But what's important to keep in mind as well, you need to power those chips as well. That's electricity generation. That's the second user of water in the country after agriculture. I need to produce the chips, which is where we're active as well.
Jordi Hays 1:06:41 ↗
Sure. Sure. Yeah. What, how have you grappled with the AI bottlenecks, the bottlenecks to the buildout? Sometimes it's good to be a bottleneck because that means the stock's going through the roof as demand. You can just raise prices so much. At the same time, you want to keep your customers happy. You want to keep the supply chain flowing. What have you had to grapple with on the supply chain side to make sure that when you get the call, you can deliver your products on time, on budget, within the expectations, and to the quality that the buyer demands?
Christophe Beck 1:07:16 ↗
Well, it's the number one problem if we look at the two political parties today. So they don't agree on much, but on that they agree that they don't like data centers, which is a problem for everything that we're talking about here. When you think about it, well, investments go through the roof and all that, but 60% of the projects are being either paused or delayed. That's a problem. So on one hand, you have huge demand, and on the other hand, you have huge slowdown politically for the most part. And it's really unfortunate what's happening here because in our country right now, there is this way of talking about technology and AI in negative ways. It's going to kill all of us. It's going to eliminate all jobs. It's going to be impacting our power bills. I mean, all the stuff that are really dramatic, which is really unfortunate, but that's where it's going. And at the same time, locally, in a community, in a village, in a city, nobody wants to have a data center. So what's happening in our country right now? So we think that speaking louder will solve the problem. Well, that makes it just worse because the whole negativity is getting more prominent, which is a problem. What we do, and we've done that in many industries, is basically to get much closer to the community. It's to go to a city council. It's to call the neighbors. It's to be with the local politicians, the NOS's, all the people who really hate what's being done, and to listen to them and to share with them. Okay. Do you realize that we can have a data center that is going to use no water, which means less than a car wash in your own village there? Your power bill might go down because you have the same infrastructure and you use more power through the same infrastructure. Okay, you don't need to be a genius to understand. So all the cost is going to go down as well. And that's how we're making some progress. And one example is Minnesota and Texas. We've been working with the two states. I took those two because they're kind of extreme, most liberal, most conservative, one way to simplify it. And interestingly enough, Minnesota hasn't gotten to a pause while Texas went. So in a way, I think we're finding ways, but he talked.
Jordi Hays 1:09:33 ↗
Have you been surprised that the sort of tech industry saw that data centers were unpopular and decided to start calling them AI factories? Because I'm sure you work with like thousands of factories, actual factories globally that are actually producing, you know, waste water. They might have a smoke stack or something. They're not the most aesthetic things. I would think you want to not go towards that.
Christophe Beck 1:09:57 ↗
It's the last thing you want to be. Yes.
Jordi Hays 1:09:59 ↗
Thank you.
Christophe Beck 1:10:01 ↗
Oh my god. Yeah. Well, I don't think it's the right thing. And both sides are going so kind of against each other in crazy ways and thinking, well, if I spend more money against you, I'm going to convince you that you're wrong and that you're going to say yes to my stuff. That's where we are right now. That's the exact wrong way. And we're talking with the hyperscalers, the collocators as well, and to say calm down, get closer to the folks in your communities, the schools, the churches, the NOS's, the communities. They're good people. They're like us. They're Americans. They want to have a good life in front of them. Speak less loud, try to listen, come with solutions because technology is going to help all the things there. And for whatever reason, we spent two weeks in China a week ago. Well, 90% love it.
Jordi Hays 1:10:58 ↗
Yeah. Well, that's exactly what the Chinese want us to slow down. You say, well, are we doing the right thing here? Well, maybe not.
No, I completely agree. Tell me about some of the other product lines. And I don't know if you have a strong thesis on this, but I'm very interested in desalination. I remember Blake Masters during one of his campaign runs is talking about the future of California should be nuclear-powered desalination because that would allow the Colorado River to flow back to Nevada and Arizona and sort of create this lush inland area. And I was like, from a technology perspective, it sounded doable on a long enough timeline, but we talk to CEOs all the time. We haven't talked to that many people that are like, I'm going to be the one who's doing the mega project on desalination. We've talked to plenty of people that want to do that nuclear. What is your view on desalination?
Christophe Beck 1:11:57 ↗
Well, it sounds great because obviously we're surrounded by water, especially when you're in California. We don't have that problem in Minnesota where I'm living. It's kind of far away from the sea. But desalination is not the solution for the future. It requires a lot of power to get it done. It needs to be close to the sea, obviously, otherwise you don't get much salt water. That creates political issues as well. Look at what's happening with the big oil pipeline in Saudi that got destroyed by the Houthis as well. Well, that's creating a big issue in the country. If it's water, which is the case in Saudi, you have another problem because you can cut the water access as well to big cities. There's a much simpler solution, which is to do what nature has always done. The concept of wastewater is just a wrong concept. It's an engineering flaw for an engineer like me. I'm an aerospace engineer. This is just a flaw. Nature has never done it that way. It's always in a circular way. It's in a lake. It evaporates. It goes to the clouds. It goes down. It gets filtered. You use it and all that. Whether we like it or not, the water that we're drinking today has been through a human a few hundred times. Don't overthink it. It just keep recycling.
Jordi Hays 1:13:15 ↗
Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
Christophe Beck 1:13:18 ↗
Keep recycling. You know, with the fabs, we have that discussion in Taiwan, in Korea, here in the country. We have this art of putting those fabs in places where there's absolutely no water. Well, you need ultra-pure water for a fab. You're familiar with it. It's a million times more pure than the water you put in your own body in an injection. Well, that's hard to recycle to make sure that you get to the highest standard. We've developed those technologies at ultra-pure water level. Well, guess what? You recycle the water, you get higher purity water, which means that you can get lower than the 2 nanometers and you get a higher yield as well. So from 50-60% to 80-85%. This is billions. Why wouldn't we do that? You don't need a desal plan to do that.
Jordi Hays 1:14:07 ↗
Okay. Okay.
Christophe Beck 1:14:09 ↗
Real rock.
Jordi Hays 1:14:10 ↗
Decelerate the desalination. He's a del. That's what he is. I'll agree. Disagree. I'm still optimistic, but you make a lot of good points.
Last question. I know we're over. From my understanding, in many of the areas where there are proposed data center developments, the actual water infrastructure in those areas is terrible and that the local water utilities are actually wasting water, as in there's leaks because the infrastructure is old. They're underbilling for water because they don't actually have good systems to sort of understand flow. Is there not an opportunity for the tech industry to go and say to these local communities, hey, our data centers are very water efficient already. We're going to make a closed loop system. It's going to use less water than a car wash and we know that you're wasting a ton of water by having leaks and underbilling and all these different things. Why don't we invest a relatively more modest amount to actually just upgrade the local water utility infrastructure in these areas that just don't have a lot of funding? Again, I've heard a lot of this through the grapevine, but it feels like you could come in and say, hey, we're going to give you $20 million to upgrade your local utility to remove waste and help find leaks, etc., and then we're going to put this thing in that is going to use a little bit of water, but the delta will be significant.
Christophe Beck 1:15:48 ↗
So just to be clear, it uses zero. Well, so we're working with some companies, not to be named. There's not so many obviously. So thinking about data centers in space. Those data centers in space are not connected to a garden hose obviously. So it's 100% closed loop. So you need no water. You bring it once and it works forever. What the point you're making of saying supporting the communities, that's a good idea, but that has nothing to do with the data centers or providing water to it because you need zero, like 0.0, and that's important to keep in mind.
Jordi Hays 1:16:28 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. I know, but it's just like for me there's outrage around data center water usage and no outrage around just poor utilities, poor water infrastructure in these local often rural communities where no one for years has come in and said they just don't have the budget to invest, right?
Christophe Beck 1:16:45 ↗
And tech is a great idea.
Jordi Hays 1:16:48 ↗
Yes. And that's back to the point I was making before. It's to get closer to the local communities. It's not to spend billions on communication. It's to be closer to those guys. I mean, it's people like us. They want to have kind of a good community, good schools, live in great places, not having their water being wasted and all that. Yes, we should help and we have to.
Love it. Thank you so much.
All right. Well, I think we solved it. We did it.
Christophe Beck 1:17:15 ↗
We did it.
Jordi Hays 1:17:16 ↗
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Christophe Beck 1:17:17 ↗
Great to meet you. Let's do it again soon.
Jordi Hays 1:17:21 ↗
Yeah, we got to do it again soon.
Christophe Beck 1:17:22 ↗
Great to see you guys. Talk to you soon. See you later.
John Coogan 1:17:24 ↗
Goodbye. I got a pitch for you, Jordi. You know how we mentioned the ultra-pure water that's used in semiconductor fabs?
Jordi Hays 1:17:33 ↗
Yes.
John Coogan 1:17:34 ↗
I think you got to daily drive that.
Jordi Hays 1:17:35 ↗
I think so, too.
John Coogan 1:17:36 ↗
100 bucks a gallon.
Jordi Hays 1:17:37 ↗
Actually, no. You want the mineral content.
John Coogan 1:17:40 ↗
Oh, you want the mineral content. Okay.
Jordi Hays 1:17:43 ↗
You want the mineral content. Okay, folks.
Well, then it's out. It's out. But you know who's in Figma agents? Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And you know who else is in the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Ray is Capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest will probably be there shortly. We got Hassan Raza, co-founder and CEO of Tavis here with us for the first time on TVPN. Welcome to the show. How you doing?
Hassaan Raza 1:18:13 ↗
Hey, good. It's so nice to meet you all. Excited to be on here.
Jordi Hays 1:18:16 ↗
Thank you. Beautiful office. What is the car behind you? Is that a Corvette?
Hassaan Raza 1:18:21 ↗
That is, it's a '85 Corvette. It's part of the museum. I spent the last couple years restoring it. But we got a lot of vintage computers out here. If you've seen bad, they said it was one of the most powerful computers at the time. So it's a lot of fun.
Jordi Hays 1:18:36 ↗
I love it. I love it. Very cool. Tell us about what you're building. Tell us about Griffin.
Hassaan Raza 1:18:41 ↗
Yeah. I mean, so Tabist in a nutshell, we're a research lab focused on human computing. So we want to deliver a future where using a machine will feel like talking to a friend or coworker. And today we released our biggest breakthrough model yet. It's called Griffin. It's a human interaction model. And it's the first model to pass a Turing test.
Jordi Hays 1:19:00 ↗
Did it actually pass? I'm looking at the data. 48% of testers, 26 out of 54 believed Griffin was a real person. That feels like you barely didn't pass.
Hassaan Raza 1:19:12 ↗
Well, to be clear, before, the next best model had less than a 2% pass rate. I'm not saying it's not amazing. I'm not saying it's not the best. I'm not saying it's not.
Jordi Hays 1:19:23 ↗
What I'm saying is job's not finished.

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APA

Hays, J. (2026, October 1). Timeline Mud Wrestling, Apple Play Coming to Old Porsches, SI Domain Debate [Interview transcript]. TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003047/

MLA

Jordi Hays. "Timeline Mud Wrestling, Apple Play Coming to Old Porsches, SI Domain Debate." TBPN, 1 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003047/.

BibTeX
@misc{hays2026_3003047,
  author       = {Jordi Hays},
  title        = {Timeline Mud Wrestling, Apple Play Coming to Old Porsches, SI Domain Debate},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3003047/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}