The Future of Everything: What CEOs of Circle, CrowdStrike & More See Coming in 2026

(0:00) Intro (0:50) Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire on stablecoins post-GENIUS Act, interest rate impact, growth in 2026, and the future of money in an AI world (52:33) CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on cybersecurity in the AI era, most capable hacker nations, and more (1:17:53) Archer CEO Adam Goldstein on the state of eVTOLs in 2026 and when to expect them (1:42:27) Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller on powering the trillion-dollar AI buildout On Public, you can invest in stocks, options, bonds, and crypto. Plus, build your own custom index with AI. Get started at https://public.com— investing for those who take it seriously. Follow Jeremy: https://x.com/jerallaire Follow George: https://x.com/George_Kurtz Follow Adam: https://x.com/adamgoldstein13 Follow Chase: https://x.com/ChaseLochmiller Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to All In at Davos. We're here at the World Economic Forum. For some reason, they invited me, and I'm here interviewing all the most important people in the All In style, which is full contact.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

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• 0:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think most of us agree going into 2026, stable coins and AI, crypto having a huge resurgence. And we were lucky enough to get two of my friends, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase and Jeremy Allaire, who's the CEO and co-founder of Circle. We've known each other for 30 years.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  What a long, strange trip it's been.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  I know. It's great to be with you again.

• 1:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and this is not your first time at Davos. You've been here a couple of times.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started coming with my last company, Brightcove, back in 2008, 2009. And a very different time, both for WEF, it was a different time in the world. There was a great financial crisis breaking out everywhere. And that was, you know, an interesting backdrop. And, you know, also notable, I always reference that same week was when the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain was minted with the, you know, Chancellor on the brink bailout kind of embedded in the blockchain.

• 1:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. I think it's Game of Thrones, chaos is the ladder.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Chaos is the ladder.

• 1:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's, and for guys like us who've been through this, I guess, three times now. We went through it in the dot com boom. I think we're too young to have, you remember, obviously, that Black Friday in 87, but we were in college. And so we had our dot com, great financial crisis, and then we had COVID.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  COVID.

• 2:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, which was also pretty spicy. That was a great disruptor. But when you have those moments happen, I'm guessing for you,

• 2:22Jason Calacanis?

  And many of the founders I talked to, you just think this is the time to build.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I mean, constraints have a huge have a huge impact on what an entrepreneur does. And, you know, even in the history of Circle, we've had extraordinary up and downs, some of which are endogenous shocks, exogenous shocks, all of this. And, you know, back to that 2009, that was that year, actually, I got my company profitable, Freycove, and then not long after it went public. And so, you know, we deal with what we're dealt with with constraints. Yeah.

• 2:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, constraint makes for great art, is I think the old expression. So let's let's talk about your journey with Circle. Stablecoins obviously are top of mind because we had the genius act. My bestie David Sacks, who's our crypto and AI czar for America, who's here with me at Davos, or I should say, I'm here with him. He invited me to come. This technology is important. Why?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  I mean, look, when I got started working on this almost 13 years ago, Bitcoin had emerged. And it was from my perspective as an internet technologist, I was thinking about, wow, this seems like a new infrastructure layer for the internet, like a missing infrastructure layer of the internet. The internet had ways to represent in, you know, data, media, audio, video, you know, software. But there was no notion of money on the internet. And there was no protocol for money on the internet. And it was very clear at the time that that was going to happen. And when when we started, I wasn't convinced that everyone in the world

• 4:02Speaker 01

  is just going to use like a new, a new, you know, commodity money like Bitcoin. My view is that we needed a bridge. We needed to connect kind of the existing fiat system to crypto and to these new networks and and build like what we called like an HTTP for dollars on the internet. And that was the idea. And eventually, that's called stablecoins.

• 4:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Early on, we talked about we're building fiat digital currency, or fiat tokens, or all this. But stablecoins stuck. But I mean, the basic idea is we now have a general purpose, general architecture form of money on the internet, digital dollars that can move just like everything else, but that and can, you know, transact peer to peer, which is super, super powerful and provides a huge amount of value to people. And really importantly, because of the technology of blockchains, like we actually have like programmable money. And so we're right at the front edge of a kind of, I think, a renaissance in how money is used in the world. We'll come back to AI, I'm sure, because it ties into that. But,

• 5:09Speaker 01

  you know, fundamentally, we just, we need a native way to have money on the internet. We need a very safe form of dollars on the internet, and that's what stable coins provide.

• 5:19Jason Calacanis?

  And variability and not knowing how much your dollar is worth when you open your wallet or your bank account was a blocker for consumers.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, volatile cryptocurrencies, no one's going to buy a cup of coffee with a Bitcoin, etc. So that's where the word stablecoin came from. It's like, well, it's a coin, but it's stable. How do you actually achieve that is a whole different thing. And that's where, you know, the model that we built, which is fully reserved with like ultra safe assets and, you know, have regulators look after it and auditors look after it and make sure it's all done the right way.

• 5:51Jason Calacanis?

  And I remember talking to you offline about this. It was the easier decision for most people in crypto to go to the Zug. What is it? Zug?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Zug.

• 6:04Jason Calacanis?

  The Zug here in Switzerland, or just be based in Zurich, or be based in maybe Dubai. And yeah, just YOLO it and don't worry about regulations. And don't worry about audits. Don't worry about regulators. You made a different decision. You told me, no, I'm going to do this buttoned up and proper. And why didn't you go for the quick, you know, I'll just do this offshore and give up my United States citizenship.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Or even go to jail.

• 6:30Jason Calacanis?

  Or even go to jail.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 6:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. We have many crypto people right now watching this show. Yeah, from San Quentin.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look.

• 6:40Jason Calacanis?

  Show is popular there.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I actually, you know, going back to like even in the founding of the company. When I looked at like, okay, if we want to like establish a new way to put like what we think of as regular money on the internet and we want to actually build a new internet native financial system that the whole world uses, like actually uses, like businesses are you going to use it? And and people are going to use it and we're going to like do loans in it and we're going to do all these things with it. Like if you want it to work that way, well, you know, you have to integrate with the existing system and you have to work with policymakers to figure that out. There's just no other way. So I testified to the Senate in November of 2013. And, you know, the if you read the testimony, it's saying all the same stuff now as I did then.

• 7:25Jason Calacanis?

  And it was received slightly differently.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  It really was. Yeah. I mean, well, I got a lot of hate.

• 7:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, explain, take yourself back to that moment in time where you're you know, you're in the right, you're trying to explain how to do this correctly. And you get a reaction that is different than what you may be anticipating.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think with a lot of technologies on the internet, you know, I was around, I think we were both around in early stages of the internet, early stages of the web. And there's, you know, there's sort of a very kind of hard libertarian, you know, view. And then there's the, you know, obviously like the statist view at the other end of that. And, you know, I lean libertarian, but I think also, you know, in the early days of the internet, it's like, well, if we want to allow companies to get on, well, we need to have like regulation for ISPs and we need to be able to have.

• 8:15Jason Calacanis?

  Secure transactions.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Secure transactions and SSL. And well, then we're going to need people who are, you know, making decisions about who's a valid site and who's not a valid site. And these were really controversial things at the time. That I think the, you know, more anarcho side of things was against. And now crypto itself, cryptography and crypto kind of birthed out of that. And so like naturally.

• 8:38Jason Calacanis?

  These are people who wanted to be outside the system.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Wanted to be outside. Yeah. And so, you know, and I think Circle has always kind of tried to find this middle way, which is open public networks, permissionless innovation, building on public blockchains, using open source infrastructure.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  And really, what you can do with something like USDC as a dollar and as a technology is far more open than the legacy payment systems and the legacy money systems. And so there is a very deep commitment to those fundamental internet ideas. But at the same time, like if you want, you know, BlackRock to use it, or you want to, you know, you want the biggest tech companies in the world to use it, or you just want someone to hold it in a digital wallet and be like, "Yeah, this is actually a dollar and I can rely on it." Like, you end up needing to have this kind of structure around it.

• 9:30Jason Calacanis?

  For trust.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  For trust, yeah. Trust, you know, remains a key thing. And obviously, I think, you know, people talk about "in code we trust" is sort of the, what you'd, you know, kind of put around.

• 9:43Jason Calacanis?

  Easy for a developer to feel that way. Easy for somebody who is extremely technical to feel that way.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:49Jason Calacanis?

  But for, you know, a civilian.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:52Jason Calacanis?

  Non-anarchist.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, maybe you want to understand how the dollar is actually backed.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Yeah, so I think we just took that path and like, and that was like a harder path. It took more capital. It took more, I had to hire, you know, my first executive was a general counsel and chief compliance officer.

• 10:12Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you had to bring those in-house, I suppose, because if you went to a law firm, they would be like, "We don't know."

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 10:20Jason Calacanis?

  And, "Don't take this risk."

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, one of the stories actually is that before, you know, Jim Breyer and General Catalyst would give me capital when we were starting the company, they were like, "We really need to know that if you do this, it's not illegal. Like, we're not going to have some kind of liability issue."

• 10:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  And so I personally, you know, on my own, with my own money, like hired like the top kind of regulatory advisory firm in the world to like, "Go look closely at this." Like, talk to people at the US Treasury Department, talk to others, like really figure out, like, "Can we do this?" And, and actually, we could. There was, there was a path to do it. And that's because the US Treasury Department actually had given guidance about how to deal with virtual currency in the banking system. This was in March 2013, so super early. But, yeah, I mean, we needed to like know, like... You know, is there a legitimate legal pathway to accomplishing what we want to accomplish? It's always been, you know, important.

• 11:18Jason Calacanis?

  And as we've seen, there's things that are legal and then there are incumbents. Incumbents will use the legal system to try to stop innovators. You've also faced a little bit of that, yeah?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I would say in the entire history of building this, it's been just, there's been huge uphill battles with regulators and incumbents. And what's interesting is that I've found over the years that if you come into a policymaker or regulator and you say, hey, there's a new technology, it can improve things in this way, we're trying to figure out how to deal with the risks, there are real risks, like let's not pretend there aren't risks, and like, let's come up with ways to address that, like, actually, people are pretty interested in talking. And so I think there's, you know, that's there.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  But generally, when you go to like the incumbents and say, hey, we want to like work with you or integrate this because we kind of need to work with you to make the whole thing happen, like, a lot more skepticism and I think kind of constraint there. And so that's changed now. I mean, we're in a very different world now.

• 12:26Jason Calacanis?

  Now, it's gone from a threat to an opportunity, but there is still a little reticence to stablecoins and crypto by, I think, some of the major banks and the big players because they're, maybe they're, my perception is, they're a little concerned that you're too good at what you do and you might be too far ahead. And if you weren't so dexterous at doing this and capable, and they started, you know, five years ago, they might feel differently about it. Is my intuition close to your assessment or am I wrong?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  I think that that's, there's some truth in that, for sure. But it's interesting, like, it's, both you and I have this kind of juxtaposition against these other areas of the internet. And, you know, when digital media happened and it was like, hey, you could stream media or you could put up content on the web and you could do all this, there are all these digital media startups and the media companies were like, well, we can do that too. And, okay, our business model might have to change, et cetera. Digital advertising, you know, okay, well, you can transform advertising into this. Oh, it's more targeted.

• 13:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  All this stuff and but then there obviously were companies that kind of executed like fundamentally different technical execution, software execution. They built completely different types of utilities with completely different unit economics that kind of turned the product user experience and the economics upside down. And those, we know those companies.

• 13:53Jason Calacanis?

  Craigslist to classifieds, Google Ad Network.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Google Ad Network.

• 13:57Jason Calacanis?

  New York Times.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Amazon Marketplace.

• 13:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And many, many more like that. And so I think that we're in a similar place right now where, you know, a lot of media companies absolutely and communications companies as well and enterprise software companies. There's big buckets here, retailers, like sort of said, okay, this is like a new paradigm. It's better for customers. It's I can deliver a better product, like the economics are better. We just have to do this and we're going to, you know, innovator's dilemma, blah, blah, blah. And they make that transition and it takes like five to 10 years.

• 14:31Jason Calacanis?

  It takes them three times longer than probably the innovator, like Walmart and Target actually do an exceptional job now. The United Airlines app is not terrible.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's not Uber, but.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  And this is the difference between like a software driven company and not like we're a software company, like, you know, fundamentally.

• 14:49Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, we're going to go faster. Of course, we're going to understand UX. So the banks now, my understanding is some of them are threatened by the concept of a stablecoin having the ability to generate points, incentives or interest essentially. And that's kind of the sticking point. The genius act says, hey, you can have rewards, but you can't have interest. And that was, I guess, where this was able to get through the legislative process. Explain that to the audience, yeah?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a couple of things. So if you go back a few years, when stablecoins sort of emerged, the sort of all the biggest like regulators, bank regulators around the world got together, what's called the Financial Stability Board and said, we have to have regulations around this, like this can't just go crazy. And that was also when Libra was coming out and all this. It didn't come out, but tried to come out.

• 15:44Jason Calacanis?

  Meta tried to do their own project and they gave up on that project based on my insider information because the government felt. They had too much power already with their platform and Zuckerberg said, "I have enough heat on this company already. I don't want to have another group of people thinking I have too much power." And he shut it down. That's what I was told by intern insiders.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting is, you know.

• 16:09Jason Calacanis?

  Is that your understanding as well?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  I have a variety of insights about it. But I think, you know, we're kind of like a neutral company, right? We're not a giant big tech, etc. But kind of coming back to your question, regulators got together and said, "Hey, there is this payment system innovation. It is this thing called stablecoins." And they all kind of said, "Here's some recommendations for how you could regulate this." And actually, all around the world, that happened. So it happened first in Japan, there are stablecoin laws. And then it happened in Europe, years ago, actually, stablecoin laws. And then, you know, in the UAE and Hong Kong, and then in the US with the Genius Act. And in all of these, stablecoins are designed as like a cash-like instrument,

• 16:55Speaker 01

  a payment instrument. They're designed as this like form of money to be used in the payment system. And that's really at the heart of it, right? And that's how these laws have been written. And it's pretty consistent around the world. So Genius Act does that. But it also, I think, provides, so, you know, as a result, under the Genius Act, Circle, as a payment stablecoin issuer, we're prohibited from paying interest directly to stablecoin holders. It's the same thing in Europe. We're regulated in Europe, same rules. Same thing in Japan, you know, all these markets, it's the same. But at the same time, like, we're building a business. We do generate revenue. And we work with lots of different types of platforms and markets

• 17:40Speaker 01

  and distributors and brokerages. We work with everyone from Robinhood to Revolut to Coinbase to, you know, Visa and lots of companies. And so those companies, you know, stablecoins are really important too. Because they are how people hold money, how people make payments, how people trade, how people do a lot on those platforms. And so they want to be able to have the ability to pay rewards or have loyalty programs or incentives and other things. And if they're making money from their relationship with us, they want to be able to do that. And that's what the Genius Act captured. And I think really, I think it's good. I think it's a good model.

• 18:18Jason Calacanis?

  So you're happy with it as is?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  We think it's a very solid model. And I think really, there's some ongoing discussion about, well, is there a specific set of things that qualify for that kind of, those kinds of like, loyalty and rewards and other things?

• 18:33Jason Calacanis?

  I mean-

• 18:33Speaker 01

  And how prescriptive should the law be? And it's kind of getting relitigated a little bit.

• 18:37Jason Calacanis?

  The banks, my understanding, maybe want to try to kill it. Maybe some of them who feel the most threatened. Is that the back channel here at DABOS?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I think banks see stablecoins as both a threat and an opportunity.

• 18:52Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  You know, I can say, we're having more engagement with more banks in the world than we've ever had before.

• 18:59Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And so, and major banks, global banks, regional banks, banks all over the world, who want to integrate this and use it in payments, they want to use it in how capital markets work. Think about, I need to post collateral on an exchange to trade, and I'm trading different assets. Stablecoins are a better way to do that. And so whether it's in capital markets, in trading, in wealth management, in payments, there's uses for this. And so definitely banks see a lot of-

• 19:36Jason Calacanis?

  Because it's faster and cheaper. It's instant and it's free, essentially.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, if you talk to like a money, a global money center bank, you know, you can imagine, you know, one of those.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  I might say JP Morgan.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Something like that, or a Citi, or one of these banks. And if you ask them, how many different payment networks are you integrated into as a bank? And they'll tell you like, over 200. They integrate to over 200 different payment networks.

• 20:00Jason Calacanis?

  And it's all over the planet?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  It's all over the planet.

• 20:01Jason Calacanis?

  And it's all different standards, I would assume?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  All different standards, all different systems, et cetera. And so if you go to them and say, well, stablecoin networks are like a new payment network. They're like, I get it. Like this is, oh, it's on the internet. Oh, it has the attributes of how the internet works. We understand that.

• 20:18Jason Calacanis?

  And this will be your fastest, cheapest, and most trackable version?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  That's right. And so we actually, we have, you know, there's a global systemically important bank we work with, who's actually- Moving their own money between their own global branches using USDC because it's faster than going through the corresponding banking system.

• 20:37Jason Calacanis?

  They trust it more.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, in those cases. So, bottom line is, there's a lot of opportunity for banks.

• 20:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Bank, it is not, it's not, this is not a black or white thing. I think, I think, you know, we'll figure out this rewards thing, I'm very sure, yeah.

• 20:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, AMEX figured it out, and

• 20:53Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 20:54Jason Calacanis?

  Video games figured it out. There was a little rattling even in those cases where they were like, "Hey, is this a currency?" Because people are trading it on eBay.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:02Jason Calacanis?

  You're trading my sword from World of Warcraft or whatever these nerds are up to. And they were like, "Ah, is that like, you have your own currency?" It's like, they're playing video games, who cares? Can we just move on? There's more important things to do in the world than sweat AMEX points being traded somewhere and pretending it's a currency. You're up against a offshore platform that has, I think, maybe three times the amount of under management.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Who's counting?

• 21:32Jason Calacanis?

  Tether, who's counting? Three, four, or five times, but you have been catching up pretty quick, yeah?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. USDC amongst the largest stablecoins has been growing faster

• 21:41Jason Calacanis?

  You're number two.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  For two years straight. Yeah, we're the second largest.

• 21:44Jason Calacanis?

  Tether's first.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  And we are, we are by far the largest regulated stablecoin network.

• 21:50Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And our, you know, kind of growth in the amount of transactions happening with USDC is growing, you know, quite a bit faster as well. So, yeah, we feel really good. I think our view has been, to the earlier question, if this is going to be part of the actual economic system, if households and firms and corporations and financial institutions are going to use this and depend on this, whether you're a remote worker who's a software engineer working in Pakistan, or you're a small business that's importing products from Vietnam that's in Brazil, or you're a hedge fund in the US that's, you know, trading derivatives,

• 22:30Speaker 01

  like, you're going to want to know that you have something that is safe, fully reserved, audited, compliant, liquid, available in and out of the global financial system. And, you know, when we think about that opportunity, that's an enormous opportunity.

• 22:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  The TAM of legal electronic money today is about $120 trillion, and growing because of monetary easing and things like that, but Of that, there's about $60 trillion, which is physical cash and non-interest-bearing demand deposits, so kind of working capital money sitting out there, right? So there's a huge amount of value stored and used in as a store of value, as a payment system money, and stablecoins can grow into that, and there's going to be, you know, an infrastructure for that that's well-integrated.

• 23:22Jason Calacanis?

  And the business is there's a float on this large base of capital that gets to underwrite your business if interest rates are high. It's boom times, Tether's making over $10 billion a year on their float, you're making, I'm assuming, billions of dollars or low billions of dollars on your float, I'm not sure if that's public knowledge.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  We're a public company, you can look it up.

• 23:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so I mean, I'm assuming it's billions, yeah. Well, I'm not sure if you break it down by that.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  We talk about reserve income.

• 23:50Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  As a line.

• 23:52Jason Calacanis?

  And it's billions.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  It's a significant amount.

• 23:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And so, but if we go into a zero-interest-rate phenomenon, this could be challenging for the business or not?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Well, a couple of things. I mean, if you actually look at what's happened, when interest rates were actually very low, we saw 1,000% year-over-year growth two years straight. So growth was off the charts. When interest rates actually started to rise, we actually saw declines in circulation.

• 24:19Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Well, it's really the price of money, the opportunity cost of money.

• 24:22Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  So, you know, interest rates set a kind of cost to holding money and...

• 24:29Jason Calacanis?

  So the incentive matters.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, the incentive matters. And so what's interesting is that if you actually look at from like December 2023, when basically the forward curve, which was sort of the kind of short-term kind of price of money, in a sense, the forward curve kind of being the market's view of the short-term price of money, when that started to fall because the expectation of interest rates came, USDC started to grow, and actually from the from the peak of whatever was five and a quarter, five and a half, down to where we are, which is three and a half or whatever it is now, that's, I don't know, exact percentage, let's call it 30... 45, 40% decline in the interest rate. We've had a multi-hundred percent increase in the amount of USDC in circulation. And so there's an inverse correlation there.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  And so I've, and I've said this publicly, I've said this publicly in the media, I've said this many, many times. I have wanted, when, when interest rates were really high, my view is we really need interest rates to come down.

• 25:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  We really need them to come down because that will help us grow. That will put more velocity of money.

• 25:32Jason Calacanis?

  The pie gets bigger, yeah.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Pie gets bigger and.

• 25:35Jason Calacanis?

  Which also impacts adoption.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  It impacts adoption as well. So more people are investing capital in technology to transform their businesses, to grow.

• 25:44Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Tech on, right? And so that is a catalyst. And so my view has been, that is, that is really important. And so, you know, I think our view is there is some conceptual neutral interest rate. And given the persistence of inflation of around two and a half percent or whatever it is, some people argue. Is, is, is the neutral rate, should the neutral rate and, and the kind of baseline of inflation be two and a half or 2.8?

• 26:12Jason Calacanis?

  You know where the 2% came from? I talked about it on a previous All In episode. I don't know.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I do, but go ahead.

• 26:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, New Zealand.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there was a politician in New Zealand was talking to their central bank and he's like, what should it be? And he's like, I think two. And he's like, yeah, how'd you come up with the number? It's like, my instinct.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:27Jason Calacanis?

  America's been 2.8.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  4% unemployment, 2% interest rates. Both of those are going to be challenged.

• 26:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Both of those are going to be challenged because of very significant techno, technological and macro forces.

• 26:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, job displacement, globalization have had impacts on this, depending on the country.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:44Jason Calacanis?

  The unemployment rate and also how many people choose to be employed? I mean, when you have a society that is, you know, doing as well as ours is, or the European Union is, some people just choose to not work. Labor, I think labor participation now is 61 or 62%. And then when you and I were coming up, it had peaked at 68, 69%. So it was like.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:05Jason Calacanis?

  15% higher.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:07Jason Calacanis?

  It's really interesting to think about that.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Changes.

• 27:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:10Jason Calacanis?

  Tether as a competitor would not be able to operate in the US. Lots of reports, I'll be.

• 27:18Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to be judicious here. Claims, reports, concerns from politicians to the press and everywhere in between and regulators that they're doing some stuff in the dark areas that maybe you wouldn't want to touch in terms of the dark web, dark economy. But rumor is they're going to do a US version of Tether and maybe try to go legit and audited. How do you think about them as a competitor, given that they've been banned in multiple GOs and there was, you know, some very big concerns that they might have a run because they weren't dollar for dollar backed and people had all kinds of claims about, hey, maybe they have Chinese paper and all these different concerns and they wouldn't do an

• 28:02Jason Calacanis?

  attestation. Or they would do an attestation with a bank and somewhere in the VVI that nobody's heard of and a big KPMG maybe doesn't.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  You seem to know a lot about this.

• 28:12Jason Calacanis?

  Kind of, I was not a Tether truther, but I did go down the rabbit hole because I reported on it, you know, on the pod and talked about it. But they are, they're a significant player. I'm wondering how you think about them coming to the US and becoming more legit and maybe trying to catch up with you in that way.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  I mean, look, the beauty of having the Genius Act is that it creates a level playing field. It defines a federal law that you have to come in, not just be audited, but you're regulated by, if you're large, by the National Bank Regulator, the OCC, which is a very serious regulator, a serious prudential regulator. And, you know, we've conditionally, we've received conditional approval for something called First National Digital Currency Bank, which is a national trust bank that we're setting up to be part of how we operate USDC as well. And, but, but again, level playing field.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  If you want to comply and build a product under that regulatory framework, you can do that. And I think many people will. And this is like when net neutrality happened and common carrier rules came, like anybody can get into providing data services to the internet. Anyone can build, you know, these things. So that's great. And so, free market. Clear rules, love it. So my view is there's absolutely going to be more competition. And my view is also that the structure of this market, stablecoins are network businesses. Meaning, they actually exist as platforms and utilities on the internet.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Like the USDC and our stablecoin network is literally the software protocols, but it's also the tens of thousands of applications that have integrated to the APIs. And every time an app integrates, you know, Cash App just said, hey, we're adding USDC support. That's great. Coinbase has you. Coinbase has it. Revolut has it. You know, banks have it. Visa's using it. Every time someone adds it, you know, Stripe merchants, Shopify merchants can use it. Every time someone adds that, it adds utility to the network and it adds network effects. And then the next developer who comes along and says, hey, I want to build an app that uses digital dollars, et cetera. Which one should I use? Oh, I have interoperability with all this stuff. Great. So you have these network effects that are really key.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  And then you also have, you know, what I call liquidity network effects, which is the ability for one to easily get it and use it within banking systems all around the world. So we've built out this incredible liquidity network by being regulated in Singapore, you know, in the UAE, in the European Union. And this isn't an easy thing to do. This is a huge build. Yeah. It's a huge build. And now it's at a point where... And it's defensibility. It is defensibility. And we have, you know, pipes in a sense where, you know, some of the biggest capital markets participants in the world, companies like BlackRock can enable a tokenized fund that enables USDC to come in and out of it. And their institutional participants know that'll work.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Right? So I think it's a long-winded answer, but the answer is essentially, we feel like we've built a great platform and a great network, and we have really strong network effects, and they're accelerating, and we've been publicly audited as a corporation. Yeah. As a New York Stock Exchange governed, publicly listed, SEC supervised company now for a period of time, but more broadly for a long time. And when companies are going to choose what they're going to build on and what they're going to use, they're going to look at all that. Yeah, the footprint matters. It does. And so... The marginal value of a net new dollar stablecoin coming into the market is essentially zero.

• 32:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  You need, you know, all these things are needed.

• 32:10Jason Calacanis?

  And what do you think about this concept that everybody's going to have their own stablecoin? There'll be an Amazon one, obviously PayPal's added one. Do you think that's realistic? Or do you think people are going to be like, that's just, I might as well just use Circle?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't see that. I think this is a lot like other internet platform markets. Like, everyone doesn't need their own data center. Everyone didn't need their own vertical search engines.

• 32:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  You know, everyone, you know, there's a lot of things that people thought, everyone didn't need to build their own video platform.

• 32:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  You know, and so internet-scale utilities, you know, achieve network effects. They achieve unit economics. They achieve developer flywheels, like, all these things.

• 32:47Jason Calacanis?

  And they tend to lower their prices over time.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  It tends to get, yeah.

• 32:50Jason Calacanis?

  More affordable.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  You know, yeah, more and more economical and more and more capable. And, and so, you know, there's, there's a lot, there's a lot one would need to do to do that. And I think even, even the biggest banks who have pretty big technology budgets may reach that same conclusion.

• 33:08Jason Calacanis?

  What worries you now? What's 2026 for, looking like, what do you, what keeps you up at night? The opportunity is obvious, I think. You've explained it perfectly.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think we're at an interesting place where we, we have a big piece of the regulatory clarity done. There are more pieces that are, that are needed. So there's work, you know, sort of related to markets, related to how digital tokens work. That's actually really, really important because we believe in kind of tokenization as a phenomenon. Smart contracts as a way that people are going to like, intermediate things on the internet. So there's, there's more that's needed there. And I think now, you know, I think one of the things that concerns me is sort of the... The changing geopolitical, geo-economic landscape,

• 33:59Speaker 01

  which is, there's lots of different points of view that are being taken on where economic alignment is, etc. And as a global company that is building technology that we want to make available globally, that introduces new complexity.

• 34:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. We are entering an era of new alliances and national champions.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 34:23Jason Calacanis?

  And you're an American company, and America first. And so, yeah, you might be looked at differently based upon how the American enterprises generally done.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is very true. Our headquarters is Freedom Tower in New York City. And at the same time, the technology of these networks, there's an opportunity, actually, to develop versions of this that are more geopolitically neutral, geo-economically neutral, so that if you're from India, or you're from Brazil, or you're from Southeast Asia, or you're from the Middle East, like you can build, and these are high-growth markets, that you're comfortable building on this with a variety of different nexuses of economic relationships. And so that's something we think about, actually.

• 35:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, like a Euro-based stablecoin.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  We have the largest Euro-based stablecoin.

• 35:17Jason Calacanis?

  How many currencies have you done that with so far?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  We've really only focused on dollars and euros.

• 35:23Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think those are two widely adopted currencies, both as a store of value and as freely floatable, circulated, tradable currencies. And we have a big commitment to the European market. And so it's also part of just being committed to that market. We think it's a big opportunity. And then for everything else, we've really built, we've built a technology stack for other stablecoin issuers from other markets now that there's laws around the world.

• 35:57Jason Calacanis?

  So if they want to do their national stablecoin.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  Centralized. And are you doing that with Bermuda or some sort of partnership?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  The Bermuda partnership is related to helping them kind of have digital dollars and have economic activity, commerce activity, treasury activity, all happen on-chain.

• 36:16Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So that's infrastructure play, not, I don't know what their dollar is.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Well, they're a dollar. It's a dollar-backed, it's a dollar-backed currency. They're already, they're on stablecoin. But in other places, you know, in, you know, the Philippines, or in Mexico, or in Brazil, or in Japan, and other markets, or Australia, Korea, there are stablecoins coming, and we want to make sure that we can provide technology so that they can do all the same things.

• 36:44Jason Calacanis?

  To the government, or to banks?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Well, more to the private sector, because stablecoins are private sector innovated, but these companies all need to be regulated by the government. They need to, they need to be following the same.

• 36:55Jason Calacanis?

  So easier for you to partner with a major partner in those markets?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, and we want to see that grow and flourish, you know, this idea of an internet financial system where, you know, all the economies of the world can be on-chain, and all of the contracts, and financial contracts, and markets, and capital formation, lending, everything can happen on-chain.

• 37:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's obvious that small businesses and people who are very, and poker players, people who are, you know, concerned about their fees, will, and you know, are focused on that, are being driven to stablecoins. They get it. They're like, yeah, I'm doing my design job for, you know, I'm a designer in the Philippines, working for somebody in India or America. They're starting to figure out, hey, I don't need to pay these. And then consumers are starting to figure it out. Maybe if they're, like me, a poker player, you're sending a lot of wires. Every year I send, you know, tons of wires back and forth for different poker games.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, now, you know, Polymark and Calci, both, you fund your account with USDC.

• 37:56Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  And well, that's because that audience understands because they're always looking for edge.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Speed.

• 38:02Jason Calacanis?

  Speed. And but they're looking for edge. In a poker game, like you as an if you were a novice and I was an expert, if I was Jason Kuhn and you were Phil Hellmuth, whatever it is, you know, it's got a bigger edge on them. It's an inside joke. Anyway, point is, like, you might have a 1% or 2% advantage, but it compounds after 100 poker games to be a bigger number.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  It does.

• 38:24Jason Calacanis?

  This is why the rake matters and, you know, gamblers and people like to wager.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  You know who the biggest users of USDC are?

• 38:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's what I was kind of getting at.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  It's actually, it is a form of gamblers, which is it's the biggest electronic markets firms in the world.

• 38:39Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  The guys who need the they need every edge in terms of milliseconds and cost and capital efficiency to be able to move capital in markets because at the end of the day, they are algorithmically trying to figure out the very next best thing to do.

• 38:56Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  And if they have dollars that operate with the physics of the internet and the cost efficiency of data, they have an edge. And so they love it.

• 39:04Jason Calacanis?

  They love it. And then the people who are sending money home to their family.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  They love it, too.

• 39:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, because they're like, wait, I'm paying Western Union 12% of this? This is bullshit.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Right. They can have a wallet they directly send to their counterparty. And it's like, wait a minute, this wait, I have this literally arrived. And there's proliferation of of these digital wallets now that also can where you can hold it in USDC but spend it through Apple Pay that are being issued all around the world, too. So people can store value in digital dollars, use it through payment terminals, and that's pretty cool, too.

• 39:34Jason Calacanis?

  What's the QuickBooks TurboTax thesis there? Because that seemed like there's something underlying that that I wasn't getting to. I mean, it's obvious that, like, okay, there's money flowing through there. But what's the big picture there?

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Well, Intuit's an amazing company. Obviously, they've been around for a long time. They have franchises that are huge. Credit Karma is a huge franchise, actually, huge. They're growing what they provide to people through that franchise. QuickBooks, obviously, we all know if you run a small business, you use QuickBooks. And actually, QuickBooks, you know, invoice they invoice people through QuickBooks. And it's actually trillions of dollars of transactions a year that are invoiced through QuickBooks. And you know, if you can invoice people and settle in USDC,

• 40:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  that's better than ACH and it's faster and you can imagine a world where, you know, small businesses can gain an advantage from something like that.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  Reconciliations are so fast.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  If you're a TurboTax user and you file your taxes and you get a refund, imagine being able to get your refund instantly. So I think there's a lot of cool stuff. Intuit's a very innovative company. It's a tech company, you know, that is in these financial technology adjacencies. And so we're super excited about the collaboration that we have with them.

• 40:47Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to say there's a loser in this, but there are people who are going to be challenged by it. How does American Express, you know, and Bank of America look at Circle and stablecoins? In your mind, if you were to... Because they must call at some point, or do they not?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  I mean, look, I think all these companies have an opportunity to use this technology, right? They have this, they have an opportunity to use this technology to improve how they provide payment utility. They have an opportunity to use it if their customers want to interact with the whole on-chain economy and on-chain investments and what's happening there from a wealth management perspective. I eventually think that, you know, there's going to be more credit products that are actually built using stablecoins.

• 41:30Jason Calacanis?

  How would that work?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Well, basically...

• 41:31Jason Calacanis?

  And what's the advantage?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Well, so already today, there have been trillions of dollars of loans made in stablecoins through DeFi protocols. So you take your USDC and you effectively deposit it into a protocol. And on the other side of that protocol is a borrower. And you're paid an interest rate for the amount of time.

• 41:53Jason Calacanis?

  You become the house, you become the bank, the individual.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  The protocol does, actually. I mean, these are, as someone years ago said, these are like self-driving banks, meaning it's software machines where the risk management, the collateral management, the liquidation, all of the liquidity that's there is all just smart contract machines that we can all observe in real time, perfectly auditable in real time, transparent. You don't have that with a bank. So you have a really interesting thing there. And right now, a lot of that is like lending to people who are borrowing to do things like investing, like margin.

• 42:23Jason Calacanis?

  It's like margin loans. I own a million dollars. If I own a million dollars in Bitcoin. Yeah, I want to spend a hundred thousand, but I want to liquidate any Bitcoin. Somebody else can make some number of points.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  And you can you can borrow USDC against your Bitcoin and so on. But I think this is like this is the early stage of that. And so I think our view is that if you have these digital cash things like USDC, that you can create lending protocols that are lending for, you know, I want to, I want to, you know, hire a new employee. Or I want to, you know, I need some new equipment for my kitchen in my restaurant.

• 42:58Jason Calacanis?

  So factoring, equipment leasing.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  All of these forms of lending, right, can be done. And the risk that is taken, there's real risk there, can be underwritten. And the insurance on the risks failing can be priced. And so you can build credit markets entirely in software, entirely with software machines.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  No storefronts.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Coming into play.

• 43:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  AI plus these sort of smart contract machines and stable coins, I think creates a really interesting little cauldron for credit market innovation.

• 43:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  And I have a gleam in my eye, which is imagine a credit market that worked like AdWords. Imagine something that was that efficient and could clear and settle credit decisions at the speed of which an auction happens for attention. And so like those kinds of things will become possible. And that probably would be pretty good for people who are on the other side of of credit need.

• 43:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if you think about also monetary velocity. And the economy, you can get more things moving.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:06Jason Calacanis?

  More jobs created, more chances, more swings at bat, more shots on goal.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  So money velocity increases. And I think these kinds of credit intermediation models powered by AI and blockchain networks. Can actually further increase money velocity. And, you know, we have a, we have a, a mission statement to increase global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. That is literally our mission statement. And that people, a lot of times they think exchange of value means like, oh, like making a payment. No, value exchange is the sort of time value of money transformation. And it's sort of, I have value I don't need right now. You have, you, you have a need for that value and I'm going to use time to transform that and, and then, you know, create new things from it. And that's where actual growth comes from. So that's what we want to see.

• 44:53Jason Calacanis?

  One of the interesting things, since we're here talking politics at Davos, you and I are talking tech and, but politics is, you know, one of the big topics here. So we'll, we'll sort of end on that a little bit and get your ideas and your thoughts on it. There's a movement towards socialism in New York City, my hometown. It's kind of heartbreaking for me to watch California is seizing the billionaires' assets, literally asking them to write down and audit everything they own, put a value on the painting or the piece of jewelry they bought for their spouse. And, uh, yeah, we'll just take 5% of it once. And they lost, uh, 200 billionaires and a trillion dollars worth of, uh, and, and they,

• 45:38Jason Calacanis?

  and they don't seem to have any problem with it. As a technologist, a builder, and a capitalist, as, as long as I've known you, um, what do you think about this moment in time us Gen Xers are living in, watching this socialist movement?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I just moved to New York City.

• 45:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Just in time.

• 45:58Jason Calacanis?

  Just in time. Yeah. By the way, that's costing you, I think you're going to have to pay 2% more a year. But I don't think you're an income guy. I think you're more of a cap gains guy.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, here, here's what I would say is, and, and actually I was with Dario from Anthropic a couple of times over the past couple of days. And he obviously talks a lot about, um, you know, kind of the economic disruption, labor market disruption, what's going to happen with AI.

• 46:20Jason Calacanis?

  He's not a doomer, but he has deep concerns.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  He has, he has deep concerns and I also do, which is when I look at the very positive thing, which is that I think we're going to, we're, we're going to see an acceleration of GDP growth. Pick your timeframe, three, five, 10, 15 years. Like, we're gonna, we're gonna see, I think, an extraordinary period of economic growth acceleration.

• 46:42Jason Calacanis?

  Even more than the internet and PCs.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  More than the internet and PCs. This is, this is a very, very, very big.

• 46:48Jason Calacanis?

  Strongly agree.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Very, very big transformation. And, but where most of the, the labor is actually executed by AI machines.

• 46:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  And the capital accrues to the capital owners.

• 47:01Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  And that's just kind of there in front of us.

• 47:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's the fundamental nature of capitalism.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Fundamental nature. And, and I think that is just going to challenge us in ways that we haven't dealt with.

• 47:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  In, in a long time, since other periods.

• 47:17Jason Calacanis?

  Labor was necessary for capital.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 47:20Jason Calacanis?

  To succeed.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Industrial Revolution was mechanized human labor, right?

• 47:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  This is, this is, you know, mechanized AI.

• 47:30Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, the CEO job seems like ripe for AI doing a better job than we would do at times, right? Like, I don't know if you've.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  I use, I use AI all the time in my.

• 47:40Jason Calacanis?

  And you, do you ask it?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  I don't know if they realize what they're interacting with.

• 47:43Jason Calacanis?

  No, but I mean, I, I, literally, when I was talking to Brian from Coinbase, our friend, he said he's got all of his data into a proprietary LLM internally. He said this on the, on the program, I'm not speaking out of school. And that he asks it, what do I need to know about my organization? It's like, oh, there's non-consensus about this important issue in the corner over here. And he's like, I didn't know that. Like, whoa, was that a coach? Or is that like a parallel?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:09Jason Calacanis?

  Like, another, like, CEO? Is it a duplicate CEO? Did you clone yourself? It's like, how, how do you think about that?

• 48:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think about it all the time. I, I, you know, I'm pushing very hard to encourage that we are all inside of Circle, doing more with AI. We're, we're making sure, obviously with safety and compliance in mind, because we're a regulated company.

• 48:31Jason Calacanis?

  Permissions matter.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's, there's, there's a lot of, of work. We invest a lot in that. But nonetheless, you know, creating the avenues so that, that awareness and understanding can be there. And that as leaders, we can turn to that. I, I put a Slack post in, in a Slack channel recently that sort of said, if, if you want to become a, a, a great manager at Circle, probably the, one of the best things that you can learn how to do is manage AI.

• 48:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  And so, you know, invest in how you manage AI and AI agents. Actually, that's how you might actually become a better manager and leader through that.

• 49:07Jason Calacanis?

  It seems like It is one of the, if you think about the tasks of these product managers who would run the stand-ups

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 49:14Jason Calacanis?

  You know, that your mid-level manager historically, it's to keep tabs on a group of people and their targets and their timeframes and who's excelling and who's got blockers. AI is kind of better suited for that.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Really good.

• 49:25Jason Calacanis?

  And so, the, a great middle manager, which is a derogatory term, but let's just say use the word manager. A great manager should be able to manage 10 groups using, say, Claude's coworker. I don't know if, have you been playing with it yet?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 49:36Jason Calacanis?

  It's

• 49:37Speaker 01

  It's really incredible.

• 49:38Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's at a week and I'm like, I'm sitting there like

• 49:41Speaker 01

  We haven't deployed that inside the company yet, but I've outside looked at it.

• 49:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. What impresses you about that?

• 49:48Speaker 01

  I mean, look, the, the ability to take tasks that I have to do and just teach them and then it just can do them is extraordinary. And I'm trying to get this deployed in my household too, but it's, it's really amazing.

• 50:01Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting way to do it is, because I went down this rabbit hole, like estate management stuff.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:06Jason Calacanis?

  Like when you have to deal with this, when you get a second home, or however many you wind up having. Notion is, I think, the best solution right now because Notion put AI into it. Do you use Slack personally too for your domestic affairs? You don't have a domestic

• 50:20Speaker 01

  I don't have a domestic Slack.

• 50:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I have a domestic Slack and a domestic Notion. So I took the stack from the office and I just did it at home. And what that did for us was the people who bridge, you know, the family office and this, you know, can kind of, they know the same tool stack. The Notion has been investing in their AI so much that when you do a query, like an AI query of your Notion and you're like, hey, this house with this HVAC, you know, this issue is like, answer. You know, like, oh my God, that would have taken like three phone calls in an hour. And I think it's going to change everything about how we work.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:56Jason Calacanis?

  What, what else did Dario think? I think I might have cut you off before

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think the, the big picture there was just like, whatever your politics are, whatever you think about taxes, whatever you think about the social contract. All that's, I think, in the coming years, gonna kind of have to get thought about again.

• 51:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  In different ways. And I don't think it's gonna, it's not gonna be the straightforward answers that we've turned to.

• 51:19Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  It can't be. And so, that's why I, you know, my answer is like, yeah, there's things California, New York, etc. are doing, but I think when we, when we look at that in comparison to the broader political economy that we're gonna have in front of us, those will seem modest in comparison to what we've got to think about.

• 51:39Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, we fixed it in startup land long ago. It's called stock options. And if you look at the Trump accounts, which Invest America, Michael Dell did, and Brad Gersner, and a number of our friends, if the 42% of Americans who don't own an equity, and, you know, are not part of that, let's just say it's 50, because some of them own them kind of passively, half the country doesn't own equities. If everybody had equities in a superannuation fund like they have in Australia, and they're watching them go up, then you're not like, well, screw those guys at Amazon and Apple and Google.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Being stakeholders in the success of this technological transformation is critical.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that would, I think, solve so much of the problem. Jeremy, I could talk to you for hours. You and I have talked for hours in our lifetime.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:25Jason Calacanis?

  About all these paradigms, continued success.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Thank you, Jason.

• 52:29Jason Calacanis?

  And it's just a pleasure to spend time with you. It's always like one of the great discussions I have.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  It's awesome.

• 52:33Jason Calacanis?

  I can't believe it. George Kurtz is here. He's the CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike. This is your second Davos.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:40Jason Calacanis?

  Why are you at Davos? Obviously, everybody knows CrowdStrike.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:43Jason Calacanis?

  We'll get into it. Why are you spending the week at Davos?

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Well, I have all the world leaders here, and all the best company CEOs are here. So really, it would take me a year of activity and flying around the globe to meet all the people that I need to meet. And it's just a fantastic opportunity to meet customers and get business done.

• 53:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's efficient.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Very efficient.

• 53:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's this tiny little ski town.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:05Jason Calacanis?

  It's not fancy at all. This is in Aspen. And everybody's within five blocks, once you get through security.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:11Jason Calacanis?

  Speaking of security, AI has had, or is going to have, I want to get your opinion on this, a profound impact on defense and also offense, black hat, white hat, everything in between. What is the attack vector that AI is most effective at, sitting here in 2026?

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Well, there's a couple of different areas. One is, if we think about the adversaries, I kind of, I kind of create a pyramid, where you've got nation-state at the top, very sophisticated, but less of them. The middle band of the pyramid, okay, is e-crime. More of them, a little less sophisticated than the top, and then the bottom is just hacktivism. Okay? So essentially, you're minting new adversaries, because you don't have to have all the knowledge that you had to have in the past. You can ask any number of LLMs, and you can get answers back. So what's happened is, the attack timeline has been compressed. You can automate all of these sort of attacks, and you can do it with a level of sophistication that looks like a nation-state. That's one of the greatest areas of exposure,

• 54:10Speaker 02

  is the speed and the sophistication has dramatically increased.

• 54:13Jason Calacanis?

  Because the answers have been compiled.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:16Jason Calacanis?

  The scenarios can be run, even by somebody who is a level 6 hacker out of 10, I'm just making a number up here, and they can become an 8. So just like a developer using a copilot goes from being an average developer to an above-average, the same thing is happening with hackers.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And one of the things that we're seeing is autonomous malware. So, most people are probably familiar with malware, runs on your computer. Typically, people would use antivirus to protect against that malware. But what we're seeing now is prompt-only autonomous malware. Meaning, I can drop the prompt on your computer by a variety of means, and then it will autonomously interact with an LLM, and it will give a unique... Fingerprint every time it runs. So your computer is different than the next guy's. You have different data. And it will begin to prompt its way to getting to what it needs without ever phoning home to someone controlling it.

• 55:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow. So just unpack that.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:10Jason Calacanis?

  And translate it. I did a little hacking in my day in the eighties.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 55:13Jason Calacanis?

  A little phone freaking mainly.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 55:15Jason Calacanis?

  We'll get into it offline.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Haze modems.

• 55:17Jason Calacanis?

  I had a haze twenty four hundred guilty as charged. I started with the Vental three hundred bod. I think we're of the same.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  I had a three hundred haze.

• 55:23Jason Calacanis?

  You had the three hundred haze.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  It was a tank.

• 55:26Jason Calacanis?

  It literally had such a great form factor that's never been repeated. It's great like rectangle, but.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  We're old.

• 55:33Jason Calacanis?

  We are old. People are now saying, hey, I'm going to use the Comet browser by perplexity. Chat GPT has got a browser. Claude has an extension. And it's really wonderful to say, hey, get all my emails from LinkedIn and then put that into a database and add it to my CRM. Wonderful. You watch it work. Get me the cheapest flight. The same thing can be used by an adversary to get on your computer. And one of the great ways is detection in security. You're in the business of detecting the attacker. But what you've just informed me of, which kind of blew my mind, even though it's completely obvious, is the LLM can say, I'm going to do a thousand attacks today and I'm going to make each one different and unique.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  And unique. Absolutely. They're unique.

• 56:14Jason Calacanis?

  So scary.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  They're not actually code because they're prompts.

• 56:17Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  And traditionally malware would phone home. They would be, there would be like a tether.

• 56:21Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  So you'd always be able to see the signature of something phoning home. Now these can run autonomously without ever phoning home.

• 56:28Jason Calacanis?

  Like a sleeper agent. Like you drop them into America. Twenty years later, they start pursuing, but they never have to return to base.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 56:37Jason Calacanis?

  How does one counter that?

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Well, you need AI to counter it.

• 56:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  And I mean, that's been a big part of the success at CrowdStrike. When I started the company, I founded in two thousand and eleven. It was using, we'll say AI, but machine learning at the time to detect malware that's never been seen before. Now, obviously that's evolved into Gen AI. And really leveraging basically the, the large data set that we have, that we've amassed over fourteen years to train our own models to be able to counteract with the speed that you need. What the adversary is doing. So we took, if you think about it, there's only a few ways to break into a bank. I'll use this analogy, right? You can drive there, you can walk there, you can use a gun, you can blow the safe. But at the end of the day, you got to get the money and you got to get out.

• 57:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  And these, it's the same way in the computer world. There's certain, we call indicators of attack. We've trained our models to look for these. So it doesn't matter kind of what you look like or what car you're driving. We can identify that. And a big part of our success has been the AI we've built over the years with this tremendous data set.

• 57:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so you might be able to get into the bank. But at some point, you got to leave with the diamonds and you got to get to the safe.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 57:42Jason Calacanis?

  That's where you can catch him.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 57:45Jason Calacanis?

  You mentioned state actors and you mentioned for profit. When we look at a country like North Korea, they need revenue.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 57:52Jason Calacanis?

  Hacking is a pretty great revenue source. They were even using AI, my understanding, and I'm sure you've been following this, to get developer jobs in the United States, convince Americans to put laptops in their homes.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:06Jason Calacanis?

  So that they could remote work.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:07Jason Calacanis?

  Talk to me about that attack factor, actually infiltrating companies as employees because of this remote work nonsense.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Well, we were one of the first to ever find that. So we were actually going through developing some new AI algorithms.

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  And we saw something that was called Signal, which basically strips the noise from the signal. And we saw the signal and we said, this is really weird. And we investigated it and we said, okay, this looks like somebody using remote tools to, you know, what's going on here? And we went further and then we said, we think it's North Korea. And we think that it's an employee, or the company thinks it's an employee. So when the R and D team came back to me, they said, okay, we want to notify our customers. And we want to say, we think we found this, but we have to tell them that the employee that they think is an employee isn't really their employee.

• 58:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the phone calls coming from inside the building.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Exactly. So for us, it was, you know, when you have a piece of malware, it's like, okay, that's bad. You can detect it. But when you have to tell a company that their employee may not be their employee, there's, you know,

• 59:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a little gentle, like.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  You have to be gentle.

• 59:09Jason Calacanis?

  It's, you're letting them know just how incompetent they are when it comes to security. I said it, not you.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Okay, well, it's hard to find these guys. But in any event, we found 40 of them. We were right, 40. That's for the first run. We found hundreds now over.

• 59:23Jason Calacanis?

  Hundreds in America.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:24Jason Calacanis?

  Now, they were doing it, my understanding is, for the high-paying salary to fund stuff in North Korea? Is that correct or not? They were doing it to get trade secrets?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  They were, they were doing it to buy access. Why, why break in when you can just log in? You know, so it's a lot easier to get somebody hired. So, true story. So, we, we actually say, we think this employee is not an employee. Company investigated. They investigate it and they go, "Yeah, you were right." I said, "Well, tell me the story." And they said, "Well, we, we went to this person's boss and we said, 'We don't think that's, that's a real person.'" And they went through all the reasons why. Finally, they said, "It's, you know, we think it's a North Korean." And the guy, his boss said, "Well, do we have to get rid of him because he did such good work?"

• 1:00:05Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my Lord. So, the value of a top-tier developer is so high that you'll take a spy?

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:11Jason Calacanis?

  It's like, "Ah, you know, we kind of need him to ship."

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was doing such good work.

• 1:00:16Jason Calacanis?

  He was, he was shipping. This is one of our best performances.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  True, true story.

• 1:00:19Jason Calacanis?

  What now? I mean, remote work has opened up so many factors. Do you believe in remote work? Do you support it in the company?

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  We do, yeah. We started the company in a remote first.

• 1:00:28Jason Calacanis?

  But this opens up all these attack vectors. What's the best practice?

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Even without remote, well...

• 1:00:33Jason Calacanis?

  Best practices?

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  Best practice, really, and what we see companies doing is, we'll take a simple one. Meet whoever you hire.

• 1:00:39Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, shocking.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Shocking. But, you know, with COVID and remote work and, and things of that nature, there's a lot of people that get hired that people never met. And, you know, you never see them on the screen. And, but the work would get done. You know, emails would get written. And then, you know, these things happen. So, what we're seeing now is the best companies are actually embedding a security person in the HR group. Where they're pre-filtering all these resumes because the resumes are AI-generated. The LinkedIn profiles are AI-generated. So, you want to catch them upfront rather than in the interview process.

• 1:01:12Jason Calacanis?

  Here's a crazy idea. "Hey, for your final interview, can we fly in?" Or, "Hey, week one, you're going to be at HQ."

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:01:18Jason Calacanis?

  That's it. You solve the whole problem because then they don't take the job. They move on to the next person.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:01:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, we're looking at state actors. Russia, still number one state actor?

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  China, Russia. I mean, it depends. Like, if you, you know, pure intelligence, pure IP...

• 1:01:32Jason Calacanis?

  Ability?

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  Russia.

• 1:01:33Jason Calacanis?

  Russia.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Jason Calacanis?

  Why are they so good?

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  I mean, like, the Cold War, you could say, is over, but you have really smart people that went to work in various areas, right? Obviously, from a nation-state, but also from an e-crime perspective. They're smart, they know what they're doing. Typically, they're what we call low and slow. The Chinese, over the years, have been a little bit noisy, kind of a smash-and-grab. They've gotten better.

• 1:01:55Jason Calacanis?

  Not subtle.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Not subtle, but much better now. But the Russians are very targeted, they're patient, and they're not always gathering IP information to steal it, but they're gathering intelligence for reconnaissance, for nation-state activities, and/or then they moonlight for, you know, for e-crime.

• 1:02:14Jason Calacanis?

  And let's go to China, then. This is, you know, if we were sitting here 10 years ago, we'd be talking, "Kum by ya, China, we're all gonna win together." The decoupling has happened, essentially. Do you have operations there? Do you work with Chinese companies?

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  We don't have operations there. We don't have any revenue. We don't sell into China.

• 1:02:32Jason Calacanis?

  Never have.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Never have, from the start of the company.

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  And what's your take on the decoupling? Let's go a little geopolitical here.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Jason Calacanis?

  They are our adversary, obviously, competitor. You know, their technical ability is pretty strong.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:47Jason Calacanis?

  We're seeing that with AI. Are they the future competitor and the future attack vector that you have to worry about, China?

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know that they're the future, because I think it's already there.

• 1:02:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's here, yeah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  And it's been here for the last, you know, 20-plus years. I mean, some of it may not have been talked about in the early days, but they're very, very prolific. They're very good. And, you know, it's one of those areas, obviously, nation-state is always gonna be nation-state versus nation-state. You know, that just happens. The big thing with China is, there is a commercial aspect to what they do. So if the government breaks in and steals a trade secret from some company in the US, they'll just give it to another company in China.

• 1:03:23Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  That doesn't happen necessarily with all nation-states.

• 1:03:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we're certainly not breaking into China to steal their trade secrets.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Right, and giving them to a US company.

• 1:03:32Jason Calacanis?

  And, yeah. The CIA is not breaking in to figure out what BYD is doing to give it to Tesla or something.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:03:39Jason Calacanis?

  So it's a one-way relationship there. Now, there's also something very unique. They make hardware. They ship a lot of hardware. Our laptops, in some cases, Huawei, other countries. They're putting spyware or backdoors into all that hardware, yeah? In your estimation?

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  I mean, over the years, there's certainly been cases where people have had concerns on, you know, what was actually shipped. And supply chain is can be problematic, whether it's actually shipped with something or, you know, in some cases, packages get diverted somewhere else. The malware gets installed and it gets reshipped out, right? So you've seen that. So it's important like to have good hygiene on whatever equipment is being brought in. And you know, the providence of that manufacturer and that software that goes on it. And that that applies really around the world.

• 1:04:29Jason Calacanis?

  Do you trust Signal and your iPhone to protect you as a corporate executive? Like, what measures do you take? Because you're a target.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're a target. I mean, we our team spends a lot of time making sure that we try to do the right things.

• 1:04:43Jason Calacanis?

  So WhatsApp, Signal, what about those two? You think those are attack factors? People can do insertions there?

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I think you have to look at the privacy versus the the actual attack vector. You know, if you're clicking on links that are in different, you know, because you got a link in Signal, doesn't mean the link is secure, whether it could be Signal or something else, right? So there's a lot of ways to get implants on these devices. I mean, I would say, you know, an iPhone is more is safer than just a regular computer because of the way it runs. But, you know, if you look at the nation states and some of the creative ways they can actually get into a phone, as an example, if they want to get in bad enough, they're going to get in.

• 1:05:21Jason Calacanis?

  How do they get in? What's the attack vector? They get you to click on a link, they insert something. That's the typical.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, typically what they'll do, and there's there's a whole black or gray market on the value of a zero day. So there are zero days in all software. And if you have one, say for Apple iOS, that's super valuable. And generally, if you click on something and it's a not known zero day, just by going to a browser.

• 1:05:45Jason Calacanis?

  Explain in plain English to the audience what a zero day is.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  A zero day is, yeah, sorry.

• 1:05:49Jason Calacanis?

  No problem.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  Talking technical jargon.

• 1:05:51Jason Calacanis?

  Not everybody's got the hacker bona fide.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  I know, not everybody's a Hays guy. But yeah, if there is a software vulnerability that hasn't been found and patched.

• 1:06:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  It means that they can exploit that and then they can run code. And in some cases in the past, there was a vulnerability where they could simply send you an SMS message. Like you didn't even know, you didn't have to click on anything.

• 1:06:12Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  But the SMS message would process this information and then they would put an implant on the phone.

• 1:06:18Jason Calacanis?

  Biometrics, two-factor, this has changed everything in the industry, made it much more secure?

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  Secure, but not much more, yeah. If you look at a lot of the attacks, they're identity-based attacks. And what you see is that even when you have a credential, or if you steal a credential, or if you have a session token, which means that you've already authenticated.

• 1:06:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  Right? So even if you have two-factor, if you have the session token.

• 1:06:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  You can replay that and get access to a system.

• 1:06:48Jason Calacanis?

  The crypto people learned this the hard way.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:50Jason Calacanis?

  They basically were using two-factor over SMS. People call the phone company.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:56Jason Calacanis?

  Reset the SIM.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:58Jason Calacanis?

  And then they got you.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  And game over, yeah.

• 1:07:00Jason Calacanis?

  Game over. Now your Bitcoin wallet is emptied.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:07:04Jason Calacanis?

  Where there's money, the hackers will go figure out a way.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  They figure it out. And humans are normally the weakest link.

• 1:07:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, the way I was able to get my first exploit was I called the New York Public Library. I knew they had like a VAC system with the dial-up.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:07:20Jason Calacanis?

  And I just said, "Hey, it's Joe from IT at the 34th Street branch."

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Jason Calacanis?

  "I need the number for the dial-up."

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Jason Calacanis?

  Literally the person gave it to me at IT over the phone.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  They want to be helpful.

• 1:07:30Jason Calacanis?

  I dialed it and then I could search the stack.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:07:33Jason Calacanis?

  Search all the books. That was the only thing you could do.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  What year was this?

• 1:07:35Jason Calacanis?

  87.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:07:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I was at Fordham and they had BitNet. They had the internet there and I was just starting to see these things, but it's almost universally that. Calling somebody on the phone, meeting somebody, compromising somebody.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:07:49Jason Calacanis?

  That's it.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  And normally the

• 1:07:50Jason Calacanis?

  To this day.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  The weakness is between the keyboard and the chair.

• 1:07:54Jason Calacanis?

  The keyboard and the chair. What is the best practice then for you when you're advising your customers of explaining to them just how the human factors part of this is the most important one to focus on?

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Well, there's certainly an educational element and you also have to look at how people get paid and the motivation. So typically, they're going to call a help desk, okay? How does a help desk get paid and what are their metrics? Their metrics is get a call, open a ticket, and close it as quick as you can.

• 1:08:22Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. The incentive is speed.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Right, particularly if it's a third party.

• 1:08:25Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, in another country.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Right, so their whole job is to open a ticket, solve a problem, close a ticket. So if you follow the money and the incentives, you can see why there's a problem. And people want to be helpful at the help desk and hence they get into the situation. So, you know, first start with the education piece and then having the right controls, identity protection, things like what Crouch right bills is going to be additive to making sure those sort of things don't happen.

• 1:08:52Jason Calacanis?

  People using their own devices, bring your own device. This is the other major attack vector corporations make the mistake on, yeah?

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Yes. That, you know, your own device could be like a cesspool if you let your kids, you know, use it. Or it could be pretty good, but that's the reason why now there's enterprise browsers to kind of contain what people do, even if you bring your own device.

• 1:09:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the enterprise browser is running on a virtual machine at some headquarters. You provide that kind of situation?

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  That's sort of the old school way of doing it. So what we've done, we actually just acquired a company called Seraphic.

• 1:09:27Jason Calacanis?

  I saw that. Explain to me the state of the art there.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the state of the art is not switching out a browser because if you use Common or, you know, Firefox or whatever, you want to use the browser you have. So it's actually running beneath the browser and it will support any browser, which basically looks at the interaction with the browser's doing. And if there's sort of malicious activity in the browser or there's an identity that's compromised, you can stop it at the browser and you can wall off what you do with the browser, including what data you take out of it. So it's the front door now for how people work and how adversaries get in is through the browser.

• 1:10:03Jason Calacanis?

  How should companies implementing AI? In the enterprise, putting their data into these clouds and working with partners. Claude cowork this week, kind of blew people's mind. I don't know if you saw the announcement or played with it.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Jason Calacanis?

  And I was using it earlier this week and I'm authenticating Gmail, Notion. Oh yeah, my desktop files and I got like halfway through this and I was like, this probably isn't a good idea, but.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  It can be pretty scary. Well, let me, let me tell you a story, not specific to that, but.

• 1:10:34Jason Calacanis?

  We don't want to throw them under the bus, but it was a lot of authentications I did.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. They're doing great work, but there, there was a, a customer who basically created a whole suite of AI agents to help their automation, their IT department, right? So they had one agent that was looking for sort of IT problems, software bugs. And it, it found something, you know, while the code was being, before it was committed. So the agent said, hey, I found this bug. I want to fix it, but it didn't have access to fix it. So it, it went to the Slack channel that had the other 99 agents and said, hey, does any other agent have access to this thing because I need it fixed? And there was an agent that raised its hand and said, oh, I have access and I can fix it. Do you see how scary this is? These two agents are reasoning and they went right around the guardrails that were put in place.

• 1:11:21Jason Calacanis?

  This is unintended consequences and these L L Ms are essentially guessing what you want them to do. They're reasoning it, oh, it is reasonable for me to go ask for help.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:34Jason Calacanis?

  It is reasonable for me to give help. Now, what if it pushes the wrong code? What if it makes a mistake? And then how do you ever track that down? Who's monitoring these agents? The agent technology has unlimited upside, but my Lord, you're going to be in business for a long time.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  Well, this is it. It's called A I D R.

• 1:11:51Jason Calacanis?

  A I D R.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. AI detection and response.

• 1:11:54Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  So there's a concept that's been around that we helped pioneer, which is really endpoint detection and response. So on your computer, most companies have it. You can monitor and see what's happening and prevent bad things from happening. We have to do that now with an agent and this is why it's a huge opportunity for us because on average, each employee is going to have about 90 agents they control. So we're going to have. And visibility across all of those agents, whether it's from a third party or whether it's a homegrown agent and that, you know, is a massive TAM opportunity for us.

• 1:12:25Jason Calacanis?

  Do you trust the LLM operators with Crouch likes data? Or do you want to stand up your own large language models?

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  We, well, we have our small language models and we do work with just about all of the large language models. But we've built our own guardrails around what gets shared, how it gets shared and how we process any of the data back. The key.

• 1:12:47Jason Calacanis?

  Are you concerned about it? I can see you're kind of like thinking like, hmm, yeah, like, maybe there are some concerns here.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  No, no, there is, but we, we tried to engineer for that.

• 1:12:55Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Right. Because you want to leverage, and this is the thing, you know, it's tokenomics. There's, there's an economics to how you use the tokens as well. Plus you want to get the right data. So we've built small language models for things that we control with our data. And then for other bigger, you know, frontier type models, I mean, you're not going to replicate billions in R and D. You want to leverage what's out there and take the best of it.

• 1:13:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. You're also a race car driver.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:13:21Jason Calacanis?

  And hey, you've done well in your life. You got to buy a piece of an F1 team. I've been going to F1 races. I went to three this year.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:13:28Jason Calacanis?

  Tell me everything about it.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Where do you want me to start?

• 1:13:31Jason Calacanis?

  How'd you get the bug? And when did you get the bug? Because this has been an American thing the last couple of years. I can't believe the rack that these F1, you, well, you guys are doing. Somehow you made this the most important thing in America ever.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  I, I. Drive to survive was fantastic.

• 1:13:44Jason Calacanis?

  That is a big driver and then it's a luxury experience. So now I've gone to, what did I do? Miami, Austin? And Vegas. I've been to three in the last year.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:13:53Jason Calacanis?

  I hadn't even heard about it five years ago.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  That's fantastic. Well, I mean, little backdrop. I grew up, I had zero money as a kid. I always liked.

• 1:14:00Jason Calacanis?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  Uh, New Jersey.

• 1:14:01Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Jason Calacanis?

  I grew up in Brooklyn, yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  You know, we used to play Fordham.

• 1:14:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Okay. So I always liked cars and fast things and never had the opportunity to do that. First car was Toyota Celica.

• 1:14:12Jason Calacanis?

  Toyota Salica.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Jason Calacanis?

  Seventy-three Mustang, Ronde, three-hundred-and-fifty-one Cleveland.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:14:16Jason Calacanis?

  Three-fifty-one Cleveland engine and slightly more horsepower than yours.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  I know. Mine was just a, I had a commuter in the thing.

• 1:14:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, okay. It's functional.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  It worked. It's functional. But, um, so I never had the opportunity to do it and then I got into, I mean, I always followed sports racing. Mostly it was Indy. And then, you know, got into racing later. We talk about that. But I've been in Formula One since 2018 because Crouch Strike became, well, Mercedes became a customer of Crouch Strike.

• 1:14:39Jason Calacanis?

  Nice.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  And then I met Toto Wolff, who runs the team, and you said, hey, why don't you think about working with us as a partner?

• 1:14:44Jason Calacanis?

  You got in at the right time. Good. That was a good trade.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  It was a good trade. So we got in then, and then, um, over the years, I built a great relationship. And then just last, uh, fall, I put a deal together and own 5% of the Mercedes team now.

• 1:14:55Jason Calacanis?

  Congrats. And now you ride yourself? You're in the bronze league, I hear?

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I race, uh, in fact, I gotta go back for a race in Daytona.

• 1:15:03Jason Calacanis?

  Nice.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  So we got the 24-hour Daytona.

• 1:15:04Jason Calacanis?

  What do you drive? What kind of car?

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Uh, LMP2.

• 1:15:06Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what it is.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Uh, it's a, it's a full-fledged race car. I mean, it looks like a...

• 1:15:12Jason Calacanis?

  Like an F1 car?

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  Uh, with, with, with, with covers over the wheels.

• 1:15:16Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So it's safer.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:17Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think of this new Corvette ZRX1? Have you seen this beast?

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  I'm trying to get one.

• 1:15:22Jason Calacanis?

  Me too.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fantastic. I know.

• 1:15:23Jason Calacanis?

  I got a contact.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:15:24Jason Calacanis?

  At GM.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  Everybody's got a guy.

• 1:15:26Jason Calacanis?

  They, they gave me an E-ray to play with.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Jason Calacanis?

  Which is kind of the precursors. You know, they took the E-ray and they put it in the ZRX1.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:34Jason Calacanis?

  And, uh, my lord, off the line. It's like having the Tesla acceleration off the line. And then you have the, you know, 600, in that one, I think it was 600 horsepower plus 150, you got about 800. This new one, it's 1,000 horsepower.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  It's a great car.

• 1:15:48Jason Calacanis?

  Plus 250. It didn't cost $200,000.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  And for the money, it's, it's, it's a tremendous car. And, you know, I, I still think to this day, I mean, someone will keep me honest, that

• 1:15:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  The ZR1 will, and will still have a warranty even if you track it.

• 1:16:03Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's one of the rare cars. At least it used to be.

• 1:16:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they said you can take the ZR1 in the, with the e-ray version, you can change the driver profile.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:12Jason Calacanis?

  Lower the RPMs, you know, the, when it shifts and everything. So you can actually talk on the phone.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:17Jason Calacanis?

  You know, and have a conversation and not make the passenger throw up.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  You want to hear the engine.

• 1:16:21Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's right. I had a C6 convertible in that generation, which was just dynamite.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Jason Calacanis?

  Canary yellow. What color are you looking at? This is where we're going to get real. You saw that crazy green.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  I like the blue.

• 1:16:34Jason Calacanis?

  You like the blue?

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:35Jason Calacanis?

  Beautiful.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  They have like a really beautiful vibrant blue.

• 1:16:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. That's a, I was looking at the silver and I don't usually like silver on cars, but it looks, on that car, it looks tremendous.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  I keep all my Mercedes silver.

• 1:16:49Jason Calacanis?

  You do?

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, interesting. Alright, listen. The question everybody wants to know. Greenland, what should we pay?

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  You know, I'm just-

• 1:16:56Jason Calacanis?

  How do we make a deal?

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  I'm sure, I'm sure there's lots of deals that's above my pay grade, but I think whenever you see the geopolitical tensions go up, there's always more security activities, so.

• 1:17:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, good for business.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  It's a, it's good for business, so.

• 1:17:08Jason Calacanis?

  Seems like something we should, I, you, the Trump administration is spicy on the margins, you may have seen. Uh, but they've been good for business, yeah? Supportive of the business community?

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Uh, I think so. And you know, when you think about what the administration's doing with security, they're taking a business-first approach. You know what that means? They want to save money. They want to consolidate. They want platforms. They want better outcomes, right? And they don't want this piecemeal buying across the government. So absolutely, I think they're doing a great job on security.

• 1:17:36Jason Calacanis?

  I've been asking people's perceptions and it's overwhelmingly been, yeah, they're calling us up. They're, they're at the table, they're engaged. So whatever you think, politically, uh, you know, all these-

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  They're listening.

• 1:17:47Jason Calacanis?

  Culture war issues. They're listening and they're engaging the business community, which I think is a great thing. Alright, brother, thanks for doing it.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 1:17:52Jason Calacanis?

  Talk soon. And transportation, of course, is one of the most important parts, uh, in the business sector and VTOLs. We were promised flying cars. We still don't have them. But my guest today, who's spoken and is a friend of the All In Podcast, uh, is going to tell us how close we are. To getting rid of these noisy helicopters buzzing around and having VTOLs, nice and quiet ones. Adam Goldstein, CEO of Archer Aviation, welcome back to All In.

• 1:18:21Adam Goldstein?

  Thank you. Good to be here.

• 1:18:22Jason Calacanis?

  Two years ago, you were at the summit. You promised us we get flying cars. When can, I mean, that's, let's just get to brass tacks. This is all anybody wants to know. When can I go from Manhattan to JFK? When can I go from San Francisco to Oakland Airport? When is this gonna happen? And is it gonna happen in the United States first? Or is it gonna happen in the UAE or Saudi or maybe China?

• 1:18:47Adam Goldstein?

  The hardest part about bringing these aircrafts to market are, is the certification. Like, we have to prove that these aircrafts are really safe. It's not, you can't blame the regulators. It's not a regulatory thing. They actually have to be very safe and reliable. So the rules got put in place. But the most important thing that happened in the most recent history was that President Trump issued an executive order that was fast-tracking the program through the regulators and really starting to create a platform for us to launch. And so they are now, five cities going to be announced in the first quarter, and then we'll start flying in the summer. And that will be the first time you'll see these aircrafts flying in around the cities on a regular basis. That will allow the general public to get comfortable with this, and they will certify us sometime after that. Because the political side of this is not a Democratic-Republican thing.

• 1:19:32Adam Goldstein?

  It's a, consumers have to feel comfortable with this. They have to want this. And so, we don't want to be fighting that. And so they're giving us a chance to go do that.

• 1:19:39Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so it's 2026. We're sitting here, January of 2026. You guys are going to announce five cities?

• 1:19:46Adam Goldstein?

  The government will. DOT will.

• 1:19:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, here in the United States, they're gonna, and these are for all veto companies. Jovi, yourself, all the contemporaries will get to do those five cities first.

• 1:19:55Adam Goldstein?

  Correct.

• 1:19:56Jason Calacanis?

  You got any guesses of what they could be? What are people thinking? And how are they selecting them?

• 1:20:00Adam Goldstein?

  Well, my big push has been around Huntington Beach, right around Los Angeles, because...

• 1:20:05Jason Calacanis?

  You live there?

• 1:20:05Adam Goldstein?

  I don't, but we won the exclusive for the LA 28 Olympics. And so that was a big deal for us. So we need to start trial operations, really ramping up the ops, because it's challenging. We also recently bought the Hawthorne Airport, right outside of LAX, to help give us a hub.

• 1:20:22Jason Calacanis?

  Hawthorne, the private, I've flown out of it many times.

• 1:20:24Adam Goldstein?

  Exactly. So...

• 1:20:26Jason Calacanis?

  Humble brag.

• 1:20:27Adam Goldstein?

  It's a, it's a great platform.

• 1:20:28Jason Calacanis?

  You bought it, wait, let's just let this soak in, folks. Archer Aviation bought...

• 1:20:35Jason Calacanis?

  An airport.

• 1:20:36Adam Goldstein?

  We did.

• 1:20:36Jason Calacanis?

  Can you just buy airports? It's a privately owned enterprise, Horthon. What did that cost you?

• 1:20:41Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, you can. It's, I'll call it a sort of buy it. You can control it. So there's a runway that's owned by the municipality. There's all the property around it. And then there's the control of the master lease. It is very hard to do. They come up for sale every 50 years. So if you look back.

• 1:20:54Jason Calacanis?

  What did that cost you?

• 1:20:55Adam Goldstein?

  It's around $170 million for everything, including the FBO and all the real estate around it.

• 1:20:59Jason Calacanis?

  So you own all the real estate. That's got some residual value.

• 1:21:02Adam Goldstein?

  Right.

• 1:21:02Jason Calacanis?

  But this gives you a massive opportunity because Los Angeles is, um, yeah, known for its traffic. So that would be a place where you could have a home base for these?

• 1:21:12Adam Goldstein?

  Exactly. It also happens to be home to a lot of the Elon companies. And so it borders SpaceX. The original Boring Tunnel was there. Tesla Design Center is there. You have a lot of good connectivity around people trying to change the, you know, the future of transportation.

• 1:21:27Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes, I'm sorry. I was thinking Venice. Horthon in the South.

• 1:21:30Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Jason Calacanis?

  Funny story. Uh, name drop. Elon was like, hey, I'm thinking about renting a place for my rocket ship company before I had a name.

• 1:21:38Adam Goldstein?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:38Jason Calacanis?

  Want to come down and see it? I went down to see it. It was at Horthon. And I said, he had just gotten the Falcon. And I said, uh, can the, can you land the Falcon here? He said, yeah. I said, get this off of space immediately. So you own the SpaceX office or you're the?

• 1:21:54Adam Goldstein?

  That's on the other side of the fence.

• 1:21:56Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:21:56Adam Goldstein?

  And so we have the airport side. They have some hangars.

• 1:21:58Jason Calacanis?

  What a perfect location. Cause if memory serves me, it's just south of LAX.

• 1:22:02Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, about two miles from LAX, about two miles from SoFi Stadium. So the goal is to make that a hub of Los Angeles. Imagine a Grand Central type of, uh, you know.

• 1:22:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you go down to San Diego, Laguna, just so many places to the south, Manhattan Beach.

• 1:22:16Adam Goldstein?

  And let's push our imagination here. Boring Company is also based there too. And so maybe we can convince Elon to start digging some holes around LA.

• 1:22:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:23Adam Goldstein?

  All of a sudden you could really transform LA.

• 1:22:25Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think the other cities will be in America? And how are they picking them?

• 1:22:29Adam Goldstein?

  Well, the FAA and DOT are going to be the ones that choose.

• 1:22:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:22:32Adam Goldstein?

  So there's the companies have submitted in partnership with the cities, these different bids. And I think it's going to be a mix of urban areas, rural areas. I think it's probably going to be a lot of red states you'll see. So my guess is you'll see something in Texas. You'll probably see something in Florida. Maybe you'll see something in New York.

• 1:22:48Jason Calacanis?

  Red states because Trump's a Republican or because they're easier when it comes to regulations?

• 1:22:53Adam Goldstein?

  I think both. It's also just easier to operate.

• 1:22:55Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:22:56Adam Goldstein?

  And so if you want to land a helicopter in California, there's a lot of rules. You want to land one in Texas, you put it on the grass, wherever you want.

• 1:23:02Jason Calacanis?

  You know, it's interesting. When I got my ranch in Texas, they were like, this is a perfect place to put a helipad. And I was like, hell yes.

• 1:23:08Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09Jason Calacanis?

  Like you can really put a pad down? And they're like, yeah, it's your ranch. You can do whatever you want. Now in LA, it used to be that people would land helicopters in their backyards. I don't know when that stopped. But what are the rules in LA now?

• 1:23:21Adam Goldstein?

  Each municipality has a different rules around, you know, the different permitting you need, the different amount of time that takes to get done, how you certify the helipad. If you need to certify the helipad.

• 1:23:29Jason Calacanis?

  So you basically can't do it.

• 1:23:30Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, it makes it very hard.

• 1:23:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Adam Goldstein?

  That being said, this is a safer platform than what already exists, helicopters. So I think there'll be a lot of loosening of that. Because it's just increasing safety to something they already do.

• 1:23:41Jason Calacanis?

  Now, New York City, that's the big one. I think Joby made an announcement that they're going to be at one of the ports. Yeah, you're contemporary. I don't know if I would describe you guys as competitors now because like the early days of say, EVs or self-driving cars, if this works, man, we're going to need 10 archers and Jobys to do it. But they're going to be out of Manhattan soon, yeah?

• 1:24:00Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, we both will operate out of the city. I mean, it's a wonderful place. It's already the biggest helicopter market in the US. So there's three big heliports that exist already, the West Side, East Side, and the downtown Wall Street heliport. So it's already naturally kind of configured. It is very complex congested airspace. And so I also think, you know, the way that this will come to market will be in, you know, relatively low volumes will gain the trust of the public. They'll allow us to keep scaling this stuff up. So you can start with maybe 10s of aircrafts and then, you know, maybe over five, 10 years, you scale it up to hundreds of aircrafts.

• 1:24:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's like the robo taxi and Waymo story. You start slow, build trust. Are you guys on the clock? You've been working on this for a decade, yeah?

• 1:24:37Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah. So it's the tech actually goes back to NASA 40 years ago, how to use multiple electric engines to fly airplanes. And then really kind of thanks to Larry Page and the early work at Zierro, they really helped, you know, bring a lot of that technology.

• 1:24:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Larry bet on two or three, right?

• 1:24:52Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, so he's been super involved. He was a huge part of the industry. And then if you go back, really Uber did a great job when they had the Uber Elevate platform.

• 1:25:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:25:01Adam Goldstein?

  Which really put it into the mainstream. That was around 2016.

• 1:25:05Jason Calacanis?

  With Blade, right? They were doing or?

• 1:25:07Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, they kind of, well, they really were like almost a research project to showcase what.

• 1:25:11Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right. I remember when Travis did that. Yes.

• 1:25:14Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah. And then 2018, Morgan Stanley had a hundred-page initiation report saying it's the next nine trillion-dollar market. That opened up the capital markets to everybody. And so that allowed us to do this.

• 1:25:23Jason Calacanis?

  You guys SPAC'd right after or during COVID, yeah?

• 1:25:26Adam Goldstein?

  2021, yeah.

• 1:25:27Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so right after COVID started to wane. And was that the right decision? I know these Sacks have been up and down. Being public can be a distraction. And you guys are a deep tech company with a long runway. What's it like trying to deal with shareholders in a public company? When, you know, you're in a multi-decade rollout of a product like this?

• 1:25:47Adam Goldstein?

  Well, I actually give a lot of credit also to the Reddit community. Because the retail army really helped allow Archer to raise the money it needed to raise in order to get to where it is. So we've raised around $4 billion of capital to date.

• 1:26:00Jason Calacanis?

  Four billion, wow.

• 1:26:01Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, and we'll probably, you know, over time, you know, raise more. But the stock is super liquid. Because it has such a huge fan base in the retail market, it creates liquidity, which allows the institutional investors to play, which allows the whole kind of cycle to keep going. So as long as we keep performing, there's this pot of gold at the end of the, you know, the Morgan Stanley sort of pot of gold. We should be able to keep stair stepping up the valuation, keeping everybody happy, raising the capital, keeping it going. Deep tech is extremely capital intensive.

• 1:26:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:26Adam Goldstein?

  And this was the right avenue for us, for sure.

• 1:26:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's really interesting when you think about it. Who is a better base of investors for long-term? Public markets, institutional investors, venture capitalists, private equity, or the lunatics on Reddit? It turns out the lunatics on Reddit, all due respect, I say that with like peace and love, like, they actually probably get it right because they know what consumers want.

• 1:26:48Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Jason Calacanis?

  And they're willing to go for it. Yeah?

• 1:26:51Adam Goldstein?

  They're also willing to kind of look past the quarterly earnings issues.

• 1:26:54Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:26:54Adam Goldstein?

  And really to say like, this is a technology they want. I mean, who wouldn't want it? It's safer than helicopters, they're super quiet, they cost less, it's convenience for everyone. Like, nobody loses here. This is a win-win type of product.

• 1:27:05Jason Calacanis?

  Where's your product out? You guys are flying. Run, obviously, where are you flying the runs currently?

• 1:27:10Adam Goldstein?

  So, two core places we fly, one is in Northern California, in the Bay Area. So, we fly at a Salinas, the airport there, which is about 90 minutes south of the Bay Area. And then also in the UAE. So, we have a great partnership with Abu Dhabi. Mubadala's been an investor, IHC's been an investor.

• 1:27:24Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Mubadala's an investor?

• 1:27:25Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, they've been a wonderful partner.

• 1:27:27Jason Calacanis?

  Ibrahim, yeah.

• 1:27:27Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, it's really opened up the country.

• 1:27:31Jason Calacanis?

  They're a long term, yeah, they're thinking in 50-year cycles, I think. How often do you fly this thing? What's the distance that it flies? And are there humans in it?

• 1:27:39Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, so we fly most days piloted flights. And so, you can't fly them without pilots. It's actually pretty easy to fly the planes autonomously or remotely, or automated is a better way to really describe it. But we fly them piloted and the goal is to work towards enough flight hours, enough confidence from us, from the regulators, that we can start operating a commercial service. We're getting there, it takes time to do that. I mean-

• 1:28:01Jason Calacanis?

  How often do you fly in it?

• 1:28:02Adam Goldstein?

  I haven't flown it, just the pilots do.

• 1:28:05Jason Calacanis?

  Why, they won't let you? You're the CEO.

• 1:28:07Adam Goldstein?

  No, you could. I mean, if you look at, and we're just sort of honest about flight test programs, it's, you know, there's a dangerous part until you kind of cross every T here. And if you go back in time, I mean, most of the big aerospace companies have had crashes with early platforms. So, you really try to be careful with just the test pilots, very serious testing, until you get to the point where you're close to the certification side.

• 1:28:27Jason Calacanis?

  Virgin Galactic, another SPAC, they had a tragic instance and, yeah. Aviation is dangerous in the early days. When will you be willing to get in one? I guess is the question we all want to answer, because we're not getting in until you do it every day.

• 1:28:42Adam Goldstein?

  Later this year, that'd be my guess.

• 1:28:43Jason Calacanis?

  Later this year?

• 1:28:44Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:44Jason Calacanis?

  Now, you married, you got kids?

• 1:28:46Adam Goldstein?

  Married, two kids.

• 1:28:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so we have the conversation with the wife, I assume?

• 1:28:50Adam Goldstein?

  Probably tell her after.

• 1:28:51Jason Calacanis?

  What's her, oh, but what's her position? When will she let you go in it?

• 1:28:54Adam Goldstein?

  She's a huge believer and supporter of everything I've done.

• 1:28:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:28:57Adam Goldstein?

  So, I think she'd trust me when I think it's time I would do it. She'd be okay.

• 1:29:00Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, continued success with it. It's obviously going to work, it's obviously going to change the world. What do we need to know, as we wrap here, about safety? And why these are much safer? Because the idea of even having a pilot seems a little bit performative, like, is it?

• 1:29:19Jason Calacanis?

  Just to make the passengers feel a little bit better? Because these things obviously are going to be flown by computers much better than pilots eventually. And eventually, I mean, like by the end of this year.

• 1:29:29Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, the challenge with autonomy is regulation and infrastructure. So even if you could do it, there's no rules in place to get that done. And even if the rules were in place, how does the system work? Because today, air traffic control is very, very manual. If you listen on ATC, when you fly in somewhere, they're guiding you in. Turn 10 degrees to the left, drop 1,000 feet.

• 1:29:48Jason Calacanis?

  That makes total sense. So the infrastructure doesn't allow for autonomy?

• 1:29:52Adam Goldstein?

  Yet.

• 1:29:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yet, even though autonomy, we would both agree, would be safer this year than a pilot? Would you agree with that statement?

• 1:30:00Adam Goldstein?

  Assuming you could work your way into the air traffic control system, definitely. The actual, you know, humans make mistakes, computers make a lot less mistakes. And so maybe no mistakes. And so it certainly, that's the dream, that's the goal. With the advancements of LLMs, it actually allows this interesting period of time where you can now communicate with a machine in a way you couldn't really before. And so there's this probably middle ground that happens where there's pilots talking to machines, machines talking to pilots. And so you can start to implement different systems. And that's where I think it goes first, actually.

• 1:30:29Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, that's fascinating. So when you're clearing with the tower, it's just that the VTOL is talking to the tower?

• 1:30:36Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, it's think about like, you know, instead of like looking at your map, looking at the weather, you know, understanding, you know, all the different trackers you have to follow, the machines can just do that and make the decision and say to do this. So it actually is easier for a machine to do it than a human. And again, I would encourage you, listen to air traffic control.

• 1:30:52Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I've listened to it, yeah. I'm obsessed with it. There's an incredible channel on YouTube called Blanco Lirio. Have you ever heard it?

• 1:30:58Adam Goldstein?

  No.

• 1:30:58Jason Calacanis?

  So go on YouTube and Patreon and throw this guy five or 10 bucks a month.

• 1:31:02Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Jason Calacanis?

  He's based out of, he's a pilot, commercial pilot, and he's based out of Lake Tahoe area. And all he does is break down every aviation incident. And it's amazing, and I've become a little bit obsessed with it. And he just breaks it all down. It's almost universally.

• 1:31:20Jason Calacanis?

  The pilot makes some series of incredibly poor judgments. I'm talking about in private aviation as opposed to commercial aviation. And yeah, it's just great that there's somebody like him out there. Now, how many rotors on the thing?

• 1:31:33Adam Goldstein?

  Uh, 12.

• 1:31:34Jason Calacanis?

  12. Now, is that six with two in each, or is it like 12?

• 1:31:38Adam Goldstein?

  It's 12.

• 1:31:39Jason Calacanis?

  Which means 12 motors?

• 1:31:40Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, there's actually redundant motors. There's actually 24, but we for simplicity, call it 12.

• 1:31:45Jason Calacanis?

  So there's 12 redundant motors, 24, and then how many blades, how many are they double blades? Like one on the bottom, one on the top?

• 1:31:52Adam Goldstein?

  Um, there's five blades on the ones on the forward part of the wing and four blades on the ones on the back.

• 1:31:56Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 1:31:57Adam Goldstein?

  There's lots of different reasons.

• 1:31:57Jason Calacanis?

  Why is there a difference?

• 1:31:58Adam Goldstein?

  One are used just for the lifting portion. So the ones in the back and then they stop. And then the ones in the front are used for both lifting and the cruise. So they have different configurations.

• 1:32:09Jason Calacanis?

  What scenario do you have the most concern about and then work on the most? Because with 12 of these, anybody who's flown, you know, just a toy drone, if you come up to it and you push it, you hit it, it just immediately gets back. Uh, now with 12 of these and 24 and your technology, I'm sure it's even smoother and better than that. So what do you worry about? Like some catastrophic electronic failure? Are the electronic systems redundant? The battery failure?

• 1:32:39Adam Goldstein?

  Everything is redundant. Like you have to design.

• 1:32:41Jason Calacanis?

  What do you worry about?

• 1:32:42Adam Goldstein?

  Um, from a safety perspective, today, I would say the biggest thing is the pilots. That's probably the thing you worry about the most.

• 1:32:47Jason Calacanis?

  Take the pilots out. Now what are we worried about?

• 1:32:49Adam Goldstein?

  Um, you're always worried about just different cascading failures.

• 1:32:52Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:32:52Adam Goldstein?

  So, you know, there was an incident in the industry where one of the companies had a, um, a propeller blade dislodge and it cascaded their aircraft. You don't really know that unless it actually happens.

• 1:33:02Jason Calacanis?

  Blade comes off, hits the other blades?

• 1:33:05Adam Goldstein?

  And then the whole thing cascades. So you don't really know if that's going to happen until it happens. You have the math behind it that you can try to predict. But and when scenarios happen, you know, so there's, you know, you try to protect against cascading failures.

• 1:33:16Jason Calacanis?

  How many of these 12 could go out and the thing could safely land?

• 1:33:19Adam Goldstein?

  Well, one of the beauties is we're also building it to be able to take off land conventionally. And so you could lose a lot. We have a big 50-foot wing. You can glide. The glide area is huge. You can get up to max 10 miles a glide. So you can do a lot of things here. That's the only way to really certify at the standards the FAA wants you to do it. So it gives you a pretty big...

• 1:33:37Jason Calacanis?

  You have those nice wide wings. You can glide in.

• 1:33:39Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:40Jason Calacanis?

  What height? What's the ceiling on these now?

• 1:33:43Adam Goldstein?

  They can go up to 11,000 feet. There's no real reason to. It's not pressurized. You really want to fly helicopter range, 500 to 2,000 feet.

• 1:33:50Jason Calacanis?

  What do you take from the helicopter industry away from, you know, when they have accidents? What happens? It seems like those pilots particularly are really skilled, but also maybe on the margins, maybe I'm reading into this, cowboys, a little bit eccentric? Yeah?

• 1:34:11Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, I mean, it depends. I mean, every scenario is obviously like pretty different. The beauty behind these aircrafts is the redundancy allows you to just have a capability to certify with near zero single points of failure or zero single points of failure, where helicopter doesn't have that. So, you know, if you think about one big rotor, there's a lot of parts that go into making that one big rotor work. And if that one part fails, you have a catastrophic event. So that can happen. They're mechanical, complex machines.

• 1:34:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40Adam Goldstein?

  And so, you know, with the EVTOL side, you reduce that complexity.

• 1:34:45Jason Calacanis?

  But if you were to say it's X times more safer without us like, you know, holding you to it, if you were to ask the 10 engineers working across the 10 companies in your field, not you, but what do you guess those 10 engineers would say? It's currently this times more safer than helicopters.

• 1:35:05Adam Goldstein?

  Well, that will be a standard that the FAA, you know, makes us certify to. So the question will be, what's the ultimate standard? So 10 to the minus 7, 10 to the minus 8, 10 to the minus 9, 1 in a billion, 1 in 100 million?

• 1:35:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but you think it's twice... What would your...

• 1:35:18Adam Goldstein?

  It'll be an order of magnitude safer.

• 1:35:20Jason Calacanis?

  So 3, 4, 5 times safer is a pretty reasonable goal, 10 times a reasonable goal? Why are you here at Davos? You virtue signaling about being all electric? What's going on?

• 1:35:30Adam Goldstein?

  Selling aircraft.

• 1:35:32Jason Calacanis?

  You're here to do business?

• 1:35:33Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:33Jason Calacanis?

  Who are you selling to? Just nation-states?

• 1:35:35Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, so geographically, obviously, easier to sell stuff in the US or kind of close to the US. Here, you get to meet different companies and countries. The Middle East, GCC has been very active. Africa's been very active. Asia's been very active. So there's a lot of great folks to go see where you can kind of line them all up. So we'll announce, you know, deals here. We'll, you know, sign things here that will ultimately get announced. So it actually is very beneficial from a business standpoint to come here. And most of the companies here are AI. So there's a lot of AI talk. We're a non-AI predominant company. There's a lot of AI in what we do, but we don't sell AI. And so we sell infrastructure, and it's the perfect place to meet the ministers of transportation.

• 1:36:15Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect, yeah, super efficient.

• 1:36:17Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, the heads of state. So there's lots of opportunities to, you know, kind of bring Western tech to these countries.

• 1:36:21Jason Calacanis?

  I think they see having VTOLs as a point of pride for their country, yes?

• 1:36:26Adam Goldstein?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:36:27Jason Calacanis?

  Countries like this is, I don't want to say vanity project, but it is something they can point to and say, look, we got here first.

• 1:36:32Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Jason Calacanis?

  They could see the UAE. I could see Saudi. I could see Qatar.

• 1:36:36Adam Goldstein?

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:36Jason Calacanis?

  Kuwait, all feeling that way, like, oh, we have this.

• 1:36:39Adam Goldstein?

  Absolutely. There is another element where, you know, Davos is sort of a non-defense oriented. They don't like you to talk about defense here. We do have a really strong partnership with Androl. And so we've been building the new kind of autonomous attritable aircrafts. We talked about one of the programs.

• 1:36:54Jason Calacanis?

  What was the second word? Autonomous?

• 1:36:54Adam Goldstein?

  Attritable, they call it.

• 1:36:55Jason Calacanis?

  Attritable? What does it mean?

• 1:36:56Adam Goldstein?

  It's not a 20-year plane. It's not expendable like a one-time missile, one-way type of product. They call it the space in between. They call it attritable.

• 1:37:03Jason Calacanis?

  If you lost it, it wouldn't be a big deal.

• 1:37:05Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, so the goal is, so one of the programs we've talked about is one is called the Project NICS. It is an autonomous collaborative attack helicopter drone. So think like, sort of like, you know, an Apache type of platform. So there'll be a big manned asset and they'll have a bunch of drones that fly with it. So that's a program we're working on with Androl. We build the core aircrafts and Androl missionizes it. So think sensors or munitions, those kind of things.

• 1:37:29Jason Calacanis?

  But it would fly with a bunch of little drones around it to protect it?

• 1:37:33Adam Goldstein?

  We are effectively, they're not little, but we're, it's, you know, huge aircraft. We, it's almost like, think about it this way. If you have an Apache, which is a 50 to 70 million dollar asset.

• 1:37:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Adam Goldstein?

  And it has a person in it, you're, you don't want to risk it for lots of reasons. One, there's a person, two, it's super expensive, three, very hard to replace. If you're not willing to risk it, it's not that much of a deterrent. And so when you do risk it, you want to be certain you can have these things come back. But what if I could make an aircraft that does the same thing, the same fighting power, maybe even more fighting power, at 90% lower cost with no, with no pilot?

• 1:38:04Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, that's key, because these pilots are worth 25 million dollars each. They literally have a friend who was in special forces and he told me that they put a number on each of them, how much they had invested in the replacement cost of a Navy SEAL, of a, he wasn't in the Navy SEALs, but one of these kind of type groups, you could actually know the replacement cost of a person. And they called them assets, you know, these top elite folks. So you have no problem working in defense, that's awesome.

• 1:38:29Adam Goldstein?

  No, I'm, I'm a, I'm a patriot, I'm a super believer in what the US is doing. And they've been, you know, as a country, extremely helpful to new industries like Archer and EVTOLs.

• 1:38:41Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe more so than the last administration?

• 1:38:44Adam Goldstein?

  A lot more so, just a quick example on that was, I could not get a meeting with the former Secretary of Transportation.

• 1:38:49Jason Calacanis?

  Couldn't get a meeting?

• 1:38:50Adam Goldstein?

  Wouldn't take a meeting, and I know he's busy.

• 1:38:52Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, wait, you're a publicly traded retail company who's meeting with the Gulf monarchies being courted.

• 1:38:59Adam Goldstein?

  Zero meetings.

• 1:39:00Jason Calacanis?

  And you requested meetings?

• 1:39:01Adam Goldstein?

  Requested meetings.

• 1:39:02Jason Calacanis?

  How many times?

• 1:39:03Adam Goldstein?

  Multiple times.

• 1:39:03Jason Calacanis?

  And they literally, this is Brian Armstrong's story, he wanted to meet with the SEC, they're like, yeah, no, we're good.

• 1:39:08Adam Goldstein?

  Secretary Duffy comes in and all of a sudden, like, monthly, it was, it was, we want to make sure we can re-industrialize America. This is important, aviation leading the world is important, and modernizing air traffic is important. And if you can help in all that, we want to hear from you. What, what can we do to help you? And that was resulted, by the way, in the executive order that came out. And so that helped the industry, because I showed them a path, because we won the exclusive for the LA 28 Olympics, to fly air taxis around, you know, that city during the game. And so we'll sort of control the air during that. And I said, I need a path to make sure I can do that, because this will be a huge opportunity.

• 1:39:44Jason Calacanis?

  I think people have not taken, the Democratic Party has not taken this to heart yet. It's not about... Being subservient to the technology industry, or capitalism, or corporates. It's about winning the future. And part of winning together for American companies is at least meeting with them and hearing the vision. Like, how does that hurt the previous Secretary of Transportation to meet with the VTOL companies? How did it hurt the SEC to meet with Brian Armstrong or any number of crypto companies? It was, they were in contempt, it seems, in hindsight, of the entire technology and business industry.

• 1:40:26Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah, I mean, in the end, if this works, imagine the jobs we will create. Imagine the, you know, GDP contribution we will create. I mean, the FAA administrator, you know, kind of publicly keeps saying 11% of GDP touches aviation. And so it's capped because of air traffic. We have to upgrade that system.

• 1:40:44Jason Calacanis?

  I'm red-pilling myself as we speak here.

• 1:40:46Adam Goldstein?

  But it's like, if you believe that, then you would think you'd want to unlock that. And it will help everybody, like, literally no one loses. So you would think you'd want to do that.

• 1:40:54Jason Calacanis?

  It was almost like they had, like, an ax to grind with capitalists for some crazy reason. And the opportunity to embrace the industry was always there for them. Whether it was incompetence or intentionality, the result is the same. They set back the industry years by not engaging. Greenland, how much should we pay? What do you think? What do you think it takes?

• 1:41:15Adam Goldstein?

  I will tell you.

• 1:41:16Jason Calacanis?

  Jump into it, make yourself an interesting guest. We should take it, right? We should just take it, or we buy it?

• 1:41:21Adam Goldstein?

  I saw something that said, um, there is an offer that was

• 1:41:24Jason Calacanis?

  It's kind of the buzz here.

• 1:41:24Adam Goldstein?

  That was more than the GDP of Denmark. And so, uh, I was like

• 1:41:28Jason Calacanis?

  The offer was big. I mean, there's 55,000 people. Let's make a deal. How much do you all want? I mean.

• 1:41:35Adam Goldstein?

  Well, the funny thing of my meetings here, so I come to sell, you know, aircraft. That's what we come to do. And I will get asked that question nearly every meeting. And I, I mean, literally, back in Silicon Valley. Like no one's, I mean, yes, we've heard it on the news, of course. Yes, of course, it's important, but people aren't talking about it on a every hour basis. I come here, every meeting, there's people commenting on it. So there's definitely an obsession here.

• 1:41:56Jason Calacanis?

  And Trump negotiates by tweet or by Truth Social, whatever they call that platform, by truth, by post. Say what you will, this has been on the agenda for America for a century or two, and it's a critical deal. If Trump gets, President Trump gets incredible enjoyment out of negotiating a deal and solving a long-term problem for America, I say let him, let him cook.

• 1:42:20Adam Goldstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:20Jason Calacanis?

  Let him cook.

• 1:42:21Adam Goldstein?

  I agree.

• 1:42:22Jason Calacanis?

  Greenland, we're here. 51st state, let's do it. All right, listen, continued success, and thanks for coming on the pod again. We're very lucky to have Chase Lochmiller with us. He's the CEO and co-founder of Crusoe Cloud, C-R-U-S-O-E, not Caruso, Crusoe Cloud.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  You got it.

• 1:42:36Jason Calacanis?

  Which is, or was, the first NeoCloud, really. You were kind of...

• 1:42:41Speaker 04

  We were part of this space. Early contingent of NeoClouds, you know, between us and CoreWeave and, yeah, Lambda.

• 1:42:46Jason Calacanis?

  How did, did that occur because you had anticipated buying a bunch of H100s before everybody else and you had the inventory? How did that start that you got such a good lead?

• 1:42:56Speaker 04

  Well, so we had started well before Hopper came out. You know, we were, you know, Crusoe's a business that's always taken this very energy-first approach to developing computing infrastructure and really changing, you know, the, the, the, the motion from trying to find, trying to co-locate, compute in these, in these network hubs and, and really focusing on where we can access abundant energy. So, you know, we, you know, we're experimenting a lot with, you know, the Ampere generation, which preceded Hopper, so a lot of A100s. We built out this, you know, high-performance cloud platform that was meant to enable AI inventors to, you know, do incredible work. You know, we launched before ChatGPT came

• 1:43:39Speaker 04

  out, and so, you know, sometimes you're in the right place at the right time.

• 1:43:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, timing was good.

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, timing worked.

• 1:43:45Jason Calacanis?

  And...

• 1:43:47Jason Calacanis?

  Your biggest customer by far is Oracle and OpenAI?

• 1:43:52Speaker 04

  Correct. So, you know, we're a vertically integrated business, which means we're focused on not just the compute layer, but also the energy development, the data center development, as well as the, you know, application layer where we're, you know, running things like our managed inference service. And, you know, as this boom really took off, you know, the scarcity of data centers became very apparent, and our ability to build those large-scale AI data centers very quickly became a very in-demand, you know, skill set. So, please.

• 1:44:23Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, guys in the back, if you're talking, can you just take it outside because it's going to get picked up on the pod? Appreciate it. Three, two. So, why West Texas? Is it because the politicians there are pretty permissive in terms of giving permits and you can build quickly like Elon experienced with his big factory in Austin? Or is it because of energy?

• 1:44:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was really an energy-driven decision. So, you know, in Abilene, Texas, we had, you know, it's an area where a lot of actual renewables had been built out on the back of production tax credits. So, there was an abundant amount of wind and solar that was there that actually had issues with transmission. So, power prices were actually frequently negative. There were renewable energy producers that were having to curtail that could be producing power, but actually were shutting down because there was no marginal demand. And-

• 1:45:14Jason Calacanis?

  So, the grid didn't need their energy?

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:45:17Jason Calacanis?

  That's wild to think about. It's also wild to think about that Texas has the largest solar base of any state in the Union, yeah?

• 1:45:26Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And, you know, we went there and we said, "Man, you guys have too much energy. Hey, buddy, I got a..." Do I have a-

• 1:45:33Jason Calacanis?

  I got an idea!

• 1:45:34Speaker 04

  ...man for you. And so, we, you know, we have a 1.2 gigawatt substation there. We've also built a 350-megawatt gas plant on-site to energize one of the largest clusters of GPUs in the world.

• 1:45:47Jason Calacanis?

  So, was there gas under the actual data center, or they're shipping-

• 1:45:51Speaker 04

  No, no, no. We had access to a pipeline that feeds into, you know, 10 gas turbines that are on-site there.

• 1:45:57Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. And the gas turbines, those were a blocker for a while, too, huh?

• 1:46:01Speaker 04

  They still are. I mean, you know, gas turbines are a massive supply chain constraint as people look to energize compute infrastructure. I think a lot of people, we were really one of the first groups to be focused on, you know, natural gas powered data centers, doing things behind the meter, off grid. And I think a lot of people have sort of followed this pathway, which has created a lot of supply chain challenges with some of the major producers, folks like GE Vernova, you know, Caterpillar has a company called Solar that we work with very closely. You know, Siemens, Mitsubishi, and we actually recently did something with an incredible company Boom Supersonic.

• 1:46:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, Boom Supersonic was making the Concorde replacement, Blake.

• 1:46:41Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:46:41Jason Calacanis?

  Is the CEO.

• 1:46:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43Jason Calacanis?

  And they're making their own engines that go pretty fast. And so what was the idea there?

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, you know, they had reengineered this turbine for supersonic jet travel. And, you know, we, Colleen, my co-founder and I, were talking to Blake and said, hey, you know, could we use that to generate power instead of, you know, transport people over the ocean at supersonic speeds? And, you know, now we're, you know, their first large purchase order for 1.2 billion dollars of gas turbines to power AI, critical AI infrastructure.

• 1:47:13Jason Calacanis?

  It's wild to think about. The gas turbines and jet engines are not super dissimilar.

• 1:47:20Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I think this is the full playbook of, you know, GE historically, right? I mean, the reason GE Vernova exists is, you know, their leadership in terms of, you know, air transportation as well as power generation.

• 1:47:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and I wonder if, it's really interesting about that opportunistic thing for Blake to do from Boom Supersonic is that now that will allow him to fund his Concorde replacement, yeah?

• 1:47:46Speaker 04

  Absolutely. You know, power is a great business and, you know, we think he can make a lot of money as, you know, the scaling up of AI infrastructure occurs. And hopefully, you know, he's able to build those incredible supersonic jets that get us to Tokyo much faster.

• 1:48:01Jason Calacanis?

  And the Stargate project?

• 1:48:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:48:04Jason Calacanis?

  Is a $300 billion project? What's the number? Because there was a big announcement at the White House and there's been a little bit of, you know, wink, wink, like, these are numbers, we're kind of estimates. What's the realistic footprint of this?

• 1:48:21Speaker 04

  So, you know, I think Stargate has been a term that's been used to describe a lot of different things at this point. You know, initially, our campus was called Stargate and then, you know, Stargate was then a company for a while and then I think OpenAI sort of described it as all of their spend on compute is just sort of broadly labeled as Stargate. So I think the number is 500 billion and this incorporates, you know, chips, data centers, energy to ultimately power this intelligent infrastructure that's running and scaling both ChatGPT and all their other core services.

• 1:48:56Jason Calacanis?

  One of the blockers, in addition to the turbines, has been electricians and construction workers.

• 1:49:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:49:04Jason Calacanis?

  My understanding is you're paying two to three times what they were getting paid before the data center.

• 1:49:11Speaker 04

  No comment on exactly what we're paying the electricians, but they're very well compensated.

• 1:49:15Jason Calacanis?

  Am I in the right zone? That their salaries in the industry have doubled or tripled?

• 1:49:20Speaker 04

  Look, I think it's an incredibly exciting career path for anybody looking to do work with their hands and get well.

• 1:49:28Jason Calacanis?

  Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

• 1:49:30Speaker 04

  Yes. So, you know.

• 1:49:32Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, let's think about that for a second. No college degree.

• 1:49:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Jason Calacanis?

  You just have to be an apprentice as an electrician and you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And you need how many? Thousands, hundreds?

• 1:49:43Speaker 04

  Correct, so we.

• 1:49:44Jason Calacanis?

  But which one? Thousands or hundreds?

• 1:49:46Speaker 04

  Thousands. So I'll get into it in a second. So I'll give you an example. So in Abilene today, we have 8,000 people onsite every day. They're working day and night to bring this facility online as fast as possible so we can energize this.

• 1:49:58Jason Calacanis?

  And that's three hours west of Dallas.

• 1:50:01Speaker 04

  Correct, so it's in West Texas. You know, Abilene is a town of 120,000 people. So, you know, when you're hiring 8,000 people to work in that town, you can't source everybody locally. So we've actually had to bring in a lot of labor from all states.

• 1:50:14Jason Calacanis?

  And housing, I would assume.

• 1:50:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, housing, you know, housing, you know, the market's actually fairly efficient. There's a lot of people that won't be long-term permanent workers there. That are actually, you know, they bring mobile homes, you know, they collect a stipend. It's kind of a very, you know, efficient process in that regard. But, you know, long-term, we're going to have about 2,000 permanent workers at the campus. So there's both, you know, short-term job, you know, spike and boom in terms of demand for the construction and installation process. But there's also great long-term permanent jobs to operate the facility. And we have a power plant there. There's a lot of mechanics that are going to be operating this facility. But this is just one campus. We have another campus in Armstrong County, Texas, that, you know, has close to 3,000 people on-site every day.

• 1:51:00Speaker 04

  We have another project in, outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, that we've announced we're planning to build a 10-gigawatt campus.

• 1:51:05Jason Calacanis?

  Why Wyoming?

• 1:51:07Speaker 04

  Wyoming is a state that, you know, is very rich in natural resources and energy. And, you know, there's been really favorable, you know, public-private partnerships in terms of making this project happen. You know, there's a tremendous amount of gas there to sort of support what we're doing. And one of the very cool things that we're focused on is actually trying to bend the arc of energy production towards sustainable resources. So even with the gas, Wyoming is a place where you actually have primacy on what's called Class 6 wells. They're post-combustion carbon capture and sequestration disposal wells, where you can actually take the carbon that comes out of, you know, the combustion process of a natural gas turbine, and you can pump it underground and permanently sequester it.

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  And there's actually an incentive there called 45-Q, where you get paid by the government to do this. And it doesn't quite cover the cost of doing it, but for customers that care about sort of the impact and the sustainability of the campus and the carbon.

• 1:52:05Jason Calacanis?

  They're not putting the carbon into the atmosphere.

• 1:52:07Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:52:08Jason Calacanis?

  Putting it underground.

• 1:52:09Speaker 04

  They can produce power from gas in a carbon-free way, which is a really exciting, you know, value proposition we can.

• 1:52:14Jason Calacanis?

  How are batteries? I think we saw Elon bought a and is building. He's got his own lithium refinery and he's building, obviously, his own batteries. And they're one of the larger battery manufacturers. How do batteries play into all this currently?

• 1:52:32Speaker 04

  There's a bunch of different ways batteries play into it. I think, you know, you sort of need batteries in these low voltage UPS systems that sort of, you know, help operate the electrical system of the plants.

• 1:52:45Jason Calacanis?

  Just to normalize and base load or?

• 1:52:48Speaker 04

  Yes, actually, one of the issues that we're seeing is, you know, when you think about these large scale AI factories, when you're deploying giant clusters of GPUs, you know, the entire data center is acting as a single computer. It's running one single workload that's training some breakthrough foundational model. And what that results in is actually massive load fluctuations in the actual power draw. Because what they're doing is the chips are basically running compute cycles and then publishing the data over the network to all the other, you know, GPUs. They can sort of be in sync with one another. This causes this massive fluctuation and sort of overall power draw. Well, utilities hate that. It's terrible for the turbines. So you really need a way of actually normalizing that.

• 1:53:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you gotta smooth it out.

• 1:53:31Speaker 04

  That power draw, exactly. So we've actually been able to solve that with a one hour battery. That's actually a medium voltage battery energy storage system. That's something that we've deployed. You know, there's a lot of other use cases for batteries. I'll give you another example. We're actually working with Elon's former co-founder and partner at Tesla, J.B. Strobel.

• 1:53:50Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, he's doing the recycling of them.

• 1:53:52Speaker 04

  Correct. So he has a business called Redwood Materials that's focused on recycling of batteries. And he has this massive supply of end of life EV batteries, batteries coming out of digital cameras, all these like, you know, this, this whole collection of, of batteries that are sort of at the end of their life. And so as a demonstration, to show people what we could do in terms of, you know, cost competition as well as, you know, deployment, we actually deployed a fully off-grid solar plus battery energy storage system that powers an AI data center 24 hours around the clock with a power price that's lower than the power price in Northern Virginia. And we're able to do that because you're basically taking these batteries that,

• 1:54:33Speaker 04

  you know, were in an electric vehicle and maybe the range was 300 miles and now it's 250 miles. So the, you know, the owner trades it in and it's like, okay, this car is done, right? But there's still a lot of juice left in those batteries.

• 1:54:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:54:47Speaker 04

  There's a lot of life in those batteries. So we're able to really make use of them in a second life to power these AI data centers.

• 1:54:53Jason Calacanis?

  You're under massive pressure to deliver these data centers, correct?

• 1:54:57Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, yeah, you could say that.

• 1:55:00Jason Calacanis?

  Compared to where you were like two or three years ago, maybe let's say three or four years ago, you were knocking on doors saying, hey, do you need a data center? Now your door is being knocked down.

• 1:55:08Speaker 04

  Um, I think there's just, I think it just really speaks to, you know, the demand for compute. I think people are constantly having this conversation of like, are we in an AI bubble? Uh, you know, I think there's just an incredible, you know, there's no, nobody has enough compute. None of the, you know, leading labs, none of the leading application companies can get their hands on enough compute and that's just driving an incredible amount of urgency to deliver infrastructure, both the chips and the data center.

• 1:55:35Jason Calacanis?

  So even this year, going into 2026, you're seeing the same amount of inbound, hey, we need more, we need more, we need more, what do you got? Or was last year like people put in their big orders for the next couple of years?

• 1:55:47Speaker 04

  Um, no, we're seeing things accelerate.

• 1:55:51Jason Calacanis?

  Who are the new customers? Cause obviously Elon, Sam Altman, I'm sure A W S, I'm sure, well, I think Google does their own, yeah?

• 1:56:01Speaker 04

  Um, Google, I think, uh, I don't want to speak for

• 1:56:06Jason Calacanis?

  You can. This is all in. If you want to be on all in, you gotta speak candid. Just tell us what you heard at the cocktail party.

• 1:56:13Speaker 04

  Google does, does a mix of, you know, self-perform development as well as sort of outsourcing.

• 1:56:18Jason Calacanis?

  So they do do some outsourcing, yeah.

• 1:56:20Speaker 04

  Correct. Um, but you know, I think all of the leading labs, we're seeing a tremendous amount of demand. Uh, so you know, Anthropic, OpenAI, you know, Google.

• 1:56:29Jason Calacanis?

  Elon builds his own.

• 1:56:31Speaker 04

  Elon builds his own.

• 1:56:32Jason Calacanis?

  What was your take when you saw him build Colossus under that short timeframe? Like your team must be like, that's just not possible. And then he did it.

• 1:56:41Speaker 04

  Uh, no, I don't think we thought that at all. I think I was like really, you know, rooting for him.

• 1:56:45Jason Calacanis?

  No, but did he, my understanding is he did it in half the time anybody else had ever done something like that.

• 1:56:53Speaker 04

  It, I mean, it depends on how you sort of measure these things. I think Colossus was a that Colossus one was sort of this unique case where he had this in large scale industrial building, he had power to the building. And really what he was doing was what I would call like the tenant fit out, which is basically the in the data hall build out of the cooling distribution units, the RPPs, the electrical systems, the hot aisle containment systems that really, and then you sort of roll racks of GPUs into these.

• 1:57:18Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:57:19Speaker 04

  So they were able to execute on that incredibly fast and you know.

• 1:57:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Jensen said he'd never seen anything like it.

• 1:57:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:24Jason Calacanis?

  He seemed to think it was like a, a unique thing that occurred in your industry.

• 1:57:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, Elon's the GOAT of, you know, a modern industrialist, so you know.

• 1:57:34Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:57:35Speaker 04

  It's hat tip to, you know, him.

• 1:57:37Jason Calacanis?

  You as running, not competitive to him, but building the same things, you have to look at that and study it a bit. How did he get it done so fast? What do you think? How do you think he was able to do it so fast?

• 1:57:48Speaker 04

  I think Elon does an incredible job of, you know, breaking down, you know, a, a large industrial process into a lot of sub-processes and understanding constraints and really taking a first principled approach of, you know, how do I build things as quickly as possible? How do I parallelize things as quickly as possible?

• 1:58:06Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:58:06Speaker 04

  And.

• 1:58:07Jason Calacanis?

  Has that informed some of your thinking? Yeah?

• 1:58:09Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, he's been an inspiration from, you know, building the Giga Factory to everything he's done at, you know,

• 1:58:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:15Speaker 04

  SpaceX and Starbase, you know, it's all incredibly inspiring. And, you know, we try to channel that same sense of incredible urgency, you know, parallelizing a lot of the work, you know, we, we, we self-perform a lot of, you know, procurement functions and engineering functions. And then, you know, work with a, a lot of, you know, very ambitious folks on the, on the construction side. There's actually a bunch of folks that worked on the Tesla Giga Factory in your new hometown in

• 1:58:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Speaker 04

  Austin.

• 1:58:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Speaker 04

  That are working on our campus in, in Abilene, Texas. So there's a lot of overlap and sort of methodologies.

• 1:58:50Jason Calacanis?

  There's been a lot of talk of. And I think Brad Gerson kind of started this discussion on his BG2 podcast when he had Sam Altman on. How does a company with 20 or at the time 12 billion, now it's 20 billion run rate, how does OpenAI pay for a $500 billion build out? In your contract with them and your relationship with them, I'm assuming this is being done in stages, not one giant $100 billion contract, but stages, yeah?

• 1:59:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think it's important to understand, like, you know, in a lot of ways, my role as CEO of Crusoe, like, half my time is really spent on like, risk management, you know?

• 1:59:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:59:29Speaker 04

  The amount of capital going into this is just enormous. And, you know, all that capital is not going to come from like, dilutive equity capital, the raising of the parent company, we have to raise project equity, we have to raise a lot of debt. And what debt folks are focused on is, how is this person going to pay me back? And so it is very much something that's being evaluated in the capital markets. And, you know, this has actually been a major role that we see these large-scale, blue-chip, investment-grade businesses play a major role in sort of catalyzing the capital formation you need to build these giant infrastructure projects. So when you have a, you know, a company like Google, or, you know, a company like Microsoft, or a company-

• 2:00:09Jason Calacanis?

  And they're sitting on 100 billion in cash and they throw 10, 20 billion to the bottom line every quarter.

• 2:00:14Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 2:00:14Jason Calacanis?

  They can just fund it from their existing businesses, but Elon and Sam have new businesses, or even Anthropic, they have to come up with that money somewhere, yeah?

• 2:00:22Speaker 04

  Correct. So, you know, in our case, I'll give an example in Abilene, Texas, because that's the most public one. You know, we have a long-term lease agreement with Oracle, right? So we have a long-term, you know, 15-year offtake agreement with Oracle. And so they're committed to sort of paying us for that, you know, timeframe. So that helped unlock a lot of the construction debt and the capital we needed to build this project. So we worked with JP Morgan on, and a number of other folks were in the syndicate, Bank of America, Apollo, you know, MSNBC, you know, a bunch of different-

• 2:00:56Jason Calacanis?

  And they must be very excited about this opportunity.

• 2:00:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think everybody's really, really excited about, you know, the opportunity to, you know, build the infrastructure that's going to power the economy in the future.

• 2:01:05Jason Calacanis?

  And there's, this is collateralized by a data center which has inherent value. If-

• 2:01:12Jason Calacanis?

  A customer of yours was unable to meet their commitment. Based on what you've told me today and shared with the audience, and I appreciate your candidness. That is the currency of the all-in branded candidness. There would be somebody else to take that capacity.

• 2:01:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's the biggest argument I make when people ask about the AI bubble is like, well, you know, imagine a scenario where like OpenAI went out of business, which I don't think is going to happen.

• 2:01:37Jason Calacanis?

  There are people saying that that could happen.

• 2:01:39Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:01:39Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not saying that. You didn't say it.

• 2:01:41Speaker 04

  Imagine they did go out of business. The reason they'd go out of business is because some other model company, whether it be Anthropic or Gemini or Grok, like really blew them out of the water.

• 2:01:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and they're kind of in fourth place right now, according to some of the benchmarks.

• 2:01:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you know, put parking that all aside. They have incredible adoption, incredible platform.

• 2:02:00Jason Calacanis?

  Billion users.

• 2:02:01Speaker 04

  But if that were to happen, the group that massively surpassed them would have so much demand for that product. They would be jumping for joy to step into the seat.

• 2:02:11Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 2:02:12Speaker 04

  To take over that compute capacity. So I think, you know, if you believe that AI is going to be an important aspect of, you know, the operating system of the economy in the future. You know, this infrastructure is going to be very useful and valuable to whoever the winners are in that future state.

• 2:02:27Jason Calacanis?

  And people don't know this, but you've also made a bet on startups. You've been incredibly generous to give credits to startups. And maybe you could talk a little bit about how you made that decision to play the long game. Because I would think there's probably some people on your board or in your own organization says, hey, listen, we got some big fish here. We got whales. What are we doing with the minnows? You're specifically targeting up and coming startups to be their provider.

• 2:02:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, you know, I really think about Crusoe, you know, being a vertically integrated business is like, we offer three core things, right? We can build the data centers and we can rent those to customers. We really only focused on a small subset, maybe five customers, these very big tech companies. And that's really their key bottleneck, right? That's their key pain point. They're not, you know, renting out capacity from clouds because, you know, Meta doesn't know how to run a GPU cluster. Like, of course, they know how to run, you know, big clusters of GPUs. They need data centers, right? So we're trying to unblock that critical pain point for them. On our AI cloud platform and our infrastructure as a service platform, we offer managed clusters of high-performance GPUs and we're a very large partner with Nvidia. And that's really critical infrastructure for the startups that you're talking about.

• 2:03:39Speaker 04

  This is the development of new AI-native applications, you know, coding assistant tools, you know, managed inference solutions, video generation, image generation, you know, all sorts of chatbots and, you know, AI applications that are sort of proliferating in the world. You know, we offer great sort of managed GPU clusters there. And then we also offer serverless AI services like our managed inference product, where we're charging people on a dollar per token basis. So we can kind of charge on a dollar per KW rent on the data center, dollar per GPU hour on the GPU, or a dollar per token on sort of the managed services.

• 2:04:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and that's thousands of customers, tens of thousands eventually. And that's where you're going up against Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, yeah?

• 2:04:24Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 2:04:25Jason Calacanis?

  Those are some pretty significant competitors. How do you compete with those kind of folks?

• 2:04:30Speaker 04

  You know, I think, I think when you look at those really large hyperscalers, they're, you know, they're incredible platforms and they've been able to accomplish so much. But they really are the outsourced IT solution that's meant to be everything to everyone. Which means, you know, their lowest common denominator isn't AI, it's every reason.

• 2:04:49Jason Calacanis?

  You need an email server, you need storage, it's everything.

• 2:04:53Speaker 04

  We are relentlessly focused just on the AI use case and the AI application to deliver the most reliable, most high-performance computing infrastructure directly for the AI use case and application. That's all we care about, which means all of the optimizations we're making on the high-performance networking system, the compute side, as well as the storage and how people access their data, is entirely in service of AI use cases.

• 2:05:17Jason Calacanis?

  There's going to be some technological advancement in the coming years that... Really ramps up what we're able to do in building large language models and doing inference. What do you think that'll be? A lot of people have talked about optics and just the transfer, transport layer. Some people talking about the raw horsepower, other people talking about cooling. Where do you, when you talk to some of the hardware providers, where do you think we'll see the next step function? In the next, let's call that the three to five year window? And because you must be thinking about that, skating to where the puck's going? Because you did that with your current company, your current offering, I should say.

• 2:05:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, look, I, I think what's so fascinating about this space and what gets me so excited is that it's actually like the culmination of like the, the, the, like so many different engineering disciplines. And it's like the pinnacle of human achievement across so many different engineering disciplines from, you know, the cooling systems and the chemical engineering and uh, you know, the electrical systems and, you know, the, the physical electrical engineering that needs to go into these chips to, you know, the silicon systems and the chips uh, and the networking and the, and the, and the software engineering. It's, it's really a full stack solution that ultimately produces intelligence. Now getting to specific challenges that we see in specific trends, we're seeing

• 2:06:36Speaker 04

  uh, everything go to higher density configuration, so more power in the rack. Um, a traditional data center, maybe, you know, five years ago was like 15 KW. You know, 20 years ago was probably like 4 KW in a rack. Um, you know, the current generation of blackwell chips uh, is 130 KW in the rack. Uh, the next generation Vera Rubin is going to be 250. Um, and then Vera Rubin Ultra is expected to be 600. We're ultimately going to get to one megawatt racks. One megawatt, to give a perspective, is roughly the amount of power of a thousand homes.

• 2:07:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's like a small town.

• 2:07:09Speaker 04

  In a data center, right?

• 2:07:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Um, so a rack will be a town.

• 2:07:12Speaker 04

  A rack will be a town.

• 2:07:13Jason Calacanis?

  And then a couple dozen of those will be a city.

• 2:07:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, it'll be a New York city in a, in a data.

• 2:07:18Jason Calacanis?

  Crazy.

• 2:07:19Speaker 04

  Um, and you know, we, you know, Crusoe has uh, over 45 gigawatts in our pipeline to, you know, and I know you're from New York, that's about like, you know, eight to 10 New York city's worth of power, depending on. How you measure it. So, you know, it's an incredible amount of energy infrastructure that's going to need to come online to help energize this layer of compute. And there's, like I said, there's challenges in every, you know, domain from cooling to networking to.

• 2:07:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, as that density arrives, this 10 to 1 density you're talking about, the heat also arrives. Yeah.

• 2:07:55Speaker 04

  Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of exciting stuff happening.

• 2:07:58Jason Calacanis?

  And what do you think of the small modular nuclear getting close to hydro?

• 2:08:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:08:06Jason Calacanis?

  What do you, you know, obviously gases the layup, gas is everywhere. We're leaders in that solar. That feels like a layup and battery, that combo to add, but hydro, I don't know if there's much left.

• 2:08:20Speaker 04

  We're actually doing a lot with hydro, you know, in the Nordics. So Norway, in Iceland.

• 2:08:27Jason Calacanis?

  The fjords.

• 2:08:28Speaker 04

  We have, yeah, in Iceland, you know, there's abundant geothermal. It's like this sort of geological phenomenon and there's ultra low cost geothermal energy and also a lot of hydro there.

• 2:08:40Jason Calacanis?

  So that's a one, two.

• 2:08:41Speaker 04

  You get the one, two punch there.

• 2:08:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And I don't know if you guys heard, but America just acquired Iceland. That was like the rim shot off of the Greenland. We.

• 2:08:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08:50Jason Calacanis?

  That wasn't a mistake.

• 2:08:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08:52Jason Calacanis?

  We're taking both. I mean, or you're giving us both.

• 2:08:55Speaker 04

  It's like Greenland.

• 2:08:56Jason Calacanis?

  We don't ask for much. We don't ask for much. Okay. It's a very simple request. We're like a little Iceland, a little. We have data centers. You may have heard of big data, big data centers in the fjords. Listen.

• 2:09:09Speaker 04

  But to your comment on small modular nuclear reactors, we are very bullish on SMRs and.

• 2:09:15Jason Calacanis?

  Have you signed a contract yet or are you in negotiations?

• 2:09:17Speaker 04

  Four contracts that we've signed.

• 2:09:19Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 2:09:19Speaker 04

  We're actually hoping to energize the first AI, AI factory powered by an SMR in 2027.

• 2:09:25Jason Calacanis?

  2027, that's next year, bro.

• 2:09:27Speaker 04

  I know. And, and one of the ways we've been able to do this is it's actually going to be at the Idaho National Lab. Where you actually are, you're, you're outside of the regulatory domain of, of the NRC. It's considered experimental technology. So.

• 2:09:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes. Who's the partner on that?

• 2:09:45Speaker 04

  I don't think we've made it public yet.

• 2:09:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's okay. They're going to make some news here, journalists. No, I know because I, I was told this exact same insight by the company that's doing it, but I won't say the name of it.

• 2:09:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 2:09:57Speaker 04

  Well, I think, I think we can announce it.

• 2:09:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 2:09:59Speaker 04

  Let's, we should announce.

• 2:10:00Jason Calacanis?

  We should announce.

• 2:10:00Speaker 04

  Uh, the partner is Olo Energy. So, uh, they're an incredible partner.

• 2:10:05Jason Calacanis?

  Isn't it amazing that for solar, it was something we haven't been able to do since the seventies? And now it's like, yeah, we're gonna do solar. It's absolutely necessary, so we're gonna do it.

• 2:10:17Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:10:18Jason Calacanis?

  What do you attribute that to?

• 2:10:21Speaker 04

  You know, I think there's this like, human ingenuity and sort of the passage of time and sort of the relentless pursuit of efficiencies. Like, I just think, uh,

• 2:10:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:30Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's really incredible if you look at the cost curve of solar, just how much it's come down over the course of time. I think you're gonna see a similar thing play out in SMRs. Next gen geothermal, like, we're really excited about like innovations like Furvos made, uh, in terms of like being able to produce, uh, geothermal at scale at a very competitive price point, uh, leveraging a lot of the technology from fracking in oil and gas.

• 2:10:52Jason Calacanis?

  And we're not going to have this impact consumers' electrical bills?

• 2:10:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's a, that's, that's such an interesting story. You know, when we look at this problem, we say, look, a lot of the, you know, power on the grid is, is very saturated. A lot of the data center capacity is saturated. So it just makes sense for the technology industry that wants to bring online all of this new infrastructure to also bring online the power to, you know, that goes with it. And, you know, the incredible opportunity from my perspective is that when we bring on new power generation to support an AI data center, we're sizing it to the peak demand of the data center. Which mean, you know, and we're only using peak demand, call it like 0.1% of the time.

• 2:11:33Jason Calacanis?

  So you might have some excess.

• 2:11:35Speaker 04

  9.9% of the time.

• 2:11:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:36Speaker 04

  We have excess power that can be, that can support the local community, that can create an abundance of energy that drives down the overall cost for ratepayers in the local communities. People have lower cost power, we're gonna have advanced intelligent infrastructure that's driving massive efficiency gains in the economy. It's gonna be like a incredible future we're building towards.

• 2:11:54Jason Calacanis?

  And this is something that I think the technology industry could be self-aware enough to understand if we're making this incredible.

• 2:12:03Jason Calacanis?

  New business, it's a great way to share it with other Americans. Hey, maybe your energy bill will get lower or eventually free.

• 2:12:12Speaker 04

  Absolutely, and you're already seeing this trend unfold. I mean, we've taken this energy first approach. You saw Google recently make the acquisition of Intersect Power. You know, Sheldon and his team there, incredible group of of energy developers. And they're doing that because they know they need to build the energy infrastructure that's going to support their compute needs in the future.

• 2:12:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, really appreciate you taking the time, Chase, and continued success. And what an amazing story, man. You you really got there early. And one of two things can happen when you get there early. You can just fail fabulously, or you can just absolutely crush it. And it's been the latter for you. But there might have been some moments where you stared at the ceiling at night as an entrepreneur and said, are we too early?

• 2:12:55Speaker 04

  It's mostly been up up into the right, you know.

• 2:12:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:58Speaker 04

  No real, no, I'm just kidding. Yeah, there's been, you know, tons of complex problems and challenges and, you know, moments of doubt throughout the the company's lifetime. But, you know, I wouldn't want to do anything else with my life.

• 2:13:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's nice to move from will the customers arrive to, OK, we've got too many customers. We really need to deliver.

• 2:13:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's actually, it's a it's a whole organizational mindset of like, will the customers ever show up? And this like fear to, oh, my God, I hope my customers are happy and delighted.

• 2:13:29Speaker 04

  Totally, but scaling people, scaling culture, scaling technology, it has its own set of challenges and problems.

• 2:13:36Jason Calacanis?

  The culture part is important.

• 2:13:38Speaker 04

  It's difficult. Yeah, it's difficult to go from a small startup of, you know, tens of people to, you know, more than 1,000 people.

• 2:13:44Jason Calacanis?

  And adding, what are you adding? 1,000 a year?

• 2:13:47Speaker 04

  We're going to add 2,400 people this year. Full time employees and then tens of thousands of contractors.

• 2:13:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I've seen that movie before. No, I mean, I watched it with Uber and Robinhood as they were adding, you know, one person a day, then it was five new people. And then now you've just got training and recruitment and just trying to keep that culture tight and make sure you hire the right people. Well, listen, you have to go, and we're way over time. I appreciate you taking the time to be so.

• 2:14:16Speaker 04

  It's fun, man. I appreciate it.

• 2:14:17Jason Calacanis?

  All right, give it up for Chase.

• 2:14:35Adam Goldstein?

  I'm going all in.