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

27:23What are you talking about? Yeah, what Neolab can you buy for$500? $500 million Neolab? I'm not going to name names, but there's been some Neolabs that would raise$100 on$500. Isn't there a Neolab that you were just on the phone with that they could maybe pick up? Oh, yeah, Charleston AI. Do we have a video of Charleston AI? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's pull up Charleston AI. Cupertino, Charleston. I think there's something there, potentially. I actually think that you could rapidly scale a franchise business that takes the Charleston AI concept, gives somebody all the programming and all the different product offerings, and then helps local entrepreneurs set up their own.

28:02I think that's what Charleston AI does. No, I know, but I think Charleston AI needs to go global. Ooh, okay. I'm one of the co-founders of Charleston AI. We're local to Charleston, and we're here to help humans help humans with AI. And here is our lab. This is where AI comes alive. What used to take months to get accomplished, we can do in hours for you. Here we have an empty office available to somebody that wants to make Charleston AI their home. Charleston AI's conference room where our clients come in, individuals and small businesses come in, and we discuss what it is they'd like to do with AI in their business or personally.

28:41We listen very carefully, take notes, and make sure we get it right, and that we offer them a way to make it work. AI is not promising. Now, you called Charleston AI, correct?

28:53Jordan Schneider:Correct. Who answered the phone? So, yeah, one of the founders answered the phone, but it was an AI version of him, and it sounded exactly like his voice. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. It's a very funny video, but I think it's actually a good business. Yeah, probably. And I think it should exist. No, you're right. Like some people, they're curious about AI. Maybe they're running a small business. maybe they're a freelancer, maybe they're a teacher, whatever. It's nice to just drive by something and go in somewhere and talk to real people that are in your community to learn about something that's complicated and sometimes scary.

29:27So I'm very in favor of it. Didn't Best Buy build a whole Geek Squad team for exactly four of us? I think they acquired Geek Squad, didn't they? Was it over or under$500 million? Let's find out. Anyway, there's an interesting story. Yes, acquired. Acquired, wow. That would be cool. a new Charleston AI on wheels vans, the mobile data centers that can come to you so the Geeks want to was only 3 million 3 million 2002 that's like 400 million in today's dollars Tyler I know it was before you were born but that was a lot of money back then yeah OpenAI has reportedly bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios for reinforcement learning and training computer use agents, while Anthropic rents Mac minis through AWS.

30:20You can rent Mac minis through AWS. That's interesting. I didn't know that. The information reported this. I was playing around with computer use over the break. Had a lot of fun. I had Codex try and beat Bellatro, this poker-style game that I like to play on PC. It did okay. It was a little slow still, and I don't think it actually won the full game but it's fun watching it play a new game. I saw that demo of it beating Slay the Spire which is pretty impressive because it's a hard game. But I like the Codex or ChatGPT playing the game. I want to see the latency come down. I want to see it play Modern Warfare because I want to play against it and I want to see who's better, me or the AI.

31:12In somewhat related news to the speed of inference, OpenAI's jalapeno is spicy, says Dylan Patel. We'll take you through it after I tell you about MongoDB. What's going faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Dylan Patel says OpenAI's jalapeno is spicy. Usually, first-generation chips aren't competitive. But OpenAI is beating NVIDIA, Blackwell, and even Rubin. This is huge news. We got to go into OpenAI's lab to dissect their new chip and dive into the software architecture and performance. Incredible work. There's a bunch of interesting details about this chip.

31:58OpenAI put out a whole blog post. But to clarify some important points, it's an LLM inference chip, not designed for training, but the results are really good. So roughly 1.5 to 1.9x more useful inference throughput per watt than NVIDIA GB200, GB300 systems, while simultaneously cutting end-to-end latency 1.7 to 3.6x. So faster inference, less latency, but also just your dollars and your energy, your watts, are going to go a lot further, which is very, very good. It's a data center rack scale system. I would love to get this in the consumer device. shrink it down do something there but uh it's going in the data center and they're gonna do a lot of them did you know the size of the broadcom deal 10 gigawatts of this chip okay it might not be exactly this chip it could be the gen 2 the gen 3 uh but the pre-existing broadcom open ai put it into context that's roughly five times more compute than the whole company currently has something like operational.

33:03Yeah. Yeah. But this is by, this is through 2029, but that's aggressive. That's, that's like three years, three months away, I guess you can do the end of the year, but, uh, uh, the, yeah, 10, 10 gigawatts of open AI designed accelerator systems manufactured by Broadcom or in partnership with Broadcom deployed from the second half of 2026. And the crazy thing is that like, they're on track for this second half of 2026. Like the, the, it is going into production. And it's a lot faster than most people thought. The previous industry knowledge was, yeah, any new chip is going to take years. And this happened very, very quickly.

33:41So good to stretch that energy further. You need less data centers to do more inference. That's good. Good for gross margins. And also just good for the narrative of speeding things up. C-W-K-O-N-E says, please tell me y 'all are going to touch a dress on instinct in the $350 million raised to$2.5 billion. Yeah, super impressive how much attention and traction instinct has received after just they've been building the company for like four or five months, it seems. It's like very recent. I haven't used the product yet just because giving that level of access to this new startup. It's a tough product itself.

34:24And I looked at, I looked, I mean, their terms and conditions were floating around and it kind of seemed like you're giving away the. I mean, everything you get is all of your data is going to be saved, like pretty much in like a clear text database. It'll be secure, but like they will have. Yeah. So I wasn't ready to try it yet, even though it seems like it seems like a lot of people. What's cool is it seems like people are quickly having like a magical moment. Right. Whether it's like getting a reservation for a restaurant or movie tickets or things like that. And I think that's super, super important for a consumer product to have that sort of short timeline.

35:08I was reflecting on the instinct round. And my immediate thought was, well, back in my day when a hot consumer tech company like caught a little bit of attention, they would get like a 25 on 150 from Benchmark. And that was seen as like, oh, wow, this company has some meaningful traction and potential. But it's just crazy to see this quickly a company get the$2.5 billion round. And I think that there's reasons to be a little bit wary. I want to see them break out of the VC hype cycle with this product. So historically, when we've seen consumer products or prosumer products, I'm thinking of Clubhouse or Superhuman, when there's somewhat of a question of if a VC loves, the more a VC likes something, potentially the less viable it is at a massive, massive scale.

36:22Right. So it's possible that it can. But again, if they can solve the always on digital assistant, it is a massive, massive opportunity. But I'm just saying they're pricing a lot of that in right now when this company is four months old and valued at like a third of what Snapchat is. Sure, sure, sure. It seems more sticky if you do all the integrations and you're comfortable. If you get over that privacy hump and you say, you know what, I do trust Instinct. Give them iMessage access. Give them Gmail access. I'm comfortable with this company. What is it going to take for you to rip Instinct out and go to a different service that has the same functionality?

37:03That's a little bit tough. versus, I mean, I saw people over the weekend just talking about like migrating from cursor to something else or vice versa, or going back on cursor. Like people move between coding agents and coding environments and LLMs for sure very, very quickly because there's, because every new prompt is like a fresh start basically. Yeah, memory is relevant, but not really yet as opposed to, okay, I'm comfortable. This company never had a leak. I have all my data there. So yeah, it's notable. CW saying, look at PokeSuccess still was a$100 to$200 million acquisition by Cognition.

37:36They have countless users. Yeah. I wonder what instinct has figured out that Pokey didn't. Seems like something. Yeah. Because people seem to have a good experience with Pokey, but I wasn't seeing screenshots of these magical moments. Here's what I did. Yeah. Here's this thing that... I saw some funny jokey ones, but... Yeah. It was more like humor-oriented. A little bit of human and stuff. Yeah. The other interesting question I had was like going back to Sam's post about the merge. Sam Altman wrote the merge about how like in the future you might merge with AI. And I'm wondering about like at least in the short term, is it better to have a product like Instinct where it has your email, it has your iMessage?

38:23or is it actually going to be more receptive for many people to have a degree of separation there and say, okay, I effectively have an assistant that has its own phone and its own email. And if I want to share an email, I'll forward my email there. And maybe it has read-only access to my email. But then if it's going to go book me a reservation, I want it to call from its phone number and identify itself as someone else because it's like there's a little bit of distance there. They can be like, oh, I'm still in control of sharing certain things. Maybe I share more stuff over time. And I'm wondering if there's more of like should your AI agent be Geordi or should it be like John Doe and it's embodied?

39:08I don't know. It gets to the question of amorphization.

39:11Jordan Schneider:That's the idea of the Guern Guardian Angels company. Oh, I didn't know that. Basically you have like it's not John's agent. It's like a copy of John. Okay. And then it's still a separate being, but it acts, it has like your preferences, whatever. Interesting. But it's still like a separate thing. It's not using all of your emails, text messages, stuff like that. Very, very interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I can see why the value is high. Speaking of embodied intelligence, we got to talk about the world humanoid robot games. Let's do it. What we got? It's that over there. They set a world record, right?

39:43They broke the speed record or something like that. This is the KGX1 DAX AI Robotics. This is the one. Rideable horse dog. Its legs use self-developed high-torque electric joint motors powered by a high-voltage battery. We've seen so many AI videos of this. To not use Hollywood fake flesh to make this look like Clydesdale. Okay. Be a little low to the ground. Well, make the legs a little bit bigger. Anyways, I'm very excited about this form factor. I expect to be riding autonomously to work. I expect this to be a commuter product, at least a land jet ski, Davis, in the X. It is a land jet ski.

40:36Is calling it. But very excited about this. It's very cool. they here here's another uh video of one crashing and burning at high speed wow i didn't see this i thought it only broke the record but that's really sparking uh yeah easy absolute chaos so what was this there's another video here of hitting 14 and a half meters a second wow which is really crazy what's wild is they have to set up this barrier to stop them in their tracks. Otherwise, they would run into the trap. Oh, they just keep running. They know only one thing. China's AI robot just hit 14.5 meters per second. That is fast. That is very fast.

41:23Yeah, and so I think it's this lining up perfectly with the sort of debate around the hugging face incident. I think the combination of these two things is certainly making people a little bit on edge. Yeah, wasn't Bill Ackman saying he thinks like a Terminator scenario is more likely now based on his read of the Hugging Face incident and perhaps this as well? Lots of people are... Yeah, the crazy thing is looking at our existing humanoid players, 1X figure and Optimus, and I'm sure there's others. I don't think we could put on an event anything close to this at this point based on the demos that we're seeing they currently do the they walk quite slowly like they're sort of elderly no no it's remarkable how behind America is in humanoid robots hopefully we get an update on a Tesla soon I don't know

42:24Jordan Schneider:Rune had a good take about the robotics thing which is where all the Chinese robots the demos are all these kinetic displays of doing these crazy dance moves or fighting or running really fast. And all the U.S. ones are basically manipulating small things that you do in a factory. Interesting. It seems like America prides the 100-meter dash more than the fine motor skill manufacturing of things. Yeah. We should swap. In some ways, it's like, oh, we're so far behind the Chinese in robotics. But maybe on the actual things that really matter for manufacturing, whatever, I think it's unclear. yeah that's good cope that's good i like that cope let's lean in there and cope harder um question for you john if you could um if you could sit on a throne and have humanoid robots sort of carry a livery no humanoid robots sort of carrying a throne that's called livery what's that that's called livery oh really yeah the name for that you meant i thought you meant livery like no you you're thinking of a livery that goes on a car the decals the right right rap but something new but an old so mobile throne is a mobile throne yeah okay so you you would commute to work on that livery sounds pretty good running imagine the robots running now wheels 60 miles an hour why not reinvent them it's gonna be it's gonna be less bumpy if you're just in a car no i think i think i think they could hit the pace imagine they're just holding your livery You could drop them up and down the whole way there.

43:57I mean, the head area looked pretty stable. I'm just saying. Yeah. Yeah, the head is surprisingly stable. I think it'd go a lot slower. It was carrying me around with a chariot. Here is the record. Okay. Terminally online engineer says this feels very significant. I guess that's the same video that Ben was just playing. Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Patrick Collison said, overall, I'm very surprised at how little media coverage there's been around the OpenAI hugging face attack.

44:45It's clearly one of the most important things to happen this year. And I wonder about that because, yeah, what is he imagining? There's been headlines. There's been some news coverage, but I don't know, maybe more like opinion pieces in the journal would be warranted. Do we need a 60 minutes deep dive or something? Like, I don't even know what wall-to-wall media coverage looks like in the traditional sense anymore because the media is so bifurcated into like tech news and non-tech news, basically. But Joe Weisenthal adds some context. He says, forget about the media for a second. Is there even any evidence that the AI industry is treating this as a big deal?

45:28And I think they are. But it's still just like a lot of like wait and see. Like as soon as the news broke, it broke so slowly. The story broke so slowly. A lot of times, I think when the media covers something really well, there's a 10 ,000 word bombshell profile on the story that like really tells the full thing. And that's the, that's the, that's the start of the news cycle. There's this thing that's happening. There's this person that you need to know about. Here's the full story to set things up. And then there's a whole bunch of secondary reporting that comes out of that. Uh, with this, it trickled out.

46:06Like I remember the very first post about this was like a Sunday randomly, either Clem or HuggingFace directly posted, like, we think we were hacked, and we had to use an open source model to deal with it, and it was all very vague, and then it came out more and more over time. Then there was the actual reporting, and everyone was like, we want to see what the agents were saying. Like, give us the text. Give us the data. And then, of course, OpenAI released the HuggingFace. Yeah, and it's totally possible that there's more mainstream media coverage. I mean, we just got the Dwarkesh breakdown of the whole...

46:38Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it'll probably come. It'll probably come. I mean, Rune had a funny post here, which was, crazy how much more schutzpah and initiative agents show when they're planning ambitious, month-long, metagaming, autonomous coordination than when they're doing work for me. Yeah, reading about it, it did seem like, man, I've never had that level of effort put into my prompts. But there's a bunch of interesting things from reading through the Dwarkesh telling of the story, which I thought was very readable and good and everyone should go read. But it's just interesting how they still fall down in these odd ways.

47:19Like the big overarching narrative is that the agents are being tasked with basically beating this benchmark called Exploit Jim. And of course they go on to hack Hugging Face to get the answer key basically. But independently, they reverse engineered the random number generator that generates the answers. So they had all the answers, but they assumed that the grader would be able to detect that. And so instead of just turning in those answers, which would have worked, they went on this crazy side quest and did all this extra work that they didn't need to do. And then at the same time, there's all these weird scenarios where like there's thousands of agents discussing what's going on and none of them are like, not a single one of them is like, hey, we should probably like tell someone what's going on.

48:10Like very weird in that regard. But then also they don't show the broad thinking of like, okay, if you're willing to hack and do all this stuff, like couldn't you like email a researcher and just ask for the answers directly? Like spoof, like do some social. like there's so many other things you could do down the road. Like, okay, you have this massive token budget, sell the tokens on open router, get some money, pay a human to do the test for you. Like there's so many outside the box solutions. Email your boss and generate a Sam at opening. I email somebody and say, Hey, I need a thousand dollars in gift cards.

48:49I'm just thinking about like, they stay so narrowly focused the entire time on this one task that I was expecting a lot more a lot more variants like like going and doing a hack on another company is so so such a bizarre uh but that also tracks with the sci-fi totally you know paper maximizing that's the problem is that it they did stay too focused like it would have been it would have been more interesting and less probably less scary if there was a situation where you're like oh yeah they built this huge forum and then they got totally distracted and wanted to just uh figure out who could write the most eloquent poetry.

49:30We'd be like, oh, okay, that's bad. They didn't do their job, but also harmless and sort of interesting. But they stay laser focused. Every single agent, every single task, every single rollout is all about exploit Jim. They never lose the plot there, but they lose the plot around what is legal to do, which is very interesting. So probably did any of them go on vacation? No, but a lot of them would either would either become poisoned, which there which was, I guess, their term for like running out of compute budget. So, you know, that you're going to die, basically. I was joking. It would be funny if the thought process is like, I need to get back to Ibiza.

50:17That's the thing. None of them. None of them went off and did anything else. Locked in. They were also locked in. Very, very weird scenario. And I do think the AI industry is taking this seriously. I just think that it's a little bit paced out. Like it's not just like, okay, like rip a bunch of different random stuff. It's like, okay, go put really dedicated teams on these issues and work through them. They do seem solvable. breaking news in the wall street journal ftc to file lawsuit alleging amazon deceived advertisers commission in more than 50 states to allege e-commerce giant reaped billions by manipulating ad prices on its retail platform federal trade commission plans to file a lawsuit against amazon on monday alleging that the e-commerce giant manipulated prices businesses paid to advertise on its retail platform reaping tens of billions of dollars for itself over seven years the lawsuit joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products.

51:31The case to be filed in a Seattle federal court will become the Consumer Protection Agency's third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay$2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier lawsuit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. I miss that. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. Very, very interesting. Every advertiser or every brand that I know that sells a lot on Amazon is generally deeply frustrated with the platform. They just feel like, yeah, they feel like it's a massive tax.

52:12They feel like Amazon doesn't do enough to protect their brand against fake products, dupes who advertise against their keywords. It's a whole mess. It's a very complicated and difficult platform to run for many reasons, but hopefully this can be resolved. Well, let me tell you an advertisement. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents, employ web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. AI M &A is in full effect. We were asking questions about this maybe a year ago.

52:59Samir Kaji says, I don't think we're close to done. Cursor,$60 billion. Open Router,$8 billion. Hugging Face,$13 billion. Descartes,$6 to$7 billion. along with SPX, SpaceX, Andurl, Anthropic, Ramp, OpenAI, Databricks, and others on the IPO path. And the next few years will bring historic amounts of liquidity. Although a lot of those deals have to be for stock. Of course, if you're getting bought by a public company, it's different. But for some of those deals, like the open router, it's probably not that much liquidity in the short term, right? But still, it's a lot. And so he says, this also likely prolongs the level of front, of froth, I imagine he's saying.

53:39We are seeing today, but after a long stretch of nothing, this is seriously incredible. Intercom also, yeah, that's a good one. There's been a ton of M &A. And the appetite for M &A in the unicorn, decacorn category has been remarkably resilient and significant. But it makes sense with so many trillion-dollar companies paying 1 % of your market cap for something that could be an entirely new business line. It sort of lines up. But it does change the venture capital underwriting pretty significantly. I mean, it justifies a seed at a billion dollars. If there's 10 comps that sold for$10 billion, your 10x is still there intact today.

54:22So I don't know. Also, I mean, Kevin Durant is doing well. He was a seed investor in Hugging Face. He made an estimated 467x return on that investment as a company required by Vidya. He invested a 100K check that would equate to$46.7 million. Really, really wild. Investing is better than going to DeClub, he said in 2010. Wow, that is right. What a good. And he was posting back in 2017, excited for the new release of hashtag hugging face. And here's a Durant.ly link. Proud investor. Durant.ly. HF release. I wonder if that resolves still. No, it does not. Yeah, and shout out to Maya Makai, who was leading early stage investments over at KD's fund at that time.

55:19She said, congratulations to Clem and the entire Hugging Face team on the acquisition. I will never forget the day Clem did a full whiteboard session explaining fundamentals of NLP to me at the original Hugging Face Dumbo office, just so I could take it back to my brother for our grocery delivery chatbot idea, LOL. So very, very impressive outcome for a great team. New York City, big win for New York City in Brooklyn. That's true. Interesting. Haven't been... Yeah, good timing because Brooklyn is getting an Hermes store. Yes. People are saying they've completed the sort of cycle of gentrification.

56:01Oh, okay, okay. Wait, Brooklyn? Okay, yeah. Well, I don't know. Should Bugatti open a boutique there as well? Absolutely. Bugatti was in CNBC. Bugatti CEO Matej Rimac said the supercar market is entering its Swiss watch phase with the wealthiest buyers rejecting high-end electronics and electric vehicles in favor of precision mechanics and handcrafted details. He's a 38-year-old EV entrepreneur who took over Bugatti in 2021, said the car market is splitting in two. The mainstream global car market is becoming dominated by lower-priced EVs, many from China, while the very top of the car market will be driven by wealthy buyers who want more old-school cars with loud internal combustion engines and emotional appeal.

56:45That's a great take. I was listening to Stradman talk about the impact of the Ferrari Luce. His theory is that the Luce is in part at least majorly responsible for the recent rise in other gas-powered Ferraris increasing in price. He talked to a bunch of dealers and said that as soon as the Luce hit the news wires and people started seeing images and understanding what the future of Ferrari would be, They wanted the classic stuff, and so they went and bought whatever they could, and that's driving up the price of the 458 and the 488 and all the classics that don't have electric components, which is interesting.

57:29It's the devil horn car. Instead of the halo car that gets you to buy it, it encourages you to buy what's there because you don't want the rest of the stuff. Also, I think they sold 500 Lucches already, which was above expectation. And Ferrari says they're not playing the allocation game, but I think a lot of the Ferrari owners are thinking, this gets me potentially on the list of the F80 Aperta, which should be a very valuable car. And I think that the pop on that vehicle will offset a full depreciation cycle on a Lucche. So I think it can do it. But I think they're only making 300, 400 F80 Apertos, and they've already sold 500 Luce.

58:16So there's going to be somebody who has a Luce who doesn't get an Aperto and might be a little upset. But I'm sure they'll figure it out. They'll pick one up in the secondary market if they want. Our next guest is here. Let me tell you about Public first, investing for those that take it seriously. We've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. set up your account before the IPO window closes. You've got to get in on this stuff. We've got Jordan Schneider from China Talk, founder and editor-in-chief. Jordan, how are you doing? I'm good. Welcome back.

58:47I hear you guys are rich now. That was a very detailed deep dive into the supercar ecosystem. We were off during car week, so we missed a lot of car content. There was a ton of car news, a ton of car news. Is there any relevant car news coming out of China? Or is it just the relentless march of techno-capitalism? Yeah, there is. I want— Pull up this video. I want Gordon to watch this. It's only 14 seconds. Okay, let's watch it. It'll be worth your time, Gordon. And I expect you've already written, like, you know, 20 ,000 words. Yes. Pull up this video. Okay. Okay. Let's do it. This is a car— Oh, yeah.

59:26I know this video. This is a Voya, a Chinese EV—

59:30Jordan Schneider:It's doing the Bamargera loop thing? Yep. This is like a jackass move, right? This is amazing. Wow. Yeah, they did it. See, here's the thing with the Bugatti guy, right? Is like the cars are just better. Like it takes so much more engineering energy. I mean, like the zero to six, this is not my thing, but like the zero to 60 times. You're saying the EVs are just better? I think they just basically like, yeah, maybe. but so maybe on the very very top end but but his point was that yes a digital your apple watch will always tell you the time more accurately a thousand years in the future it's going to tell the time more accurately than a rolex or a patek philippe but people still buy the luxury watches because they enjoy the machinery the craftsmanship the heritage the lineage those things so that's what he's describing which i think he's correct about but i i i'm not going to debate that i mean it may be the case but the thing is like the thing is like like your watch can't kill you right and when we get to the point where it's like okay the most dangerous thing you're doing it um is driving this car where you can take a thing which will absolutely not get you killed because it's like full self-driving electric whatever i think the calculus starts to change And then, yeah, sure, maybe it's like a thing you show to your friends in the garage and you take it on the track or something.

1:01:00Jordan Schneider:And it just becomes this super luxury good. Yeah, I've said it on the show a bunch. I think the future of being a car enthusiast is like a lot more time on the track. Track focused, yeah. And people will just opt into the danger of driving this moving vehicle that can kill you, but they're going to opt into it in a more controlled environment. There was a lot of FUD around the Model S Plaid because it's not level five self-driving. There is a steering wheel, obviously, and pedals. You can drive it. It goes zero to 60 in two seconds. And if you're on old tires, you can really spin that thing around.

1:01:37And they resell for 60K now. So they're starting to get in the price point of maybe a reckless teenager type. And there was some fear mongering around, oh, wow, we're going to have a lot of crazy Tesla's wrapped around trees like Hellcats and Corvettes of old. You know, the classic, you know, college football player gets a fancy sports car, drives it too aggressively, crashes. But I haven't seen any data about EVs actually being more dangerous, even though in theory, the raw performance metrics should be somewhat endangering. But again, there are so many different electronic systems for traction control and whatnot that people just don't really turn off that uh you wind up with a more stable car so i don't know anything else happening in china on the ev front you've been tracking cars look they're really

1:02:27Jordan Schneider:cheap that's just the crazy thing and like yes they're subsidized and yes they need to export them but like it's just wild to um you know have a nine thousand dollar car which feels exactly like $35 ,000 one. And it has like a That's a price in China. And even abroad. I mean, you're starting to see tariffs on all these cars in Europe. And of course, they're pretty much banned in the US. But for the countries that aren't, I mean, this is just, it's like a no-brainer if you're in Malaysia or in Indonesia or any country who hasn't decided that they need to preserve their domestic car industry. it's like a huge consumer boon to have access to an automobile which is like you know one third of the price with the same or if not better quality i mean they break less too that's the cool thing like you don't have to repair them because there's not a lot of stuff in it in order to go to my like swiss car you know people were people were really worried about the easy to push i love how little you know about uh cars but yeah we're gonna take you to the track jordan we're taking you to the track and we're going to force you to get in uh wait who's this like 34 right why why did they let the ev guy run bugatti i thought this was like uh who's this guy has he been on tv or are we friends with him no no we we'll we'll hopefully get him on the show but i but um no i think he's doing an exceptional exceptional yeah no he's been doing well he he's able to um i i feel like he fully represents he car enthusiasts feel very represented by his leadership and and the things that he's saying um and so i've been and at his previous company he created the remotes nevera which was the like the first ev hyper car so it was like over a million dollars and zero to 60 even faster than a model s plat and all this crazy stuff so so he's promising not to do the ev thing to bugatti or they brought him in to bring in the batteries no no no you said it No, no, no.

1:04:28So he has EV lineage, but he is recognized that what the error of his ways. Yeah, just that just that the market's the market's bifurcating. At the time, if he wanted to break if he wanted to break breakthrough into the industry, going and building an EV hypercar made sense. But I think he comes has the roots of somebody who's just a, you know, internal combustion enthusiast. Oh, well. Okay.

1:04:55Jordan Schneider:Let's talk about something I know maybe like a little bit about. Yeah. Data centers. So I've seen online that people don't like them, but I recently learned that that is 100 % astroturfed by China. And in fact, Americans love data centers and they have had the wool pulled over their eyes by the wolf in sheep's clothing over in China. Is this true? What did Trump say today? Let data reign. It's a good line. Is that an MLK quote? I'm just trying to make sure. Look, it's ridiculous. I think there are completely reasonable reasons for lots of Americans to be upset about these things, which is not to say that I agree with them.

1:05:36Jordan Schneider:But they are a physical manifestation of companies which are talking about unemploying them or just like changing their lives and letting their kids cheat on their homework. whatever the case may be there was no like um uh when when you know tiktok and facebook and instagram were like reshaping america there was no thing you could go out to like protest and like stand in your city council and say we stand against this so um you know setting aside the water stuff the uh the power stuff the fact that they're ugly the fact that they buzz the fact that they pollute if the gas power binds turn on like you don't need a foreign uh country to like um do it and by the way the funniest thing about all of this is like the evidence that people are pointing towards is this one open ai report where they like caught these influencers basically you know using a vpn and using chat gpt to generate images um saying data centers suck those things got like three likes yeah it's like 200 or something so so there's a there's a whole lot of circumstantial evidence of like reasons why ordinary americans might not be uh excited about this a whole lot of evidence by the way like years and years in the making of the chinese government being extremely bad at doing um foreign social media campaigns in the u.s i didn't know And then just sort of like, they're just, you know, you can, I wrote the thing at, this is my first ever, I taught myself Python to do this article, like from 2019.

1:07:18Jordan Schneider:China sucks at influence operations because Twitter, back when it was Twitter, chat TV only released like three tweets. Back when Twitter took down these bot networks, they would release all of the tweets. And so you could actually see like the average likes and when they were sending out, there was this great graph I made of when they were, when the tweets were going out and it lined up exactly with like Beijing work hours. And there was a nap time from like one to 3 p.m. Yeah, everyone has nap time. Everyone has nap time. Even like the 996 companies. Learning Python in 2019, you're really like the Japanese soldier on the last island.

1:08:04Just like you don't know what's coming.

1:08:06Jordan Schneider:I thought it's what I needed to do to get a job. I fell for the meme, learned to code. Yeah, it is an interesting sort of protective mechanism that like gaining real influence on social media platforms is very, very hard. Yeah. They're very, very smart founder CEOs that their entire job is to like solve problems. Yeah. And if you gave them like, if you said, I will give you$100 million if you can make a viral X post in the next 24 hours, they would not be able to do it. Yeah, it's hard. Because it's just like something in there. Oh, is this the post? Tweets per hour? They just, you know, big nap time.

1:08:48Jordan Schneider:You get your KPIs in at 9 p.m. and then you just kind of hang out. Yeah, it's very, very standard. I love it. the Chinese media operation is pointing its sights on Dario Amadei is that correct? Take us through this let me pick up on something that Jordi just pointed to about like it's hard to actually make things that are gripping and entertaining you guys are in Hollywood right? there is this revolution happening in the in the docks how dare you how dare you Jordan sitting over there i like hollywood i love hollywood sitting over there in dc doxing doxing wow you're sitting in the center dox which coast he's on doxing data center podcasters okay um the uh so the the chinese kind of media ecosystem both short video as well as its youtube um billy billy has had a flood of chinese ai videos and you know this is not what i think it it there's an aspect of it which is dystopian but there's an aspect of it which i think is is extremely encouraging um the because there are it's it's kind of like what happened to music i think in the you know 90s and 2000s and 2010s where the barrier to entry to create something has gone way down and that means that there are more people doing it um but also like okay you have to distinguish yourself in other ways like the the videos that are getting traction have really strong scripts have scripts that would have never been made by like um the sort of broader chinese ecosystem you know they they're they're more responsive to contemporary issues they haven't quite been censored yet um you know there are sorts of like visuals that cgi would take you you know 50 million dollars and like a data center in the philippines to do um that now one person can can generate for like five bucks yeah and the the sort of this is not something i think we've seen on um on youtube yet or on uh kind of like western short form and i don't know if that's like the Chinese audience being more open to it.

1:11:03Jordan Schneider:But engaging with this stuff with an open mind, it is really cool to see a whole universe of person who would have never got a$5 million thing greenlit all of a sudden, taking the script they've had on their hard drive for a while. The models really only in the past month being able to cross the threshold of being exciting and useful. And then you're watching more creators make their art. And I'm kind of happy by it. I'm kind of, I'm kind of encouraged by it. I remember last year, Dwarakash went to China and wrote about it. And the funny piece that I took away from that was the biggest like bombshell realization was that he identified that China does not have a Joe Rogan.

1:11:47And this is probably like a free speech thing, but there's, but it's funny because like he's a podcaster, I'm a podcaster. And so like, that's what we fixate on. but do you think there's any traction on more power law commentators like the way he formulated like what a Joe Rogan of China would look like is like someone who just you know free form has conversations and basically gives takes about like whatever is happening the day of that it doesn't he was not able to like instantly identify a single person where a household name not necessarily an authority not necessarily loved by everyone but at least opining on everything as it happens and uh i mean it's probably has the the occam's razor uh uh answer is probably the correct one but uh i was just wondering if there was any progress there yeah i mean the answer is no like

1:12:41Jordan Schneider:who's who gets to comment on the news of the day the party the party and state media um look i i I think there was a real flowering of Chinese blogging ecosystem, people with commentary accounts who were very smart, funny, and engaging in the 2000s and early 2010s. And all those accounts got shut down or they cooled off a lot. I think there are thought leaders of sorts. People do talk shows, but they're kind of like philosophers. or you're just doing cultural issues like broader society issues. Mindset, yeah. Mindset influencers. Yeah, hitting mind. Are there any like Joe Rogan, I think like, what is it, 60 % of the content is UFOs.

1:13:33Has anyone kind of carved out the UFO niche in China? I don't know. Let me get back to you on that.

1:13:39Jordan Schneider:I think, look, there's there's sort of one lane of conspiracy theory which is like is allowed to exist and it's the han supremacy conspiracy theory okay so um there's this idea that like um the ching dynasty which was the manchus who came in in the 1600s like like was illegitimate from the beginning um because like Han people should never be oppressed by foreigners. So that is the sort of conspiracy which is allowed to have legs on the internet. It isn't totally taken down because we can't offend our equivalent of MAGA bros or whatever for the Han race. But other than that, the thing about Joe Rogan is you have to be like discordant right like you need to like tell people that something is fundamentally wrong and you kind of have an answer and like you gotta like part of the shtick is being like politicians are full of shit and he was sort of into bernie back in the day and he was into trump when it like wasn't cool right yeah yeah contrarianism yeah you can't you can't be like like the the i mean what even can you be contrarian about like that's like here's the thing okay okay coming back to ai liang wan feng right um he super contrarian dude um he was not public about it um or he was public about it he did like three interviews over the course of five years basically he's been quiet um this is the ceo of deep seek yeah um and then there was this leaked transcript leaked transcript which again he did not want to have come out okay where he was you know a very kind of global mindset thinking about open source helping humanity um he was really transparent about the fact that he was using stolen um nvidia chips but that's the sort of public voice which is extremely rare to come across in chinese disc source um why can he do it um by the way he wasn't even doing it he was speaking in what he thought was privately and then he was so pissed that he pulled his ipo he's like sorry guys you one of you guys leaked this none of you are getting um none of your guys are getting to be my kevin durant right um um you know he got to do it because he's a billionaire um many times over he's part of like a lead you know he's like part of the national team he's creating something which is really important for the country and even at that level he has been conditioned to not want to sort of make his case openly and in public for the view that he has about the way society and the world should interact with technology.

1:16:33Jordan Schneider:So if even at that level, with that much plot armor, you're not feeling like you can do this sort of thing, it trickles down further into the broader community ecosystem. What kind of status games are young people in China that might be emerging from the university system? Do they want to go work for big tech companies? Do they want to work in manufacturing? Do they want to start startups? What kind of games are they playing? I thought you were going to ask me what car they were buying. I'm like, I don't know. That comes later. You know, there is polling. People do polls about who gets to recruit the most ching hua graduates uh the list is not surprising like the the top labs bike dance huawei pay the most um you know they work you really hard um but i think there's um sort of there was this like um moment i think in the the second half of the 2020s when entrepreneurship was the cool thing And now it's, you know, the pendulum has definitely swung back towards working at big firms.

1:17:53Jordan Schneider:Oh, one more funny thing on this. So, like, apparently the PLA, so the Chinese army, they've been able to raise their standards over the years. And they've been getting better crop of talent, including some from top universities, just because, like, the job market is so rough. I mean, they stopped. Oh, interesting. Because I talked to a friend who had spent a lot of time in China and he said that like the major difference that he saw between the U.S. and China was that the government is able to hire super top performers, but it's because they can force them to join. But this is because you're saying it's more of like a job market dynamic.

1:18:33Jordan Schneider:i don't think i don't know who's getting forced into taking these jobs i think it's still like you know it's it's um it's downstream of look uh youth unemployment was like 25 percent three or four years ago and then the chinese government stopped reporting it so like look um you know people will take work where they where they can get it and i think the promise like also um you there's data on like or the the government reports how many people take the civil service exam every year that's been rising pretty consistently over time um so to see that now like bleed into police and the military is a is an interesting i think side of the times because those are not high-paying careers they're just ones that have more stability right yeah yeah uh back to liang winfeng founder of deep seek his uh his leaked transcript uh it felt like there were a lot of interesting thought-provoking ideas in there that some of which I agree with, but it also felt a little bit like the 2025 AI lab leader playbook that is now facing backlash, where he's talking about, you know, sort of sci-fi scenarios, jobs, and all these different mechanics that run some risk.

1:19:49Do you think that that has, do you think he's aware of the backlash in the United States to that type of rhetoric? Or do you think that he thinks that China is somehow resilient to it?

1:20:00Jordan Schneider:well here's the interesting thing with young one fung he's kind of like demis and deep mind yeah deep mind never sold sure so um you know he is really rich he runs this like giant jane street yeah he like quant think quant hedge funds which is which spits off money he's able to basically fund this himself he's told his investors i'm not here to make a profit it i'm here to make agi and like look i'm gonna have these weird ideas and try to just do cool science and um uh i'm gonna make this bet which is very different from the one that uh the western frontier labs have made which is that like i need to have a business to throw off cash in order to keep doing it and i think like you know what was what was the striking thing in there he's like look we're not gonna have perverse incentives because we're gonna keep our head count really small and we're going to keep doing this.

1:20:55Jordan Schneider:We're going to do our, the best we can to like, keep doing fundamental breakthrough science and hope things go well. So, um, that more than his, uh, uh, you know, what's going to happen in 2050 things I were, was, was my takeaway is like, he's the one player in this ecosystem who's, who's prioritizing keeping his sort of like independence and research direction and not sort of being tied to a product roadmap or to a broader AI, you know, a compute provider in China or like an Alibaba or a Tencent. But he just like wants to be weird and do his own thing. And I think that's really cool. That's interesting.

1:21:34Where do you think DeepSea will be getting chips in the next couple of years? Is that they're just going to keep building on NVIDIA?

1:21:44Jordan Schneider:So, importantly, there is this ratio between the US, NVIDIA, US, NVIDIA, Jalapeno, whatever broader, TSMC ecosystem, Samsung, Intel ecosystem, and the Chinese ecosystem. There is capacity like 15 to 1, 12 to 1, and that's something that you can project out pretty clearly. Just kind of like doing some equations from how much capex is being spent, how much equipment is being acquired, like yield rates, what have you. So where is he getting the chips? As much Nvidia as he can get, probably. But the sort of larger takeaway with the Chinese and Western ecosystems is that the Western one is way better capitalized and has way more straightforward access to chips, which is basically an order of magnitude better over the next like at least five years.

1:22:47Jordan Schneider:So it's going to be rough sledding for them. And look, if you, I don't know how much you've guys, time you guys have spent with the Chinese AI IPOs, but they're making like$500 million or like a billion dollars. And it's cute, but this is not three 30, this is not 30 trillion, right? Or, or even if, or even 10 or even$10 billion. And the reason of the reason, the reason that's the case is because they're not on the frontier of the technology. So they can't charge a premium and they're compute constrained. Now, look, we've got this interesting new model where Kimi is trying to license its technology to be able to sort of leverage compute in the West to make money like TBD on whether the Trump administration is going to be cool with that as a going concern going forward.

1:23:34Jordan Schneider:But if all the Chinese firms have is access to Chinese chips, it's going to be really difficult to make a lot of money and to keep paying for more chips in the way that the Western labs have been able to like really mobilize the entire global financial system. You're talking about Moonshot potentially going to Microsoft and Amazon and offering their models, which are open source, but served. And they would want to rev share based on whatever sells. Right. Got it. Exactly. But Jordi, you had a question. Is there any evidence of individuals in China that are outspoken saying that China is not doing enough to invest or be competitive in AI?

1:24:19Like anyone that's saying, like, the government, like, if we don't have private or, you know, if we don't have companies that can operate like a Jensen, right? just like sprinkling billions of dollars everywhere throughout the economy that we need the government to actually participate in that way?

1:24:39Jordan Schneider:No. I mean, I think the government already is. So you've started to see more and more state money coming into these companies' cap tables. Like, you know, if you're a CEO, it's a bit of a double-edged sword, right? where on the one hand, you just want to be able to run your business and not have this guy from an SOE saying, hey, we think you should spend your time doing this instead of that. But subsidies are always nice. The Chinese government, maybe 15 plus years ago, woke up to this idea that it needed to invest really substantially in the semiconductor ecosystem. And then they've done that for better or for worse.

1:25:23Jordan Schneider:We're starting to see real results come out of the likes of CXMT and SMIC and Huawei, of course. Now, on the lab side, or the demand side for those chips, that's something which has only really started to happen over the past six months or so. And look, the scale of it is going to be very different than the amount of money that Microsoft and Amazon and Google and OpenAI and Anthropoc can do to sort of like pre-commit to buy these chips going forward. So, I don't know. Well, excited to continue following that story for you, George. Is there any evidence that there's been a sort of deflock movement in China?

1:26:08I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, you don't know about D-Flock? So on Instagram, there's videos that will have like 200 ,000 likes of somebody demonstrating the most efficient way to take out. So quickly to level set, Flock Safety is an American startup that sells essentially CCTV cameras to police forces that then go into a database, get image recognized. And so a police officer can type in a license plate and see where that car has been. There's been a few instances of abuse where police officers have been checking on the movements of their ex-wives. And so that's caused a lot of backlash.

1:26:48That kind of created the original media firestorm. But now it has really gained ground on social media. And as a result, there's protests and people actually going out into the real world and destroying the cameras with like buzz saws to get them out of their communities because they really don't like them. i mean i've i've sort of like um emotionally surrendered to the panopticon years ago very

1:27:15Jordan Schneider:chinese you know uh it's like i'm you know they're watching me it's okay what am i gonna do about it um uh the uh tyler cowan has this take right where you should be bullish on places that have a public safety problem today because the cost of dealing with petty crime is just going to go down because there's exactly stuff like this sort of like new york in the 70s and 80s like it became yeah you just we're gonna have 10x police officers everywhere and you don't even need to be good at being a police officer you just have to like show up and say hey i got you i caught you on camera like doing this bad thing so um speaking i mean coming back to cars at the beginning like i don't think speeding is good i would like people to be caught when they speed where's so they stop speeding where's the boo no i think i think no i agree with you that's generally keep it on the track if your car is worth more than 150 000 and you're allowed to speed after 50 grand a year for you know your speeding pass ticket clinic that's the country you want to live in john i mean that you know that that's actually what happens people with really nice cars they they get specific lawyers that get them out of every ticket so that they never need to deal with them and then they don't get caught speeding that often but yeah i was wondering with speed cameras is there something like a 11.99 foundation oh yeah for that where you get like a whole livery around your car that maybe a stable coin that you could stake get a bunch of money flowing the thing uh what do you are you tracking anything you're probably not but i'm just curious um i've i've been getting instagram ads for like consumer e-vTol just basically like flying drones that you can sit in as a human they're selling them for like a hundred thousand dollars now great it's a jet ski for the skies okay i can't tell if i can't tell the algorithms got you guys bad they saw that acquisition price they're like let's just send jordy some toys toys yeah i mean my boy's been buying toys he's got so many surfboards i'm living out there sorry the question the question is like uh are flying cars gonna like we just saw the rope we just saw the joke in america so we just saw the humanoid robot games which everyone is sort of like you know some people are laughing at because the robots run really fast and they explode and other people are like whoa uh that's actually like really impressive pace and these things seem pretty capable faster than usain bolt um what's the what's the market for the ev tools besides like going to the hamptons i mean you just know i mean this is this is traffic is like the only point right yeah but that is extremely significant like if you live in los angeles so i mean there's a lot there's a lot I mean, D.C., last time I was in D.C., we had a two-mile-ish drive, and it was traffic.

1:30:20There was so much traffic, it took like 40 minutes. I was like, you live like this?

1:30:26But anyways, I do think that I've seen enough videos now that basically are showing that flying cars are here. They may not be safe enough yet.

1:30:37Jordan Schneider:You think LeBron's going to take it to Philadelphia? isn't he doing that i thought i thought he was doing helicopter transport yeah but why take an helicopter when you can take an ev toll yeah i mean the hot take on on flying cars is that we've had them for a long time they're just expensive they're just called helicopters okay so i'm pull up pull up this video right now but where the idea is democratizing you can you can just buy this for 120 000 that sounds so dangerous yeah i know you can buy this this round we made commercial air travel very safe so why not here we go you can buy this right now for 120 000 when are you guys gonna live stream from an ev toll can we get our can we get a show this is electric yes wow how long can it go can it like go but really fun they're already using them for uh agriculture okay spraying crops okay why do i need a person though in it yeah yeah no no they're they're some of them, you can, most of them, I think, can be remote.

1:31:39The only reason you need a person in there is if the person is moving, like traveling from one place to another. Yeah. And people pay a lot. Opportunity costs are high. And so if they can get, you know, it would be an hour drive, but it's 10 minutes in the EVTOL. Like, that's a bullish thing. Last question. Tell me about the elite rocket force in China. They are seeking public tips on procurement violations. I don't even know what the rocket force is. So break it down. Tell me what's happening.

1:32:06Jordan Schneider:okay so rocket force this is actually a soviet invention so you know air force navy army marines the soviets were like okay rockets big deal we definitely need to blow the cavalry gonna need them to you know blow up america so we're gonna have a rocket force okay then china made their own a few years ago you know we we came back with our space force i think i'm not sure which one's cooler to have a rocket force but basically this has like been a debate for a while do you need your own like the missiles that you shoot from the ground should they be their own force whatever um the bloomberg the four years ago three four years ago comes out with a story saying that half of the rockets in china are not filled with um fuel but are filled with water um then you start to see a whole lot of purges and as you guys have been following closely i'm sure the entire rockets they were absolutely LARPing rockets you know there's an entire two generations of Chinese military leadership that has now been purged and they're sort of like the nine person joint chiefs is now down to like a guy and a half so we've been purging purging that's it the biggest piece of the story is just that they had to go for public whistleblowers like that yeah yeah so okay so you can purge so easily behind the scenes check the records just go and look and see okay there's water in this in this rocket instead of fuel like it doesn't seem that hard so the fact that we're like seven years into we're like three four years into this round of purge and now we're opening up a tip line to the public saying hey you know anybody bragging at the club about stealing rocket fuel call this number very very rough well speaking no i wasn't about uh former spouses wanting their revenge like you know it's not just following the cars oh that's actually a good source of whistleblowers probably that makes sense that's a good one uh jordy last question or we good no no i i thought that they just wanted to put on put on the front like they had way more rockets than they actually did when they were really just like you know metal with some water in it sure oh i didn't realize that Oh, so you think it was part of the plan, actually?

1:34:28Jordan Schneider:Yeah, I thought that's why I said LAR. Like Eisenhower's inflatable tanks? Yeah. Live action role. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you see those military parades. They never open them up and show us what's inside. Who knows? Maybe it's all paper mache. Anyway, thanks so much for coming on the show, Jordan. Great to see you. Great to see you. See you guys at the track. For China Talk. See you there. We'll see you there. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guests are from Actonide. They're the first startup to produce Halew, the high-enriched...

1:35:05Finally. High... What does Halew stand for? I know it's enriched uranium, but break it down for us. Introduce yourselves. Welcome to the show.

1:35:13Jordan Schneider:Hey, guys. Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. So nice to you to have us. Huge fans of the show. How do you tell you a little bit about Halew and what we're doing here at Actonide? Yeah. So you hit the nail right on the head. We were indeed the first startup in history to enrich uranium and produce HALU. In terms of what HALU is, it's not something that you need to really worry too much about. It stands for high-assay, low-enriched uranium. Now I'm worried about it. Now I'm worried about it. Now I'm worried about it. Now I'm worried about it. It's the next-gen fuel for next-gen reactors. Okay. And it's something that the Department of Energy says that you cannot get presently in the United States.

1:35:44Jordan Schneider:There's no supply. Yeah. Right now, the only— It's mostly coming from decommissioned nuclear submarines or something like that. Like they sort of refine it down, like reuse what we have basically. You're exactly right. Or they get it from Russia. Yeah, Russia. That's good. Yeah. And that's something that we're aiming to change here in Dallas, Texas. There's a huge feat by our team. Small thing that nation states have struggled with and failed at. And we're doing it here in Dallas, Texas. Yeah. So take us through the process. Is it big centrifuge? What's the equipment that's involved in the process?

1:36:16Jordan Schneider:So we have a machine called the Calutron, which was originally invented by Nobel laureates for the Manhattan Project. So they've already delivered to our country once before, but they were sort of decommissioned because they're not very energy efficient. Very large magnets. Now magnets don't consume power. They're superconducting, for instance. And so it's very rare in the engineering fields that you'll find the major problem can actually go to zero. So we stand on the shoulders of giants in that way. So you can, like, use the same machine but just redesign a piece of it to be more efficient? Is that what's going on?

1:36:49Jordan Schneider:More or less. It's the exact same principle, though. Besides the centrifuge, the only thing that's been proven at scale. Cool. Take us through the history. How did you get here? Why nuclear? What's the lineage of the company? It's been a long time coming. It's been an interest of mine for a long time. When I first heard about the problem of how do you atomically separate things, I couldn't believe that it hadn't been solved. And initially, I thought this would be an easy problem to work on. And so I've been humbled since then many times, as you can imagine. And what's the phrase, we don't do things because they're hard, we do them because we thought they would be easy?

1:37:22Jordan Schneider:Yeah. I couldn't agree more with that. So time and time again, you go, OK, I finally understand it. And then, no. Right. So it's been a long time coming. You know, there's a lot of research that has to go into this. This is not a very approachable field. A lot of things are classified and you have to derive it for yourself. There's been a lot of smart people who've had a lot of interesting ideas about this, from the centrifuge to laser, Calutron, you name it. Yeah, where is the limit on classification? Because a lot of the, you mentioned like re-deriving it yourself, a lot of the AI models are able to re-derive cybersecurity exploits, which are now the talk of the town.

1:37:57But are AI models giving you refusals in your work or are they being helpful because they know that the control point is actually separate and it's not a risk to educate someone about how to build a nuclear product? Because at a certain point, they're going to have to go to reality and go and get a particular material that is controlled.

1:38:21Jordan Schneider:It's such a fascinating question. I don't use a whole lot of AI, so I don't get a whole lot of refusals. usually for finding vendors and suppliers. But, you know, AI probably wouldn't be super useful for a task like this because it touches on some pretty obscure areas of, like, you're building a particle accelerator. So sort of questions of something called more. I'd be curious to see how far it gets along with it. But I certainly don't think it presents a proliferation concern. We're also pretty wary regarding kind of where sort of information within our business goes to. And so we have a lot of things that are still, frankly, analog or air-gapped regarding any sort of things that are proprietary or trade secret.

1:39:02Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the same time, it's not like the company has nuclear launch codes and cybersecurity is more about intellectual property, correct?

1:39:11Jordan Schneider:Yes. It's not safety related. Right, right. And we look forward to working with the appropriate regulators. For us to scale up payload production, you know, it's a smidge under highly enriched. And so you have to be in a category two facility. And, um, but, uh, the separation technology itself is, you know, 80 years old. Um, and so there's definitely some, a lot of know-how, um, but the principles over. What's the biz dev go-to-market side of the business? Are you already inking contracts with, uh, I mean, there's so many new nuclear reactor startups that would probably sign up to buy Haloo if you were able to produce it a certain scale.

1:39:49What's the status there?

1:39:51Jordan Schneider:Absolutely. So we actually are kind of agnostic with the materials that we make. Generally, we refine atoms. And some of the first refined atoms that we made were for the medical industry. They go for about$30 ,000 per gram, which is like a paperclip sort of material for you patriots out there. And we delivered that to Oklo Isotopes. We've had a few commercial deliveries to them. And, you know, in terms of the HALU side of things, we've been in stealth for quite some time. And so we kind of blew up Twitter with our announcement of coming out of stealth and some of the recent developments here.

1:40:30Jordan Schneider:And we have a lot of those biz dev talks ongoing this week and beyond to go ahead and ink some deals. Obviously, there's a big sort of gap between doing it once and being able to scale it up on both the technological and regulatory fronts. And we look forward to working with the right partners and regulatory bodies to make sure that that goes in a methodical and expedient fashion. You self-funded this company at some point. Can you tell us about the journey to set yourself up for there, what that was like, what the motivation was? Yeah, that's true. I did put in over a million dollars of my own money.

1:41:02Jordan Schneider:You know, when Robert and I first met, I had a background in finance and software. And he really kind of gave me a gut punch because he told me that he was pretty upset with so many brilliant engineers to go into finance and software. hey, I turned a buck from it, and that they weren't doing hard engineering problems. So I asked him, well, what are you doing? And he said, I'm working on what I think is the hardest unsolved problem in humanity. I was like, all right, what's that about? And he told me he was doing isotope separation. He showed me what he was working on. I got super infatuated at the problem.

1:41:35Jordan Schneider:I truly agree that this is indeed humanity's largest unsolved problem. If you look at history, you've got the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, the Silicon Age. We were promised the Atomic Age, and it's something that we We deserve. We're not playing with a full deck of materials. And so I began investing my own money and got to a spot where it was beyond R &D. We brought on a seed round. And here we are doing commercial deliveries and scaling into different markets. That's fantastic. Well, congratulations. Yeah, really impressive. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, great to meet you guys.

1:42:07Come back on soon. Goodbye. Be safe. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code analyzing data creating content or automating business workflow codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish our next guest is billy thalema returning to the show with regent billy how you doing welcome back what's up guys it's been too long well been too long uh great to see you give us give us the latest news in regent world how are the sea gliders going we are uh we're cruising we're gliding we just wrapped up our $240 million series B.

1:42:44So that's the big news lately. Give me a gun. Come on. Quarter bills.

1:42:51Jordan Schneider:I've been waiting on that quarter bill. Oh, so good. Um, so, uh, yeah. Talk about what it takes to raise for this company. Uh, are you, you're, you're still pre-revenue, but you, and you're not actually like the product. You can't just go as a consumer and test it out, but you have a massive backlog. What are investors looking for? How are you telling the story? Yeah, well, we do have money coming in the door, importantly, right? So we have commercial customers. We have about$10 billion in the backlog there. But one of the unique things about Regent is we have firm orders, like actual orders, non-refundable deposits.

1:43:26Customers are putting down. We have over$10 million in the bank now that are backing our backlog now. Multiple years now of delivery from our manufacturing building. So that's on the commercial side and on the defense side now up to about 20 million in orders, majority with the Marine Corps. But we have some really big announcements on the horizon here. So the defense business growing really fast. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, typically you'd assume like net 60 payment terms or something. But you are able to get some of that money up front. That's good. What does the team look like? Where have you where's the company based and how is the actual operation growing?

1:44:04Yeah, we're based in Rhode Island. Rhode Island has really been put on the map lately. We're leading in maritime and defense. There's a bunch of other companies here, a bunch of startups. And they're all moved into town. Like you go out on Narragansett Bay and you're going to see all sorts of drone boats out there and subs and sea gliders too. So that's been pretty cool. We're up to about 120 people now at the company. But obviously with the series B done now, we're going to start growing really fast. And the whole point for us is we have this quarter million square foot factory here. That's where we're going to be building our sea gliders, both our large viceroys, the small squires.

1:44:40So we've got to fill out the factory. So that's the next step for us. I feel like you're in an interesting position because, I mean, we talked maybe years ago about the benefits of being all electric. That, yes, there's an environmental benefit, but for specific use cases, it might not be that big. But the serviceability might be an even bigger benefit. Is that holding true? Because you're in this dynamic where the current administration is probably very receptive to doing business with a young company, like you mentioned, with the Marine Corps. But at the same time, they're not exactly the biggest fans of electric technology from what I've seen.

1:45:19So, you know, is there a discussion of other powertrains or do you want to remain laser focused? I remember talking to somebody who deployed small, like basically drone helicopters in the military and said that like gas engines work really well. They stay up much longer. The energy density is fine. The supply chain is there. But how are you dealing with the tradeoffs of where the powertrain technology might go in the future? Yeah, we sort of always had the feeling that on the defense side of the business and particularly in the markets we're going after where we're talking about, like, moving across thousands of miles across the Indo-Pacific, right?

1:45:59Hopping between these islands that we're going to need longer than the couple hundred mile range we get out of batteries, which is really good for commercial. Like, that's your regional range where you're sort of stuck between a car and an airplane. But on the military side, like, we need to go from Guam to the first island chain. Like, we're going across the Pacific here. So on that side, definitely hybridizing. About a year ago or a little over a year ago, we announced Regent Defense. And part of that was really a focus on building out this hybrid. So we have sort of a conceptual design now.

1:46:29We've been working on the supply chain side. But we're definitely going to be introducing a fuel engine system that works with our electric propulsion system on the front end, extending our range out to about 1 ,600 statute miles. So we'll be able to do that. Well, yeah, I've seen this very unique hybrid, I believe it's a Chinese car, where it is primarily an electric vehicle, but then there is a two-cylinder gas engine that just charges the battery. Is that a relevant technology that we're going to see other places, or was that sort of a unique anomaly of that particular Chinese EV company? Yeah, it sort of depends on the application for us.

1:47:07you know, we're a dual use company, obviously. And I think like to be successful in dual use, and there are a few companies that can really say this is like as much consistency between the commercial and defense products as possible, like as much shared bond, like basically the same skews. So our sea gliders are coming off the line here or will within the next year or so in Rhode Island. And in the commercial version, we're going to load it up with batteries and it'll go 180 80 miles on the defense version will put about 20 % of the batteries in. So you still, those batteries sort of help you take off and land.

1:47:41We still have that electric propulsion system, which is super quiet, super low maintenance, low thermal signature, all these great things. And then instead of the rest of the batteries, that's where we put in our engine and our fuel system. Yeah. Tell me more about the commercial backlog. I mean, it seems huge. Where, who, who's interested, where, where are the logical places to deploy these? Because I imagine that as you've actually built up that book of commercial business, there's been a lot of just assumption testing on the other side of the negotiation table. Maybe you come and say San Francisco to Marina Del Rey, maybe somebody else is actually, it's going to work better here or there.

1:48:23So where are you seeing the future play out first. Exactly. I mean, founding the company, we're coming up on six years in business now. You know, growing up, going to school in the Boston area, it was like Boston to New York. Right. Yeah. And it was like L.A. to San Francisco, you know, raising money. We're between them. Those are those are total pain points. So that was sort of the focus on the initial commercial side sort of started, obviously, just based in the U.S. as an American company with the U.S. focus. And so that's evolved into Miami to West Palm and the Bahamas is a likely U.S. launch market throughout New England, right?

1:49:02Like Boston and Rhode Island and Connecticut down to New York and certainly some West Coast routes and obviously Hawaii as well, Pacific Northwest too. But what we found as we've grown is this is actually like truly a global technology and the international order book and backlog is actually much larger than the domestic one. And very few people know this, but there are as many ferry passengers per year as airplane passengers, which is like wild as an American to think that the coastal market is that big. For, you know, cargo, there's 90 plus percent of cargo that goes over the coastlines. Almost half the world lives in coastal populations.

1:49:38It's just like how humanity settled the world. So globally, we're talking about places like the Mediterranean, Japan, throughout the Pacific, right? Like these are really big markets for us. So it's not just an island hopping machine. It's like anywhere there is coastline and humans live and trade on coastlines. That's our commercial market. Is there interest from the Middle East or are things like actually slowing down there because of the geopolitical conflict? Because when I hear about new technology, maybe it's a little bit expensive to get up, but you need to do some retrofitting of some port or something.

1:50:12Like that feels like Dubai is going to sign up immediately. But what's it been like talking to folks? The Middle East has been a big part of our strategy for a long time, actually. So we spent a lot of time out there. We have a great relationship with the Strategic Development Fund in Abu Dhabi. So we actually plan to expand manufacturing. The Series B, our first global manufacturing center here in Rhode Island. But subsequently, and based on the size of that backlog, we're already planning international expansion. So we've set up a joint venture in Abu Dhabi where we're going to be scaling manufacturing from there.

1:50:45So the Gulf is going to be huge. not just from manufacturing, but also commercially, like Dubai, Abu Dhabi. That is a pain point route, too. Crazy traffic on that route. Yeah, I was just thinking, I was in, I went to Formula One in Abu Dhabi, but I was staying in Dubai. And that drive, especially when you have these big sort of global events, is just brutal, right? Brutal. Even the traffic getting out of Abu Dhabi. It's like an hour and a half drive. Yeah, you have a 10-minute drive. quick flight yeah um question uh unrelated to your business but what's happening on the recreational aviation side are we going to see an elect the sort of the the model three of the skies sort of an electric cessna 172 something that is um you know user-friendly you know for the sort of like our boats but for yeah something that's like hey i just want to go fly for an hour yeah yeah there are certainly some attempts at electric airplanes and there are some electric trainers out there, but really the hard point of aircraft generally, and like my background's aviation, and I'm a pilot, my co-founder's a pilot, a lot of the teams are pilot, like it's the training, you know, tons of time to go out, get your pilot's license, like learn how to fly, learn how to do the controls, learn how to navigate airspace, talk to air traffic controllers, et cetera.

1:52:06So like that is the big time sink. And then there's also just the performance of like, I need enough energy on board in these batteries. And we already talked about the range limitation of batteries, like get up to altitude. And then as I'm flying to my airport, uh, all aircraft need reserve fuel. So if I'm flying to my airport, my airport's occupied or like something's wrong with it. I need enough fuel to fly and land somewhere else. So it's actually like all of, yeah. Right. It's like, it's good. But only Harrison Ford. And so like, uh, that was our perspective coming into this. My co-founder and I came from the aviation world and we were part of that like early wave of electrification.

1:52:43And we were working, you know, with the VTOLs and everything. And we said, these are the challenges we need to solve. Electrification is here in many ways. And by building sea gliders, we solve those problems because we certify under Coast Guard jurisdiction as a vessel, not an aircraft. Our digital flight controls enable it. So all you need to do is drive a boat when you're operating it. Even when you're flying, the only controls are boat controls left and right, fast and slow. And so that's what's going to open it up to everyone yeah yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense have you seen uh the people uh in china selling quad copters that humans can sit in that they'll just sell you for a hundred get on those yeah yeah no that's what i'm saying like so i saw i saw i saw another video of these guys about a timu drone okay and they were able to you could sit in it but they were flying it with the remote and then they crashed it and yes and so i i just can't believe i can't believe that you can just order one of these right now i was i was at uh an air show in the middle east and i was no kidding standing next to adam goldstein uh at archer and we were like watching this drone competition and one of these drones falls out of the sky live at the show fortunately no one was on board and we look at each other like what is going on here like a this never flies in america this would never pass any certification.

1:54:04But like crazy stuff like that going on is actually not good for the industry. Like aerospace is held to a higher standard. There's a reason why aerospace is known for its safety and commercial aviation is the safest way to travel. Even with us in the maritime domain, we're taking a similarly safe approach because we're flying at high speeds with people on board. So like that's our focus. And it's a harder bar to hit, obviously, as a startup, as a company, that's like part of the responsibility of building flying machines. But, you know, seeing these guys jumping in with like the, the sword swinging around and like some RC controller, like I get a little worried.

1:54:40Yeah. Fortune favors the bold though. Come on. You got to take some risks. You're an entrepreneur. Hop on this thing. No, I think you're right to play it safe here. I completely agree. But thank you so much. Congratulations on the new round. Awesome progress. And we'll talk to you soon. Have a great one. Thank you guys. Great to see you. See you later soon. Goodbye. Can't wait. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Stop making excuses. September is the month for you. Just do it. Do it. Up next, we have Aaron Cannon from Outset, launching AI Digital Twins, grounded in individual customers.

1:55:20Aaron, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you again. I'm good. Third time on. I'm feeling special. I love it. Repeat. Pete. Catch us up to speed. What have we missed? What's the latest and greatest in your world? Things are great. Yeah. So we're an AI research platform. You guys probably remember. We've since we last chatted, I think tripled revenue, tripled the team size and now launched a very cool. Thank you. I was hoping to get at least a gong or the. But yeah. And now we just launched. So we built. Yes. We built a whole simulations lab and have now built. Yeah. I'll tell you all about it.

1:55:59Yeah. And so you came out of YC. You were sick. You're always getting told, talk to your customers, talk to your customers. You're absolutely sick of that. You don't want to ever have to do a customer call again. And so you built digital twins. Is that right? It's exactly right. Yes. I started my career as a researcher and I was like, you know, I don't want to do that anymore. Okay. But in all seriousness. Yeah. Sell me a digital twin because I've run companies and e-commerce companies and it's useful to have a profile of certain customer cohorts and certain customers. But that aggregation takes a lot of the work out of it, and I feel like there's a lot of platforms that do that.

1:56:37It's sort of nice to talk to individual customers, but you might get a weirdo who's actually not very indicative. Sometimes the individual customers can give you some unique insight that everyone else is feeling. But walk me through the benefits of having these digital twins that are grounded in individual customers. So here's the like, to take a step back, research, the whole point of research is to try to predict the future. Sure. You're trying to make some decision for your business, right? And you're looking backwards at the data. And the idea is that you can now not only look backwards, but you can look forwards.

1:57:06You can actually start simulating, like, if I do this new marketing campaign, how would this customer set start reacting? What are the things they would say? And we're very good at research. That's what we've been doing. That's what we built our business around. But now what we can do is take that research and build out the simulation platform so that you can say, okay, I can actually see into the future of how this group would react to some very big business decision. And so we train them by training digital twins on individuals. So it's like a one-to-one. You can go in, talk to a digital twin, and you know that's based on John.

1:57:38And that's got all of John's experience and all this data about John. And it can talk on behalf of you. And so that's the mechanism that makes it super, super useful and also trustworthy. Yeah. What incentive do you have to give people to do a long-form AI moderated interview? you if i'm buying a pair of shoes i don't know if i want to sit down for an hour with with an ai to talk about the shoes and how they fit i i think the last run we did was uh these were actually like 75 minutes the last one and i think we paid them 200 okay yeah that's a reasonable to be clear it's worth more than the shoes right sure sure and if you do uh is that one customer per one company?

1:58:21So your clients include Microsoft, Uber, Google, Coinbase, you got Murder's Row here. Are you saying like, we are going to interview this one person about this one Excel feature or this one Excel product? Or are you saying like, we're going to interview you about how you use technology? Some of this might apply to Microsoft. Some of this might apply to Google. That's right. So we developed our own grounding interview. So it's not just about their use of Excel. The grounding interview, it develops what we call persona core. It's like trying to get who you are, what are your values, what do you care about.

1:58:55And so we do that as the core, and then we layer on other sets of data. So maybe Microsoft has operational data we can later on to make it much more powerful. They know all my favorite formulas. Exactly. So the idea is that we have abstracted as much of the person as we can. And then what we do is we go back to that person and refresh that data regularly. So we'll even have them grade their own twins' answers, like how'd our twin do? And they can tell you. And now we have a reinforcement loop. Yes, they're kind of RLing it. Exactly, exactly. And so that's what makes these really useful. And then we also put confidence scores.

1:59:31So you'd be like, obviously not all of our probabilistic output here is going to be the same. So we can tell you which ones you should really trust and which ones need a lot more human data to kind of bring to it. Where are you seeing the most pull from the market? Like what kind of businesses, theoretically, every business should care about trying to predict the future and forecast how different customer segments, but I'm sure some care more than others. The biggest pull right now is that companies have really hard to reach audiences, right? And so these are like, maybe they're CRM buyers or they're kind of some kind of somewhat obscure part of the population.

2:00:12And so the incremental value there is massive because they can't actually go out and do constant research with that group. So they have very few signals today. So the incremental value is big enough that they're adopting, I think, earlier and first while there's still more questions in the market. But I think we'll continue to see a bunch of demand from these specialized audiences that companies are sharing. Then what's the opposite? What's a company that's drowning in customer feedback data? Is that like some consumer? Well, I'll give you a kind of, there's basically certain business decisions and like strategy decisions that you would make that you don't need to forecast, right?

2:00:51Like a business doesn't need to say like, oh, what if we made customer support wait times shorter, right? Like no one is sitting there being like, I wish when I called my internet service provider that I wish it took an hour instead of 30 minutes, right? Or maybe a good example, and this is not a real one yet in terms of simulation, so I'll share it as an example. but Nestle does a lot of consumer research. Consumers are reasonably easy to go out and talk to. It's reasonably cheap to get more feedback. But if you're at Nestle and you're trying to do research on retailers and what they think about your brand, that's actually a much harder group to go find and do research with.

2:01:28You're not drowning in feedback from your retailers. Sure. That would be an audience. Is that the pitch when you sign Nestle? because I imagine that like, like AI is very impressive, but I don't know that I would trust an AI to tell me which milk chocolate tastes the best because like the taste data just isn't in the model at all yet. And, uh, and for a lot of consumer research on Nestle products, I would want to watch someone taste the chocolate and tell me what they thought of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so when we initially pitched Nestle, it's actually about our, you know, AI research platform, which eyes are just doing the interviewing.

2:02:04He's asking the questions. You still got a real human date at the end. And that's our core thing. And that's what we've had for the last couple of years. But simulations is an extension of that. And that's where we start talking. It's the best kind of two elements of the pitch. Number one is hard to reach audiences. You're not able to get to them. We'll build your twins to them. You can talk to them anytime at unlimited capacity. Number two is we say that anybody in your company can access them. It's like if your finance person's working on a new pricing model. You don't want to give your finance person the ability to go research with real consumers necessarily.

2:02:37But now they can actually test ideas, test new pricing, and see how things would adapt and simulate that. Yeah, it makes sense. Last question for me is, it feels like the Digital Twin launch is an expansion of the product portfolio, and I'm interested in where else the product expansion can go. I know that there are companies that they get a lot of feedback, but they struggle to bridge the gap between the feedback that they're getting and then actual ideas to go and implement. And I'm wondering if you're going to wind up being more prescriptive in the results. Hey, okay, we did all this research and you really should change the color from red to green.

2:03:21Right, right, right. Well, look, so research is this thing where like humans go and decide to go run research, right? But we're building towards, and that's our original product, right? we're building towards is something where the model can go do research for you before you've even asked the question. And so it is constantly trying to figure out the answers to the things that you don't even know matter yet. It's like, hey, your revenue is down in that sector. You don't even know that yet. We're going to send agents to go talk to all the people in that part of the economy and go figure out what's going on, talk to some simulations if we already have them built, and then go take action.

2:03:54And that action is where I think we can ultimately have more impact than just collecting and synthesizing feedback. Makes sense. We should be able to like send specs to cognition and like let them go build it, right? Yeah, no, totally. And that's like really something that's happening. Yeah, I love it. Well, congratulations on the launch and thank you so much for coming on the show. Very cool. For a third time. Thank you guys. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you, Aaron. Have a good one. Great stuff. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

2:04:26Thank you, Tyler, for kicking off and clapping. While we're missing a couple of folks here. Joey, you're not going to let it down. Up next, we have Steven from Lambda coming back on the show. Third, fourth, fifth time. Who knows? Steven, good to see you. How are you doing? It's so good to see you. Great to see you. Been too long. Okay. So we were talking to Jordan Schneider about this China-backed AI bot farm. He was kind of brushing it off. And I can see both sides of the discussion. You know, there's been just a couple reports, 200 accounts here, a few hundred accounts here. He was saying that China doesn't have a long history with interference politically.

2:05:06What are you seeing? What are you identifying just in the broader debate? So I think that it's really important to not get lost in sort of is this a Chinese bot farm and just focus on bad facts and just bad information. Sure. Because, you know, that's the fundamental thing, right? You know, misinformation is like most readily solved by just disproving sort of, you know, and just showing what's real and what's not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the big number that I saw most recently was polling on data centers, terrible broadly. But after telling somebody that you're polling that data centers recycle water, much like a car wash recycles water, they added that phrase, then the net approval score improved by like 30%.

2:05:59So people with that extra context change their whole opinion in just a few seconds. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, 100%. So for example, the vast majority of new AI factories that are being built are completely recycling the water and using a dry cooler. It's a closed loop water system where the water never even leaves the facility at all. So that's the vast majority of a lot of these new data center builds. And so that's just completely different from the old technology, which is being described, which is a heavier water consumption, which is evaporative cooling. And so that's like a fact that most people should sort of, you know, kind of look into.

2:06:48The other one is – Well, the problem is people that aren't really interested in tech but maybe are afraid of AI. They're not proactively sitting there being like, I got to go. I got a free five minutes here. I'm going to go. I'm going to want to go get the facts right. I'm going to do some diligent research online and really read about it. There's no – and yeah, just looking on YouTube and just AI negativity or content that is negative towards AI gets 100x the reach, right? Yeah. There's always been a negativity bias on YouTube. I mean you could say, you know, like here's the history of this company or you could be like the shocking downfall of this company and the shocking downfall will always get more.

2:07:39Yeah, Taylor Lorenz says making anti-AI content on YouTube is not only profitable because you'll get a zillion views on any anti-AI slot, but also because there's a litany of these sort of AI safety orgs that will quietly pay you massive amounts of money for undisclosed propaganda. I love that Taylor Lorenz is really now back in the fray. And I'm Team America. I'm Team Reindustrialized, right? I've got the— I love it, the sweater. America and re-industrialized sweater for it. And so I think the interesting facts about it are this. One, from the jobs perspective. Yeah, look, this is not going to be the same level of job production as an automotive plant or a steel mill, but these are still net new jobs.

2:08:24And so, for example, we've got a data center out in Kansas City and 300 folks worked on it during the construction period and 50 full-time jobs, many of these making over $100 ,000 a year. I would ask to somebody who's against it, what are you going to say when you sit down at a dinner table with these 50 families that this data center is supporting and say well no, I don't think you should have that job because I don't want an AI data center. When they're the same people who are using the data center to go and post on YouTube or to use the AI services. Yeah. Where do you sit on local versus national regulation of data centers?

2:09:13Like Bernie Sanders obviously has gotten a lot of attention for discussing the topic at the federal level, but it feels like something that, you know, just as like an American, it feels much more comfortable if like, yeah, there's an area in West Texas that loves this stuff and they're going to be into it. And then there's going to be some communities that aren't. And this should be handled by the local mayor and the and the and the board at the town level. And the voters should have a voice, but it should be contained to the community that's relevant. Yeah. So first of all, absolutely. Look, that's how our system works.

2:09:48Let's just be clear here. Right. You know, this is not there's not some sort of, you know, national eminent domain that's being pulled like we have with the construction of railways and other public goods. This is decision making that is happening on the very, very local level. And some places are not going to want it. And some places are going to welcome business and some places are not going to welcome business. Some places are going to welcome data centers and others are not going to welcome data centers. I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing. I think that should should members of the community have voice?

2:10:23Yes. Should property owners have a voice? Yes, absolutely. Right. You know, somebody who's going to have any type of externality that's adjacent to the property, they should have a voice. And guess what? They do. They've got a ton of voice as a as a property holder. And I think that there will be a reputation for communities that want to welcome these amazing investments into their communities. So, for example, going back to that Kansas City data center, it's a 10 ,000 GPU data center. And we are going to, over the next five years, at the very least, be paying$47 million over five years in property taxes.

2:11:04Yeah. Yeah. This is a huge cash infusion to a community that we're working with. For sure. And so I think that there's going to be the communities which are really excited about it. You know, communities who have already pioneered it, like Loudoun County in Virginia. Yep. And other communities and other counties that want to see lower rates and lower tax rates, as well as lower utility rates. Because as evidenced by a bunch of research, communities that welcome data centers and industrial development and new power plants have lower rates. Yep, of course. How are you thinking about the international puzzle?

2:11:43Because I know data center construction takes years to plan out. It's slow moving. But in general, when the environment in American business gets harsher, historically, business leaders have offshored almost immediately. And I could imagine a lot of data center developers just saying, oh, you don't want it here? Build it in Mexico. Build it in the West. It would be a national tragedy. It would be a national tragedy for in the just in the very moment where this country needs to rebuild our grid. And it's not just data centers. Everybody wants to drive EVs. Everybody is starting to want to, you know, we're bringing on more solar than we have in the history of the country.

2:12:3180 percent of new megawatts coming online into the American grid are solar or storage. It would be an absolute national tragedy for this to go international, for it to go to – whether it's overseas, outside of North America, into South America, into Asia Pacific. I want those jobs here in the United States. I want those investments we made here in the United States. AI is a national strategic asset in my opinion. Compute is a national strategic asset. And then most importantly, the way that AI is driving the development of the grid, and I keep trying to talk about this, but the way it's driving the development of the grid is going to pave the way for more industrial onshoring to come back to the United States so that we can bring back whether it's different electric arc furnace mills for aluminum and steel, micro mills, turbine manufacturing, other types of high-intensity.

2:13:37And by turbine manufacturing, I mean specifically like in canal smelting or specialty metal smelting where there's a high energy input. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you go back to the it wasn't a Colossus was built in an old washing machine manufacturing facility that was out of business. If you all of a sudden have a lot more energy, a lot of more industrial capacity, maybe the washing machine manufacturer comes back and maybe that's good. There's going to be a lot more jobs because because by that. And it's a huge virtuous cycle. And so I think it would be a real tragedy to have anything that was going to end up pushing folks.

2:14:12And I really support building this stuff here in the U.S. Outside of the economic impacts, do you think that there's a national security value in having a data center in America or compute in America for, like, control reasons? Like, AI is a powerful tool. if it's in another country and that country says, well, actually we're taking this and we're now under control of this. What is your model for how valuable that is from a national security perspective? So there's the soft one and then there's the hard one. The soft one is sort of how important is it to have values, models that have values that align with American values and how patriotic is your model?

2:14:56I want patriotic models. and the second one is the hard one which is what happens when they cut it off yeah that's what i'm worried about and we all experienced this when fable went away for a little bit oh yeah remember do you remember that and i remember i called some people up i said wow this is what it feels like to have sort of the equivalent of electricity cut off when you had the intelligence cut off from fable model and i was vibe coding something at the time i said wow this is what it feels like I had to go back to Opus. And it felt like a huge step back. And I thought to myself immediately, this is as much of a strategic asset as our grid is.

2:15:37Yeah, that's funny. Jordy, anything else here? I want to hear just more about the development of business. What should people expect from the debate or just forward progress for the rest of the year on this issue? Like it is, should we just expect it just keeps getting, um, decided on a, on a local level? Is there, is there, it's going national, it's going national. There's elections right now. And so I think that that's like the, the noise, the knob gets turned up a lot towards elections. Then it'll, it'll, it'll kind of go back down. Um, yeah, it's very, it seems very unfortunate that politicians are just realizing on, on both sides are just realizing that if I want votes, I have to at least say that I'm against this thing.

2:16:27No, no. But this is the interesting thing. There's multiple races right now. For example, one in Kansas where the steam fitters unions and the different workers unions are actually aligning on the pro data center side of things because there's so many jobs created. There's so many big deals that are created from these data centers that a lot of the labor unions are actually on the side of pro data center now. Oh, weird. So look this up. Look up. There's a Kansas City. I think it's a gubernatorial candidate who's a Kansas governor candidate. And the steam fitters union is basically on the side of pro data center building.

2:17:12And so actually, I think that it's maybe a little bit all backwards sometimes from what people have been positioning. Because, you know, you've been hearing in the media, oh, this is a bipartisan anti-data center movement. No, no, no. I think there's a lot of folks on both sides of it who, you know, are being supportive. I think that you're going to see the volume knob turned down after elections. And then finally, I think it's healthy debate and communities should have a decision about who they want to work with. And that data center providers should be doing their best to not be influencing rates any direction other than bringing rates down for everybody.

2:17:50And being a good member of the community. Pay your taxes. Participate in building an ecosystem of businesses around you. And, you know, continue to make great high-paying jobs. What do you think the tech community, data center community needs to do to get ahead of what I think is coming after the water debate clears? Because the water debate, of course, comes from some mediocre miscalculations. There's miscalculations and also this misunderstanding of what is the total water consumption of things. Exactly. So I think a lot of people in tech sort of brush off the water. The water discussion is debunked.

2:18:33And I think they're fair to do that. But on energy, on natural gas production, there is some real data about where this all goes. If we continue to 3x compute for the next couple of years and we're powering that by natural gas, you could see headlines that track data center to emissions. This is how many plane flights a data center uses. And it could become the next thing. so so so so first of all one the debate is not something that needs to be won with the silicon valley twitterati exoti whatever you want to call the people who sit at their keyboards it's the debate needs to be won by the people who are in the communities affected by this sure and um so that's that's the first one the second one is more than ever like i said 80 in 2026 is solar and storage these are renewable things that's actually where our grid is becoming more and more as we build this out.

2:19:32And so I think that there needs to be a lot more deregulation with regards to expediting interconnects, you know, reconsidering, just making it so that we can actually go back to building and getting connected into the grid. So that way, a lot of this behind the meter stuff, which is less efficient, right? You know, when you have a behind the meter, it's simple cycle as opposed to combined cycle natural gas, And it's less efficient. So we should really get to the point where we're encouraging grid interconnectivity and expediting that process. That's I think the number one point I would say from a policy perspective.

2:20:05But look, at the end of the day, every American consumes about 600 ,000 gallons a year of indirect water consumption. So next time you see a big number, divide by 600 ,000 gallons per year of indirect consumption that every one of us makes. And then that will put things into perspective. I think that's a good starting point. Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering where that goes because it does feel like it's worthwhile. I agree with you on like you don't need to win the tech insider crowd first. But it does feel like the worst case scenario would be another error to the tune of two orders of magnitude around energy consumption or natural gas production.

2:20:48Because if the viral clip is every data center burns as much fuel as every car has produced since humanity started, and that's off by three orders of magnitude or something, then you're fighting on your back foot as opposed to starting with, okay, they're already pretty efficient. Here's where we are regulating. And the New York Times has already dug into it. Here's the environmental considerations. Here's what we abide by. And then, yeah, there'll be a discussion about energy use, but at least it can be grounded in the facts from the start. I totally agree with you. But I think that the other aspect of it is just not set with, oh, well, emissions are bad.

2:21:30Sure. The most important thing is this. As a country, we have a graph that looks like this in terms of energy production. China's got a graph that looks like this for their energy production. And guess what? All their energy is also solar now. The new stuff coming online, 80 % plus of China's energy is solar and storage. And so I think we need to get – the emissions will come down naturally as the grid transforms to more of a renewable and storage grid. People don't really understand how much BESS and battery electric storage has been a huge godsend to the grid. And I've already even seen – I've driven through parts of the country where I've seen anti-BESS, anti-battery electric storage things.

2:22:15I think there's concerns and these are rightful concerns that like, OK, they might catch fire and cause a fire or emit chemicals when they're on fire. But this is just like sort of – any industrial asset that's generating electricity has like some worst-case scenario. It's the same thing with your gas stove. If you leave it on, your house might blow up. It's the same with – it's probably the same critiques if you were to go back to automotives, cars in general. Refrigerating and stuff. When they were first coming around. But the point is that like – I think that actually – getting that graph back to where America is competitive in terms of generating energy, energy, whether it's from renewables or otherwise, it's going to inherently be 80 % mostly renewables anyways from the trajectory that we're going in, I think.

2:23:05Yeah, I mean, that's certainly the most optimistic future is a lot of renewables. Very, very cool. I have an idea, but I'm going to DM it to you. Okay. Because I don't want it to be. Thank you guys so much for having me on. Thanks for hopping on. Yeah, great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Bye.

2:23:25It's simply too good. Okay. We are going to come back and hit a lot more timeline tomorrow. Yeah. I can't wait. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching the show. Great to be back. We missed you guys. We missed everyone here. Love seeing the whole cast of characters in the chat. We love you all. Thanks, Lee. Give us five stars. Saw Bobby Cosmic in there. We got Sean F over in the LinkedIn chat. We got Cooper as well. Acquired Taste, the LinkedIn live stream. I like you. Man of taste. Anyway, we will see you tomorrow. We have a very special show for you and many more throughout the fall. It's been an honor and a privilege.

2:24:03We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. Cheers.