Jassy's Shareholder Letter, The Next AI Capability, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Saagar Enjeti, Joe Weisenthal, Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, Brian Manning, Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, Changpeng Zhao, Tal Hoffman

28:55this is crazy your catalog just sits there collecting streams because people want meek not just a rap song and dimes square holding says first in my bloodline to see a rapper with ai psychosis commenting on a deck from i think it's a i think it's a reasonable it's a reasonable analysis reasonable analysis i just think it's i just think it's a little bit unfair for the ai to be dunking on the other AI? Is this kind of like a crab's bucket? There's a whole story about this in the journal the other day about a local group that's lobbying against data center development using AI tools, ChatGPT, like very heavily to understand the legal code, how they can organize who they should be calling.

29:46It sort of feels like a good use of AI in the sense that they're exercising their democratic rights properly through the correct channels. It could be so much worse. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, well, hopefully by using models enough, they'll be like, oh, wait, this is actually good. Yeah, or there are some parts that I like narrowly, but do we need this data center in my neighborhood? Maybe not. Yeah. Also specifically on this, I think it's interesting, like among celebrities, it seems like rappers specifically are like really leaning in a lot more than other like types of celebrities.

30:19Oh, interesting. You see like little baby, little baby, not little baby. Okay. There was a post yesterday about someone who got paid to like set up open claw for him. Yeah. You've seen this a bunch. Yeah. It's just funny. Like you don't see actors. Baby Keem, little baby was second after baby Keem. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, I mean, Matthew McConaughey had some words about AI saying it's coming. Oh, yeah, when he was going to log in, he needs to log in. Well, no, that was separate. Wasn't it like months? It was like months, months, months and months later, he was like, this is coming.

30:48You need to be prepared for this. You need to work alongside of it. Yeah, but he's not talking about his specific pieces. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, I guess Ben Affleck had that company, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ben Affleck already got the nine-figure exit. He's good. Yeah, but you would imagine that AI actually might be a useful tool for understanding the impact of building a data center in a particular community because everyone is debating the economic impact, how many jobs will be created, what's the environmental impact, and being able to crunch through all those trade-offs so that the community gets to a net positive impact that the population can basically vote on and be happy about and say, yeah, we made this trade-off properly and we feel like we're getting the benefit because maybe it's generating a lot of tax revenue.

31:40Maybe the tax revenue is very durable. Maybe the tax revenue is going to the right place. Is it going to a tax refund? Or is it going towards a project that people don't actually support? And so there's a whole other question of for the local community, is that tax revenue meaningful? Like what dollar value do they put on new tax revenues for the city? depends on what the city's building or doing with that revenue. Anyway, what is this post by Eigengender? Actually, that's not impressive. The concept of a Dyson Sphere was already in the training data. This is like, you know, we build the Dyson Sphere, and then someone's coping and just saying like, yeah, I mean, it's not that impressive.

32:19You're just watching the Dyson Sphere be built around the sun, thinking like, eh, I'm not that important. Here's another like self-referential thing. Like, you know, AI, should AI be used to fight data center construction? Today, Meta began removing ads from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to be harmed by social media while under the age of 18. And so there's been these class action lawsuits have been a big, a big, you see them on social media all the time. Usually it's some sort of data breach or some sort of random product that they're targeting you for. And I feel like many people just sort of scroll past them because the default class action is like you wait a long time and then maybe you get a check for$5 in the mail.

33:10But Meta has begun removing advertisements from attorneys. What is their justification for this? Lawyers across the country are now seeking new plaintiffs in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts. It's unclear if any of them have been backed by private equity, as the California lawsuit appears to have been. Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large national firms like Morgan & Morgan. Almost all of them ran on Facebook and Instagram. Some appeared on threads and Messenger, plus Meta's Audience Network.

33:41One such ad read anxiety, depression, withdrawal, self-harm. These aren't just teenage phases. They're symptoms linked to social media addiction in children. Platforms knew this and kept targeting kids anyway. Yeah, so Meta has something in their terms of service that says, we also can remove or restrict access to content, feature services, or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate misuse of our services or adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Meta. Huh. It's basically like, we're not going to let you use our product to take legal action against us.

34:15Yeah. I wonder where, where the, uh, the class action recruiting will go next. You know, it'll go everywhere out of home, out of home. Yeah. Could go on podcast. I mean, it's such a broad case that, yeah. Well, YouTube is easy to, it's relatively easy to reach like Facebook and Instagram users. Yeah. Especially young people. It's everyone. Yeah. So they just need to cast a wide net. But it'll be interesting to see how that develops. Has anyone built an out-of-home advertising network for classrooms? Classrooms? What do you mean? Like teachers? I don't think people want to advertise to good. No.

34:56Kidding, kidding, kidding. Anyway. The spreadsheet will become irrelevant, says Buco Capital Bloke. No, the spreadsheet is eternal. The spreadsheet paradigm is capitalism. The two are irrevocably intertwined. We were using spreadsheets 3 ,000 years ago to trade aux, and we will still be using them in 3 ,000 years. Long live the spreadsheet. And he shares a stone tablet that appears to be a spreadsheet. This is in reaction to Signal's post that Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have maybe four to five years of relevance left simply because the document spreadsheet paradigm itself will become mostly irrelevant.

35:31It already makes zero sense to draft, review, or analyze anything without a native AI environment around it. That gap only widens over time. Most communication, including email, chat, status updates, is heading towards agent-mediated flows where humans set intent and AI handles execution. I don't know. I mean, it is like both can be true here because you could be in a world where if you need a spreadsheet, like the code is written on the fly and instantiated. Like we saw ramp launch ramp sheets very, very quickly. And it was a very full featured product that was clearly only possible to build that so fast.

36:09Like cloning Google sheets is, is used to be insane. Uh, we had some luck cloning slack recently. Our, our, uh, our intern built like a very, very convincing clone. It's sort of crazy. In about like an hour. Yeah. I think it was on the$200 plan? Wow. That's incredible.

36:36I think there's still the question of actually getting that to feature complete, maintaining it, really serving it, hosting it. All of that seems like a hassle compared to just signing up on a consumption basis or a seat-based basis for a lot of SaaS. I'm still sort of you know not a firm believer in like this near-term SAS apocalypse broadly but it it does it does I think the more likely scenarios that you will see you will see software instantiated on it like in real time so if you're building something and it requires a spreadsheet to visualize and you're already seeing that with a lot of the chat apps when if you ask for a deep research report or something that requires sort of building a timeline or a chart.

37:27It can write Python. It can write HTML that will generate that term. Yeah, the other thing is just giving customers a lot more flexibility around the product and thinking that, like, okay, if you're buying a piece of software, it'd be like buying, like, a home. You get the home, and then you can make changes to it to fit your own needs over time. And so we'll see what ultimately changes. but you can imagine a world where, you know, it stops being, I forget who was on the show, but they were talking about how, oh, it was console, console.com, talking about how instead of having like a request a feature button, you just let people build it themselves.

38:07Yes. Well, there's been some back and forth on the timeline between Nate Silver and Nikita Beer over whether or not links are truly de-boosted on X. Philippe Lemoine said, after the exchange between Nate Silver and Nikita Beer, I did a little test to check whether that was true. And to my surprise, what I found suggests that link deboosting was indeed reversed. What I did was randomly sample 15 tweets by the New York Times between 2019 and today. That feels like a small sample. It feels like you should look at maybe a larger swath there. But he computed the weekly average number of likes and retweets they got and plotted the results along with a trend line.

38:50The idea is that likes and retweets are probably a decent proxy for reach. And the New York Times only posts tweets with external links. So by looking at this, we should be able to see how many changes in the algorithm with respect to how links are treated. As you can see, it's pretty clear that starting around the spring, summer of 2023, posts with links started to be penalized and eventually they were completely nuked until the spring summer of 2025 when a reversal to that policy seems to have started to be honest this isn't what i was expecting to find so it even if it's just a quick and dirty test it's hardly definitive proof uh it's good news and i thought i'd share the results there is a question of like even so links links yeah they there was clearly like a de-boosting moment although some really good stuff could break through.

39:37Like, uh, there were a few examples of people just posting links to, um, uh, links to, uh, the, uh, uh, like Google docs basically. And those would still rip somehow. And I don't know if that was like a specific link, but I think one thing is remain true the entire time, which is that, that if you are linking to content that is genuinely very interesting yeah it can still do numbers yeah and and there is a little bit of uh maybe some uh some feature of the new york times where if you spent a year or two on x knowing that uh okay like there's sort of this adversarial relationship with links you're going to open it in the browser you might actually just develop a different habit of okay i go and read the apps like i definitely developed the muscle memory to open the Wall Street Journal app regularly and scroll that newsfeed separately.

40:34And I don't really look for as much cross-pollination as I thought. Anyway, we have Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points in the waiting room. So we'll bring you to the TV panel. Sagar, how are you doing? I'm great, guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. Let's start with the data center thing. I didn't get the tie memo. Oh, yeah, yeah. The tie is... I'm getting brutally tie-mobbed. Dude, Jordy gets an exit and immediately starts dressing like a tech asshole. What's going on here, man? To be clear, I've been going... I've been having... I have the limited edition... Technology in motion.

41:14Okay, well, why has nobody sent me one? How come I haven't been sent one? These are dropping soon. They're in the works. We'll send you one. You're going to get to wear TBPN all day long. Yeah. So we were talking about Andy Jassy's 2026 shareholder letter,$200 billion of CapEx, tons of new data centers coming online. This applies to every company. You were hoping for a bigger number, wasn't it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, of course, as an American, I just want all of my farmland. I want all the trailer parks pushed out. And I just want to make sure that there's beautiful data centers that are just sitting on previously like taken care of and people with generations just get kicked out.

41:55So I wanted 400 billion, 600 billion, something like that. Yeah, I mean, maybe we can start with the shape of the pushback against data centers because it's fallen in a few buckets. But let's just start with like the big one, which is energy. What are the headline numbers and fears that people are pointing to the case studies that people are nervous about the energy impact specifically? Well, I think especially guys, you know, there's a pre-Iran war conversation. There's a post-Iran war conversation. I think that's really important to say because, you know, who knows where the price of oil will eventually stabilize.

42:32But when you have high inflation at the gas pump and likely at least some moderate increase in electricity bills, we have we don't know exactly where things are going to stabilize. You're going to have a lot more cost consciousness whenever it comes to energy. Now, especially in the midst of a data center conversation, I know that the data center pro data center people are always telling us, don't worry, it doesn't actually impact your electricity bill all that much. Nonetheless, there is a feeling there. And John, I just sent you that study or that story this morning, which is very interesting.

43:01My colleague Emily Jachinsky actually talked to me about this. But a Wisconsin city has now been the first in the nation to actually pass an anti-data center referendum. And so the ballot measure is basically the last thing that the voters in that town felt that they had at their disposal to effectively ban the entire city from approving any of these new projects. You guys remember the guy who went viral in New Jersey who blocked the data center? I interviewed him on my show. He was a longtime viewer actually of the program. He was just like a normal activist type but hadn't really engaged with it.

43:36And he went through the zoning and he was like, look, these developers are making all kinds of promises. and he was concerned about water. And I know, you know, again, the pro people are always telling me that that's not the case. Maybe, you know, I got to see a little bit more evidence for myself. Real quick, is your mic, I don't know that you're on the correct mic. We might be on that. Yeah, the gain might be a little high. I will give everyone some news about this Wisconsin city passes nation's first anti-data center referendum. The vote suggests ballot measures could become a powerful new tool for grassroots activists.

44:10The chat thinks it's a foreign adversary. He doesn't want data center projects. This isn't Politico. Let's hear if it sounds any better now. Is it a little better? Oh, yeah. I think that's great. There we go. Thank you. There we go. OK, so is so is this is this what is this local Wisconsin city referendum like the new playbook that will spread all over America? Are there other jurisdictions that are already looking to copy and paste this? How do you think this, where do you think this goes? I definitely do think it will serve as a model, especially as other, remember, this is really a bottom-up phenomenon.

44:48So it's really at the community level. And here in the state of Virginia, where I live, 40 % of our power is actually consumed by data centers. And so you've seen organic pushback. It became a major issue in the gubernatorial campaign. Both the Republican and the Democratic candidates were against data centers. And a lot of the candidates are seeing all of the energy. I'm sure around this, I'm saying at the community level, I'm sure you guys also have seen all of these viral videos. I referenced the one more recently of this trailer park, which is being basically told they have to go out because they're going to build a new one.

45:22There's the famous one recently, I think it was in Kentucky, of a woman being, I think she was offered like$20 million for her land. She's like, I'm born on this land. I'm going to die on this land. And so I really think that this is one of those bubbling political issues, which no major politician, maybe Bernie Sanders, the only one that I've seen, which has been willing to like jump on top of it. But I think it's going to be a major issue in 28, 28. I think in 28, both candidates are going to have a data center platform. Maybe the Republican one, depending on who it is, is going to try and square the circle around GDP.

45:57But I don't think that voters want to hear anything about it. That's just my personal opinion. Is the sense in Virginia that Virginia would be better off if the state had never had a data center? Well, it's complicated. Remember, we're full of a military industrial complex. But don't forget this. We had Amazon. Remember when they were going to leave New York and they were going to come here? They're actually going to come near where I live. It really didn't work. And there's a lot of local op-eds. They're like, hey, we didn't get all the jobs that we were promised. Virginia threw all these tax credits.

46:30And so people do feel really taken advantage of, I think, especially by Amazon here in northern Virginia. But look, the backbone of our economy is always going to be the military industrial complex and all of these like ridiculous server farms that serve the CIA and the Pentagon. But I mean, Oregon, I think it was 30 percent of power in the state of Oregon is being used by data centers. It's like 20 percent in a few different states. Virginia is definitely we were the highest in the nation. But I can tell you at the organic level, Fredericksburg, more of the rural communities where there are the new projects that were being looked at.

47:02All of those city councils, people were lining up for hours to campaign against this. Same thing in New Jersey. People lined up for, you know, in the middle of the night. And I've talked about this before. Guys, do you know what it takes for a voter to actually care? You can barely get people to come out for Election Day for the president. Now, to come up for a local meeting against zoning, usually that's just really old people. this time. People are bringing their children, they're sleeping in the room, they're waiting all night just to be able to sleep. What is your advice for the data center developers out there?

47:36Certainly, you feel you don't think that we should just not build any data centers. It depends. I don't know. I'm becoming more radical as times go on. Maybe we do just need a butlerian jihad. I'm testing the limits of your editorial independence, by the way. Shout out to you, Sam. But, I mean, look, I'm not giving any advice to the enemy. I think really what I would say to the tech community more generally, and John, you and I have talked about this, is just prove to me that this is going to make my life better. And stop talking about all these scary things because I'm starting to believe you.

48:12In fact, I do believe you. What is this new Claude news that their new model is so scary? They have to pre-release it to the cybersecurity companies so that they can develop. So that the new model can develop defenses against itself. We're very much with you that the fear-based marketing needs to stop because it's not helping anyone. Part of the whole backlash is like - But I don't know, guys. I mean, Jordi, you have always made the case, and maybe you're right, is that that's a great way to fundraise. Every time the company that bought you wants more money, they have to go and be like, look, we're changing the world.

48:47We're going to destroy all these jobs. We're like, I don't know. Oh, I mean, for, for, let's say like with Anthropic, I feel like he believes it. So my point, my point was that it was very effective when there was no revenue in the industry. Right. Yeah. And, and, and it was kind of this kind of far out idea. Nobody had had like a magical experience with AI. They hadn't had like a question, didn't have anyone to ask it to, and then asked AI the question and they got a good answer. Like when, when, when the average American had not had a very cool experience with AI, They hadn't generated an image that was, you know, photo real or gotten help with their homework or help with writing any of these things that like now everybody's had the experience of.

49:25It clearly like was necessary to kind of marshal enough capital for a bunch of upstarts to be able to compete with the biggest companies in the world on this, like the Googles of the world. and I just think at this point I made the case like you know at the end of last year where it was like we need to stop we need I think we need to stop this as an industry because why would average American be excited about this if you're just trying to give them you know Terminator nightmares but clearly the entire you know some people in the industry still feel like they need to because I think they really believe it no I think they believe it that's the I'm with John like I feel like Dario believes it And he just goes on every podcast in the world and says it like over and over again.

50:07And at a certain point, especially like with the new Claude news, I'm like, dude, maybe I should just believe you. And, you know, people, what is it? People are taking leaves of absences because they're afraid. And I mean, you know, you can only call yourself the new digital God so many times before. Look, again, I'm a Luddite. I don't know a ton about the technology. I listen to smart people like you guys and many others to try and figure out what's going on. But if anything, I just want to be able to convey to the people who watch this show. So you're not very popular right now, and especially in the midst of a global energy crunch.

50:38I would just be real careful about strolling around town and talking about how it's going to bring jobs in because, A, nobody believes you. They all think that their bills are going to go higher. There needs to be – I think what this really needs, guys, is I don't think it can be solved at the federal level – or sorry, at the company level. I think the government is going to have to step in and genuinely like codify, let's say, the executive order that Trump wanted to put in place where every data center project is going to have to supply the amount of energy that it's going to use. It have to prove it to the local city council, to the state, to the feds.

51:10Like there needs to be genuine Democratic buy in if we're all going to decide like this is cool for us. And I'm not sure that I'm not sure really that the tech companies are ready for that. Although maybe Sam is, you guys saw his new social contract. I was going to do a segment about it on my show, but I didn't have a chance because of this entire Ron Moore thing. But, I mean, look, I mean, clearly he can foresee what the problem is. I don't really agree with some of the stuff he laid out, but, yeah, anyways. Yeah, it was notable. So Demis had an interview with Harry Stebbings this week. It's just 30 minutes.

51:46you would probably appreciate it because Demis is, you know, one of the godfathers. And he even was kind of talking about potentially, you know, one solution to this is like sovereign wealth funds, like investing in the labs, getting a piece of it so that every sort of citizen benefits. I thought that was notable because it was, you know, Google and, you know, The Gemini team is the most heavily funded lab in the entire world. So we'll see how this stuff works out. In Virginia, Tyler on our team just dropped a truth nuke. He said in some localities in Virginia, 31 % of total local tax revenue is from data centers.

52:32Is there, like, do you think that, like, I guess part of what I'm trying to wrap my head around is, like, it seems like there are plenty of places in the United States where that putting a data center somewhere that would generate a huge amount of local tax revenue would be a net positive, right? And I believe that you're right, that individual areas should be able to decide, is this an industry that we want to support? Is this an industry that we want as a part of, Like, personally, do I want, you know, people, you know, drilling oil like, you know, 10 feet from my property line? Like, probably not.

53:15Right. But there are places in the United States where people have decided we're going to drill for oil here and and we're going to be OK with those tradeoffs. And so I think I generally, you know, I've said this before. I think there's a lot of reasons for somebody to like citizens need to understand, okay, what is the benefit of putting this data center in our County, in our town? And it, and it needs to be, it needs to be, there needs to be some positive benefit other that for, for the local community. And so I think we agree there because, because the data center could be halfway around the world or, and you still get, you still get access to all the AI tools that you want.

53:56It doesn't need to be in your backyard. And so, and, but I believe that, to tyler yeah uh who's in the chat uh but i mean i do think though that that tax argument the problem is that largely again i'm speaking from a voter level is they do not feel either that impact or that they often like with the amazon you know example that i gave you is that we give these tax credits away and then the promises a lot of these things don't end up happening come on guys this is a tale as old as time every state in the country remember when amazon did that ridiculous pony show for every state to throw whatever it could to them and then they ended up yeah for hq2 that's the project i'm talking about is that virginia where i live also did that and then of course you know local politicians feel very burned and a lot of the voters do as well but ultimately jordi i don't think we're disagreeing man like local control is really what it's all about that's what i'm saying okay and i also think the feds though i do think that you know considering the way that trump and the ai industry are so like they really do need each other just because of the way, especially now after Iran, my God, can you imagine, you know, like, look at how much he's reacted to market swings.

55:04One of the fears that I had really was that a lot of this, you know, you're talking about sovereign wealth funds, John, you and I know the amount of Gulf money sloshing around Silicon Valley. I'm like, guys, like we're about to see force majeure just get declared. I mean, if you see even 10 % go down from QIA, SIA, or any of these other investment funds, you're like, that's like an extinction level event for a lot of these or they might reallocate. They might start funding all these defense tech companies and not investing in data centers. And don't forget that an Amazon data center was struck by Iran in the UAE, I believe.

55:38A couple of different tech infrastructure places were explicitly declared war on by the Iranians. So I do think that there's an element here where what we're what we are watching play out, I think, politically and even geopolitically, is that foreign adversaries can see clearly that this is a potential pain spot for the U.S. economy. Here in the U.S., the administration is really aware of this. But there's also just this rising populist tide against the data center movement and against, I think, really like abundance style assurances from politicians and from companies that after 40 years now, I mean, before data centers, it was Walmart.

56:18And before that, it was something else. There's always going to be like a small guy versus big guy feeling, especially in rural parts of the country. And, you know, I'm from Texas, Geordi, with the oil industry. So I get exactly what you're talking about, right? Like there's a symbiosis of we actually get rich off this stuff. So we're okay with drilling for oil. But, you know, there has been enough stories also, even there, where people go bust as a result. And there's a lot of animosity towards the oil industry, especially pre-shale revolution after things petered out. And, you know, I don't know.

56:51I've just seen this go politically in a lot of interesting directions enough to see that, A, something is happening. B, is that the tide is not only just turned but, I think, coming very explicitly. And what I would really advocate for is a genuine democratic process because that's what it's all about. Like people just feel like this is out of their control. About AI especially. They're like, I want impact. I want a say. And I don't think they're wrong to say it. I really don't. What's the flow for getting some sort of resolution on the federal level? Is that like a new bill or something? Or like, obviously this is going to happen after the midterms.

57:25But then, yeah. And it's going to try and tie a bunch of these different questions in a bow around safety and cybersecurity and data center build outs. Is there a world where a good data center exists in the sense that it supplies its own power with clean energy. It's not an eyesore. It's either buried or covered in trees or beautifully designed, and it doesn't have any environmental impacts. Is there a world where someone could get behind a data center at that level? Yeah, absolutely. You know, and that's kind of the thing. Why are we just talking about data centers? I've talked about this before.

58:01I read it once a report of a guy who just came from China and he said nobody in China cares about power with data centers because they just have a ton of power. He's like, we have energy, dude. He's like, bro, we don't care. He's like, yeah, you can build a data center. We're good. Like we have cheap and abundant power. So if we have cheap, abundant power all over the nation, no one will care either just about data centers, especially if we have, you know, cheap electricity. If there's just if there's no concern on the power generation level. And this is why, you know, I'm a huge advocate of nuclear power plants or whatever renewables.

58:31I don't care at this point. Shale gas has put it all in together. But I actually think our grid and the delay of our grid and and really just the knowledge right now. We're not investing a lot more into it. It doesn't seem like things are propelling. That's what makes it a zero sum game. It doesn't need to be this way. Like really what we need is just a ton of power. If we have a ton of power, then we don't care about anything being built. Yeah. So is codifying the the ratepayer protection pledge into law a good move? It would be a good move, but I don't think it's enough at this point. There's so much distrust, guys, like at the local level and on the political level.

59:07I recommend you follow Ryan Gerdusky. He's done some more recent work on the data center question. He's been talking about this. He's like, guys, this is just laying out there for any politician to pick up. And I'm talking about it from an anti data center position. He's much more of an expert on polling than I am. Go and check out his feed and some of the work that he's done, especially not just on feelings against AI, but data centers. Because I think he crunched the numbers. I know it was within the last couple of weeks that he looked at the question, and he just said there's an overwhelming animus and that people are angry.

59:38So it's not just – again, let's be very clear. It's about a feeling of lack of control over you're coming to take my job. You're increasing my electricity. You're changing my nation. and I have to have a say as a citizen. So that's not just no longer about electricity. That's about the whole picture of like technology and oligarchy and the economy. So you're fighting against a very, very big force right now in the country. Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. Thank you for coming on and breaking it down. I'm sure we will be talking about this. Have you tried just out of curiosity to just not use any AI?

1:00:13I mean, it's impossible to not use AI now because every company for the most part is using it, but have you tried to do your own personal pause just for a few weeks? I should try. That's a good idea. Let's get you back on the schedule for a few weeks from now. Pause AI. Pause your own AI use. You will not use any AI at all until you're next. Guys, it'd be so hard because even the chessboard behind me has built-in AI. It's everywhere. It's got the built-in chess engine. No, it's fine. Just don't play chess, bro. No, I can't do it. I can't. Just get an old school board. You're fine. I've been one-shotted by the game.

1:00:52That's amazing. I've been completely one-shotted by the game. Anyway, yeah, that's the problem. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Great to see you. Appreciate it. Always helpful. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg and Odd Lots here to break down the New York Times analysis of the strongest Satoshi Nakamoto candidate. Joe, how are you doing? Look at that. I'm good. Look at that sweater. Yeah, what do you think? You look fantastic. I love the green. You think the green works? Green is great. And the collar coming out the top.

1:01:25That's actually what I meant. When I said, what do you think? I was like, oh, actually, I'm wearing TBPN green for you guys. Yeah, exactly. That's perfect. So, yes, glad you guys noticed the gesture. Well, welcome back. It's nice to see you guys. Is the New York Times the most underrated company in the world? Yeah, of course. Of course, it's the most underrated tech company and the most underrated news companies. The number of haters. The thing, though, is to be fair, that's the hater comment. It's just a gaming company. But look, it's extraordinary juggernaut, both tech and news. And so many people have some sort of criticism of it or whatever and find a reason to hate it.

1:02:06Everyone can find good reasons to complain about the media. but it keeps on winning in ways that I've certainly been very surprised about. So I was really excited. I know a topic at hand. This is one of my favorite, Satoshiology is like one of my favorite topics. I was super excited to see that they took a stab at finding out who it is. Did you have a candidate in mind before this piece dropped? Had you watched the HBO documentary that actually pointed to a different suspect? Yeah, I've read a lot. I actually didn't watch the HBO documentary in part, I guess, because it was just so heavily criticized, et cetera.

1:02:42They're like, maybe I don't need to watch it. I had often often found the Nick Szabo. He was one of the candidates. I had always found that one to be fairly compelling. Yeah, me too. And, you know, in my first read of the New York Times piece yesterday, I thought about Adam Beck, like I knew he had been in the mix. it struck me that most you know the piece didn't have a smoking gun right and that's sort of what we're all waiting for smoking gun whether it's some sort of digital signature or an email it didn't have that it was sort of a lot of it was sort of linguistics like oh he makes it's and it's wrong or hyphens wrong I make those same mistakes too I don't know everyone makes those mistakes so I wasn't totally convinced but then I read it a couple of more times over the last you know 24 hours.

1:03:30I read it again right before I came on this because I wanted to be prepared to chat with you guys. And I am like, I've been like upgrading my odds that John Kerry has correctly identified him. Yeah. Have you worked with any journalists like John Kerry before? It feels like such a lost art and it's so delightful when someone has a chance to, it seems like this was reported for a year or more like he really he had the space in the breathing room no i i love it and i like i said whether this was right or wrong it's one of my favorite topics and it is one of these things where like over the years you know a handful of journalists have like i can be the one to crack this which actually like brings to my mind one of the more fascinating aspects of bitcoin period which is, it's amazing to think that like, okay, here's this thing.

1:04:23It's kind of like a digital gold and so forth. It's a new kind of money. And whoever Satoshi is, he or her group of people, whatever, maybe it is Adam Back, maybe it's not. But the OPSEC, I mean, can you even fathom being online for several years in a way that could not be traced back to you definitively? I wouldn't even know where to begin. I wouldn't even know where to begin how to like interact online in a way that like I could ensure my anonymity. And I think one of the fascinating things about Bitcoin is that it does have like this founder creator myth, this sort of the divine birth by this entity that left almost no earthly trace is as much as a fascinating part of the story, almost as Bitcoin itself as a technical accomplishment.

1:05:10Yeah, and also just the fact that then Satoshi, even like it wasn't an effort to remain anonymous in perpetuity. It was like then Satoshi went dark and nothing's moved on the wallet. And it's just been this like, you know, that's obviously fueled the theory that that potentially Satoshi passed away or something. Yeah. So the question. So here's a question that I have. So one of the stronger arguments or one of the piece of evidence that the article in The New York Times points out is that Adam Baggott is well known. He has a long history with the cypherpunks. He'd been interested in privacy and digital money for a long time, going back to at least like the mid-90s, et cetera.

1:05:52He had invented hash cash, which was basically laid the foundation for proof of work, which of course is elemental to mining. So he was like right there. Now, one of the arguments that the piece makes is Adam Back disappeared, didn't have much of a digital trace of those first couple of years when Bitcoin was taking off. So maybe that was when he had slipped into Satoshi mode. On the other hand, there was no way that anyone in 2008 or 2009 or 2007 could have known really what a gigantic phenomenon Bitcoin was going to be. why you know like adam back clearly was very comfortable talking about many of his projects under his own name he talked about hash cash all of these people had been talking about their work and applied cryptography for years under their own name yeah so have not having been able to know how big of a deal bitcoin was going to be why would this particular project suddenly all he would like have the foresight to like oh i have to be pseudonymous for this particular project i don't totally understand why someone who had like talked about digital money digital money for years under his real name would have had reason to think okay with this project i'm gonna have to talk pseudonymously or anonymously that is not entirely obvious to me yeah yeah uh like again in retrospect like sure like in 2026 we can look back yes it makes a lot of sense that this person would have like the pseudonym aspect but when it's just a bunch of people part of a community trying to solve the problem of p2p payments yeah who have been using their names why suddenly like when this these pieces come together this way would the creator feel impelled to be private in a way that they didn't feel impelled to be private with all the other bcash hash cash digital gold etc that's not totally obvious to me well the way that i mean I mean, honestly, the way you're talking about it is that I'm becoming more suspect that it was, in fact, you.

1:07:56So this is a, yeah, wait, John, it sounds like you don't find this component. No, I, yeah, I, I just, uh, I, I feel like after watching a number of projects sort of sputter where they did have a specific founder that could be, uh, just not even attacked, but just like the, the motivations of that individual could be questioned. And, and there's so much like risk tied to like a single person. It doesn't strike me as that crazy. I mean, clearly someone went anonymous, right? Yeah. One exercise is like, is there a person that if it came out and we could determine that it was entirely factual that this one person, who is the kind of person that would make the Bitcoin sort of trade up in value?

1:08:44Right. Because there's like, I can't really think of anyone. I can think of a lot of different groups that it would trade down dramatically. It comes out with some government entity, you know, you know, that that that goes down dramatically. And so there's not a lot of like ROI for anyone on a personal level. One of the funny things about Adam specifically, if you go to like his Twitter profile, it says, you know, it lists his accomplishments and it says he is the inventor of hash cash, hash cash in parentheses, Bitcoin mining. And what's funny is many people over the years have actually accused Adam of overstating what his claim there.

1:09:28It's like, yes, there's clearly a lot of overlap between hashcash and the notion of proof of work that was elemental to how Bitcoin mining worked. But hashcash itself is not Bitcoin mining. It is a sort of a thing that precedes one of the antecedents or the precede whatever to Bitcoin mining, a similar technique, the whole proof of work concept. So there's been this claim that actually one of his issues is that he overstated his invention or role in the creation of Bitcoin, which is very funny. Like if it turns out it's him that for a long time the accusation was that he overplayed his role. And then the other thing that's strange is that like since he's had – like so – and this is mentioned in the New York Times piece.

1:10:11He was one of the guys who last year or whatever launched one of these Bitcoin treasury companies, right? like a micro strategy like entity that was just going to hold a lot of Bitcoin. And does that sound like something Satoshi Nakamoto would do? In my opinion, not really. But then the flip side is, well, that's like the best opsec in the world. Do a bunch of stuff that feels a little bit scammy, feels a little bit cheesy, feels a little bit like opportunistic. This guy is definitely broke. There's no way. There's no way. There's no way he's got, you know, the tens of billions of dollars. That's what I'm saying.

1:10:46So it's like on the first pass, I was like, no, like Satoshi is not going to like launch a little like mini, mini micro strategy company. This does not seem very likely. But then the flip side is, man, if you were someone who like maybe some suspect of being Satoshi, what would be the thing that would be the least Satoshi like thing to do? And throw people like maybe it would be like create a Bitcoin treasury company. Yeah, or if you were Satoshi, but you lost the keys in some sort of silly mishap, then you would want to get back in the game because you're still a believer, but you don't have access.

1:11:18Anyway, last question. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, last question on the Bitcoin thing. Did you ever go down the Paul LaRue route? And were you ever a Paul LaRue believer? No, I was never a Paul LaRue guy. Which one was that? So he was a former criminal cartel boss informant to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. He created TrueCrypt and was really early in basically spamming, like, the classic email spam of, like, you know, mail enhancement. He would spam that out, scam everyone. he became so deeply entrenched that at one point he didn't just own a, uh, like domain name and he would switch the URL. He owned a TLD or like a registrar so that no one can kick him off and he could create unlimited new websites.

1:12:10That's pretty funny. So we would just create a new website every day. And so the Gmail filters would get confused because they're like, well, we've never seen this one before. I love that. Uh, but the thing is I've always thought like that. I don't know if any of you ever read it, But there's an amazing book by an NYU professor, Finn Brunton, called, I think it's called Digital Money. And it's about the prehistory of Bitcoin. So it's about this community of the cypherpunks in the 90s and 80s. And actually, even going back to the 1970s, where people were talking about this fact that as the world was going to go online, it would be very difficult for me to send you a payment without the need for like a third party database.

1:12:48The idea of like we need something that's cash like a bearer instrument on the internet. And I think this is like a really important thing to know is that there was a small group of people that basically for three decades or more before Bitcoin had been trying to solve this problem. And so like in the New York Times piece, it points out that Back had been talking about all of these things that Satoshi had been talking about. And my first response is, yes, of course they did because this was this core group of people who for years understood that in the online context, if payments were ever going to be a thing, we would need a third party.

1:13:27And if there was a third party, they can block a transaction. They can reverse a transaction. They can penalize you for making a bad transaction, et cetera. And so this was understood by some people from day one of pre-internet that this would become an issue. And so I'm not surprised that they were all using roughly the same analogies and so forth. Yeah. The book is Digital Cash, the Unknown History of Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency. And I will recommend a book to you about Paul LaRue. I think it's called The Mastermind. And I believe it was optioned into a movie.

1:14:03I'm not sure. I think Michael Mann was going to do it. And that sounded really good. But the book is fantastic. It sounds really fun. Has this been like a nice reprieve for you from covering the war? How have you been processing the constant gyrations in the oil market and the broader financial market? It feels like such a hard thing to cover, but obviously you've been doing a great job with Odd Lots and beyond. Thank you. The stakes are, I mean, it is a hard thing to cover. It's an awful thing to cover, right? It's a war and wars are awful. and the stakes are so, you know, there are so many ways that wars can get more, as catastrophic as they are, get even more and more catastrophic.

1:14:44So it's like, you know, but it's also like an extraordinary story for the things that we like to cover, which is like understanding the real flows of the economy. And, you know, prior to this war, I had not fully appreciated essentially just like how, I mean, I knew about for oil, I was aware that the Strait of Hormuz was a very big deal. But like the degree to the fallout, whether we're talking about like fertilizer, whether we're talking about real estate in Dubai. You guys had a great episode of that. Yeah, it was crazy. Real estate in Dubai, which, you know, we probably, you guys probably know more people than myself.

1:15:22Camping out to Dubai for the low taxes and stability and then suddenly, you know, you're like, oh, this could be. Honestly, credit to Americans. Like Dubai has just not been that popular. I think it's different. I think it's more of a European thing. When I was out there, I mean, it very much is like a melting pot. I've been there a couple of times and very limited number of Americans. And the Americans that are there for the most part, aside from on like, you know, scheduled, you know, fundraising trips are not really in the same type of business community that you and I are in. Yeah, it does seem like a more of like a British thing specifically in terms like going there for the low taxes or the stability, etc.

1:16:10But yeah, like all of these things getting upended or the specific not just oil and gas that yes, that goes out of the Strait of Hormuz, obviously. But then like this specific acuity, then pain points that are being felt in Asia specifically and how they're already having to go into sort of like a 1970s rationing mode where you see these headlines about if you have, you know, if your license plate ends with an odd number, then you can drive on this day. I mean, the economic reverberation is clearly the biggest sort of global econ story since COVID. Yeah, I was reading this article in The Economist this weekend in Buttonwood about how it feels like the market is not actually able to process what a 20 % decrease in oil rates is.

1:16:56And it feels like, I don't know if that's just like hope that there will be a taco, that there will be a quick resolution. But the key stat that they were latching onto was that even if everything was world peace tomorrow, just bringing resources and infrastructure back online, just starting the flow and moving the ships again, takes, you know, three months, six months. And so you will see reverberations through the economy for months, if not years, even if we get a good outcome immediately, which is what we're all hoping for. Yeah, some sort of benign outcome. But this is the weird thing. And you're spot on.

1:17:34And this is the weird thing, which is that if you talk to the commodity guys, they're like, this is unbelievable. This is like a scenario that we couldn't even really have contemplated. And then you look at the stock market. And oil is up a lot. It's not like oil markets are not registering. It's up a lot. But then you look at the stock market and it's flat on the year. Like as of the time I want – or it's like down 0.3%. I mean it's stunning because you have to remember that like the last thing we were all talking about prior to the war was like, oh, every legacy business model in the world is going to zero because AI is getting so good.

1:18:08So that was the first two months of the year. And then the third month of the year is this war that massively shoots up the price of oil, kind of like takes the prospect of rate cuts off the table. And we're looking at a market that's flat on the year. Like it's really like, you know, I try to I'm sort of an EMH guy. And so I always think if I'm missing something, I just trust the market. It's very strange. It is very strange. It is very strange. have you have you found any particular corners of the economy that are serving as white pills these days because it feels like a year ago things were sort of it was there was there was political chaos.

1:18:45We were talking about the tariffs and whatnot, but it felt like broadly most industries were sort of seeing reasonable advances. Things were much less controversial and we're in a much more tumultuous time. I mean, it's hard to it's hard to disagree with that. I mean, I think that there's basically – I think most people say there's basically two parts of the economy that are growing, and one is anything related to AI and data centers, et cetera, obviously. And the other is like home health care jobs. And I don't think much has like changed on that front. And unfortunately, like, OK, like again, let's just go back to the world of February 26th before the strikes had begun.

1:19:25You know, the issue was we were already still at that point well above target for the Fed's inflation. Now, there are reasons to think maybe it's trending down, maybe there's some softening, et cetera. But even with just essentially two cylinders out of – I don't know if the cylinders analogy is great because I don't know how many cylinders. But two cylinders really firing like, OK, ongoing need to like provide people health care and then AI. Even with that, the economy was like under a certain level of like strain with price – stress, yeah. And so then you add in, OK, now like all forms of commodities are going to be more expensive.

1:20:01They're spending, of course. Wars are very costly from an expenditure perspective. And so where does that leave the rest of the economy that is not AI or health care? I have yet to see – I don't know. I'm sure you're not feeling white-pilled. To the extent maybe the closest is like, look, I would say there's still evidence a little bit out there that, for example, that we're not seeing the evisceration of tech and software jobs the way some people might have anticipated. And there continues to be like evidence like, oh, actually, like that sort of like the economist optimism that maybe AI will create demand for software engineers because there are more things that can be softwareized.

1:20:42I actually think maybe that's looking okay, that thesis. And so it's white-pilling in the sense maybe we don't have the total evisceration of the labor market, like that part. We actually got a good jobs report last week on the Goodfriar report. So like – And we trust all the jobs reports now. We could definitely lean on it. The revisions have been a little tumultuous for me. There have been a lot of revisions. It's very tough to measure the economy, but I salute our brave statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Services. And we did talk to some other folks who were looking at like private market data, payroll data.

1:21:20And there were green shoots there as well. So I'm optimistic that that holds. Yeah, I've heard the most optimistic take about just more companies building more new things. We've built a bunch of internal tools here. the actual like NPS score for most AI apps is actually very high, even though AI as a concept pulls very poorly. So there's this difference there. What does the NPS stand for? Net promoter score or like approval rating. So like people might give ChatGPT directly like an 80 % approval rating. And it has like a lot of good reviews in the app store, for example. And if you just ask them about that or what they're building with Cloud Code, they'll say, oh, they'll tell you an amazing story of some custom software that they built for their business that they would have had to spend a million dollars on a consulting group to do it.

1:22:13And it maybe would have been really tricky to get it to math out. But then they'll just tell you like, oh, yeah, we needed this dashboard and we just made it in a day or a couple of weeks. So people love their specific things they built. And but then it's like, but also terrible. Yeah, they hate it. Yeah. No, I mean, look, I mean, I think this is actually seems to be a recurring phenomenon. People have even, over the last several years, to some extent, said this about the economy generally. Oh, yeah. Like, I'm doing okay. Yeah. My financial situation is actually fine. Yeah. But the economy is, like, really terrible.

1:22:42Yeah. So, it would be kind of interesting, like, if maybe there was a pattern that we're seeing across domains where, you know, everything else, I was, yeah, I like AI. I like how it's doing. I like this thing I built, et cetera. It's all terrible. Maybe that's just sort of, like, a general disposition that people have towards a lot of things. Yeah, it's the Kyla Scanlon vibe session concept. And maybe it's caused by media. Maybe they're happy in their relationships, but they're like, oh, but dating for everyone else is a total wasteland. Totally, totally. Maybe that's actually kind of a thing to do.

1:23:15Last question. Any prediction market predictions from your side? What do you think's going to happen? We had an episode out today with Tomas Petrofi, the founder of IBKR, which is also one of the most impressive trading entrepreneurs. They're really getting into prediction markets. So I think my prediction is that it's not just going to be like a two-entity race for that much longer. I think as it gets bigger, there's probably too much money to be left on the table for it to just be these two companies that most people have never heard of up until like a year ago. Yeah. No, it makes a ton of sense.

1:23:53Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Our next guest is Andrew Dye from Elorion. He's the co-founder and CEO with Big Rays. To the CBP in Notre Dame. Let's bring in Andrew from The Waiting Room. Andrew, how are you doing? Hi, good, thanks. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. I would love to hear a little bit about your background. Maybe we should start even before Google Brain, DeepMind. What was your academic track like going into tech? Yeah, so I grew up in the UK. I lived in Manchester and Sunderland and London all across following my dad's work.

1:24:41And then ended up in London, did my high school there. I went to the University of Cambridge for computer science. And then I went to the University of Edinburgh for my PhD in AI. And what did you work on when you were at Google? At Google, I worked on a whole bunch of things. I worked on Google Now. I worked on Smart Reply and Smart Compose. But really, I had a paper about 12 years ago where we proposed language model pre-training as supervised fine-tuning. And that's the paper that all the GPT paper site. And here we are today. Turned out to be a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. Did the... Wait, wait. Yeah, sorry.

1:25:20I don't know if you're going to dig in deeper there, But at the time when you were writing that, how much conviction did you have around the paradigm? Did you expect? And scaling laws in particular. Yeah, I knew it was going to be something big. And I could tell because when I was giving my poster at NeurIPS that year, one of the inventors of LSTMs, which was the biggest model at that time, they said it just works, like the method just works. and then I could tell there's something happening here but I never imagined it would get to this scale and I never imagined I'd be doing it for more than a decade Did you go to NeurIPS this last year?

1:26:04Yeah, I did How has it changed? It's all LLMs now A lot of language A lot of VCs sneaking around Yes, a lot of VCs That's right Well, then, yeah, take us through this company, the decision to launch this company, what you're thinking needs to be different about the current strategies employed by AI Labs. Yeah, so our company is built around visual reasoning as a first-class citizen, multimodal reasoning. So looking at all the labs, you see there's a lot of focus on text, on language. That's been very effective, right? We have new paradigms in cybersecurity right now. But the visual capabilities are kind of getting left behind.

1:26:53And there you have problems where the models on visual problems are at the level of a preschooler, of a three-year-old. Can you give me an example of that? What does that look like in practice? In practice, you can tell these models to generate a pool table and they will make a perfectly good-looking pool table. But if you ask them to count the number of balls on the table, or count the number of bottles in the bar, then they will just hallucinate. They'll be off sometimes by a large amount. Yeah, so I've seen sometimes the reasoning models will ingest an image and then wind up writing a bunch of like Python code to basically like count pixels and do things like very much not the way I would imagine the way a normal human would process counting something.

1:27:40At one point I was asking to estimate the height of a desk and it was writing all this math to sort of manually try and understand the size of things, which meant it was a reasonable approach. It wound up just being a normal size table, which was sort of underwhelming. But how are you thinking about the actual development, what you want to do differently? Are you focused more on a new architecture, new data sources, more scale? what's the shape of your strategy here? Yeah, so we are basically a full-stack team. We have experience with pre-training data and multimodality. So we are essentially building specialized models that includes new architectures for visual reasoning, a very specialized set of data with specialized data processing and new algorithms.

1:28:37So we expect to be running the full gamut of changes, and this is really needed to really make a breakthrough in visual reasoning. What does good training data look like today? Is it synthetic? Is it images, videos, 3D, virtual worlds? What's the shape of what's valuable? As you can expect, it's a bit of everything. All of it. Definitely natural data. Data that's not generated from a model is more valuable and more useful. data from a model that's synthetic data has the risk of putting the model into like a weird place where it just outputs like m dashes or just like tries to repeat the same thing all the time yeah but yeah data around the natural world around the 3d world that's invaluable what do you think the cyber security analogy is for visual reasoning like cyber security is so equipped for text-based models, coding agents, the entire cybersecurity threat can sort of be understood as a big string of text, more or less.

1:29:42Where do you think visual reasoning goes in terms of applications? Yeah, so for applications, one of the most promising ones that we're seeing is engineering. So right now, all these engineers, mechanical engineers, hardware engineers, and also architects, they're drawing all these diagrams in CAD software, which has been developed around the last few decades, but there hasn't really been AI breakthroughs there. People are still doing basically the same thing they've been doing for the past few decades. And so what we will do is we will produce models that really understand these drawings. Like say you have a real estate floor plan and you want to say, make this bedroom bigger or add an extension to my house.

1:30:27right now that would take weeks and lots of manual time and then you have to follow building codes make sure everything is correct and that's because there's not really any reasoning, visual reasoning in our current models and so there's a huge potential One of the hardest times we've ever laughed on this show was reacting to a floor plan that was generated by AI and it looked so high fidelity, every line was perfect it didn't have any of the fuzziness that you've expected from earlier models, but when you dug in, it made no sense. There were like 12 toilets and two baths and it had one big it didn't really understand the problem.

1:31:07So very exciting. Well, you raised some money. Tell us about it. How much did you raise? We want to hit the gong for you. Yes, we raised$55 million.

1:31:18Congratulations. From who? And that's from Stryker Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Automata, and Nvidia and 49 Palms participating. And we have some great angels there, including Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean. He's been on Angel Investing Terror. It's really exciting to see. I mean, obviously he's a legend, but he's clearly very optimistic about all these different approaches going forward. So very excited. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Great to meet you, Andrew. We'll talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Up next, we have Lumini and Kasava Dina Karan in the waiting room.

1:31:51We'll bring him in to the TBPN UltraDome. They have raised a$38 million series being able to scale AI automation for health systems. How are you doing? Good to see you. What's going on? Doing great. Great to see you, Bob. Great to see you. I believe it's your first time on the show, even though we've met in the past. Please introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, I'm Keshav, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Illumini. We help large health systems drive automation in their operations and back office. So is this a diffusion story or is this like a foundational AI research problem? Like what is the secret to actually driving improved healthcare outcomes in these larger organizations?

1:32:36Yeah, I think the models have kind of got to a place probably in the last maybe six to 12 months where some of the opportunities to actually drive automation end to end in a very reliable manner is very possible. So it's 100 % a diffusion story at the moment because the reality is like, you know, American healthcare still runs on faxes in many ways. And so you're kind of at this opportunity now to dramatically change how it's done in the first place. So I would love an example of like a specific back office task. Is this like passing information to insurance providers, processing claims? Like what are some specifics?

1:33:18Yeah, I'll give you a very concrete example. So imagine like, you know, one of the customers we work with is the Cleveland Clinic. And they're obviously one of the most advanced sort of academic research organizations, as well as hospitals in the world. And so there are patients who come from all over the world to Cleveland Clinic. And the way they actually get care is initially through something called a referral. Right. And that referral basically gets sent from, you know, small clinician practices to massive hospitals that are based in, you know, even all the way from the Middle East. And they're all, unfortunately, or at least sent to Lumini, sent via a fax machine.

1:34:03And these are sort of documents with handwritten notes where people are sent saying, hey, this is Keshav. He has some unique sort of left knee pain that requires, you know, specialized attention. Here are the details. And there's a huge sort of operations team on the clinical clinic side where their job basically is to look at every single document, read every single sort of handwritten note. And by the way, these facts. Sorry to interrupt, but you guys. So just so I have it correct, you guys are making humanoid robots that can write handwritten notes to fax back through a physical fax machine to the original sender.

1:34:43You know, I think five years ago, that would be an easier solution to solve in healthcare than try to get it implemented. But it's all enterprise software. So it's just literally a virtual inbox agent that triages each referral that comes in, puts in the high risk patients first, and then processes the referral in an automated way. But that's sort of an example of many other problems that obviously exist within the operations of the health system. That makes sense. And so are you guys doing the kind of forward deployed model where you basically say, hey, we have a good understanding of current AI capabilities.

1:35:19If you let our team into your space, we'll figure out individual workflows to automate or what's been the approach so far? Yeah, I mean, healthcare is extremely nuanced. You have to understand the specifics pretty deeply. And so without actually being on the ground, living in the offices of your customers, it's difficult to sort of scale solutions. And so, you know, about 20 % of our team comes from Palantir. And so we've taken a very deep forward deployed approach to every customer we work with. And, you know, we work with some of the largest institutions in the country. And so it sort of lets us afford to actually be able to do that.

1:35:54How much about deployment and diffusion is gated by regulatory or approvals versus it's a less maybe, you know, obviously there's a lot of tech native people in these healthcare systems, but they might be a little bit less online, a little bit less aware of the progress. And so there's just an education element versus, you know, understanding the cost tradeoffs and actually implementing the processes. I mean, there's definitely a massive amount of barriers to entry and being able to actually drive or actually implement AI systems in these places. And for good reason, right? Like this is like extremely, extremely sort of sensitive healthcare data that's flowing through these systems.

1:36:43And so there's the right amount of sort of guardrails put in place. but once you're in there's a dramatic amount of work that can be done by software and that can be done by you know AI in the first place and it's sort of you know there's definitely areas we shouldn't touch like deep deep clinical decision making and threads around that this is why we have doctors but there's a huge amount over a trillion dollars just like wasted administrative operations work that yeah today can be done by software systems. How are you thinking about on-prem these days? With the AI context, I mean, these models are so big.

1:37:24The latest ones seem to run on NBL 72s. That feels like a big lift in CapEx if you're going to stuff that in a closet somewhere or in the local IT cabinet. Where do you see, like, are we going to be seeing, like, local inference happening for regulatory reasons or is it more about just interfacing with on-prem systems because they exist and then this will be actually an accelerant to cloud adoption? You know, we've offered on-prem to every single health system we work with. Really? But only 10 % to 15 % of them have actually taken us up on it. And so that's an interesting sort of one data point.

1:38:07But the primary reason to offer on-prem in the first place is because of the amount of data that you're sort of handling and you don't want that data to basically leave your premises in the first place. And so we've chosen to go on-prem with even certain workflows with large health systems. But funnily enough, we thought it was going to be a massive need when in reality, it's definitely a checkbox that they do to make sure that you can actually do it versus actually deploy some of this in full production. Interesting. Last question for me. How dramatically is the quantity of data produced in healthcare environments growing right now?

1:38:53We looked at this one company that was just an audio recorder that would transcribe everything that someone would say. We've seen a bunch of these targeted in tech audiences, but this one was specifically for doctors to take notes and then have a running transcript of everything that they said, as opposed to needing to scribble a bunch of notes. It feels like we could be at some sort of like data production inflection point. But what are you actually seeing in terms of the quantity of data that's being produced in the health care system? Yeah, I mean, there's sort of obviously a variety of folks who've done research on this.

1:39:29But I think the health care has like eight times more data than the next largest enterprise industry in the country. And over 90 percent of that data is unstructured. So these are all like sort of, you know, contracts and PDFs and handwritten notes and text that's like floating around the IT systems that exist. So it's obviously a massive opportunity and problem at hand. Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Give us the details about the round. Yeah, we raised our$38 million Series Blue.

1:40:07Fantastic. Led by the P15 team, which is the Sequoia India group, along with General Catalyst, as well as YC and a bunch of others. So, yeah, grateful for all the support and interested in continuing to deploy pretty deeply. When did you go through YC? We actually started in summer 20. Summer 20. Yeah. I've been sort of in the game grinding for the last five and a half plus years. Yeah, but I mean, you caught the perfect inflection point. I'm sure you've done a ton of work to set up for the success and take advantage of the progress in AI broadly. So congratulations. What a fantastic story. Great to meet you.

1:40:53Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have Brian Manning from Zone of Space coming in with a new Series C announcement, building a GPS alternative network. Brian. What a setup. Beautiful setup. I assume you're in your factory. Take us through an introduction on yourself, the company, and where you are. Thanks, guys. It's super exciting to be here. It's been an exciting day. We're fresh off this morning, the announcements and launch of our new satellite factory here in San Francisco, which is coming on the heels of our$170 million series C-rays that we announced a couple weeks ago.

1:41:32Thank you. So, a lot of exciting things happening. So, what we're doing, what we're building here is we're basically building a new GPS. Yeah. And so, we're building a network of these small satellites that are 20 times closer to Earth than existing GPS to provide extremely high accuracy, extremely high reliability navigation capabilities. You know, I came from SpaceX. Our CTO came from Ford. Originally, the company was designed around providing autonomous vehicles the level of certainty and accuracy they really need to scale. But we started finding pretty quickly after that that there are 7 billion plus GPS devices around the world.

1:42:10Every single one of them is looking for better performance and that's exactly what we're building a network here to provide. Okay, so 258 satellites going into low Earth orbit. You're building them in that factory, I assume, but you probably have a deep supply chain and partnership. I imagine that they launch on other rockets. What is key about what you're building? Where are you partnering? Where are you doing R &D before the actual satellites get built and sent to space? Yeah, for sure. That's a good question. So with satellite navigation, most people always focus on the satellites because satellites are cool, and that's always the fun thing to focus on.

1:42:52but a sat nav system is really three pieces that you have the ground segment which is the mission operations kind of control segment you've got the satellites and then you've got the user equipment and then the user equipment is is arguably the most important but it's also the most overlooked so we are building the satellites we're building the ground segment and then we've partnered to integrate our capabilities into all the different user equipment that's out there and And so that's the chips that would go into everything from a dog collar to a phone to a tractor to a car to military devices and everything in between.

1:43:26We've designed our capability to be just a software update so that we can integrate in with these billions of devices that are going out there. And we've been able to demonstrate that on over a dozen different receivers with the satellite that we launched last year that's up in the air now. Got it. So, yeah, can you give me an example? So a dog collar has a GPS chip in it. It's currently interfacing with satellites that are higher in orbit. And with a software update, you won't actually need to swap out the chip. You'll be able to get more accurate GPS data. What is the benefit of this particular new constellation?

1:44:06For sure. So there's three big areas that we've seen customers really need better capability. and it's we try and make it simple to remember by precision power and protection so there are some customers that are you know gps and the automotive world for example can tell you a human driver kind of reliably what road they're on where our system is designed to extremely reliably tell them not only what lane they're in but if they're in the center of that lane or not but we deliver that through a signal that's 100 times stronger than gps which means it's strong enough to punch through jamming it's punched through trees even punched through a couple walls so back to the dog collar right now everybody just accepts that like when you walk inside or when you go indoors or you go into your house gps just kind of disappears and location you know doesn't really show up anymore with ours our signal strong enough so that you can see if fido's in the kitchen or in the backyard or at least knowing where they are at all uh where you just can't do today with existing gps i heard this story years ago that i have no idea if it's true that g the the current GPS constellation is higher resolution for military applications than for civilian applications, and the technology is not actually the problem.

1:45:20It's more that there are specific rules about the level of resolution that GPS data is turned over to private companies. Is that true at all? Sort of. So there's bits of that that are true, and some I think there are just some misunderstandings that are pretty common in the world. So the military does have a different GPS service than civilians do. The big difference between the civilian GPS and the military GPS, though, isn't the accuracy. It's actually more on the security aspects. And so there's more protections that exist on the military service to prevent bad actors from being able to fake the signal or being able to use the signal.

1:46:02And that's one of the big gaps in the civilian market today is that they don't have access to a service that gives the level of protection that's needed. And so you can kind of think of it a GPS signal. Imagine taking your social security number and your date of birth, your mother's maiden name and everything, and putting it on a postcard and mailing it through the mail. That's kind of what GPS is today, that everything is just wide open. What we're providing is a capability that's more similar to the military one, where everything is secure, encrypted, protected, but making that available to civilians so that you can trust taking your hands off the wheel in the autonomous car and know that that signal is coming from us, that it has the protection.

1:46:43It's not coming from a bad actor. Okay, so the software update handles, like sort of enables the encryption as well, I assume? Yeah, so effectively, you can almost think of our service in a similar way to, you know, if GPS is like FM radio, it's the free service. We're more similar to like XM radio or satellite radio where we broadcast down and everyone can listen to it. But until you type in the subscription key, you don't know the data doesn't work. Yeah, that makes sense. That's what I was going to ask. Business model. But yeah. How big or small are current GPS devices? If you want to basically have an air tag that you can throw in your shoe so you can know where you are or the dog collar.

1:47:28This feels like we've been on a miniaturization path for a long time. Where are we now? Where are we going? Yeah, so the size of the device, I mean, we've got chipsets that we're working with that are, I think, like three millimeters by three millimeters. So it's something that's, you know, you can probably put 10 of them on the end of your hand. Yeah. GPS is really one of the superpowers of GPS. And what we're building also is that it is a one directional broadcast. So it's a receive-only signal that it doesn't do it. Your GPS device, like GPS doesn't know where you are. It only can tell you where you are.

1:48:07So there's no personal privacy concerns or anything like that. It just gives you the data to figure out where you are. And that enables it to also be used in these ultra-low-power devices because they just have to listen. They don't have to actually talk back. So it enables you to provide this into, as you pointed out, things like the dog collar or the cow tracker. We've even seen people with peel-and-stick packaging labels that we're starting to work with that you can put on the side of a FedEx package to track it. So it is getting into smaller, smaller devices. And in the world of AI, everything wants to know where it's at.

1:48:38And the more accuracy you can provide with more availability and just enabling these things to know where they're at more of the time unlocks so many new insights and logistics, visibility and whatnot that really just doesn't exist today when GPS can't get into the place where the thing is at. Tell us more about the factory. Yeah, and a lot of the space companies that come on the show are based down in Southern California. What have been the pros and cons of building in the Bay Area? For sure. That's a very good question. That's something we've had people ask before. If you open up our satellite and look inside of it, and we laid it out on a table, most people look at it and say, this looks like the guts of a desktop computer.

1:49:23There's a bunch of circuit boards. I mean, there's certainly solar panels and propulsion systems and other things around it. But the core, like the heart of it and a lot of pieces that we've designed and built internally here have a lot more in common with a desktop computer than they do with 747. And L.A. has a lot of great talents, a lot of big aerospace talent. With Silicon Valley is in many ways the heart of compute, all these chipsets and a lot of the talent, the people that we're looking for. You know, it's a lot of electrical engineering, a lot of software engineering, a lot of mechanical engineering to put the pieces together, which is, you know, the whole founding team came from Stanford.

1:50:01So we all kind of naturally landed here, which had the right resources around us. The factory that we're stood up here is modeled more after, you know, a supercar assembly line than it is after a typical satellite assembly line. And so it's something that, you know, this satellite factory is built to start providing multiple satellites per week. Where to put that in context, the U.S. currently produces maybe two navigation satellites in a year. Where with what we're building here, we can produce that many satellites in a week, which really just brings an entirely new capability to the world at a pace that's never been possible before.

1:50:37What's the regulatory side of the picture? Do you have to get FCC clearance for your designs? Is there a wait and see period? Is that being accelerated at all by new tools and the ability to proofread documents with AI, anything like that? It's, yeah, so a very astute question from the space world that anything spectrum related, we started working the spectrum engineering years before we started working any of the satellite engineering because we knew that that would be the biggest challenge. And one of the things that we've done that's very unique is with all the spectrum engineering we've done, We basically figured out how to provide a service that is in the GPS bands right next to the GPS signals Without actually causing any sort of interference to those signals, which is incredibly difficult to do because in GPS broadcasts At about the power of a light bulb from an earth and a half away from earth in distance And so it was just such an incredibly weak signal that there's a lot of people that told us we started the company Like there's no way you'll ever figure out how to put a high power signal next to these GPS signals without causing interference and a lot of people still didn't want to believe it until we launched the satellite last year and were able to show, look, there's our signal, there's GPS, it's 100 % fine.

1:51:53And it's not only, you know, fine, it's really necessary in the world today with so much electronic warfare and jamming and other things. You really need these high-power signals to be able to fend off interference, whether that's interference from a wall or a roof or interference from somebody trying to jam the signal and prevent the capability from getting through. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the new factory. Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, I'm sure we'll be back on soon. Yeah, have a great rest of your day.

1:52:22It was good. We'll talk to you soon. Awesome, you too, guys. Thanks, all. Up next, we have Cody Blumenfeld-Gantz from Chapter, raising a Series E to expand Medicare navigation and launch financial products. Not with us just yet. We're waiting. in the... Nice that got his M64. His M64. And he showed the packaging. It says, brought to you by the crack team at Mod Retro. At Mod Retro. Crack team. The crack team. We have one over there. I saw some people playing Cruisin' USA, Cruisin' World maybe. Something like that. This is going to be fun. What do you think they mean by crack team though? Crack team?

1:53:00I don't know. If you look at this, if you look at the packaging, it doesn't say, brought to you by the cracked team at Mod Retro. It just says crack team. I don't know. Maybe this is some new slang. We cracked it open. Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Cody Blumenfeld-Gantz from Chapter into the TVP on Ultra Down. Cody, how are you doing? Doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on. Please introduce yourself and the company. My name is Kobe. I run a company called Chapter. We are a Medicare navigation and retirement platform. I started the company a few years ago after seeing my parents struggle with the Medicare process.

1:53:36pretty much every person in this country who's over 65 or retiring has to deal with Medicare. And I was just really appalled at how bad their experience was and wanted to make it much better. That's what we've been up to. Yeah. Early on, when you kind of discovered the problem, did you assume that there was companies already solving it well? And when you talk about the scale of the market, it's like everyone over, we're an aging country and everyone in retirement, for the most part, is dealing with this. What did you find? And then what gave you the confidence to start the company? I found really poor experiences all around.

1:54:18Most Medicare brokerages in this country are heavily incentivized to push plans that pay people, that pay brokers more rather than focusing on what's best for the consumer. And there's really no good technology in the space at all. So you really have a combination of sort of mom and pop brokers. You can think of these as local real estate agents. And then you have these legacy call centers that are basically just like marketing orgs that are very bad at what they do. And really nothing in between that really prioritizes the consumer's interest. So when my parents were going through it, they had to deal with faxes and phone calls and they got really bad guidance.

1:54:52My mom actually now has lifetime late enrollment penalties because she was told to sign up too late. Yes, the government imposes lifetime penalties on people if they sign up late for Medicare. Yeah. Talk to me about then how it seems like reaching the potential customer or user as early as possible is critical. What's the customer journey to actually get on chapter or work with an advisor? How do the users actually find the product? We take a really heavy AI-driven approach, but we augment humans with the AI. We have one of the smallest teams probably of any tech company and especially any Medicare company for our scale.

1:55:33We're really proud of that because we're pretty sophisticated users of AI. A consumer will find us through one of our partners. We do almost no direct-to-consumer work. It's all through enterprise partners. They'll find out about us through their financial advisor or their health system or hospital, they will give us a call, fill out some information, and they'll be connected to one of our full-time employees who's a licensed Medicare advisor. That Medicare advisor has a lot of tooling at their fingertips that we've built to make sure they can deliver really high quality guidance all the time for every single person.

1:56:02And what does that tooling look like? Is it visualizing and analyzing numbers and sort of instantiating spreadsheets and dashboards and charts? Or is it actually going and filling out forms and dealing with legacy government systems that can be abstracted into something that's just more usable? All of the above and a lot more. I'll give you a couple of examples. One is every single insurance carrier has a different portal that one has to use to look up information and fill out forms. So we have to automate all of that. And most of them don't have APIs, as you can imagine. So that's kind of the automation of filling out forms and paperwork.

1:56:39for any given Medicare plan recommendation we have to know every doctor that that person is in network with we have to know every prescription that that person takes in order to answer what sounds like a very simple question of what prescription what will a prescription cost on a given Medicare plan at a given pharmacy that requires tens of billions of records to know just that one question and that's one of many elements so we do a lot of work to obviously our Medicare advisors are not crunching those numbers every time they talk to someone. So a lot of that just surface the right answer to the Medicare advisor.

1:57:12Yeah. You guys just surpassed 100 million run rate. What seems pretty fast for a company in healthcare, which typically, you know, this isn't like selling like some image gen model or something like that. What is best in class? Who are you guys going up against from a kind of zero to$100 million run rate? I'm assuming you guys are one of the faster in history, but I'm curious. I don't think of ourselves as a healthcare company, really. I think of ourselves as a really good tech company. So we compare ourselves to the fastest growing companies where we grow as fast or faster than companies like Ramp, companies like Clean.

1:57:56We went one to 100 mil in run rate revenue in I think about two and a half years. So I really think about us as just like, what do great tech companies do? And we try to orient the team around that because the bar is just too low in healthcare. So then what is the funnel to actually grow the business? What is the flow? You said you don't do consumer marketing. Is this, like you said, enterprises. Are you, do you have SDRs? Are you going outbound to companies and financial advisory groups? What does that go-to-market motion actually look like? We do have an enterprise partnership, enterprise growth team.

1:58:32The whole team is about six or seven people. So as I said, we're very small and we take a lot of pride in having a really high bar for talent. The entire company is? No, no, no. Just the growth team. But all of our sort of corporate headcount, product, engineering, growth, legal, et cetera, we're about 30 people. Wow. That's remarkable. Well, congratulations. You just raised a round. Tell us about it. Yeah, we raised about$100 million, led by Al Gore's generational fund. Nice. Massive kid. Absolutely massive. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the progress.

1:59:14Thanks for having me. And thank you for everything that you do. I'm sure you'll be back on probably multiple times this year at this rate. Have a good one. We'll do it. Cheers. Bye. Up next, we have CZ from Binance. He is the founder and former CEO. He released his book, Freedom of Money, detailing Binance's rise, crypto's evolution, and his legal battle with U.S. regulators. CZ, how are you? I'm good. Thank you. Thank you so much for hopping on. Tell us about the book. What was the goal? Is this an attempt to set the record straight or just tell your story? What motivated you to write a book at this moment in time?

1:59:50I think it's really just to tell my story. I was bored. I had nothing to do for a couple of years. I started writing a book when I was in prison. Then I just finished when I got out. I thought it might be an interesting story to share and let people know what my view is. What do you think people get wrong about your story? I think a lot of traditional media have many misconceptions about crypto, Binance, myself, etc. So I think there's a lot of media that's not accurate about crypto. So I think this is a very good chance for me to share my perspective and have people understand crypto better. What specifically do people get wrong about crypto or you or Binance?

2:00:37Sure. From 2013, people think that Bitcoin is only used by drug lords or for illicit activities. The truth is actually, if you look at percentage-wise, illicit activities in crypto is actually much, much less than in traditional finance. and then by extension a lot of the crypto players a lot of crypto platforms get hit and recently there's more attacks about just random attacks on me about how I do business who I have connections with so I'm a simple tech guy so I just wrote the book the way I wanted to tell it it's a pretty simple language pretty straightforward book just a simple guy I think I'm a relatively simple guy Yeah.

2:01:21How have you been processing the new regulation that's been proposed in the United States? What do you think needs to change in the crypto industry? Because I take your point about, you know, the amount of illicit activity might be lower than in cash or the traditional financial system. But, you know, the goal, I think for everyone, it would agree is to get that to zero. And so what do you like about the new regulation? What do you think is reasonable to ask for? Well, I think right now the U.S. is making really good progress on crypto regulation. The Genius Act was passed in last July, but I think right now there's still quite a lot of debates based on my layman understanding.

2:02:02I'm not an expert, I'm not a lawyer, not a regulatory guy. But it seems like there's a lot of debates about stablecoin interest rates. So I think it's a big important issue, but from my perspective, any clarity is better than none. So I think the current iteration of regulations will not get everything right on the first try. So there will be some collaboration over time. So I think it's more important to make progress and move forward. How are you thinking about the broad tradeoff between decentralization, anonymity, and then oversight and regulation? It feels like we've been moving towards more oversight, more regulation, more KYC.

2:02:45We've heard from some crypto leaders that that can lead to data breaches and other problems. But where do you sit on the level of regulation in the crypto industry broadly? So I think right now, the crypto industry, to be honest, is too transparent. It's actually extremely easy to track crypto funds. Like the blockchain is a public ledger. And then if you couple that with a few centralized exchanges, KYC information, you can track most of the transactions pretty accurately. So I think right now there's a lack of preserving of privacy. But right now the problem is many of the regulators and law enforcement people don't know how to use it yet.

2:03:22Some people do. I think some of the U.S. law enforcement actually knows it quite well. In other countries, they know it much less. So hopefully we'll get to a balance where, I don't know where the optimum balance is, but there should be an optimal balance where we satisfy all the regulatory requirements, but we also need to protect individual privacy. For example, if your company pays everybody in crypto, and if you get one payment, today on the blockchain you can just trace to the address that you paid you and see how many addresses that address paid in the last week, you can figure out everybody's salary.

2:04:02That's a privacy issue. If you stay at a hotel, you pay for the hotel, then people know where you know your address and the hotel address, people will know that you're going to stay at that hotel, which for some people may create security issues. So there's little problems like those that are not solved yet. So we need to strike a balance. It's hard to say exactly where the balance is, but I think over time we'll get there. How are you thinking about the interaction between AI and crypto? Generally, there's been a lot of excitement, even from people in AI about crypto and the intersection. But I'm curious what your overall view is and then if it's positive, some maybe specific examples of where you expect to see it manifest first.

2:04:52Sure, absolutely. I think both AI and blockchain are big industries. I think there's really three big technologies in my adult lifetime. There's AI, there's blockchain, there's internet. It's on those levels. I think AI is going to use crypto for payments for transactions. They cannot KYC through a bank. They cannot do a selfie. They don't have a passport, etc. And also, payments in every country is a little bit different. Whereas crypto, blockchain, is the same across different countries. So you integrate with a blockchain once, it works globally. And it also handles microtransactions, large transactions, etc.

2:05:34And also crypto is going to increase the amount of transactions significantly. So the traditional payment rails may not be able to handle that. I think blockchain also have a lot of benefit from AI. I think right now a lot of the applications are in blockchain quite difficult to build. I think with AI we can probably build safer tools for people to do self-custody and safer tools for people to transact. Today, the two industries, to be honest, have not really leveraged each other that significantly, but I think in the future they will. How are you thinking about the risk of quantum computing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem broadly?

2:06:15I think there's some risk, but I think overall, though, any technology improvement is always going to be good. More computing power is good for crypto. So quantum may break the existing encryption mechanisms, but with quantum computing, there will be new encryption algorithms. There are already quantum-approved encryption algorithms that quantum computers do not have an advantage to crack. So we just need to upgrade the protocol to use those encryption mechanisms. Also, more computing power with quantum, there's probably newer encryption mechanisms we have not even thought about that we can use quantum to encrypt, and decryption is always going to be much harder.

2:06:53Sure. What about non-quantum hacking? Throughout the crypto boom, there's been so many upstart projects. Many of them have been able to get to escape velocity, and they're still around today. A lot of them have had to go through hacks and adapt. And it feels like with the moment that we're in, in terms of AI's effect on cybersecurity, we could potentially be looking at maybe a bifurcation between the the the projects that have the resources to actually harden themselves against new cyber security threats and those who are maybe smaller upstarts and don't how do you think that effect plays out i actually think ai is going to improve security for for most projects um like um um anthropic cloud right so now they're uh i think if you play like like that you could potentially discover many flaws, at least they claim, in many projects.

2:07:50But I think projects can also use their tool to fix their security problems. I think a big company like that, they already make a lot of money. They don't need to exploit smaller projects to hack, to do illegal stuff. So I think right now with AI tools that's available, the developers can use those tools to find their own problems. But of course, if you don't do that, then the hackers may do that for you, which is a typical problem we have today anyway. So I think with AI, security is actually going to become better. I don't think it's going to become worse. So I'm pretty confident about that.

2:08:25Do you know who Satoshi Nakamoto is? No, unfortunately I don't. Even if I did, I would have said no. But I honestly don't. How have you processed that question of who is Satoshi? Have you wrestled with it? Have you done a bunch of research to try and figure it out? Have you had various suspects at various points in time favorite pet theories wild card theories or has it sort of been a quick ride to sort of process that and then let go of that desire because it's the unsolved mystery this is an interesting point i should have put this in my book maybe the next edition yeah but i've come to peace with it um i think i'm curious obviously i mean if there was one person i really want to meet in the world that would probably be him but i think there are negative consequences if we find out who he is.

2:09:15For example, if I couldn't lie on the oath, if people say, have you met Tatoshi? If I say yes, then hell's going to break loose. I think it's better if we don't know who he is. It's better if we don't, and without knowing him, we don't have a founder centralization. For example, if you look at Ethereum, Metallic's there. So there's a founder centralization. What makes Bitcoin unique is that we don't know, well, the founders is no longer participating. He may not be around. He may not be participating. So that makes it more decentralized. I think that's a good thing. We should come to terms. I came to terms with it quite a while ago.

2:09:54So even though I'm curious, I'm not actively looking. Have you ever thought about doing an anonymous project? Or do you have a reflection on why we haven't seen more projects effectively run, at least to my knowledge, the Satoshi playbook of maybe it requires some crazy OPSEC to go anonymous for a couple of years, but if it worked for Bitcoin, I would imagine that somebody would have thought, I'm going to do the same thing for this new project with slightly different opinions about how the technology is built. I haven't seen it happen, but what's your take on the idea of a new attempt at a Satoshi-like founder in the crypto industry?

2:10:37I actually really want to see that too. I think that's a really, really cool idea, to be honest. But I think it's also very hard to do. Most projects fail, even with the founders heavily promoting, we know who they are, et cetera. For a new project, without knowing the founder, there's less trust in the community. Bitcoin was the first one. Somehow it started very slowly. It took many, many years for you to get to where it is today. And for a new project to do that is very, very difficult. And there have been anonymous projects that are basically rug pulls. So the other side of it, people lose trust with an anonymous project.

2:11:15So to do what Bitcoin did is very, very difficult. I would actually love to see more anonymous, fully decentralized projects. But what you mentioned is the OPSEC is also extremely hard. It's so hard today to not leave any trace, both digitally and physically. So the fact that nobody has really announced who Tastoshi is means that his offset is crazy. I think 99.9, nobody else can do it really at this point. Yeah. What do you Americans miss about crypto adoption globally? It's here, I mean, as so many, at least younger generations, almost everyone has some exposure to digital assets or some experience buying, selling, maybe not using it functionally for payments, but obviously it's very different in other parts of the world with less centralized financial institutions.

2:12:16Yeah, I think America for the last few years before the Trump administration was fairly anti-crypto. So many of the funders left, many of the projects left, and many of the liquidity left. The biggest crypto exchanges are not in America today. The biggest blockchains, the biggest stablecoin, they're not America-based. So I think America misses that liquidity quite a bit. America right now has very forward-looking regulations, and now people are flocking back. I think the talent pool is coming back, but some of the larger players are not backing America yet. So I would love to see that changing.

2:12:53I think right now, if you buy crypto, Americans are probably paying the highest fees in the world, whereas if you buy anything else, America is usually paying the lowest price. So the cost to American consumers today for accessing crypto is quite high. So that's a disadvantage that America has today. But America has a large economy, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of VCs, and good liquidity in traditional markets. I think America definitely has the ability to catch up very quickly. You were born in China. How are you thinking about geopolitical relations between the U.S. and China? Tensions seem to have been rising for years.

2:13:35There's trade tensions. There's all sorts of geopolitical tensions. Is there any hope for de-escalation between the two countries? I'm not an expert on the geopolitics between different countries. And also, my layman understanding is both countries have leaders with pretty big personalities. So they're very hard to predict. I think President Xi in China is easier to predict than President Trump. President Trump is like a wild card, right? Which is in his advantage. You can't predict what he's going to do. But I do think both countries are large countries now with leaders who are smart and who are business-driven.

2:14:16They want the economy to grow. So if that's the goal, then I'm optimistic that there's certain outcomes to be reached. Between two countries, there's usually a fairly large zone of overlap that you can reach deals. Right now it's just the personalities and also both countries are quite proud, so they're all hard negotiators. The negotiations at that level takes time. But I'm fairly optimistic that the two countries will work hard for something that's beneficial for both. You've written the book, What's Next for You? What do you think the next decade looks like? I'm actually not too sure exactly.

2:14:53So I'm doing a few different things right now. I'm running an investment fund. I'm not really running it, but I support it. I do some mentoring in the space for new entrepreneurs. I run a free education platform, Giggle Academy, that provides free education to 240 ,000 kids now. And we've only been edited for like a year and a half. And then I also advise different governments on crypto policies. So between those four things, they keep me pretty busy. The book was actually a huge distraction for me. It takes a lot of time to write a book. But I'm glad, no, it's out there. And there's an audio version coming out soon.

2:15:36And then after that, I'll put that on pause. Just let it be for a while. And then figure out what to do, yeah. What was the strategy for the audio book version? Did you narrate it yourself, hire a human narrator, use AI? So one of my friends, Michael Santos, is going to narrate it. Okay. So we had this sort of agreement verbally from a long time ago. And also Amazon doesn't allow AI-generated voices yet. I didn't know that. So you're human, read, or audible. And then I've been playing with AI quite a bit myself. The AI cloning of voice, I can't tell the difference from my own voice. And it's just better.

2:16:19It reads more smoothly. It's better than my own reading. So in certain other platforms or in certain other countries, we may use an AI-generated voice that clones my voice to try to read it. I haven't finished that yet. There's still little quirks here and there. Sometimes AI makes very obvious mistakes. It pronounces Chinese names wrong, which I would not make that mistake. Sometimes you will say, when I write$400, you say$400. So I would not make that mistake. But 99 % of the time, he actually reads better than me. So we'll see. So I might do two different audio versions. We're still playing around with it.

2:17:00Yeah. I wonder, after Jassy's letter today, if he's still going to be anti-AI voices. Yeah, yeah. I did have one last question. I'm curious. How did you process the prediction market boom over the last two years? There had been, you know, long, people had long had predictions that prediction markets would intersect with crypto and be really big, and yet there was attempts in the 2010s that didn't really reach critical mass. So I'm curious how you process that entire period. Yeah, so I think today, I do think prediction markets has a huge potential and it's already pretty big. The top players are pretty big already and there's hundreds of thousands of upcoming platforms as well.

2:17:48and also if you look at the regulatory landscape the CFTC chairman Michael Selig, he talks about prediction markets multiple times every time I watch him talk he seems to mention prediction markets so it seems like the regulators and the traditional markets are also moving in so as you said there have been many attempts previously but then timing is important some ideas even though the ideas are very obvious if you implement them too early they don't get traction You have to implement the right idea at the right time. I don't know what all the ingredients are for prediction markets, but somehow now seems to be the right time.

2:18:26The previous attempts struggled, and now it seems to be taking off. So I'm a big proponent for anything that's new and interesting, and I think prediction markets are very interesting. Their price discovery and truth discovery, they're kind of using price to discover truth, which is usually the reverse for what we do. Information drives trading volumes. So that's a very interesting dynamic. And also, the Easy Labs, the fund I'm involved with, we invest in multiple prediction markets. So we'll see which ones work. But I do think that it's a huge potential and it's hot. And it works. How are you thinking about any of the previous crypto booms or narratives or themes coming back?

2:19:13Things like NFTs or crypto gaming? Are you optimistic on any projects, the DAOs that had their moment in the sun and didn't quite reach escape velocity? Do you think anything will have a second wind in the near future? I do think so. I think many things will have a second wind, but the second wind will most likely be a little bit different, right? There'll be something that's, you know, like even prediction markets today, they're different from the sort of prediction markets four or five years ago. So every iteration, there will be some tweak. and it's usually that little tweak that makes it a little bit different and maybe the micro environment.

2:19:49So I do think that some of the things that were there, I think DAOs will not disappear. I think DAOs haven't really took off, to be honest. The concept being there for years. It's like even in the 2010s, video streaming doesn't really work. Even today, this type of call, sometimes the internet doesn't work, sometimes the microphone doesn't work. So we get into those situations a lot. So a lot of things take a lot of time to mature. So I think the DAOs, the NFTs, again, the next iteration may be slightly different, but you may still be called NFTs or NFT2, you may be a different name. But I think tokenizing art is probably going to come back at some point, multiple times.

2:20:32I don't know when it will really hit big and stay. NFTs, I think honestly, we saw a rise and then a downward trend. So it's hard to say, But I think all of those things eventually should be much bigger than they were today. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations. Yeah, congrats on the launch. I recommend everyone go check it out and hear CZ's side of the story. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. There's some lore on the timeline. Bluetooth is such a strange name for technology.

2:21:06Apparently, it's named after a Scandinavian king who united Norway and Denmark. and the logo is a combination of two Norse rooms. I like Bluetooth. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest, Tal Hoffman from Enclave. He's the founder and CEO. Here to tell us about a seat around. How are you doing? What's going on? Hey, thanks for having me. How are you? We're good. Please introduce yourself and the company. Yes, please. So I'm Tal. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Enclave. Essentially, we're an AI code security platform using LLMs to find critical vulnerabilities in quad bases the way traditional scanners want.

2:21:45So huge week. Take us through how you've been processing it. From your perspective, what is AI actually capable of doing? What is not there yet? How have you been processing all the news around AI and cybersecurity this week? Yeah, I think what Atropic has done is tremendous for the industry. I think it's a tremendous leap forward for security I think the real novel thing that they did besides finding the unknown unknowns the vulnerabilities that have been there for decades were able to exploit autonomously vulnerabilities essentially exploitability is the name of the game as I see it because the vulnerability that's not exploitable is not worth as much until right now unless something changes.

2:22:36So I think it's a huge leap forward. And I think they have done very correct move in deploying it safely. Yeah, I think it's very exciting for anyone that's in code security, including ourselves. And yeah, how do you see yourself fitting in? Tell me about the shape of the business, the strategy, how you want to roll out your products. Yes. So I think, especially with Miros and the recent changes, I think that it's going to be asymmetrically deployed. And so I think that this creates an opportunity for other organizations that do not have access to the technology to be proactive about it and procure, whether it's for us or our competitors.

2:23:20I think it's a net positive for the industry, especially with new attack surfaces being exposed and created and with new teams from regular developers to go to market and everything in between deploying more code. So I think it's a tremendous opportunity. Yeah. How are you thinking about interfacing with Project Glasswing? do you want to fold into that and then be able to do things on top of the private models that are maybe deployed in this asymmetric way? Or do you want to use other models and sort of figure out a different way to differentiate and add value? Yeah, no, I think we want to go and partner with Entropic that has done great work and OpenAI and all those big labs.

2:24:10I think the alpha is currently in using them. So definitely want to partner with them. We are talking with them. Again, I think they are doing a tremendous job, but I think ultimately most organizations do not currently have access to this technology and they need an independent system level reviewer that's able to constantly deploy the state-of-the-art models. Tell us about the round. You raised some money. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have raised$6 million, led by ATC.

2:24:45And then we have another bunch of exciting investors on board like Aaron Levy, Patrick Fransman. Brother Aaron. Brother Aaron, Mark Benioff. Whoa. Yeah. You got the dolphin in. The dolphin. The dolphin. You don't see him ripping personal checks. Last question from my side. What have conversations been with customers like? Who do you need to get to? Who are the key stakeholders? How diffuse is the understanding of cybersecurity threats these days? And what are you educating customers about most frequently? Yes, I think so. We are just out of beta, just released the product. I think for us, we're trying to cater to both the security practitioners.

2:25:35at the end of the chain. We are seeing a lot of anger from them. We have their own cloud code, their own cursor, their own shiny object. So we want to empower them. But I think most importantly, we want to empower developers to be able to deploy safely and quickly because it's becoming very concerning. We can see we have some new zero days that we'll be publishing soon following a visible disclosure. and I think that security is going to be very big as a whole new job, you see how sexy security has become the last couple of weeks so I would say argue security personnel but ultimately resulting is very good for them, you can assume that bad state actors already utilize those zero days so eventually as more organizations get exposed to this powerful tech that is LLM powered security research, the safer it becomes.

2:26:37And I think it's become very obvious. We don't have to do much education. It's like the opportunity is very obvious. The problem is very obvious. How are you thinking about the business model? Do you want to sit between the code that's written and the pull request and the code review phase? Do you want to be actively monitoring systems in production, both? Yeah, definitely both. but we are trying to be like to prevent those issues to begin with whether it's through GitHub, through the request, through Cloud Code, MCP through Cursor but also yeah, definitely also prevent production and I mentioned exploitability so context is most important here and looking at your, and I think this is something that Wiz has done a great job with is looking at the cloud environment at the cloud environment at the runtime see what's exploitable and what's not because you can have a 10.0 CVSS vulnerability that's completely irrelevant because it's not exposed to the internet.

2:27:37So yeah, we want to be both preventing but also finding live vulnerabilities. But right now we are focused on code. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us and have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. See you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. What else is in the timeline before we wrap up the show? Yahoo's G800 is at Augusta. If you got really good SEO between 1994 and 1999, then messed everything up after that, your executive team in 2026 will still have a G800 money, says Chris Backey. That is very funny. And Preston Holland is chiming in with some crying emojis.

2:28:14Secretary Kennedy. New podcast. The Secretary Kennedy podcast. The Secretary Kennedy podcast. Derek Thompson says, the urge to pod cannot be denied. Tech VCs and David Rubenstein are richer than God. What do they want to do in their enormously valuable spare time? Fire up a mic and pod. What does Jamie Dimon want to do after JPM? Start a media company, i.e. pod again. RFK Jr. is in charge of all government health policy. What does he want to do with that power? Pod about it. In this, Will highlighted Jeremy's post. Posting is the end state. It's the treasure that awaited Alexander at the end of his conquest.

2:28:50It's all that's left for man after gaining the world. It's all there is at the very end of it all. Celebrities, billionaires, industrialists, scholars all wind up as the humble poster. David Rubenstein's podcast is deeply underrated. If you're not already listening to it, the David Rubenstein show, Peer to Peer Conversations, airs on Bloomberg Television. He's also done history with David Rubenstein on PBS. He is the chairman of Carlisle Group. And yes, truly very successful, but still enjoys a recorded conversation. In other news, the Acquired podcast just released a new website, acquired.fm.

2:29:28Stunning. Many people are calling it the most beautiful podcast website in history. It's incredible. Really, really well done. Every time you mouse over something, you get a vinyl record that pops out. I'm very excited to see the physical instantiation of this. And it fits the brand perfectly. It's a great, so many iconic episodes, so many iconic interviews. So congratulations to the folks at Acquired. Every company has a story. Really, really well designed. We've got to have them back on very soon. But thank you for being with us today. We'll see you tomorrow. It's been an honor and a privilege to podcast with you today.

2:30:05We'll see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter.