History’s Largest Oil Disruption, Oil & AI, Sundar's New Pay Deal | Alex Epstein, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, Charles Lamanna, Julien Bek, Eoghan McCabe, Michelle Volz

14:01Charles Lamanna:This may be it. First, let me start out. Muratorite, salut 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 who are about to die.

14:17Alex Epstein:Salute you.

14:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Insane, insane aura for, you know, CNBC really doesn't get enough credit for being so innovative in terms of broadcasting and entertainment. Really, some of the greatest clips.

14:29Alex Epstein:I love one of the top comments. This is an old clip.

14:33Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, obviously.

14:34Alex Epstein:Obviously, brother.

14:35Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It's 480p. It's probably from the 90s. So Zero Hedge says, you know, with oil at 111, total panic. And Mimetic Sisyphus shares a clip that says, half of this site for the last week has sounded like this. Let's see.

14:51Julien Bek:Producers are telling me there is breaking news. The Asian financial markets have just opened to a huge sell-off. 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.

15:09Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 in from its overnight highs, says Joe Weisenthal. And the quote post is Chris Paul.

15:31Alex Epstein:It's a huge three to cut down the lead to 42.

15:35Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Absolutely. Absolutely brutal. So let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. Stop making fun of me.

15:49Alex Epstein:We're somewhat of a smodern business.

15:51Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We're 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.

16:01Alex Epstein:So we got to give you a shout out to George Kurtz for the Mercedes performance yesterday.

16:06Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Oh, yeah.

16:07Alex Epstein:One, two. One, two.

16:08Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Really good. George Kurtz. Would you look at that? Takes a stake in the team.

16:12Alex Epstein:Suddenly they're at the top.

16:14Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. He's on to something. Well, my essay this morning was titled, Why is no one talking about oil? Of course, everyone is talking about oil. Oil discourse gushed onto the timeline this weekend. 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 the AI world are sort of tuning all of this out because they see recursive self-improvement, AGI, ASI, the build out 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?

17:02Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Like, is there any effect? My conclusion was that 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 So power has been at the forefront of the AI pushback like everyone's worried about these local energy prices These electricity prices increasing near the data centers, but and it's been it's big 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.

17:43Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It moves so quickly. You know, one jitter in the economy.

17:47Alex Epstein:And 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 they wouldn't really notice it.

17:59Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:No, no.

17:59Alex Epstein: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. It's variable cost.

18:11Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 something about filling up at the gas tank where you see the number ticking up. And you're doing that on an 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 in real time. It's very visual. It's very interactive.

18:40Alex Epstein:Yeah, I remember I must have been probably 18 at this point where I would just go. And for a long time, I'd prepay for a certain amount of gas. I got 20 bucks. I got 20 bucks.

18:52Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Let's see how much I got.

18:53Alex Epstein:And I felt like really, I felt like the king of the castle once I just put my card down and let it run up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How far to go.

19:01Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:No, no, totally. So pain in the pump's been like a big, broad economic issue. It's so visceral like the actual phrase has a lot of power in politics and in like attack ads like Your gas prices are going up under this person. That's why you got a vote for me. This is this is common But in AI circles the discussions 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 but can they recursively self-improve? Are they RSI? Are we in RSI now?

19:41Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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. 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 pill. A lot of smart people agree. There's definitely something happening. There's still this question of like, what is sticky? 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 irrational and you could get a better thing from a computer, but people like the human version or whatever.

20:27Alex Epstein:The irony is that George Hott's hitting the timeline to raise money makes me more bullish on acceleration. Yeah. Because if not, he's obviously not historically been a huge fan of venture capital.

20:43Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Well, he's not raising from traditional VCs, he said. He specifically said he wants to raise from 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 Watts at Tiny Corp? He said that he's raising$20 million to buy a building. He's going to buy a building. Here it is. So he said, this is from Tiny Corp, the makers of Tiny Grad 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.

21:23Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Link in our Discord. Wait for AMD to launch the RDNA 5 96 gigabyte cards mid-2027. Pre-order 3 ,000 cards. Hopefully we can negotiate for$2 ,500 each. Build$520 ,000 tiny boxes with six of the cards in each box. Run all the Chinese LLMs. Make$600 ,000 per month revenue selling tokens on Open Router. Market depth is there. This is 1 % of Open Router. Improvements to TinyGrad 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 they price for peak, not usage. We get like 3C kilowatt hour power, three cents per kilowatt hour.

22:12Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We can also make$100 ,000 per month leasing co-location space to Kama. Building and cards paid off in three years max, 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 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 for 3x more machines, 5.4 revenue per month, then continue to scale from there, custom chips, et cetera.

22:50Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:He's starting a NeoCloud? Are you starting? Yeah, he's going to be serving tokens. So that was incredibly bullish. Demand is definitely there. At the same time, 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.

23:30Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So everything new is old.

23:32Alex Epstein: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? How is this not artificial intelligence competing with?

23:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. So I think he is agreeing with that. But it's that there is an immense amount of desire for this binary moment. This is the singularity. This is HCI. This is ASI. The RSI is here. This thing is happening right now, and there's before and after, and everything has changed. 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 define the period by maybe a decade and you need a few decades to understand that moment.

24:32Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It's very hard to go back and there is like the iPhone moment and there is like the first launch of, I don't know, AOL. I don't even know what the iPhone moment of the internet was just because it was sort of a slow rollout. Anyway, live GPU clusters. Where's Jordy going? Oh, you're moving the goalposts. Okay. Jordy's moving the goalposts. Where are you moving the goalposts to?

24:55Alex Epstein:Just over here.

24:56Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Okay, but why? Is there a reason?

24:59Alex Epstein:Well, I mean, after you move, George is moving the goalposts.

25:01Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Oh, okay, okay, okay. He's moving the goalposts. So I said, you know, it's clear that the AI industry continues to grow and continues to need more and more power and compute, as we've seen from George Hoth's new project. That means large data center campuses, but if they're not in random office buildings that George is picking up on the cheap, they're probably going to be built with construction equipment. So what does this mean? They don't just drop from the heavens. They require building, which requires oil, but how much oil? And is oil a serious, is a serious oil shock enough to impact the AI build out in a meaningful way.

25:40Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Spoiler alert, basically no. But live GPU clusters in the United States do not use much oil directly. Only 0.6 % of U.S. electricity in 2024 came from petroleum. We're much, much more dependent on natural gas. Something like 42 % of U.S. electricity is natural gas. And so America ramped up natural gas production significantly over the past two decades. A lot of that was in reaction to the wars in the Middle East. Hey, we need to be less dependent 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.

26:23Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Data centers only consume a single digit percent of U.S. electricity. So you're looking at 0.6 % of a few percent is like the actual impact. So the short-term impact of high oil prices should be very limited on AI. Building out new capacity is much more expensive. Yeah, that said, it's worth noting.

26:40Alex Epstein:I think it's something like Qatar produces something like 20 % of the world's liquefied natural gas rate. We're not for us. Yeah, not for us. So we're in a good spot. But this is going to impact the data center build-outs or active data centers across the rest of the world if this continues. Yeah.

27:01Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So when you're talking about building new capacity, building new data centers, oil is a little bit more involved. So 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. 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 that slows things down.

27:42Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:You have to wait a week while you find another supplier. That stuff can add up to just a little bit of a delay. 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. But the bigger problem and the one that people should be talking about, and I think you were debating with Dan Primek 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.

28:12Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So JLL 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, I don't know if that's a huge squeeze on cash flow, but it's certainly a squeeze on cash flow. 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, you start looking at interest expense bills that are already huge, but then they're going to go up by$5 billion or up by a full extra billion just with a 50 basis point increase, half a percent.

29:07Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So half a percent change in the Fed funds rate can echo through. Even a quarter percent could probably be amplified into a multi-billion dollar cost line on your balance sheet or on your income statement as you're servicing that debt. Overall, higher oil prices do make the AI rollout harder, but not really for existing AI capacity. I wouldn't expect token pricing to change based on the price of oil, but there is 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. Middle Eastern investors pulling back, I agree with you.

29:45Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I do think that this is a significant risk because if they pull back on big investments, makes these mega rounds more difficult. Retail investors could fly to oil stocks or defense stocks. They think that this is going to be a thing for months and months and months. It could all flip if there's a quick resolution, though, which is what I'm hoping for. But if things continue, the industry walks an even tighter tightrope.

30:07Alex Epstein:Yeah, I mean, the big question right now is the hundreds of billions of dollars 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 billions of dollars of GPUs? Over there.

30:22Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And then also the money coming here is another thing where you might want to spend it elsewhere. Quickly, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full-text search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about public. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service, whatever your investing strategy is.

30:41Alex Epstein:And we have to say happy birthday to Trey. Happy birthday, Trey. We love you. We're very excited to have you.

30:46Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Thank you. One of our strongest soldiers.

30:48Alex Epstein:We appreciate you. It's been an honor to have a podcast with you.

30:52Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And have you been noticing that it's been hotter in Los Angeles?

30:55Alex Epstein:I have.

30:55Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Downtown Los Angeles is forecasted to approach 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday and Friday in March.

31:03Alex Epstein:Which is why. Not good. We're going to do the weather. We have a new segment for you today. We're doing the weather on TBPN. We have our very own Ben.

31:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We have Ben.

31:14Alex Epstein:Hello, guys. How are you?

31:15Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We're doing great. Tell us about the weather. What's happening?

31:18Michelle Volz:Well, I want to start off by saying, as you can see, the weather today for the low of today is going to be 75 degrees Fahrenheit up there, high of 100 degrees Fahrenheit 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. Does that mean rain? The issue that's not normally an issue and not a cause for concern and it's not very common for this time of year. However today later in the afternoon these two areas are going to collide and they're going to hit each other.

31:47Michelle Volz: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 airwaves 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.

32:16Michelle Volz: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.

32:27Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It's actually going to rain in LA?

32:29Michelle Volz:Yeah, it might sound crazy, but I just want it 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.

32:38Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I'm fact-checking you right now, and the weather app says it's going to be sunny all week. Is this just complete fake news?

32:45Eoghan McCabe:Those are the numbers my team gave me.

32:47Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:This is complete fake news. No, no, no. This is the fakest news I've ever heard. All that cold. The transatlantic current.

32:53Alex Epstein:John, John, I don't trust your app. I trust the weather.

32:58Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Apple says it's not going to rain the entire month.

33:02Alex Epstein:there's zero chance of rain did you look at the transatlantic current no the transatlantic

33:06Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:precipitation zero inches today zero inches tomorrow zero inches on wednesday john you're really gonna you're really gonna trust an application yeah it was probably vibe coded

33:18Alex Epstein:yesterday over ben who's doing the weather how did he get here what happened here

33:25Michelle Volz:no if you look right there you can see a localized high pressure area that's a

33:29Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I think this is an over-eager weatherman who's just looking for drama in the most boring weather market in America. It's Los Angeles.

33:36Alex Epstein:I think this is the most important story in the world. This is ridiculous. You guys can look at the jet streams. They're coming in from the west.

33:44Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And let me also tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

34:13Alex Epstein: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.

34:21Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

34:28Alex Epstein:Ben, you crushed it.

34:29Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Good job. So it's not Adam Smith's birthday. It's the 25th anniversary of the publication. 250th. 250th. Sorry. 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations. Tyler, you have a copy?

34:46Alex Epstein:I have two of our copies here. You have two of our copies. Yeah, usually I have one with me, but I didn't bring mine to work because we have a few here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

34:53Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Obviously. For those who don't know, give us the pitch for Wealth of Nations. Why should people read Wealth of Nations in 2026?

35:01Alex Epstein:Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the OG, you know, economics book, right? It was, like, put it into, like, AI terms. Is this, like, situational awareness type of? I mean, this is, like, attention is all you need.

35:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It was like the ChatGPT moment for capitalism.

35:16Alex Epstein:Yes, yes. But I would like to, you know, I have a few quotes I would like to read. Okay. All right, let me open those.

35:24Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Let's see. It's a big book. It's like 800 pages. Yeah, it's very long. And it's really, really dry. I mean, it reads like it was written 250 years ago.

35:32Alex Epstein:Okay, so this is, I think this is kind of 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. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.

35:49Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yes.

35:50Alex Epstein:He intends only his own gain. 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.

36:01Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. Rational economic actors, homo economicus, thinking of the value for society is created by rational self-interest. Sort of the spin on greed is good. He was like an OG of that thesis. The greed maxer. Yeah, productive labor, efficient markets, 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 at all. Evergreen. 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 stubborn attachments for being, like, not advancing the discipline of economics.

36:47Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And my pushback to that was that I actually think it is an 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 tenets of liberal democratic capitalism in 2020. I think he wrote it in 2023, 2022, something like that. But like 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 economic philosophy that is deliberately not revolutionary. And I thought that it was a great book for that reason.

37:34Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And that's why I recommend stubborn attachments to so many people and so widely. but if you want to crack open 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?

37:52Michelle Volz:Yeah, it's super small. It's also two columns.

37:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Oh, two columns, wow. Yeah, if you can get through that, 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.

38:40Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 from the creation of moral values, not from scripture or divine grace, but from human sympathy and mutual regard.

39:18Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:The Wealth of Nations, as his second work, second major work came to be known, was an extension of that product. The book is not, as sometimes believed, a hymn to greed, a pain to market fundamentalism or red in the tooth and 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

40:15Alex Epstein:tyler just do a speed reading of the wealth of nations live on the show as long speed run

40:23Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, Wealth of Nations speed run, any percent glitchless. You need to do glitchless, though. 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. Probably five days. It's so dense.

40:43Alex Epstein:Have you seen how fast you can rip a Rubik's Cube? This edition is 488 pages around.

40:47Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

41:02Alex Epstein:Well, we need to talk about the wealth. But first, Vibe.co.

41:08Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We're DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. And let's also tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, GoToFin.ai.

41:21Alex Epstein:We need to talk about the wealth of Sundar Pitch.ai.

41:26Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Pitch.ai. Sundar Pitch.ai.

41:27Alex Epstein:It's a new pay deal worth up to$692 million. Is this like 10 times what Tim Cook's making?

41:35Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:No, it must be over time, right?

41:37Alex Epstein:I mean, Cook's making around$70 a year combined. $70 a year.

41:41Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So if he works for 10 years, he makes what Sundar makes in three? There's going to be a conversation.

41:47Alex Epstein:It is. I mean, but this is what we've been.

41:50Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We've been advocating for this. So this is good. Advocating for this. Yeah, no, no. We're in support.

41:55Alex Epstein:Yeah, Google has increased Sundar's potential pay to$692 million over the next three years.

41:59Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

42:07Alex Epstein:Yeah, he just drops it in. Just drops it in.

42:09Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, exactly.

42:11Alex Epstein:The bulk of his package comes in performance units with a target value of$126 million split evenly into$2 million. launches. 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. Got to beat the S &P 100. Pichai will receive Waymo stock with a target stock in Waymo with a target value of$130 million and$45 million in Wing Aviation. That's their drone delivery platform. Again, both can pay out up to 200 % of the target.

42:52Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:They've got a lot of incentive pay. 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-7 era ends, Barron's is calling it. He 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 MAG7 trade is over. Finito. 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.

43:37Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 MAG7 is gone with the wind. Recall that B of A securities analyst Michael Harnett coined the term Mag-7 in 2023, pretty recently, referring to the 1970s John Sturge's Western gunslinger flick, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai. Have you seen Seven Samurai?

44:07Alex Epstein:No. Have you seen The Magnificent Seven? The stocks?

44:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:No, the movie, the movie, the Western. No. He's done the Seven Samurai.

44:18Alex Epstein:In what world?

44:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Production team. Has anyone seen either of those movies? I think we watched them in school. Okay, okay. Seven Samurai. You're saying you didn't watch them, you studied them?

44:28Alex Epstein:I haven't seen them in a while.

44:29Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Which ones have you seen, Tyler? Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai. It's a great one. It's a very good movie. Anyway, Barron's is bearish on the Mag 7, but... Sounds like Cope. It does sound like Cope. I think the Mag 7 will do.

44:43Alex Epstein:It's over for the largest and most profitable companies in history that stand to benefit.

44:49Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. The actual argument was the growth to value narrative, the loss of cash flow as they increasingly invest in CapEx. 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.

45:27Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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. Pachai 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.

46:03Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 build the tools. Yeah, because I think they lost access to Claude Code,

46:44Alex Epstein:but then they still have access to Codex. Okay. So it's kind of like, do you count that as RSI? Because it's not really internal.

46:50Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah.

46:51Alex Epstein:But is Gemini, that's the question?

46:53Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, yeah.

46:54Alex Epstein:I'm sure people at Gemini are using Gemini. I mean, there is a Gemini CLI. People don't talk about it as much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the model is very good, right? Yeah, yeah. I assume it is.

47:03Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 maybe break out financials at some point.

47:15Alex Epstein:I think vague posting is probably more heavily looked at. Exactly.

47:22Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Because it's totally possible that they're doing the same thing. Demis has been extremely just very clear about the path this goes. He's very AGI-pilled. He understands the exponentials and whatnot. So he certainly messaged it at a high level without actually saying definitively, yes, 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.

48:00Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Earlier in the week, he sold 32 ,500 Class C shares, an average price of$303, 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... Paper hands? Oh.

48:43Alex Epstein:He sold 650 million of stock?

48:45Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:No, no, no. He sold that, but he's... Oh, and he only owns half a billion. So, yeah, he sold more than that.

48:53Alex Epstein:Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully he put it all into video.

48:56Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Paper hands, which I... But he's getting topped up. And he's diamond handings the new brand. I know. I'm just saying.

49:03Alex Epstein:I'm just saying. Looking at the stock chart since 2015 when he became CEO, he would have done pretty well just to not do anything and trust his own process.

49:11Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Hey, hey, maybe he has an amazing car collection or something. You know? There's a lot of other things. Get to rotate into metal, maybe. You can't drive a Google Class A share. You can't sleep on a bed of Class C shares, Jordy. You got to get liquid. 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 is 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.

49:49Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So you put Meta and Google. That's like$6 trillion in market cap for tech companies in Miami. All of Miami. I count it. I'd count it. Anyway, moving on.

49:59Alex Epstein:Owner of 4Loco is exploring a sale of a storied alcohol brand, sources say. Wow.

50:06Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

50:21Alex Epstein:So. The parent company of 4Loco, 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 4Loco. It was too powerful. It was too powerful. Like you can just imagine the trajectory of the United States if it hadn't been nerfed and then...

50:45Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Straight downward. Really? Yes. It was so bad. It was so... I thought people were having like heart attacks. Yes, it was terrible. So 4Loco was a 24 ounce can. So twice the size of a normal alcoholic beverage.

50:59Alex Epstein:Trey, the birthday boy says it was amazing.

51:01Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It was amazing. Okay. Now we have buzz balls. That's true. Um, so for Loco, the original formulation was twice as big as a normal can of Bud Light or Miller Light or Coors Light, your normal beer, something that you would grab. Um, so it was, 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.

51:45Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And that spelt 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 or not it was behind a motor vehicle or discombobulator. 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 for Loco.

52:24Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:But apparently the company continued to sell products that were compliant with the current FDA regulation. Nerf. That's nerfed. The nerf for Loco continued to sell.

52:37Alex Epstein:Somehow they're looking to and potentially will capture somewhere around$400 million on the sale.

52:45Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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. U.S. 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.

53:16Alex Epstein: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.

53:35Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I guess they kept building. They also own...

53:37Alex Epstein:The parent company also owns Mamitas, Pirate Water. Pirate Water. Bacico Tequila. What is Pirate Water? And just Earthquake.

53:45Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Earthquake. Earthquake seems like something you definitely want.

53:48Alex Epstein:From the makers of Four Loko, Earthquake.

53:53Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 in all of college campuses.

54:20Alex Epstein:Wow, Earthquake is just a can that's just 10 % alcohol. Wow.

54:25Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Do not recommend. Very risky.

54:28Alex Epstein:Never Quake.

54:29Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 they'd 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, but at a bar, which is made at the time of sale. And so that was legal, I believe.

55:06Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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, got 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.

55:52Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 on 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.

56:29Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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, Bology posted in February going viral. And then in March, the NBA shut down.

57:12Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And in April, Everyone was locked down. And so every time I see one of these, it's like COVID. I'm like, okay. So let's see what it's like in eight weeks. 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, 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. I just think people underrate how crazy a global plague was.

57:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It's literally like a once in a hundred, like 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. Everything was changed for a full year. It was complete upheaval in our society. And it might happen, but eight weeks? Eight weeks is a little fast for me.

58:15Alex Epstein:and if you live in LA probably still be able to go to the beach

58:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I think so

58:20Alex Epstein:but maybe not 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 I messaged and I was like, how do you do that? And he's like, he's fully running OpenClaw. So he's now using OpenClaw to run his card 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 CEO, like helping me manage the calendar, helping with comms, helping me make smarter decisions on routing and scheduling and all these things.

59:14So when you book a detailing,

59:17Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

59:55Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 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.

1:00:30But a lot of times it's just Apple didn't want to do a deal

1:00:34Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:to integrate iMessage into Salesforce.

1:00:36Alex Epstein:The way to break down the walled garden was just to have a digital guy.

1:00:39Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

1:00:56Alex Epstein: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.

1:01:09Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And so I want to know what his bill is.

1:01:12Alex Epstein:He said he spent a decent amount.

1:01:15Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 a question about, are we going to see per token deflation? Or are we going to see prices? 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.

1:01:47Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So very exciting. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about console.com. Console built AI agents that only made 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, Dr. Alex Wisner-Gross, Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

1:02:07Michelle Volz:What's happening? Doing really well. Thank you, John. Thank you, Jordy.

1:02:09Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

1:02:24Michelle Volz:Absolutely. So quick background on myself. Originally from New York, undergrad MIT, studied physics, electrical engineering, computer science, math, PhD, physics, Harvard. Was there anything you didn't study?

1:02:34Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:You studied everything.

1:02:36Michelle Volz:Didn't study the humanities. Okay. Consider going to Cambridge to study chemistry and biology for a while to start at it. Was told physics is a game for the young. So I 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.

1:03:21Michelle Volz: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 build-out 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.

1:04:03Michelle Volz: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.

1:04:15Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So walk us through the fruit fly experiment, why it was so exciting for you.

1:04:21Michelle Volz: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.

1:05:10Michelle Volz:So one of these was a paper that a senior scientist at Eon, Philip Hsu, published in Nature in 2024, demonstrating that just from an emulation perspective, that you could take the fly wire, 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 2, is an excellent project to be able to formulate simulations in realistic mechanical environments of fruit flies. Another project from Ersdall et al. to formulate coordinated motor actuation of fruit flies.

1:05:57Michelle Volz: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 is 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 honestly astonished by the level of interest in just this one demo.

1:06:35Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I love it. I have a million questions. Let's start with IO, 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 choose to fly? Or at what level of abstraction is the fly's output happening?

1:07:27Michelle Volz:yeah this is what i was gesturing at a moment ago so it's a paper by ursdell et al that bundles motor actuations in terms of high level representations got it so a lot of people sort of the the people who got perhaps most excited in the neuroscience community about this video some of them i think didn't bother to read ursdell's excellent paper uh so a lot of those why i'm saying a lot of the pieces were sort of lying on the ground waiting for us to pick up and and put together. So these abstract motor movements were already available. Just no one had ever prior to this bothered to wire them up.

1:08:04Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:That's cool. Then what is the, 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?

1:08:30Michelle Volz: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.

1:08:56Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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?

1:09:20Michelle Volz: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.

1:10:00Michelle Volz: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.

1:10:27Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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?

1:10:42Michelle Volz:This is a very expensive structure of a very particular fly's brain. This structure was, again, captured through the Flywire project at great expense.

1:10:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So that's like a clone, digital twin type of thing, right? Aspirationally.

1:10:59Michelle Volz: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 doing. But the fact that Eon was 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. 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?

1:11:34Michelle Volz:I think probably...

1:11:36Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I thought we were very GPU-gated on that.

1:11:39Michelle Volz:Well, the 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 babblers. I was building Markov babblers in the 90s and early 2000s.

1:11:52Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, it just feels like even if you try and port back Frontier models now to a 1080 Ti, which was a graphics card for gaming, you're going to have a bad time.

1:12:05Michelle Volz: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 next few years where some of the earliest PCs could probably have hosted non-trivial conversations with LLMs. There's just that much algorithmic progress.

1:12:27Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Extremely bullish for Apple. Anyway, not to put it in hardware terms.

1:12:31Alex Epstein:What do you want to do next? Where do you go from here? I know it's a sign. More flies or straight to mouse?

1:12:41Michelle Volz: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.

1:13:25Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Interesting. 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 the...

1:13:41Michelle Volz:Totally unlike the transformer. Totally unlike the transformer. Totally unlike the transformer. So transformer architecture, if you subtract off the encoder and decoder layers, This 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 integrate 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.

1:14:22Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So what does that tell you about the nature of synthetic human intelligence? 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.

1:14:41Michelle Volz: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 or few-shot learners paper, yeah, GPT-3, 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.

1:15:18Michelle Volz:So my bet is intelligence is this very, very general effect and lots of ways to implement it.

1:15:24Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Interesting. Do you, so, I mean, 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?

1:15:43Michelle Volz: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. So 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.

1:16:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Interesting.

1:16:20Alex Epstein:What decisions do you make in your personal life, in the way that you live, that are based around your beliefs around technological progress?

1:16:33Michelle Volz: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, get to miss the most exciting developments. Same. That's what gets the applause. That's great.

1:16:48Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. That's a white pill.

1:16:50Michelle Volz: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 collective intelligence of civilization and AI capabilities. I also, I'm trying to make bets assuming that the AI capabilities keep increasing to the point where they're ontologically shocking.

1:17:40Michelle Volz: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 a startup that's working.

1:18:07Alex Epstein:That's with physical AI? or they're just dreaming him up?

1:18:13Michelle Volz: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.

1:18:37Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 and not in the cloud. How do you think that that interfaces?

1:18:55Michelle Volz: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 this 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.

1:19:43Michelle Volz: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 marked progress on the problem of not just whole brain emulation, but also transfer of human intelligence to new substrates.

1:20:08Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:That's very exciting.

1:20:11Alex Epstein:This is very... A new sci-fi corner.

1:20:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I love it. Every sci-fi trope everywhere all at once.

1:20:18Michelle Volz:Time travel? That's a 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.

1:20:40Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:What about faster than light travel?

1:20:44Michelle Volz: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 you don't get FTL,

1:20:55Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:it's going to be a boring travel. to go to another solar system.

1:21:00Michelle Volz:I will say this. I think 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 to discover any of such laws.

1:21:15Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

1:21:20Alex Epstein:Fascinating stuff.

1:21:21Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Thank you. Likewise. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma, make quad 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 unlocks seamless real-time experiences of new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Charles LaManna from Microsoft in the rest of your waiting room. Now he's in the TV available room. Charles, how are you doing? Good.

1:21:56Julien Bek:Thanks for having me on, guys.

1:21:57Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

1:22:05Julien Bek: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.

1:22:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And what's the latest and greatest in your world?

1:22:20Julien Bek: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 agentic capabilities in the office apps and a bunch of agent management solutions. Yeah.

1:22:36Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:How are you thinking about the open claw 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

1:23:06Julien Bek: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. Let it run the apps, let it log in as you, let it messages 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.

1:23:25Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:How do you think about model selection? Obviously, Microsoft has a time-honored partnership with OpenAI at this point, but 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's 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 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.

1:24:01Julien Bek:So that's one of the things that we think is super important for Copilot and a lot of our products, 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 autorouter is going to put you in open AI models because that's what we think works best with our work grounding in our work context. But then if you go to co-work, 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 the terminal and stuff.

1:24:38Julien Bek: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.

1:24:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 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?

1:25:34Julien Bek: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 with, 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 called 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?

1:26:11Julien Bek:Even in coders, it's taken time and it's probably not fully diffuse. 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 co-work 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.

1:26:39Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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?

1:26:49Julien Bek:Yeah, we're still very seat-based on the M365 side. But 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.

1:27:14Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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?

1:27:31Alex Epstein:Yeah, more specifically competing with the application layer.

1:27:33Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yes. 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 it might be$5 ,000 a month in a couple of 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 talking to? What are you telling to business leaders and CTOs?

1:28:10Yeah.

1:28:10Julien Bek:Yeah. So I, the, 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 of coding capabilities, they'd be like, I refuse to work in this environment. Like it's just, it's just inhumane almost. So, 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, co-work, they'd be like, no way, I'm not going to go back to the old way of working.

1:28:47Julien Bek:So, 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 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.

1:29:26Julien Bek:That's the future of how we think about how you budget for a team or a department.

1:29:31Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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, 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?

1:30:15Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Like where, when the rubber meets the road, like where are you seeing like, okay, this, this is ready. This is the next, this is the next sub area or category that will really, really benefit from the productivity gains from agentic workflows. Yeah.

1:30:31Julien Bek: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 is, this predates AI, right? Like 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. 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.

1:31:09Julien Bek: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 salespeople send a lot more emails or our finance professionals create 100 more spreadsheets. Like that's more like of a nightmare scenario for AI. One billion spreadsheets per company.

1:31:27Alex Epstein:No, no.

1:31:28Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I mean, 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.

1:31:38Julien Bek: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. 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.

1:32:22Julien Bek: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 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 in the next couple of years. It's not going to be emails, documents, files, et cetera.

1:32:50Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're in a high-level business role yourself. I find myself doing a lot of knowledge retrieval, deep research reports. but have you personally been using this product specifically in your day-to-day? Even as something as simple as, Sam Allman told us that he has some sort of 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?

1:33:19Julien Bek:Yeah, so for Copilot Cowork, for example, I've loved that. 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 how crazy is my calendar and travel look like.

1:33:36Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Interesting.

1:33:37Julien Bek:And I was able to decline 17 meetings for me. Okay, that's productivity right there. Yes, exactly.

1:33:42Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Nothing gives me more joy than declining a meeting. You sold me.

1:33:46Julien Bek:Yes. And I'd 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 and said, you know what? Decline. And it was right. So that's one thing that I use it for. Another thing that I like right now is I have 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 architecture diagrams, presentations, or spreadsheets or docs.

1:34:25Julien Bek: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.

1:34:31Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, yeah. I mean, even if it's just like the bones of a PowerPoint presentation with the actual data pre-populated, 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. But 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?

1:35:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Or where do you see that going?

1:35:15Julien Bek: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 in 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.

1:35:50Julien Bek:And you're starting to see it already, but it's going to be like code for sure.

1:35:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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, Jordy. I hope you don't mind.

1:36:06Alex Epstein:I've been calling Copilot Cowork Coco. Coco. So hopefully it doesn't stick. It's very cute. Unless you like it.

1:36:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, it's a very cute name.

1:36:16Alex Epstein:But congrats on the launch and great to meet you.

1:36:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Cheers, Charles. 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.

1:36:52So previously...

1:36:54Alex Epstein:This matches what the Collison brothers said when they had the show. They're seeing not just more business formation, but businesses growing faster.

1:37:03Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It could be that AI is actually making businesses is 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 that. No, of course, these are multiplicative very clearly, but Stripe Atlas does make it very easy to start a business. U.S. 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.

1:37:49Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:More small businesses, they are extremely edifying, extremely valuable. I highly recommend it.

1:37:54Alex Epstein:We got another white pill. Give it to me. The data center buildout has allowed Luden 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.

1:38:11Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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.

1:38:21Alex Epstein:Yeah, so this is like Northern Virginia. This is like AWS East 1.

1:38:25Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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. If we already tax every business, we tax them by default. If somebody makes a lot of money on an AI stock, taxes is capital gains. You get the money. The money shall flow. And so good news for the folks over in Luden County.

1:39:04Alex Epstein:Jacob says, America once named things plainly. Place trade surname. You had business, international business machines, long distance telephone.

1:39:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Studebaker.

1:39:17Alex Epstein:Studebaker.

1:39:18Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And Bethlehem Steel. Steel. That international business machines logo is amazing. Goes unbelievably 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.

1:39:36Alex Epstein:That is apparently the original IBM logo.

1:39:39Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:That's the 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.

1:39:49Alex Epstein: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.

1:39:56Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:No, you can just start a company and name it International Business Machines. 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.

1:40:09Alex Epstein: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.

1:40:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross: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 early SpaceX get me two chains two chains got in at some point and Gabriel over at OpenAI says two chains is about to be three chains 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, secure 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? raised capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

1:40:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Can you imagine two chains 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 radio, Julian Beck from Sequoia Capital, his partner there. Welcome to the show, Julian. Good to meet you.

1:41:09Eoghan McCabe:Hey, guys. How you doing? Nice to see you. We also hope we can ring the bell very soon.

1:41:14Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Holy logo, Mog.

1:41:16Eoghan McCabe:Yeah.

1:41:17Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Holy logo, Mog.

1:41:18Alex Epstein:I know a few of those companies.

1:41:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I do. We're partnered with Cisco. Thank you for backing them early, making TVPN possible 30 years ago. You paved the way. Since this is the first time on the show, why don't you give us just a brief back story on yourself, how you wound up at Sequoia, what you focus on, what your day-to-day is like.

1:41:36Eoghan McCabe:Sure. So first, thank you both for having me. It's an honor to be there. 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 spent 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. I built companies in hardware before. And so that's why I've been investing mostly in software for most of my career. You were like, I got to get out of here. I was like, man, it's hard.

1:42:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Are you thinking about going back to hardware? Is software dead? What are you thinking?

1:42:20Eoghan McCabe: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. Okay. So I want to remain true to that. And this is kind of the things I've been spending time on recently.

1:42:41Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. Take me through your current thesis on how software is changing in the age of AI. in the age of maybe some sort of takeoff. AGI is here, according to Sequoia Capital, amongst many other people. The labs are recursively self-improving. And it seems like Sam Altman made the claim that if you want to build a startup, you shouldn't build a company that is in the direct path while more and more products seem to be in the path of AI and AGI. How are you thinking about the changing dynamic with software as we know it?

1:43:20Eoghan McCabe:Yeah, that's a really important question. And I think we've been listening to Sam a lot as shareholders. And recently, just talking to our founders, a lot of them are wondering if they're just an iteration away from the models replacing what they're doing. And it puts us in the position of thinking, what is coming next? What is going to be defensible? And for us, we've been making that prediction last week that the next trillion dollar company will be a software business that masquerades as a services firm. And we shared that thesis with everyone online. The reality is, if you sell tools today, you're really in the line of sight for the models.

1:44:08Eoghan McCabe:And you're effectively competing with the next generation that they're going to launch. Whereas if you sell the work, you're actually benefiting from what the models are doing and all the billions of dollars that are going towards AI. So part of that prediction was saying for every dollar that's spent on software six dollars are spent on services. Until now we could only really go after the one dollars because we were building tools. Now that we can actually deliver outcomes companies should think about capturing those six dollars instead.

1:44:44Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So the obvious first step is just get to outcome-based pricing, move away from a seat-based model probably. Would you agree with that as sort of like the most immediate change in business structure that needs to happen? Or if you're starting a new company, maybe don't start with seat-based pricing on day one. Or is the seat-based pricing is dead? Maybe that's like an overblown characterization. How do you think about just the business model moving forward?

1:45:15Eoghan McCabe:Yeah, we think both can work. They just serve different purposes. We have companies in our portfolio that start as these co-pilots that are helping the workers. And then we call them autopilots, the one who do everything end to end. Many of them are transitioning from co-pilot to autopilot to do what you're describing. A company that comes to mind is a business called Sierra. that was started by a retailer that basically helps companies with customer support, which is pretty direct bullseye use case of AI. And in this example, they're actually charging the customers per outcome, right, per resolved ticket.

1:45:56Eoghan McCabe:And so if you spend$20 per ticket resolved with humans, they charge you, say,$5 instead, right? And that's driving ROI for the company. It's driving an outcome that's very measurable. And so that's the first more obvious company that's really working doing that. Frankly, until recently, outside of software engineering, we haven't seen a lot of this sort of fully owned end-to-end outcome driving. But the models are really progressing quickly. And for everyone who's been vibe coding the last couple of months, I think we've all been impressed that we can code a full website just end-to-end without any skills, frankly.

1:46:39Eoghan McCabe:And basically our prediction is that this is going to happen to other categories. And we've been mapping out these categories and helping founders come up with frameworks to prioritize where to attack them and how to do it.

1:46:53Alex Epstein:Sorry to interrupt. One thing I'd be curious to get your take on. So if a company is just selling enterprise software that helps people accomplish a task, that feels very threatened by a foundation model company that maybe makes an agent that can also do said task and then you don't even need the software. So if a company transitions to just selling the work, selling the service, like you're saying, you would agree that they're still going to be under threat from the labs who will also presumably be selling intelligence or agents that can go and do the work. But you're saying it will maybe be more closer to a fair fight.

1:47:34Alex Epstein:Is that the right way to think of it? because I still think, let's say if somebody is spinning up, instead of making a legal AI tool, they make an AI native law firm and they're selling the work, I could still go to a ChatGPT, a Claude, a Gemini, and a future version of the model, I can just say like, hey, I need to do this thing, can you help me do it? So there's still going to be that competition, but you're saying that's a much better sort of competitive environment to be in And then just selling like the software that enables somebody to do the task. Is that roughly right? Or is there something I'm missing?

1:48:13Eoghan McCabe:Yeah, I'll just add one framework that I think is helpful for people to clarify what that means. Basically, everyone is conflating the model's intelligence with what human are really good at, which is judgment. And I think if you strip those two concepts that you really understand what the future will look like. And so right now the models are becoming really good at everything intelligence related. So think of tasks that are rules based where just logic gets you to the goal. Whereas the judgment is everything the humans really spike at, which is more harder to define. It's instinct. People call it taste, call it experience.

1:48:58Eoghan McCabe:and those things are things we think the humans will remain really good at for a very long time until intelligence is able to absorb these skills into it. But it's just really hard, right, because we give the models a lot of credit for their intelligence, but they're just trained on set amounts of data. And so we actually think that this hybrid motion of coupling the intelligence from the model with the judgment from the humans is going to help you build the next generation of companies which we call these autopilots, right? So to your example, in the law firm, you will automate a lot of the intelligence work that's very much codified, which is what the model will do.

1:49:40Eoghan McCabe:But if you put the employee at the center, someone who's really experienced, who can talk to a jury, who can mark a pause at the right time, those are all the things that you learn only from real world experience that a top lawyer will be able to experiment, but that the models will omit today.

1:49:59Alex Epstein:does that make sense yeah i still i still i like you know uh maybe maybe um maybe i'm too agi but i but i just assume that a sufficiently advanced agent would be able to uh capture

1:50:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:and accumulate you know the ability to to agi pill just talked to dr alex wissner gross for 30 minutes and he's like i'm uploading my brain right now no it's it's it's not that but it's

1:50:26Alex Epstein:It's just the idea of like a, you know, you put a smart person into an organization where they don't have any experience and they start doing things and they start getting feedback from other humans in the organization. And over time, they accumulate enough knowledge and domain expertise that they're able to excel at something that even using the customer service example, you know, you've always been able to outsource customer service. and you can go work with a firm that is excellent at customer service, the alternative has always been to effectively hire a really great leader for that part of the organization, have them build out a team and a structure and an approach and execute something that would be a similar result.

1:51:13Alex Epstein:There's like a cost tradeoff.

1:51:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It does feel like overall there's like maybe some pressure on the B2B2B model or like the B2B2C model, if instead of, to use your example of customer support, there was a time when software companies would sell phone tree software to, not to companies directly to do customer support, but to customer support outsourcing agencies that would then deploy that. And now you're seeing more companies go directly to the firm that makes the customer support experience end-to-end go directly to the company that needs customer support as opposed to having this middle level. And it almost makes me feel like we're maybe going to rotate even a little bit further into D to C.

1:52:08Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:When I think about law, there's a lot of stuff where the software would go to the lawyer, the law firm goes to the person. And if the person can go straight to the law firm or the legal model, you wind up with a little bit more B2C activity, a little bit more company directly to the service provider or the technology provider. But again, this feels a little bit dependent on specific market dynamics. I'm interested to know your reaction to that, but also what does hold in your mind in the near-term AGI scenario? Because there's been a lot of debate over how will marketplaces perform, or are network effects still super sticky in a world of AGI?

1:52:53Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Or what are the powers, the seven powers?

1:52:56Alex Epstein:Yeah, I guess part of it, to kind of close out my thoughts, I agree with the entire thesis and the relative short term. the one to two years. But then beyond that, there's still some uncertainty around.

1:53:10Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:There always is, yeah.

1:53:11Alex Epstein:Like, I don't think it solves the sort of discount that even traditional SaaS companies are getting today.

1:53:20Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, Julian.

1:53:22Eoghan McCabe:On that point, I think you're right. And basically what we realize is that no one really knows, right? I've been in many partner meetings recently where everyone just is astonished at how quickly things are moving. I've been doing that for 10 years and it's just by far the fastest rate of change I've noticed. But some of my partners, you know, Alfred Lynn, Pat Grady, they've been doing that for a lot longer. And they also acknowledge that everything is moving so quickly. And so what we're trying to figure out is also not what is going to change, what are the things that will remain true no matter what, right?

1:54:00Eoghan McCabe:Customers will always want things faster, better, cheaper, right? And so that's kind of the thesis that we're describing. They're just categories that require more intelligence than judgment. And so we think that in the immediate, the ones that require more intelligence will be actually really interesting for these autopilots because you can have, you know, instead of having 10 humans in one AI, you have one human in 10 AIs, right? And just that ratio is just going to shift as the models get better and are able to absorb what we used to call judgment from the humans that is turning to intelligence.

1:54:36Eoghan McCabe:And just to put like a practical framework to that, you mentioned outsourcing. It's actually the best wedge right now is just to focus on outsourcing if you want to capture this services span. Because there's three reasons. The first one is that outsourcing has already been agreed to a third party. So it's very easy to sell, right? Because it's already a vendor that's external to the company. The second is that there's an existing budget that's assigned to it, which you can pay yourself against. And the third is that it's actually very straightforward to swap a supplier. It's not so straightforward to reorganize your company, right?

1:55:16Eoghan McCabe:We all talk about headcount reduction in terms of ROI, but actually putting that in practice takes time, whereas swapping a vendor is very quick. So I actually think that, and that's the prediction, is that the companies that will succeed very well with this autopilot model will start with where there's a lot of labor spent that's being outsourced today. We mentioned customer support. We'll mention also things like accounting, tax, insurance, and so on and so forth. Thank you.

1:55:47Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Is there a world where in the next five years or something like venture capitalists truly shift away from software and go back into rare metal mining or something crazy like that? I just keep coming back to Daniel Gross, now at Meta, venture capitalist. I think one of his first AGI trades, the first bet was in the world of AGI, is copper mispriced? And it was, it doubled in price over two years. And I'm just reflecting on this idea that like, if the job of venture capitalist is to back software companies, that's one thing. But if it's just to allocate capital in a way that can have exponential upside and a single investment return of fund.

1:56:34Alex Epstein:You said, would it ever make sense to stop investing in software? I would hate that because we obviously love enterprise software. But it has been funny. A lot of people have been pushing like you know the models are so good we just need better harnesses yeah and to me this is giving me flashbacks to early gpt days where people were like gpt is really powerful you just need the right harness right all these like wrappers yeah yeah that had explosive growth

1:57:03Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:very momentarily yeah until and and so i do most agi-pilled person ever over here i love it uh but But what do you think about the more physical aspects of the job? Rare metal mining, for example. Does that seem like something people will be working on in a couple of years?

1:57:26Eoghan McCabe:Yeah, I mean, everyone's talking about the fact that energy will be the biggest bottleneck, right, to train these models. So it's very natural that you would go there. Personally, that's not really where my skill set is. So I really hope you're wrong and that we'll find other areas in between.

1:57:43Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I think the real path will be somewhere in the middle. Hopefully, right?

1:57:50Eoghan McCabe:My way of doing things has always been to focus on talent. And so right now I'm just always asking the smartest people I know, who do you know who's the smartest person? What are they working on? And you're right, more and more people are going more into the physical world. but right now that probably means things like robotics and things like that. People are making a lot of money trading commodities, but that's a different world.

1:58:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. Who knows? Maybe that's the job of the venture capitalist in 2030, just trading copper all day long. You mentioned using AI to build a website despite maybe skills that have languished since your time in software or hardware. But how are you using AI tools these days? Are you still doing mostly like knowledge retrieval, market research for your job in venture capital? Or have you actually built tools that have accelerated certain things? Have you automated any of your workflows? I'm just kind of curious how people are using AI these days.

1:58:52Eoghan McCabe:Yeah, well, I don't know. I hope my competitors are not listening.

1:58:57Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:They are. So you can say it. I haven't touched it, actually. it's useless.

1:59:02Alex Epstein:You should uninstall.

1:59:05Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Stick to organic

1:59:06Eoghan McCabe:capital allocation. Pen and paper, actually.

1:59:09Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Exactly.

1:59:10Eoghan McCabe:Back to the basics, pen and paper, and don't try cloud code. It's really great. Jokes aside, it's been really a transformation, and particularly the first quarter of this year. I use it for all kinds. The work is basically sourcing, picking, winning, company building and harvesting right then yeah i really have workflows that fit all these boxes so it goes from things as you know at the end of the week it will just like scan my entire calendar look at all the meetings i took look at the granola notes which is a transcript sure do an analysis and and help me you know try and find the key questions and the due diligence yeah um and you know it'll help me just prioritize right because this job is just so much about prioritizing.

1:59:57Eoghan McCabe:It's a power law, right? There's only three meetings in the year that could change the course of your career. And so making sure that you're attuned in those meetings is really important. So that's really what I would say Claude has helped me do right now. And I'm sure OpenAI will release something next month that will be amazing and so on. You just have to experiment, right? I think that's also what we've seen with things like OpenClaw being so top of mind is like this culture of experimentation is not just in software engineering now, but it's transpired across the entire knowledge workforce.

2:00:37Eoghan McCabe:And venture capitalists are not an exception.

2:00:39Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Great to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Great to hear. Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. You know, if I was a venture capitalist, open claw. Every morning at 5 a.m., text me the name and market cap of the company that I passed on three years ago. I need inspiration to grind harder. That's the secret to success, as is Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

2:01:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And without further ado, we have Owen McCabe, the CEO of Intercom, a huge supporter of TVPN as well. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great to see you. Great to see you, man. Great to see you both also. It's been too long. It's been too long.

2:01:28Alex Epstein:Man, you just have a voice for radio.

2:01:32Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Live streams, podcasts, all the time.

2:01:34Alex Epstein:It's incredibly calming. Yes, I love it.

2:01:38Michelle Volz:Okay, what would you like me to say? I can record a meditation for us. We could kind of start at the hour that way. Do you have time?

2:01:44Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Do you have time to meditate? ASMR funding announcement. Do you have time to meditate these days?

2:01:49Alex Epstein:It's kind of the only thing that keeps me sane. That's good.

2:01:51Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:uh well you have some new funding for new project break us down what happened what's the plan how

2:01:58Michelle Volz:much did you raise take us through it yeah so we raised 250 million dollars let me hit the gong

2:02:08Alex Epstein:did that gong get bigger since i was here it did get bigger it did get bigger it would be cool if it got bigger every every single season right fast just wait there's a fast takeoff there's a fast Takeoff and gong size over here.

2:02:21Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It's growing exponentially.

2:02:22Alex Epstein:Except this was actually, I think the largest we could find in the US. So we gotta go. Yeah, no, there's always bigger.

2:02:28Michelle Volz:I kind of have gong envy right now. I wish I had gong.

2:02:30Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We'll send one over.

2:02:31Michelle Volz:Let's talk about that later. We'll talk, we'll talk.

2:02:33Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So$250 million, what's the plan?

2:02:36Michelle Volz:Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we've been building this thing called Fin for three years now. Service was just this obvious place where AI was gonna, you know, blow up. And us and everyone else started to chase it. We were about a year ahead of everyone else. And we started doing, you know, customer queries and then more complex problems. Originally, it was answering questions for customers. And it's fantastic, you know, the typical response rate with a human was one to two days. You have to deal with the beautifully perfections of humans. Unfortunately, these bots are just far more perfect than humans and they answer in seconds.

2:03:10Michelle Volz:And of course, they're cheaper too. So we started to say better, faster, cheaper. These things are really better, faster, cheaper. So that was a tremendous success. Fin is the biggest service agent in our category, nearly 100 million AR or 8 ,000 paying customers. You know, some of the biggest lows in the game. Thank you, from Anthropic to, I don't know, Snowflake, the cool guys like Polymarket and Vant and everyone else are on Fin. So, wonderful. But where does it go next? You know, clearly it's just so obvious as each of these categories develop that there's just more to explore. There's none of these categories are in any way fully baked.

2:03:46Michelle Volz:And that's one of the interesting things about kind of all these AI spaces that we're still kind of pulling the thread and seeing what's going to show up next. And the next big play for Finn is not just answering service queries, but really getting deep into every stage in the customer lifecycle. And so we call that the customer agent. And this money will primarily bring the customer agent to market.

2:04:07Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Okay. So when I want great customer service for a company that I'm running, I want, yeah, you you know, search the knowledge base, answer the obvious questions, handle the refunds, track. That's part of the customer journey. Are there other touch points that are unlocked by AI along that journey? Absolutely and completely. Yes.

2:04:30Michelle Volz:From day zero on the website, when the customer has very basic questions, when they get more interesting, when the business wants to start to qualify and understand who that customer is, when the customer actually then wants their hand help when they sign up or they want to actually engage and learn and meet sales people. They want to book a demo or they want to talk to a virtual salesperson. I mean, that's just the very top of the funnel alone. But to get into the application, if it's B2B, there's all the onboarding, all the detailed help required to get something successful. If it's e-commerce, it's actually buying products and getting it into the cart and bringing them back for more shopping.

2:05:05Michelle Volz:So there is really the literally the full customer life cycle of work to be done by agents. And customer service was just the little sliver. I want to know what's happening off camera though.

2:05:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Oh, we just have our next guest walking in into the studio. So I'm just, I'll be the less interesting to me. Yes. I want to talk about some of the best customer service agents that I've hired have sort of wound up in sales roles almost. They have a fish on the line. They're reeling them in saying, you don't want to cancel. This product does exactly what you want. The fact that it was delivered one day late, we're happy to refund you. But it seems like the underlying issue is that you actually want this product instead of this product. Why don't we get you over here? And that's this like sort of different skill set that comes out in the best customer service agents.

2:06:02Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:How are you thinking about actually driving incremental sales through customer service agents?

2:06:08Michelle Volz:Yeah, I think one of the interesting things is that a lot of the work in these functions isn't entirely separate. We just needed to draw lines between them when we were running human organizations, because you can't possibly have one person who's outstanding at service, sales, marketing success, et cetera. It would make the SaaS market maps too complicated.

2:06:29Alex Epstein:Totally.

2:06:31Michelle Volz:A pen in the ass. But unfortunately, that pen in the ass is coming with AI because I just don't believe you're going to have these separate sales agents and marketing agents. You're not going to have these things fighting with each other, having different context and information, different memory in different parts of the customer lifecycle, different messengers, not going to happen. And there's going to be vendors that will provide one seamless solution across the customer lifecycle. And that's a big thing we're passionate about. And one of the very fascinating things we've seen, we've been building this for quite a number of months now, and we're going to launch the first part of it next month.

2:07:05Michelle Volz:One of the fascinating things we've seen is that when there's an underlying relationship with the agent, and then there's actual connection in the moment, and then there's clear intent, the context is primed for selling and encouraging the user to do something next. If you're on a website and you get a super annoying pop-up that says, hey, John or Jordy, in fact, they're not even going to use your name. They're going to say, do you want to learn more about our whatever? And you're like, get out of here. It's not the right time or place. Whereas if you're actually discussing, it can ask you questions back and it's so much more effective.

2:07:47Michelle Volz:And so we've seen just these things. The service agent, when it starts to do sales, for example, and vice versa, they're far more effective. And so the real magic from AI across the board, and of course this agent world, is going to be when the agents can do things that humans can't.

2:08:03Alex Epstein:Yeah, one thing that stands out is right now you have this spikiness in dialogue as a customer of a business, right? You might have a question coming in and it creates a moment and then it goes away. and then you get maybe transitioned to someone else and you're talking to a real human. You talk with them a little bit and you get passed to someone else. And like, there's something about creating, I think the customer experience of having this continuous conversation with the organization that you're a customer of that I think will be super powerful because it just means that, you know, a split second away the entire time.

2:08:39Alex Epstein:I was talking with some guys that own a number of like big car dealerships recently and I was talking to them about AI and they weren't fully sold yet because they use like chat GPT, but they haven't had anything spread across their whole organization. And I was explaining to them how there's so many different moments where like a customer lands on their website and they want to know if a car is available, but somebody gets back to them too slowly and like the light was like finally going off for them. Do you think that there's a number, how many industries out there have been kind of resistant to even using software from Silicon Valley to date that are going to kind of take a second look at all the different tools and things like Fin now that they maybe have had a cool experience with AI in their personal life.

2:09:31Alex Epstein:And they're basically saying they're willing to kind of look because maybe the historical SaaS platforms, they tried them, but it wasn't quite magical yet.

2:09:40Michelle Volz:yeah there'll be so many spaces so many verticals that um some smart entrepreneurs will benefit from bringing sexy technology to um that aren't immediately obvious to those of us in Silicon Valley you know we tend to sell to ourselves it's really insular so all the names I just mentioned they're like Anthropic and Snowflake they're all the cool brands in our world however there's like car dealerships that are you know I know maybe it's not as big as Anthropic, but they're pretty down big. Depending on the car dealership, I

2:10:11Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:would put car dealership above Anthropic and Snowflake personally. If it's like a Ferrari dealership, Lamborghini dealership, just on the cool side, we got to give it to super car dealers. On the aura factor,

2:10:21Michelle Volz:sure.

2:10:22Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:For sure. Maybe not on

2:10:23Michelle Volz:the economic factor.

2:10:25Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah.

2:10:25Michelle Volz:But there are so many industries that just don't have our attention. And so there will be, you know, there'll be companies like ours selling to many verticals, but really, you know, we'll focus on all of the verticals that are adjacent to and there's tens of billions of dollars of opportunity just in that alone. But there'll be people who will say, we're going to make agents for dentists, car dealerships, for certain government bodies, maybe even for tax bodies. There'll be people who will do this because so much of the effort is not just in building the technology, it's actually creating the trust, as you say, Jordi, with the actual people who will have to deploy this technology and make it work for them with their legacy system.

2:11:05So there's a lot of very unsexy work that will be rich and rewarding for some people who bring it to these places.

2:11:12Alex Epstein:Talk about the decision to raise debt instead of equity. Not something you see very much.

2:11:18Michelle Volz:Yeah, I know. I just realized I had this kind of blind spot for this as an option for capital. And there's just so much equity opportunities out there. We raised a bunch last year for a secondary. but when you're in our dynamic where you're accelerating as quickly as we are like every every year we're doubling our our rate of growth pretty much there's no way we're going to be able to achieve our the valuation that we're pretty confident we'll get next year and so any equity raise is going to just be massively dilutive we calculated that raising this in debt is going to cost us about a tenth um the kind of price to shareholders that it would cost in equity so the The incumbents have disadvantages.

2:12:05Michelle Volz:They tend to move a little slower. They have older businesses they need to wrangle with. But they have access to phenomenal amounts of debt. Like$250 million is a relatively small amount of debt for the size of our business. And I think that you're going to start to see a lot of these older SaaS companies as they pivot to AI and they actually find new growth start to lean on debt as an opportunity to invest rather than super dilute of equity. And honestly, I just think it takes a little bit of maturity to take that route. There's so much pressure from employees.

2:12:39Alex Epstein:It's not just maturity, it's confidence. Yeah, to know your business.

2:12:44Michelle Volz:Well, I like to think so. But the reason I say maturity is that there's so much temptation to go and attain that latest, hottest valuation. Your employees want it, your previous investors want it, media wants it. But if you're able to tell them we don't need it,

2:13:01Alex Epstein:actually it's way cheaper for us to get a lot more capital

2:13:05Michelle Volz:with far less effort, then you can actually thread the needle in a way that I think is going to work much better for big companies.

2:13:11Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:The gong over here rings just as loud for debt as it does for equity. So don't let the media tell. You guys are hiring a ton.

2:13:18Alex Epstein:You said you're bringing on 650 new people this year?

2:13:24Michelle Volz:Yes. Yeah. So that's gross. I think net it'll be a little less than that. It's a phenomenal amount of hiring. I fear it. I celebrate it with great caution. There are just countless stories of the hubris of CEOs that boasted about how many people they've hired and it's all ended in tears. So it's actually not a point of pride, frankly. I think small is beautiful, but we are growing incredibly fast and we need all the help we can get.

2:13:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And you've been at this long enough to know the impact of what 100 people, 600 people, what impact that will have on your organization. So I have the full faith in you. Thank you for that. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Great to see you. Congratulations. Good to see you both. Take care. Keep doing your thing. All the best. Amazing stuff. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy apps. servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

2:14:28Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Alex Epstein. He's the author of Fossil Future, live in the TVP on Ultradam. Welcome to the show. Good to see you. Thank you so much for coming down on short notice.

2:14:47Alex Epstein:What are your texts been like the last 48 hours? This is over. Because John and I were thinking, who's our oil guy? We had one. We had one.

2:14:59Charles Lamanna:And I'm local, too. So, yeah, if I'm in town, it's great. I always like coming in person versus the other stuff.

2:15:06Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Appreciate it.

2:15:07Charles Lamanna:I mean, there's so much in energy, but we can talk about this.

2:15:11Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I'm happy to just let you lead the conversation however you think it should go. What's going on? How should we even be thinking about oil prices right now? the impact of the war in Iran? How should we be processing this news?

2:15:27Charles Lamanna:Okay. So we did this. So there's a million things to comment on. So I'm going to try to segment what I comment on. But we did get involved militarily in Iran, which I would just say, in my non-area of expertise, in general, that is a good idea. I think it's a better idea to have Congress involved, if you can get them involved. And I think it's a good idea to have a lot of expertise on international oil markets being brought to bear when you do this. And I think this administration does a lot of good stuff on energy, but I think it's pretty clear at this point that there was not maximum expertise brought in on this.

2:16:05Charles Lamanna:And so the standard issue when you're

2:16:07Alex Epstein:like indicators, there would be like the strategic petroleum reserve hadn't been refilled.

2:16:12Charles Lamanna:We can talk about that. So let's make sure to get back to that one. But the main thing is just, you know, rough numbers, you know, straight of Hormuz, which Iran has control over, is 20 % of the world's oil production is flowing through that every day. And so whether you're looking backward or looking forward, there is no replacement whatsoever for opening that straight and keeping it open. And one of the things we've heard from different people is, oh, we have a lot of options on the table. Like there's a lot of things that we can do. There are definite things that you can do, but none of them is 20 million.

2:16:47Charles Lamanna:Right. So it's just I mean, that's that's more than U.S. oil production just flowing through that one place. So, yeah, we can talk about the other things. But I think the first thing people need to recognize is if you do not get that thing open, then you have dramatically higher oil prices. And then the other thing to get is oil prices really matter.

2:17:06Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Straight from you's dumb question. Can't you just go around?

2:17:11Charles Lamanna:I mean, you can you can try to some extent, but there's a reason why 20 million a day are being routed through.

2:17:18Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Because it actually comes out of there as well. Right. Yeah.

2:17:20Charles Lamanna:There's just I mean, all of these things are very, very optimized. One of the thing about just understanding the energy industry is like things are just very optimized in terms of where the infrastructure is. You're doing all of these things. So it's there are other and we'll talk about this. I mean, there are certain pipelines you can pipe more oil through. There are alternate routes, but we're talking about the millions a day, maybe. Most of our other options are sort of in the one to two million barrels a day. And just so people know, barrel is 42 gallons. So you're talking about almost 100 million gallons a day for the stuff.

2:17:49Charles Lamanna:But yeah, so you don't have a lot of great options. And I think that's very important. I'm going to give some options, but the number one option is keep that thing open. And there are basically two ways to do that. One is you just win the war, if you want to call it that, a lot more quickly. Like if you get some form of surrender and you have friendly people controlling it, then guess what? It can open. That's one thing. So I'm not an expert on how to do that. But schematically, doing that is very effective. The other thing, which is a little bit.

2:18:21Alex Epstein:But game theory for Iran is they actually benefit from global markets being in turmoil because it gives them some leverage over any type of negotiation.

2:18:35Charles Lamanna:I mean, this is the biggest damage that they can do. I mean, clearly we've seen they're not going to do – they're not going to send missiles to Israel and get rid of Israel, let alone do anything to the U.S. but they have this incredible control of the one of the centers of the world economy and they have a bunch of stuff going on there so let's talk about that so option one is you get a surrender and they don't use all of their options but then let's talk about their options so they have mines in this thing so they can blow up mines uh they have missiles maybe the worst thing they have and this is a change in recent years and now you've had palmer on here and ethan on here like the drone thing is just a total game changer because you can have a small vehicle you can launch one of these you know shot heads out of the back of a truck they can go really far and that's a lot harder to deal with than a fixed installation yeah they have something like 500 miles of range on a typical yeah depending on yeah right so the truck drives up to a beach drone launches as soon

2:19:33Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:as it finds that cargo tanker that has a bunch of oil on it it hits it yeah and then and then

2:19:37Charles Lamanna:And you're worried about that as you're going through. So you have to think about those are the kinds of threats you face. So how do you deal with that? I mean, basically, you need the U.S. to lead some sort of convoy where people have sufficient security and economic assurances that will go through. So what's involved in that? Well, one thing is, if possible, you want to get allies involved. And it's even possible you get unconventional allies like China who has – well, they depend on this. Now, they have a bunch of, unlike us, you want to go back to SPR, they've been filling up their reserves.

2:20:11Charles Lamanna:So they have more reserves relative to their imports than we do relative to ours. If you think about ours, we have about 400 in the SPR, and we can release about 4 million a day. So we don't have as much, but still, they really care about this, and a protracted thing is bad. But for sure, Japan, South Korea, India. So one thing is just at a high level if you're doing this convoy Can we get these countries that are aligned economically? Maybe China, but definitely these others Can we get them involved because then it's an addition they have military presence there? That's an additional threat to Iran if they attack one of their ships So but that's a macro thing is just can you do this alone or can you do it with allies?

2:20:52Charles Lamanna:I think ideally you would do it With allies then there's a question of what you do about these these various things And I think the biggest, I mean, the other macro thing you can do is just in some way credibly threaten Iran and say, hey, if you, and I can't give the details of how to do it, but if you attack us, if you attack in the Strait of Hormuz, it's going to be very, very bad for you. So just at a high level, can you make that threat so they understand this is going to be very, very, no, you know, we've wiped out a couple layers of leadership. So they might be taking these things seriously.

2:21:25Charles Lamanna:After that, I think the biggest thing from what I've heard from military experts is just these drones. Like, what do you do about these drones? How do you give any kinds of assurances? And as far as I can tell, we don't have any one perfect solution, but you can do a certain amount of stuff from the air. You can do a certain amount of stuff from the ground, although it's very, very expensive. And then most cost-effective where you can do it is you can take out certain stockpiles and facilities with the proviso that these things are decentralized. And of course, I have no specific knowledge about where they are.

2:21:54Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:But in theory, if there's the suicide drone, the Shahid, there's a factory and you take out that factory, you have reduced that capacity. Right.

2:22:02Charles Lamanna:So that's going to be it. And, you know, I know you guys had on Ethan Thornton, who I'm friends with. And, you know, he talks about this a lot. It's just this cost asymmetry issue is you just want to be doing things. Even if you're way wealthier, you do not want to be spending three million dollars to take out thirty thousand dollars.

2:22:17Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Which might be what happening with a Patriot missile battery.

2:22:20Charles Lamanna:This, this, this. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that happens. So you need a combination of those kinds of things. And then the other thing, so that's all the security stuff. So you get the allies involved. You take these actions specifically against drones. I think the, what was I going to say about the other thing you can do? I'm just making sure.

2:22:38Alex Epstein:There's still just. Well, like the other big. Oh, the insurance. Okay, insurance.

2:22:42Charles Lamanna:Yeah, the insurance. So, and this has been floated by the president. And it's a reasonable idea. But my understanding is the insurance vehicle we have, the Development Corporation, does not have enough funding. So you might need to go to Congress. But basically you want to be able to say, hey, we're going to lead this as the United States. We're going to lead it with allies. If Iran does anything, it's big trouble for them. And we can counter their specific attacks. And if something goes wrong, you're insured. You're trying to create that confidence to get enough people going through. And then you get a certain amount of stability.

2:23:13Charles Lamanna:And then you start to get closer to your 20 million barrels a day. Either that or you just defeat them really quickly or both.

2:23:19Alex Epstein:So the other factor is just the loss of production, disruption to production, plants shutting down, plants being damaged. How does that factor in? Do refineries get brought back? And I'm talking about an allied country.

2:23:39Charles Lamanna:You mean just the trend over time or what?

2:23:41Alex Epstein:Yeah, generally, I mean, just seeing the videos coming out, you've seen places, I think, like Qatar, Kuwait, places, like, yeah, basically just saying, like, yeah, we're going to pause production because we don't even have a place to store this. And or they're suffering damages. And it doesn't make sense to keep, you know, refineries online.

2:24:01Charles Lamanna:This is all, but this is all just downstream of do you have the route open? Yeah, got it. Like, if you have the route open, it solves everything. If you don't, the way to think of the other things, so we do have some other interesting options. We have to think of them as these are temporary stopgaps. Like if anyone says, I mean, you hear some crazy things. People are like, oh, Venezuela. We talked about this last time. I was going to ask you. Venezuela's less than a million. I mean, it's beyond crazy. It's just impossible. It's not like Venezuela has the ability to just increase their oil production by any significant amount in the near future.

2:24:32Charles Lamanna:I mean, we're talking about companies considering going in harm's way to get some incremental boosts. So Venezuela is essentially useless.

2:24:39Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So best case scenario in the next year, Venezuela goes from under a million to two million.

2:24:44Charles Lamanna:No, I mean, two million would be insane. I mean, if we made it our entire goal in life, I don't know. But but why would you for that?

2:24:51Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Venezuela was at like three million like.

2:24:53Charles Lamanna:Yeah, some years ago. Yeah. Right. But but there's so many.

2:24:57Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:But there's a lot there. It's not going to happen.

2:24:59Charles Lamanna:It's just so. Yeah. So Venezuela, I would not even. That's just in the category of it's not even a bad idea. It's just not an idea. There's nothing. There's nothing there.

2:25:09Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:No, no.

2:25:09Charles Lamanna:So the bad ideas, by the way, are the worst idea imaginable is ban oil exports from the United States, which I have heard floated in conversation.

2:25:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Seems somewhat reasonable. I want the oil. Yeah, of course, because we have oil, so we don't want to sell. So, I mean, so many different things.

2:25:25Charles Lamanna:But one obvious one, not obvious one, but it's obvious if you know how these things work, is the refiners in the U.S. do not match up well to the oil produced in the United States. The refineries in the United States are based on heavier crude. Like crude is rated in terms of weight and sourness. Okay. And so our refineries are mostly for heavier crude. It's actually one reason why Venezuela has some appeal. Canada has a lot of appeal. Because they have heavier crude. Yeah, and we're going to talk about Canada.

2:25:51Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We're good at refining it, but we produce a lighter crude here.

2:25:54Charles Lamanna:Yes, because the Shell Revolution was just this dramatic shift very quickly in oil production. So our refineries are not primarily equipped. That's why when we ended the crude export oil ban, I forget, it was 2014 or something like that. It was just this huge unlock because it allows us to produce for a global market.

2:26:11Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So you can't look at American oil production as a monolith. Yeah, it's not fungible. We import heavy crude and export light crude. Is that roughly correct? Yeah, that's roughly correct. Yeah, so that's one thing.

2:26:22Charles Lamanna:It's just insane to do that. But in general, think about it. What is the value of higher prices? It stimulates production. We're going to talk about all these different ways where we want to unlock oil. So you want to tell American oil producers, hey, we're going to actually totally screw you over. It's actually going to be worse for you maybe than it was before because you don't even have a market. So you're going to strand all this oil. So that's terrible. There's also this financial manipulation idea, which has been floated. I think it's terrible. Hey, let's manipulate the financial markets basically in a way that you're selling futures short on a certain time period, and then you're buying them.

2:26:54Charles Lamanna:What you're trying to do is lower the near-term price and raise the long-term or treasury.

2:26:59Alex Epstein:Yeah, a very American way to try to solve a real world problem. A lot of people that like that.

2:27:04Charles Lamanna:The only solutions involve unlocking oil in one way or another. You do not want to screw up the markets so that people are less inclined to unlock oil, nor do you want to screw up the markets to destroy information. So again, the main unlock is reopen that straight. There's no way around that. But then we can talk about other things. So one category is what you call spare or emergency capacity. Okay. And this is, there's some uncertainty here, but it -

2:27:31Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Quickly, this is separate from the strategic reserve? Yeah, yeah.

2:27:34Charles Lamanna:So, well, emergency capacity is the strategic reserve. Oh, it is. So spare means you could pretty easily be producing more per day, but you're not because you're not happy with the price. And this is mainly, Saudi Arabia is considered exhibit A in terms of amount of this. Now, there's debate among experts about how much they have, but some people estimate they have one, two, three million barrels a day of spare capacity. that could ramp up on some kind of...

2:27:58Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And do they know how much capacity they have and they're just not sharing it? Or does no one know? I mean, that's always been the story.

2:28:04Alex Epstein:That's been the story of the Gulf, right? They're not going to... If they just flooded the market with every single barrel that they could possibly produce, they would be getting a worse, a much worse price.

2:28:14Charles Lamanna:Yeah, and there's this cartel arrangement that does. I mean, in a sense, everyone has this on different timescales. You think about U.S. shale producers. If prices were sustained at$100, guess what? There's a whole bunch of shale deposits that they could produce at$75 a barrel and make a fortune on that they're not going to do four weeks ago when it was around$60 a barrel. But in terms of the thing about the Saudi oil is it's produced at a much lower cost. So this is them saying, hey, we have some of this on the table. And then the question is, you need to be able to produce it and then you need to be able to transport it.

2:28:47Charles Lamanna:So you have estimates around maybe you could get one to two million barrels a day. So that's one of them. In terms of emergency, if you look around the world, you don't have a lot of immediate spare capacity besides that. So we have what's called emergency capacity or strategic petroleum reserve. You know, it's, it's, Jordy mentioned that we didn't fill up our strategic petroleum reserve. I think this is unequivocally a mistake. I mean, if you look at the whole thing of the strategic petroleum reserve is you want it for when you need it. And the best possible time to fill it up is when prices are low.

2:29:18Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And is that physically a place with a bunch of barrels that we just store? There's a bunch of different parts of it. It's like the Fort Knox of oil?

2:29:23Charles Lamanna:Well, there's multiple different places, but you can think of it roughly that way.

2:29:27Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:But we basically cash the physical oil in America or somewhere where we own it or can access it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's sitting there going unused until we're ready. Yeah, now there's issues of Biden.

2:29:38Charles Lamanna:Biden definitely misused it. So they used it to basically have lower gasoline prices during midterm elections. Oh, okay. Even though parenthetically their entire policy goal was get rid of fossil fuels, which means you want the price to go up so people can't afford it. It was a very cynical kind of move. They did it in a way that degraded the facilities. So let's say we're at about 4 million barrels a day. We can get out of that thing. We have 400 million in there. We should have over 700 million. We could have easily filled it up. I mean, it was a perfect time when you're talking about$50 barrel oil,$60 barrel oil.

2:30:10Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And can I do the basic arithmetic of 4 million a day, 400 million in the reserve, 100 days of oil? But that's not actually, if we're talking about like relieving price pressure, you could trickle it out over a year and have one quarter of the effect.

2:30:28Charles Lamanna:But just think about 100 million barrels a day is roughly the global market.

2:30:32Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Okay, okay.

2:30:33Charles Lamanna:So 4 million is just, that's its maximum capacity. Got it. It's kind of an analogy to batteries. Sure, sure. We're talking about batteries. So there's a certain amount, like with a battery, if you hear there's a 1 gigawatt battery installation. that means that's the usually means there's one gigawatt for four hours sure but if you wanted to do half a gigawatt then you could do eight hours right yeah it's the same deal with this but keep in mind this is not a hundred days of u.s oil demand and by the way for the refinery reasons we can't just supply it all with our spr it's just the maximum output is but you know four million barrels a day is something we're talking that's one-fifth of what's flowing through the straight of Hormuz.

2:31:10Charles Lamanna:So yeah, it's, it's a thing, but, but yeah, you can think of, yeah, maybe we'd be willing to do one to 2 million barrels a day from ours. Now, interestingly, the International Energy Agency, we are part of the International Energy Agency reserve program. So we have about 400, but they have about 1.4, 400 million. They have 1.4 billion. So we have allies around the world that can also release this oil. So maybe we could get one to 2 million from them. Now, At least last I checked the news, they hadn't agreed to do this because they don't think it's an emergency. But that's what it's there for.

2:31:42Alex Epstein:So notice the pattern is - At what point would they think it's an emergency? I don't know.

2:31:47Charles Lamanna:I mean, and we can put pressure on them. I think some of these determinations have to be made in conjunction with the military determinations. You can't make them in isolation. Because if you think about what's the military objective, how close are we to that? or how close are we at least to opening this up via high security and financially backed convoys, then you can think about the timetable here. If you think about, well, the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed for five years, let's just get used to being poor.

2:32:17Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Black bill.

2:32:19Charles Lamanna:No, I mean, people don't get oil. Like oil is, there's a reason why I focus a lot of my life on oil. There is nothing more – there's no material in the world of energy that is more valuable than oil because oil is just so unique in terms of it has this very high energy density and portability. And there's nothing like – I mean nuclear has higher – What about plutonium? Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have the same portability.

2:32:43Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We're going to be rich. We're going to have energy too cheap to meter in five years. I talk to a lot of nuclear founders.

2:32:47Charles Lamanna:Well, look, I love nuclear as much as anyway. They don't even have a portability solution though for the near future unless you're talking about an aircraft carrier or an icebreaker or something like that. So I'm just saying the world runs on mobility and oil is ideal for mobility. So are you going to go back?

2:33:01Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Oh, portability in the sense of like using nuclear to actually power trade and commerce and moving ships around. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even if you can power the grid, you will be poor because you will not be able to trade. Yeah.

2:33:12Charles Lamanna:Trade is really important.

2:33:14Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Trade is really important.

2:33:14Charles Lamanna:Trade is, and well, and also it's within the country too. We don't have the nuclear trucks to move things around. Sure, sure, sure. So obviously you want super cheap electricity and you want super cheap transport fuel. and we want to see if we can electrify some of this stuff, if you can do it cost-effectively.

2:33:30Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:There are some people working on electric bulldozers, for example. It's very hard. And by the way, guess what?

2:33:36Charles Lamanna:You need a lot of oil to even get that whole supply chain started because you need the mine. Bottom line, yes. I meant that thing about we can all be poor very seriously. Very seriously. So we have, if you look at the spare capacity, I think, that's all of them. So we have the rest of the IEA. We have ours. And then to my knowledge, we have Saudi slash UAE, them using spare capacity and then piping it where they can. So maybe combined, we're talking about$6 million a day if you use all of those. I mean, somebody could imagine$10 million. And all of these have time, particularly the emergency reserve things.

2:34:11Charles Lamanna:These all, like at least the Saudi one is you're sort of, you have a deposit, a big deposit. Here, it's just you have a small reserve. So you can't do this forever. And of course, there's a risk of if you deplete the SPR more, what if you really, really need it in the future? And then there's a bunch of nearer term stuff that you can do, and some of which I like just because it could be done anyway. So number one to piss a whole bunch of people off is let's stop using this Jones Act. Do you know what this Jones Act thing is?

2:34:38Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:I've heard of it, but explain.

2:34:39Charles Lamanna:So the Jones Act is a set of restrictions that say that you can only transport things among ports in the United States if you have everything is basically American. So it's owned by an American. It's run. I don't know.

2:34:53Alex Epstein:It is basically American ship, American crew. Yes.

2:34:56Charles Lamanna:Yes. So it's it's it leads to all these crazy, crazy things like we end up importing things from like instead of importing it from one part of the country to another, you end up importing it from some really far away place. It leads to that kind of thing. But in this case in particular, as Californians, we should all recognize this. We don't have oil being piped into California. So we want very efficient maritime transportation. And if you suspend the Jones Act, then you can get more efficient transportation, which means we can at least have lower prices here and we can have less of a price shock.

2:35:30Charles Lamanna:But in general, I want people to get used to having no Jones Act because I want there to be no Jones Act. So that's a good thing to do. My favorite idea here is—

2:35:40Alex Epstein:And I imagine there's a bunch of powerful lobbies that will fight and kill for the Jones Act because there's an entire industry built around. Yeah, it's the idea that we can only have a good shipbuilding industry.

2:35:54Charles Lamanna:I don't know what people think is happening with our shipbuilding industry. It's not going as well as other people's.

2:36:00Alex Epstein:It didn't exactly work.

2:36:02Charles Lamanna:Yeah, I mean, it worked to protect certain people's...

2:36:05Alex Epstein:I'm just saying if you look at American shipbuilding, it certainly hasn't allowed us to be competitive on a global stage.

2:36:12Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:The shipbuilders would say we're early, but I take your point.

2:36:15Alex Epstein:Early, but you've seen... But I'm just saying, like, how many decades of declines do you need? I think we're early. We're still early.

2:36:24Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It's like a smiling curve, like churn. It goes down and then it goes back up.

2:36:29Charles Lamanna:So that's the, uh, all right, well, it's definitely not going to help us. So here's the most interesting thing, which I, is a pet issue of mine is where we're like this administration, I should say does a lot of good stuff on energy. I say that I, you know, I'm in a fortunate position where I get a lot of people ask for advice and stuff like that. And I feel like one of my jobs is to tell people things they're not doing. A lot of things they'll just do right on their own. But Canada is not one of those things right now. We are just absolutely sleeping on Canada as an opportunity. So Canada has no people and infinite resources and is really friendly.

2:37:06Charles Lamanna:So they have these oil sands, you know what these things are? So they're just like these deposits of oil. It's like nature basically committed an oil spill is the way to think of it. So there's all these oil sands. For years, they were not very useful.

2:37:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:They weren't viable because Because it's not just you drill down, black gold comes up. It's like buried in the sands, need to be refined. There are different kinds of things.

2:37:26Charles Lamanna:You can mine it out directly, or you can do what's called in situ, which is you heat it up underground.

2:37:31Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Oh, and it liquefies.

2:37:32Charles Lamanna:In any case, they have just this unbelievable oil seep. They have way more oil deposits than we do, way more oil reserves. But they have on the order of a third of the production. And in part because they have absolutely terrible policies, which are their fault. but in part we have had terrible policies including getting rid of the keystone xl pipeline oh yeah and this kind of thing so but if you just think of canada it's just we should be so they have water i mean they get no people one tenth the population infinite raw materials they got everything they got timber they got as natural gas they got oil like and we're talking about venezuela they're a friendly country right they got smart people there they're they haven't been driven out of the country because they're afraid of getting killed by chavez or maduro or whatever So this is an opportunity to say, hey, Canada, let's work.

2:38:20Charles Lamanna:Let's have a task force. You guys are at a low in terms of we don't have pipelines, but we can do rail. At least we can do rail, maybe trucks, but at least rail. Rail transports from Canada are really low right now. So let's have an initiative where maybe you bring a couple hundred thousand, depending on your expectations, maybe we can add a couple hundred thousand barrels a day. So that's one that excites me because I want to be like the U.S.-Canada superpower thing is this huge opportunity that we're sleeping on because of the idea of, oh, we should only be doing it in, quote, America. But this is just, by the way, unbelievable.

2:38:54Charles Lamanna:I think they have the best uranium in the world. Yeah. It's...

2:38:57Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Maple syrup's up there.

2:38:58Charles Lamanna:Yeah, I don't have a Canadian personality, but I love that place. No, strategically, it makes a ton of sense. Strategically, and they're very friendly.

2:39:04Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yes. They're very friendly. Maybe we should be friendlier.

2:39:06Charles Lamanna:Yes, you know, we should, and we have trade agreements coming up. Yes, yes. The other thing is we have some, You know, we can increase capacity here, as I mentioned, depending on prices going up. So there's that. But that might be a couple hundred thousand barrels a day. But so high level, open the Strait of Hormuz. That's the only thing that really works. Then you can talk about Saudi, Mideast spare capacity, our emergency capacity and IEA emergency capacity. And then below that, you have Canada Jones Act and U.S.

2:39:37Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:production. That's a really, really thorough list. Thank you. I appreciate that. Anything else, Jordy?

2:39:42Alex Epstein:What are you going to be paying attention to most closely? Do you watch the price chart?

2:39:47Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Is that important to you?

2:39:48Charles Lamanna:Well, it's important. I mean, it's weird. I work with, I run like a kind of a network of energy executives, but I'm focused on the policy side of things. So I'm often laughably out of touch. I mean, I know in general within$10 usually what it is. But as a policy, I don't invest in energy.

2:40:08Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Because you're looking at longer term, five years.

2:40:10Charles Lamanna:But also, like, I'm deliberately avoiding exposure to the commercial part of it. Of course, of course.

2:40:15Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:You want to be independent.

2:40:16Charles Lamanna:Yeah, I want to be independent. So, yeah, I'm not. But at the moment, yes, I am looking at the prices. Okay. But I don't do predictions, but I'm just saying I think there's a service right now in just laying out the options for people. Because even in the government, I mean, you know, not everyone has a lot of expertise in oil. And this is the kind of thing where, yeah, it's kind of why I think you texted me this morning. I mean, sometimes you need to know about oil today and sometimes you don't. But when you need to know, you really need to know.

2:40:45Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. Well, it seems like whether you're in the business community or just, you know, humanitarian, everyone should be rooting for a swift and peaceful resolution.

2:40:55Alex Epstein:Yeah. Do you have any insight? This might be totally out of your wheelhouse, but insight into how people running businesses that are most impacted by fluctuations in oil prices, Like, have they been actively hedging over the last couple weeks? Are they doing, like, how do you run your business when your input costs can go up dramatically, potentially at a much higher rate than you can adjust your own prices?

2:41:22Charles Lamanna:I mean, just in general, these guys are sophisticated, I think, within the bounds of doing it. I don't think you can hedge indefinitely for this big a price kind of differential, like somebody is going to say. I mean, but it's also, you think about there's on the consumer side, but on the production side is even more dramatic if you just look at the margins of these guys. I mean, the oil industry is just fascinating. I mean, I just remember anecdotally when I came out with my first major book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, in 2014, even I could see speaking engagements correlated to these prices because you had a big price crash around them.

2:41:59Charles Lamanna:And then you think, wow.

2:42:01Alex Epstein:We don't need Alex. Yeah, it might be nice to keep the troops motivated, but, you know, I'd probably rather be employed.

2:42:10Charles Lamanna:But it's it's a hard it's a hard business. And one of these things is you just the people who survive have a very strong constitution and they can manage the risk very, very well. I was talking with a bunch of these guys and people we know in common. And like some of the better ones, some of the two of the young superstars in the industry, they're just saying like, like, we love the chaos because we can just know we can handle it. Like when the prices go down. Sure. Because that's you think about what they've been dealing with over the last year. They've increased production. Prices have gone down.

2:42:46Charles Lamanna:And you look at this. This administration is very focused. I would say too much focused on having prices go low. Like this is, this is one of the variables here is although the administration, I don't think was fully, was not fully prepared for this situation. In general, they are maniacal about prices going low. Like Trump in his mind has a very strong focus on$50 a barrel, which I think he feels like that's always the perfect price for oil. Sure. And the people in the oil industry say, wait a second, like we've had inflation of everything else.

2:43:14Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Why does our one product have to stay at$50?

2:43:17Charles Lamanna:And that's part of the appeal of Venezuela, rightly or wrongly, because it's not going to make a big difference soon. But it's like, how do we keep oil prices low? But that's hard to be in that industry as a consumer, as a producer rather, and it's hard as a consumer. So they have financial instruments. But the main thing is you need to just have the flexibility in your business model. And oil is, again, it's the most valuable material in the world of energy, which is why everyone uses it. But it's also why it's so inelastic. And you have these price fluctuations. So you just need to come to terms with that.

2:43:56Charles Lamanna:Or somebody needs to figure out something better. But it's really hard. And of course, policy-wise, we can have better policy to make it more stable. But it's still that thing where it's so valuable that guess what? You get a little extra demand, a little less supply. Price goes up a lot. It's different than other things which you can substitute for much more rapidly.

2:44:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:You're out of a job when we build the Dyson Sphere.

2:44:19Charles Lamanna:oh man i got i'm working on this ai thought leader thing we talked about last time so uh i got i got plenty to do across that bridge i got plenty to do with my time thank you as long

2:44:29Alex Epstein:as we need energy you'll be doing just fine all right guys thank you so much for coming on the

2:44:34Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:show let me tell you about shopify shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online in store on mobile on social on marketplaces and now with ai agents and let me also tell you about app loving profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we have our next in-person guest live in the Ultradome, Michelle Volz. How are you doing? Good. Good to see you. Good to see you, guys. Thank you so much for coming down to the TBP in Ultradome. Yeah, no. For those who aren't familiar with your venture capital career and your marathon running career, introduce yourself.

2:45:08Julien Bek:Yeah, so I am Michelle. I was previously at Andreessen Horowitz. I just launched my own fund, PAX, which is a$50 million early stage venture fund focused on foundational categories. So I was on the American Dynamism team at Andreessen Horowitz. Similar themes to that, just earlier stage.

2:45:26Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Biggest lessons from Andreessen Horowitz.

2:45:28Alex Epstein:Can we hit the gong first? Oh, yes.

2:45:29Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We've got to hit the gong.

2:45:30Alex Epstein:I think Michelle should hit it herself.

2:45:33Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Here we go. Hit the gong.

2:45:34Alex Epstein:You're here in person. Go for it.

2:45:36Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Now that's already sort of broke.

2:45:37Alex Epstein:You won't break it. Smash that. Smash that. I can see some kind of tennis forms.

2:45:46Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:That was good. That was good. Anyway, let's start with, like, lessons from Andrews and Horowitz. Like, what did you learn? What are your biggest takeaways? What's the playbook that you think you will be continuing? And then we can go into what you think might be different.

2:46:00Julien Bek:Yeah. I mean, I think in the categories that I look at, it is common for founders to need to raise a lot of capital.

2:46:07Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Okay.

2:46:07Julien Bek:And the ability to be able to fundraise for that capital ahead of maybe what are traditional milestones in software investing is very important. You need to be able to be a magnet for capital, for talent, and sell a vision. Because what you're doing is very hard with fewer obvious proof points maybe at the early days. And I think identifying that in founders early is something that Andreessen Horowitz is very good at. Yeah.

2:46:34Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:In American dynamism companies, hard tech companies, it does feel like there's like high CapEx requirements, high human capital requirements. You're not going to automate everyone on your supply chain on day one. And so there is this like how you talk about growth, how you talk about about scaling and success and finding product market fit. it almost feels back to like the, okay, we're scaling DAU and let's focus on that metric instead of like profit in software. What does it look like in hard tech? Is that the, okay, we have a program of record or we have these SBRs coming in or we have this long contract that is very solid, but we're not going to draw down on it for a few years.

2:47:20Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So we have a capital need. But how do you think founders in hard tech should be talking about what progress looks like like a top line or whatever top line means.

2:47:30Julien Bek:Yeah, I mean, I think that's the hardest part. In software, there's such a structured set of metrics that everybody has been trained around, like growth rate, like weekly active users, revenue. It is so different company by company in these sectors, and that's why the storytelling is important because if you're talking to later stage investors, they might be trying to make a pattern recognition off of a pattern that doesn't quite exist yet. And so in defense companies, like, yes, there are government contracts you should be trying to get, you should be working towards programs of record, but there are different intermediate proof points before that.

2:48:05Julien Bek:I usually explain it to founders as the three things you're trying to make progress on are people, product, and then revenue or traction. And so it's like, are you hiring the best people and the people that are experts in the different categories that you need? So maybe you need a mechanical engineering hire. Maybe you need a government sales hire. Maybe you need software as well. Are you making progress on people? are you making progress on product that's tangible? Can you show that there's developments? Maybe you've built something and it's gotten to a test milestone. Maybe it's in the hands of users.

2:48:37Julien Bek:Are you making product progress? And then are you getting some sort of signs from customers that they are willing to pay for this? Are you getting contracts? Are you getting LOIs? Are you getting something that shows that there's a commercial use case for this? I think sometimes in hard tech there's a million names. Hard tech, deep tech frontier tech, American Dynamism. I think sometimes people skew more towards thinking it's just deep tech, which is like I would describe. A science project almost. Exactly, like science risk. Nuclear fusion is probably the most extreme example. That's hard. It's like, of course there's a customer if you can do this, but we'll see what the timeline is hopefully soon.

2:49:15Julien Bek:But I think in a lot of the categories I look at, there are commercial proof points you can make. There's usually a latent demand or an immediate demand. It's like, how do you show that you can get those customers and they can like signal that they will buy from you?

2:49:29Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah. There was this viral Cetrini article that said software is dead, sell everything. How are LPs thinking about hard tech as a category with that backdrop of like the SaaSpocalypse? I imagine it makes things easier for you, but has it actually rippled through the LP community to the degree that your investors are more excited than ever to have a hedge against chaos in automatable software, all of that?

2:49:59Julien Bek:Yes. I will say this with love to all of my LPs. I think founders are typically leading indicators in categories. They are at the cutting edge. They are seeing around corners. Often great founders will see something before VCs do. VCs are lagging indicators. Once something is hypey, is usually too late to find a good early-stage investment. LPs are lagging, lagging indicators that once something is very mainstream and there starts to be some signs of returns, then they're like, we should pay attention to this category. And so I would say a thing that was more surprising, partly because I live in my own echo chamber and constantly hear about all these great companies building in defense tech, hard tech, industrial tech.

2:50:46Julien Bek:LPs weren't as familiar as I expected. So, like, there was a level of education. I think there's still some weariness. Like, there haven't been a ton of exits yet. I mean, I think that might change if SpaceX IPOs would be one of the biggest IPOs ever in history. But I would say, like, the appetite for it grew over time as I was fundraising.

2:51:07Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:On SpaceX, yeah, I mean, great point. It could be 1.75 trillion is the number that's being floated. It's staggering about it. It's going to return not just one venture capital fund. It's going to return 20 venture capital funds. Everyone who invested at early stage is going to see their fund return from that. But all the LPs had to go on a 20-year journey with a million continuation vehicles. How are you thinking about timeline messaging to LPs? because 10 to 12 years is what I've heard recently is kind of standard. But I've talked to some VCs and say, yeah, like most of my LPs want their money back in like six to seven years.

2:51:46Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And yet in hard tech, it feels like it might be longer. Are you communicating a particular timeline or is that even a relevant conversation?

2:51:53Julien Bek:Yeah, I think like every fund roughly pitches 10 to 12 years. That's sort of the expectation. I think it's actually an interesting catch 22 because if you had ownership in SpaceX, Your LPs actually like hold on to that. Yeah, totally. Like keep that. I think it's going to keep going up. But maybe you would have an option to take some off the table and return some money to LPs if that's what they wanted. But often if it's like a really, really good deal, LPs are like, oh, I think it's going to keep going up. But I think it's like case by case. I actually just was talking to LPs about this and they were like, sometimes it makes sense and sometimes like hold on.

2:52:31Julien Bek:And I think if you build a lot of trust with your LPs, like, they're usually along the ride with you.

2:52:36Alex Epstein:What geos are you spending the most time right now? Obviously, it feels like we have so many founders that are just, like, in our kind of neck of the woods here. But are you spending a bunch of time in Texas, Bay Area? Where do you expect to deploy most of your dollars?

2:52:52Julien Bek:Yeah, I think, like, there's five geos. It's San Francisco, L.A., Austin, New York, and D.C. I'm actually seeing like a significant amount of companies in D.C. Austin, I would say, though, is the biggest surprise for me. I know people have been trying to make Austin happen for a while, and I was skeptical. And now I think like it's sort of been an explosion of great companies.

2:53:14Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:It was kind of the same thing with L.A. Like there was this long L.A. movement a while ago. Snapchat was sort of like the first big like, you know, public tech company or one of them to come out of L.A. And then the El Segundo thing just happened like completely organically without any of those people that were cheering for LA. And it just sort of popped up. And it seems like Austin's going through a similar thing. What's unique about the companies that are building in D.C.? Are they thinking more demand generation first, more work on Capitol Hill first? And then maybe they'll set up a satellite manufacturing office or work with like a contract manufacturer to deliver their capability?

2:53:48Julien Bek:Yeah, I think you're seeing founders who are working at companies like Palantir, for example, that have a big office in D.C. They've been relocated to D.C. They're close to their customers, and then they spin out, start a company. Usually these companies will end up opening an office in New York as well. It's just a deeper pool for engineers. But there's a surprising amount of really strong engineering talent in D.C. that is pretty fixed. Like they want to stay in D.C. They have a life. They have a house. They have a family. So it can be a very good place to start a company.

2:54:21Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:What's the view on shipbuilding? Jordy says it's impossible to build a ship in this country. He was saying it can't be done. Is it possible?

2:54:28Julien Bek:We need to figure it out. Otherwise, we're going to be behind. I think, I mean, like the optimistic take would be like we can make it possible. We should make it possible. The pessimistic take is if we don't make any changes into the regulatory environment or the cost of building these things, it might not be, and that would be a shame.

2:54:48Alex Epstein:Yeah, that makes sense. Strategy with the fund? Yeah. These, like,$2 million lead, pre-seed type checks? What's the deal?

2:54:57Julien Bek:Yeah. On average,$1 to$2 million checks, like early stage, try to be in, like, the pre-seed, seed, occasionally a little bit later rounds. Like to partner really closely with founders. And I think the special thing about the early stage, which is just my favorite stage of company, is you get to be very aligned. It's like a significant check for me if I put, you know, one to two million dollars into your company. And I'm very motivated to help you be successful to get to the next round. And then for that next round, I can be much more strategic in helping you get there because I can't lead your next round.

2:55:32Julien Bek:Whereas I think sometimes at the multi-stage funds, it can be a little bit tricky to give advice for future fundraisers because you might be able to participate. And so you have to be like more delicate about it at a big fund. And as a small fund, you just get to like be totally aligned with the founder.

2:55:48Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:One last question about sort of the category targeting. American Dynamism made a lot of sense as like a theme around defense tech and hard tech. And you put a manufacturing company in there. One of the interesting subcategories of AD that always popped out to me was something around education. like re-educating workforce education, also just like education technology broadly. Do you think that that's within your purview or is that something that you're sort of carving out and focusing more on the deep tech, hard tech, physical products?

2:56:23Julien Bek:Yeah, I would say I like to look at things that sit at the infrastructure layer of society, which could include education and housing, sometimes even health care, often things at the intersection of hardware and software or tech and government, or just like doing something fundamentally important for like the broad majority of Americans. I think American dynamism is this beautiful phrase that can be an umbrella phrase as well. I sort of embrace that as well with PACs. But at the early stage, like what you're really betting on is people. Like there is so little to understand except like the team in a dream.

2:56:57Julien Bek:Like are you building something in a category that's very exciting? Are you taking the big swing? Do you sort of have a right to win in that category and some sort of unfair advantage? I like founders that have, like, worked in the industries that they are building in before. And do I believe you can be that magnet for capital and talent and everything?

2:57:15Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, where are the big talent pools these days? There's the SpaceX mafia, the Palantir mafia. It feels like there's an Anduril mafia now. Where else are you going to end up?

2:57:23Alex Epstein:Base power mafia in Austin. In Austin eventually. Yeah, I think base.

2:57:28Julien Bek:I think Sironic is starting to see a few things. Basically, any company that's reaching escape velocity and product market fit has grown really quickly and has hired exceptional people. There are some people that really love that zero-to-one stage and the company gets big. I think we're seeing it at Andrel. We saw it at Palantir. We continue to see it at Palantir. People learn how to grow quickly and then want to apply that to their own company.

2:57:55Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming by. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let's go over to some hard tech that's happening with Stargate.

2:58:15Alex Epstein:By the way, John, apparently Trump said something to the effect of, I think the Iran war is very complete, pretty much.

2:58:24Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Oh, okay.

2:58:25Alex Epstein:So we may be on the verge of a new era of peace. Crude is back down to like Friday, pre-weekend prices. What does that mean?

2:58:34Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:80, 90? 83. Okay. 83. Okay. Well, maybe he was watching. Maybe he was watching Alex Epstein. And Alex said, hey, we got to wrap this up. We got to stop. The price is too darn high, says Alex Epstein. Oracle and OpenAI allegedly dropped their Stargate expansion lease, meta swooped in the same day. Ben Pouladine says that's not weakness, that's a hot real estate market. And then he goes on to comment that the real story is OpenAI passed on six additional buildings because power won't be ready for a year. The power is the gating factor here, not the chips, interestingly. We are in the power bottleneck, the energy bottleneck.

2:59:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And by then, Rubin replaces Blackwell. So why are you going to build a Blackwell data center when you could build a Rubin data center? So why expand with last-gen chips? The eight-building, 400 ,000 GPU base build continues. This is smart capital allocation, he says. And so this is based on reporting from the information about Oracle and OpenAI, sort of adjusting the plan for Stargate. I am particularly interested in digging into the Stargate of China. They have a project that's the Chinese Stargate, funded to the tune of$36 billion, not up at half a trillion, but still. A very big number. It's a big number, and it's growing.

3:00:05Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And I've been digging into it a little bit, trying to learn as much as I can. We'll do a deep dive, probably with someone at SemiAnalysis who knows a lot more about it.

3:00:14Alex Epstein:Chat GPT is back at the top of the App Store leaderboard.

3:00:19Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:You know, we do have to.

3:00:20Alex Epstein:Adam GPT says GPT 5.4.

3:00:23Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Sentence for gods. You know what that meme is from? Big Chungus. That's a good one. Anyway.

3:00:29Alex Epstein:Yeah, so I'm kind of surprised by this for the one reason being I expected. Anthropics has been spending a ton of money on marketing. They started ramping it up around the time of the Super Bowl. I expected them to basically be willing to spend whatever it took to stay on top.

3:00:48Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Yeah, but it's capital war. So both sides are going to spend a lot of money.

3:00:52Alex Epstein:Yeah.

3:00:52Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And, you know, there was what?

3:00:55Alex Epstein:Wasn't the rise in the Claude like ranking just because of the DOW news? And now that's like not on the page.

3:01:01Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So, yeah, that's what I was getting. I was like when the Super Bowl ad dropped. And we had some harsh words for the nature of the characterization around ads, our favorite thing in Claude, led us to launching Claude with ads. But our question was, will this Super Bowl ad move the needle for the consumer app? Like a Super Bowl ad is a massive campaign. Millions, tens of millions of people will see this. It went viral. Like it's, will it work on people? Will people see this ad that's like sort of deep in the weeds around how ads work in LLMs? Like, will this be enough for people to go and hit the download button?

3:01:37Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:There's a hurdle there. Will they do it? And they did it a little bit. I think Claude went from like 26th to 18th. It started climbing then. And then you're right, the Department of War narrative really, really shot up. But as with any story in tech, it has to go back and forth and back and forth. And the memo that came out on last Wednesday probably sort of reset the narrative there and changed how people were thinking about that. And also, these charts are based on momentum, and so it's very, very hard to state a lot.

3:02:11Alex Epstein:Yeah, Claude had gotten to something like a million downloads a day, according to Mike Krieger.

3:02:16Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Oh, yeah.

3:02:16Alex Epstein:And at the same time, ChatGPT last month, I think, did like 55 million downloads, so it's still not outpacing ChatGPT's last month.

3:02:24Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Well, Paramount Plus is number four in the free apps. Although, how can it be free when you have to subscribe? Sort of odd. Yeah, that's the whole thing. But bullish for the Ellison team.

3:02:35Alex Epstein:Krish says, UMF's ruined agency so bad that I'm going to have to start saying gumption. Gumption.

3:02:41Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Gumption is really good. I like gumption. We hire for gumption. AI gumption. AI agents?

3:02:50Alex Epstein:We only hire for gumption here.

3:02:52Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:What's the noun version of gumption? I don't know.

3:02:54Alex Epstein:A friend of the show, Amjad, said, not having coding experience is becoming an advantage. and Shuria says, not knowing how to cook is becoming an advantage. CEO of McDonald's. I love it.

3:03:07Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Omgad has some great takes though. This is just an easy riff. It's all in good fun. What else is going on? Lots of debate over the singularity pricing as Will DePue put it because Barely AI, which I believe is Trung Fan, says, Cursors, internal analysis shows how hard Anthropica is subsidizing Claude Code. Last year, a$200 monthly subscription could use$2 ,000 in compute. Now the same$200 a monthly plan can consume$5 ,000 in compute. It does feel like there's a capital war. I'm very interested to dig into the history of capital wars in winner-take-all markets, but also in oligopoly markets. you should write the book on Capital Wars Capital Wars are fascinating I lived through it during the Uber and Lyft era there was a flippening for a little bit where Lyft was at the top of the charts

3:04:06Alex Epstein:the friendly rideshare company

3:04:09Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:it was very friendly the cars would pull up with a pink mustache on them and it had a very fun whimsical branding and you would sit in the front seat of the car because you were friends with the driver I could see Claude adopting a pink mustache

3:04:21Alex Epstein:this is a real thing Yeah. So when Lyft launched, people see Lyft and Uber as like commodities at the time, but Lyft was like revolutionary and people were super black belt on Uber because Uber at the time was only black cars.

3:04:37Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:So they didn't allow anyone to just hop on the network. Like it was not a three-sided marketplace or whatever, a two-sided marketplace. Like you had to have a like a livery to TCV number. I forget what it's called but like you had to be registered as a limo driver and you had a Escalade and you normally Someone would call you and say hey There's a wedding and we want you to come shuttle people around at this wedding and they would pay you for that And uber went to those folks and they said hey you are registered to legally drive this car as a professional driver we want to book you through our app.

3:05:13Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And so the black car became Uber's main product, their only product. And then Lyft figured out through some interesting strategy, how to allow people to just show up with a Prius or a Toyota Camry or Corolla or whatever. And so drivers on launch day, I remember like the launch week in San Francisco, would just show up in just some random car, but Lyft gave them all pink mustaches, huge pink mustaches. The team can pull up a picture of the huge pink mustaches on the front of the Lyft cars that were very whimsical. And it was remarkably cheap because Uber had been somewhat subsidizing the black cars.

3:05:53Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:They hadn't been taking a huge margin. They were losing money. But the Lyft cars were way cheaper because someone was just showing up with like their Toyota Corolla or whatever with their pink mustache on it. And so So you would hop in the front seat because this driver was your friend. There you go. The pink mustache on top of the, what is that, a CRV or something. And so you would hop in the front seat. They would ask you to pound the driver, give him the knuckles. Give him knucks? Give him knucks. This is the thing. No way. I'm almost sure. So you'd be like, what's up? And then you would get in the front seat, and they would drive you.

3:06:27Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Of course, if you had a group, you'd be in the back seat. But then.

3:06:29Alex Epstein:Everyone had to give knucks?

3:06:30Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:or just i i think the nux might have been optional but encouraged recommended because it was like hey we're buddies and we're and we're fighting the war on the borg we're going up again you were encouraged to get in the front front seat front seat in the lift in the lift when you're taking a lift your friendly lift driver shows up you sit in the front seat you give them nuts this is the thing pink mustache that's crazy big chungus sends his regards all right so you gotta hire a car but you have to be absolute boys you do driver but but truth be told like a lot of the early lift drivers were like super cool tech forward, San Francisco people.

3:07:03Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And so like you'd have a lot to talk about because like people were like, it wasn't professionalized at all yet. It was very much like two-sided marketplace. You'd make a lot of money as a driver. Like there was no margin compression yet. It was like free money everywhere for everyone. And it was a capital war. And Lyft raised a ton of money and came into the market with a disruptively cheap product and wound up delivering a really fun experience that was very, very cheap. And then Uber sort of fast followed and launched Uber, what's it called? The normal one. Not black. Uber X. Uber X. Yes, Uber X.

3:07:40Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:And Uber X was bring your own car. And then the rest of the game played out. And it became a capital fight. And for a while, like the meta was, oh, you need a ride. You open Lyft and you check the price and then you open Uber and you check the price. And people would check both prices constantly. and then and then over time like the liquidity and and power loss stuff came into it john do you remember uber helicopter yes that was it a real thing with blade i think it was a partnership with blade which was the uber for helicopters and uh it was a thing but in in like you know for a few weeks or something did you ever do it no no because uber ubers had a whole bunch of different uh like stunty products like uber you know uber yachts or uber they did uber ice cream where you could get ice cream delivered.

3:08:25Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:That was like the precursor to Uber Eats. They did an ice cream delivery truck where every Uber driver checked in with the field office, got a cooler in the back with a bunch of dry ice and a bunch of ice cream, and you could press a button in for like$2. They would bring you an ice cream. They even did, I think, Uber kittens, and you could ask Uber to bring hats or dogs or something. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, it was very funny. Anyway, lots of stunts, lots of ways to get attention, go viral. And that was sort of the launch strategy. They would do that for whenever they launched new markets, they would come in and they'd be like, we need to go viral on the local news.

3:09:02Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:We need to let the town know that we've arrived. And so lots of back and forth in the capital wars of 2023, 2024. It was fun times. I lived, I fought through them. What else is going on? I think that's a good place to call it. Well, thank you so much for listening. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com, and have a great rest of your day.

3:09:30Alex Epstein:It has been an honor and a privilege. It has. And I hope by the time the show goes live tomorrow, the war is over.

3:09:36Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross:Me too. Me too.

3:09:37Alex Epstein:That would be. I would love that. That would be quite nice. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye. Cheers.