Coinbase CEO's Top 3 Crypto Trends for 2026 + More from Davos!

(0:00) Intro (0:37) Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong on Crypto Adoption (38:51) Cerebras CEO, Andrew Feldman on Compute Power (1:18:50) Gecko Robotics CEO, Jake Loosararian on AI and Physical Robots This episode is sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange - a modern marketplace and exchange for building the future. It all happens at the NYSE. https://www.nyse.com/ Featuring Brian Armstrong (CEO, Coinbase), Andrew Feldman (CEO, Cerebras), and Jake Loosararian (CEO, Gecko), this conversation explores how AI is changing work, infrastructure, and productivity in real time- from the builders shaping what comes next. Follow Brian: https://x.com/brian_armstrong Follow Andrew: https://x.com/andrewdfeldman Follow Jake: https://x.com/jakeloosy 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?

  This guy is literally gonna hover over us.

• 0:04Jason Calacanis?

  This pilot hates podcasting. What a prick.

• 0:09Jason Calacanis?

  The besties are broadcasting from the USA House at the World Economic Forum. Our episode is sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange. Are you looking to change the world and raise capital? Do it at the NYSE. The NYSE is a modern marketplace and a massive platform built for scale and long-term impact. So if you're building for the future, the NYSE is where it happens.

• 0:38Jason Calacanis?

  I'm Jason Calacanis. This is the All In Interview Show. Last minute, we got added to the roster here at the World Economic Forum, and we had time to do a half dozen interviews. And Brian was here. And this is your Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, of course, and friend of the pod. This is probably your fourth or fifth appearance on the pod. You come to Davos because this actually isn't for you about networking. This is about serious regulations on a global basis. Yeah.

• 1:10Brian Armstrong?

  Well, that's been the focus of this attendance at Davos is we are trying to get market structure legislation done for crypto. But actually, I mean, there is a lot of networking that happens here. We've done a lot of commercial meetings, you know, five of the top 20 global banks are now using Coinbase to build their crypto infrastructure into their products. We meet with heads of leaders of different countries and talk to them about economic freedom and how crypto can update their financial system. So there's all kinds of good meetings.

• 1:35Jason Calacanis?

  So you had embedded in there these partnerships with banks. Is that like a white label type thing so they can sell crypto to their customers? Is it disclosed which banks are doing that and how that works?

• 1:47Brian Armstrong?

  A couple of them are public. We've talked about integration with JP Morgan, PNC Bank.

• 1:55Brian Armstrong?

  You know, there's a couple of those that are not public yet, but five of the top 20 G-Sibs are now using Coinbase for that. And then we're also powering integrations with like BlackRock and you know, they they've said they want to tokenize every single one of their funds. And so a lot of these financial institutions are coming on chain, which is great.

• 2:10Jason Calacanis?

  And this is quite, I mean, I was thinking on the way over here, how you've really struggled to work with regulators over the last decade. I remember under the Biden administration, the 46th administration, you went to DC and were like, I'm here, I would love to talk to you. And they were like, yeah, we don't want to talk to you. Now, some people might have varying feelings about Donald J. Trump, our 47th president. But one thing he has nailed is interfacing with the business community and taking regulation and creating a legal path for crypto specifically very seriously. What's the, how's the last year, how have the, how have things changed for you in the last year?

• 2:53Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, well, I know you like to call balls and strikes. And I think just looking at it objectively, you know, the Biden administration really tried to unlawfully kill this industry in America, but from my point of view. And Donald J. Trump, you got to give him credit. I mean, he campaigned on this idea of making the United States the crypto capital of the world. He's kept his promises. He's leaned in and tried to get clear rules and regulations passed so that American companies can thrive, American consumers can earn more money on their money. And he understands also it's an important political issue. There's a huge base of, there's like 52 million Americans who've used crypto now.

• 3:26Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 3:26Brian Armstrong?

  And they want to see clear rules. They want to see this, you know, get better financial services in the United States. It's also frankly, a global competitiveness issue, right? I mean, China just announced that they're going to pay interest on their central bank digital currency. Some of the largest stablecoin issuers are still offshore. He wants to repatriate that capital and bring it into the US.

• 3:46Jason Calacanis?

  This is the crazy thing we went through. I was never a fan, calling balls and strikes, of people doing things that weren't buttoned up. But I was even less of a fan of the prior administration, just not Meeting and saying, hey, this is uniquely different. Let's figure out a way to give you a path to do it properly. And so, you know, in our industry, sometimes you have to reinterpret rules. Airbnb, Uber, the biggest success of my investment career, like they bent rules too. Crypto bent some rules. Some cases, people broke them and they paid the price. But here we are. Now the rule set is being refined.

• 4:28Jason Calacanis?

  The most important one, I think, for you is stable coins and your competition with the bank. You have banks as partners, but you're also a competitor to them, yeah?

• 4:39Brian Armstrong?

  Well, I'd say it's mostly collaborative. I'd say of the bank CEOs that I've met with here, most of them are actually very into crypto. They're, they're starting to integrate it. You know, I met with one of the top 10 global banks in the world yesterday and the CEO told me crypto is my number one priority. We view that this is existential. We're all in, we're going to put.

• 4:59Jason Calacanis?

  Why is it existential for them? What do you think?

• 5:01Brian Armstrong?

  Because there's seeing, it's like, it's like when the internet came around, you know, and you had Amazon competing with Barnes and Noble, or you had blogs competing with not New York Times in print, right?

• 5:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 5:13Brian Armstrong?

  And so anytime, there's always change happening in the world and you can think of it as an opportunity or you can think of it as a threat and bury your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening. But the reality is that crypto is massive, like something like 500 million people have used it globally. You know, Bitcoin was the best performing asset class of the last decade. The largest financial institutions of the world are now integrating this. And so at this point, I don't, I think it's foolish to pretend that this isn't happening. And we also, by the way, have the genius act, the stablecoin bill is now passed into law. So we're not going to undo that. That is, that is the law of the land, like Congress just put that into.

• 5:47Jason Calacanis?

  And it's very important because what David Sacks, my bestie, I think led there was, these have to be audited. These have to be above board. We can't have a run on stable coins, which let's face it, people anticipated Tether would have at some point. There were lots of fines they got. There was these attestations, people didn't know if they even had the resources they had. And now it's pretty clear you have to keep your assets in treasuries, correct?

• 6:18Brian Armstrong?

  That's correct. Under the Genius Act that got passed into law last year, US-regulated stablecoins have to have 100% of the assets stored in short-term US treasuries. So something like 30 days, 30-day treasuries are the max, I believe. So that's pretty much the safest thing you can get.

• 6:34Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 6:35Brian Armstrong?

  You're basically trusting the United States government is not going to fail in 30 days, which I think is a pretty safe bet.

• 6:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go safe bet.

• 6:41Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, and you know, I've been making this point as well that, you know, banks do something called fractional reserve lending. They actually don't store all your money there. They're lending it out. That's why they have such high regulatory overhead, because there can be a run on the bank. And it gives them a very unique business model. They can basically lend it out. You know, the old joke is like you lend it out at 6%, you pay 3 and you're on the, you know, the tea time by 3 o'clock or whatever. But that business model is not available to you unless you have a business, a bank license. But in a stablecoin world with 100% reserves, you don't need a bank license for that and you can give people more money.

• 7:19Jason Calacanis?

  Because it's safer.

• 7:21Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

  And we saw this. Silicon Valley Bank essentially had mistimed their allocations with treasuries, I guess. And what happened? They had a run on the bank. Literally, I was in a board meeting and in the board meeting on, I think it was like a Thursday, and the run happened Thursday afternoon. I get a text like, "Get your money out of Silicon Valley Bank." I'm in the board meeting, we're having, it's on the docket, like the third thing. So talk about Silicon Valley Bank and we have 100% of our money in there. Two of the board members are like, "We can't just take all the money out of Silicon Valley. They've been incredible partners for 30 years." I said, "How about we take out half so we can make payroll?" I insisted.

• 7:59Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Jason Calacanis?

  Literally that night, boom. And so the key issue now is your business model. You need to have revenue and the revenue from these stablecoins is paying some interest. And the people who are putting their money in there are being able to make some interest on their hard-earned capital. Yeah, that's the sticking point for you.

• 8:22Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, and it's not interest, it's a rewards program. This was carefully negotiated in the Genius Act. And yes, that's our view. I mean, look, in my opinion, it's actually...

• 8:31Jason Calacanis?

  What's the difference there? The reward program, we should think of it like American Express points?

• 8:36Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, I mean, there's lots of credit card reward programs. But the difference legally is that rewards can't be based solely on the balance you're holding. The customer has to do some sort of other activity like payments or trading, or they have a subscription to Coinbase One. So when customers do that, we actually pass along about 100% of the economics to them for holding those stable coins with us. And that's a big driver of growth. Now, you know, there's always been this balance between do people want to put their money in money markets, or do they want to put it as bank deposits? I think that that is not, crypto is not really new in that dimension. Like, it's just another flavor of this happening. And there's been a lot of hand wringing about, you know, this is going to destroy all the lending market. And like, I don't think that's true.

• 9:20Brian Armstrong?

  Like, money markets are already trillions of dollars, and there's high-yield checking accounts.

• 9:25Jason Calacanis?

  But these banks haven't had to deal with a disruptive competitor, a technology competitor who's really good at what they're doing. So they're a little bit nervous about their franchise.

• 9:34Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Jason Calacanis?

  Is my interpretation, am I correct?

• 9:35Brian Armstrong?

  Some, again, some of them are nervous, some of them are leaning into it as an opportunity. I think the latter, we want everyone to win here.

• 9:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Brian Armstrong?

  I think that's what, you know, I don't speak for the president, but like, my interpretation of his comments is that he wants all American businesses to win. There is a win-win outcome here. But if someone, you know, is going to try to undermine his legislation that just got passed in Genius, he'd probably, and I-

• 9:57Jason Calacanis?

  Is that what's happening now? The banks are trying to re-trade the deal?

• 10:00Brian Armstrong?

  I, you know, I don't want to, like, let me be careful here. I think there's the bank trade groups, which I believe are trying to undo the Genius Act.

• 10:08Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 10:08Brian Armstrong?

  It just got passed into law four months ago. And for us, that's a red line. I've talked to many others in the industry, that for them, that's a red line. I think we have to accept that that's law, and that's going to continue to exist. But that doesn't mean banks and crypto companies can both win in this new world.

• 10:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so this is just a classic tale of-

• 10:26Brian Armstrong?

  Incumbents and-

• 10:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, incumbents and new folks. And you want to partner with them, you want to enable it. You have a good partnership with Jeremy Lehrer, old friend of mine at Circle. Are they like the default stablecoin in Coinbase? Or how do you think about the relationship with them? How should we think about the relationship with them?

• 10:43Brian Armstrong?

  Yes, we've got a strong relationship with Circle. And USDC is the largest regulated stablecoin, because it is compliant under Genius in the US, they're compliant under MICA in Europe, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's another one that you're familiar with, which is still-

• 10:56Jason Calacanis?

  Tether, yeah.

• 10:57Brian Armstrong?

  But I think it's in the process of being-

• 10:59Jason Calacanis?

  They're trying to clean it up, is my understanding.

• 11:02Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Jason Calacanis?

  So that they can participate. The likely scenario is there'll be two Tethers, a United States one, and then that complies. And then there'll be the Wild West one outside the US. Is that what you've heard as well?

• 11:14Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, and I should mention, we don't have like an exclusive with Circle or anything like that. We actually list other stablecoins on our platform.

• 11:20Jason Calacanis?

  Do you list Tether?

• 11:21Brian Armstrong?

  We support it in certain ways, you know, especially people who want to convert Tether. But we support it. We also support PayPal's stablecoin. We're open to listing others too. So we don't have an exclusive on USDC.

• 11:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but you're not endorsing it. And you let people trade into Tether or you just let them trade out of Tether? Like, how does it work mechanically?

• 11:40Brian Armstrong?

  I think it's different in different countries. I want to make sure I get it exactly right. But in countries where we're allowed to do it, I mean, we support Tether.

• 11:46Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 11:47Brian Armstrong?

  It's nuanced.

• 11:48Jason Calacanis?

  Are you concerned about, or have you been historically concerned about Tether? And like their little bit of a loosey-goosey approach to regulations and trading? I'm giving it that descriptor, not you. But I would think having it on your platform with regulators pretty focused on it over the last five or 10 years and this, you know, belief that this thing could all come apart and create a run, that to you is just not worth the risk to be too close to it in case it does flip over, yeah?

• 12:19Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, we've definitely gotten questions on it. And look, I want to be careful here. I actually like the Tether guys. I think they've done a lot of good things in the world. There's people who really are, they're struggling with local currencies that have like 70, 100% inflation year over year. And so there was high demand for the dollar. They got great distribution in a lot of the emerging markets. I actually think they've done a lot of good for the world. But yeah, it's not currently compliant under the Genius Act in the US. And so it doesn't follow those same 100% reserves and short-term US Treasuries is my understanding. So people have to make their own determination on that. And I think other countries are following suit in terms of cleaning this up.

• 12:54Jason Calacanis?

  Is there in crypto now a way to give a rating that is sort of objective for consumers to say like, this one has this grade? And follows these regulations, hey, this one is follows this level. It's a lower grade and this one doesn't follow and it's, you know, it's a meme coin, whatever. This is the wild west, like no crying in the casino coins. Like, what is your responsibility as a platform or opportunity as a platform to like inform the people who are participating?

• 13:23Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. So what we try to do is have minimum listing standards. So if we believe that there's a cybersecurity risk to it, the developer could, you know, rug everyone, or if it's really, it's illegal from a compliance point of view, you know, there's a few different areas we look at. So if it meets the minimum bar, we will list it and then we let customers decide. I don't feel like it's our job to be recommending investments, you know, like in the traditional financial world, there's like these AAA rated bonds.

• 13:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 13:53Brian Armstrong?

  You know, and I, it always felt a little bit like those organizations that do the ratings kind of always be politicized and like.

• 14:00Jason Calacanis?

  Go see The Big Short.

• 14:01Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, exactly. So I don't, I think of it a little bit like the app stores, right? I mean, you, or the, or let's say Amazon, I mean, you want to have the everything exchange, you want to have the everything store, you know, everything that's legal should be in the store, but maybe there's customer reviews we could add at some point. We actually tried that for a little bit, like if you see a two out of five star thing on Amazon, you can still buy it, but it's kind of, at least you're informed. We tried making user ratings at one point. It didn't go that well because people were basically voting with their, whatever they like.

• 14:30Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, they're talking their book.

• 14:32Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, talking their book. So anyway, we, and then right now, we're in the regime of just disclosures and minimum listing standards.

• 14:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Which crypto projects do you find the most fascinating right now? The BitTensor one, some of these ones that are popping up that are actually providing technological solutions to problems, distributed computing, et cetera. I find those fascinating.

• 14:54Brian Armstrong?

  They are. I mean, people are trying to tokenize data centers and like oil reserves. I think, I think the biggest trends happening in crypto right now is number one, it's the everything exchange. So it's not just crypto you can trade, you're getting equities, you know, or increasingly getting closer to being able to trade on chain, you know, prediction markets are.

• 15:15Jason Calacanis?

  You have a partner for that, right?

• 15:16Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, we're working with CalShe currently.

• 15:18Jason Calacanis?

  CalShe, yeah.

• 15:18Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Jason Calacanis?

  Is that exclusive or are you willing to put anybody up on the thing?

• 15:22Brian Armstrong?

  It's not exclusive, so we're looking at others as well. I know you guys work with Polymarket or whatever on the.

• 15:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm a, I was one of the original angel investors in. Robinhood, and I think they're doing CalShi too. It seems like people are plugging different ones in. Polymarket's our favorite, yeah.

• 15:37Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, so we're talking to Polymarket, but we can also list our own prediction markets.

• 15:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, so you could fire up your own.

• 15:43Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, so anyway, we're long. I think that, yeah, the biggest trends are all assets are coming on chain for trading. Prediction markets are growing like crazy, and stablecoin payments are growing like crazy. Those are probably the three biggest trends in crypto right now.

• 15:54Jason Calacanis?

  When do you think stablecoins tip into the area of businesses? Two-part question. Businesses using it for payments, you know, maybe to reduce friction. You know, some designer does some work for Coinbase and makes your new logo, and you want to send him $25,000. It goes through a stablecoin. When does that start to happen? And then for consumers, when do people at a poker game start settling up with, you know, through their Coinbase account with a stablecoin?

• 16:20Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, so the biggest growth area over the last year has been B2B cross-border payments.

• 16:25Jason Calacanis?

  Cross-border.

• 16:26Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, cross-border especially, because there's a lot of these companies, you know, they might be buying goods from Asia or Europe, trying to sell it in their shop in Brazil or whatever it is. And they have to wait seven days, and there's high FX fees and all this kind of stuff to move.

• 16:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's crazy, the fees.

• 16:38Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, so that's been growing really nicely. You know, we launched a product called Coinbase Business, which is serving lots of small and medium-sized companies who want to do cross-border payments and invoicing and tax and accounting and all that.

• 16:49Jason Calacanis?

  How do you find those customers? I mean, that's like a real unique group of people, or do they just find you?

• 16:54Brian Armstrong?

  Currently, they're beating a path to our door. We actually have a huge backlog for people waiting to onboard, so we need to staff up that team. We also launched something called Coinbase Developer Platform, which provides, it's kind of like AWS if you want it. So that's like you can white-label anything like with the banks, but lots of other businesses are using that for wallets, trading, payments, staking, financing, all kinds of things.

• 17:16Jason Calacanis?

  You mentioned tokenization. I was talking with Vlad. He did a little experiment. Hey, why don't I tokenize some OpenAI shares? Sam wasn't, Sam Altman wasn't too thrilled with that. How do you think about that opportunity? I'm a private market investor. I would love to be able to take my early position in Robinhood or my early position in Uber as it was going up and put it into a market and let people trade it. And, yeah, that would be very interesting for VCs, for, you know, angel investors to be able to move that around. How do you think about it?

• 17:48Brian Armstrong?

  Well, I think it has to be done with the permission of the companies because you know, if you're a private company, you don't want your employees to be able to get liquid after one year. You're trying, you know, that's why you have vesting. It's why it's a retention mechanism. Let's all build this together and like maybe when we go public, because there are stories of founders who like took a little secondary too early, then the company didn't work out and it's, you know, bad offers. So I think what's going to happen in crypto is that in the private markets, like first of all, we should make on-chain capital formation way easier for private companies. So if you want to go, this is what we're chatting with the SEC about and others is like, you know, can you go register a security? Right now, you'd only be able to raise money from accredited investors in the US. I know you and I agree

• 18:31Brian Armstrong?

  on this. Like, we'd like to expand how you can become an accredited investor.

• 18:34Jason Calacanis?

  And there is a bill right now that's working its way and it would basically mean the SEC, and they've already been charged with this, but they, I don't know if you've studied the SEC at all, they tend to take their time and then not do what they've been told to do. And that was one of the things they were supposed to do is create an accreditation test.

• 18:52Brian Armstrong?

  Well, this, I'd say this SEC is actually moving very quickly, but

• 18:55Jason Calacanis?

  This one is, yes.

• 18:56Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. But yeah, I think that would be a more fair way because otherwise it's kind of like a regressive tax, like only rich people can get richer on private investments. But anyway, I think on-chain capital formation is going to be massive for private companies. I think eventually like you'll actually just be able to go public totally on-chain too. And yeah, these markets are just going to get

• 19:16Jason Calacanis?

  Would lower the cost massively, reduce the friction and increase the democratization of wealth creation.

• 19:23Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Jason Calacanis?

  If you think about when you were a private company, like you had all this pent-up demand, people trying to buy the shares like crazy. They were all doing backdoor kind of shady stuff, popping up SPVs. I don't know if you've been following the SPV market now, but there's like, it's turned into a boiler room. It's no longer Chris Saka representing Twitter and, you know, doing an orderly thing or Elon doing every six months, an orderly thing where SpaceX keeps control of it. Now people are going out raising money from dentists and civilians, high net worth individuals to buy SpaceX or Andro or whatever it is. And then they go try to find the shares and they charge them 10% load in fee, no carry.

• 20:02Brian Armstrong?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:02Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, think about how crazy that is.

• 20:04Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, there's such high demand for some of these large private companies and, you know, it's kind of a good example of like the unintended consequences of higher regulation sometimes.

• 20:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 20:13Brian Armstrong?

  Like, you know, Sarbanes Oxley and all that kind of stuff really cut down the number of how long companies stayed private before they went public. And then, yeah, I mean, Uber and Airbnb, a lot of these things like they, all the money was made by private investors or accredited investors, like, you know, yourself. And then when they finally went public, it kind of went sideways.

• 20:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, Airbnb, Uber, they all had like a five year indigestion period, I would say. You know, and it, and some people, I think Instacart wound up going from 30 billion down to 10 billion when they went public. And it was like, okay, we got to dig out of a hole the last series of investors. And that is the unintended consequence of this because you don't have anybody setting a proper valuation for the company in some reasonable way. What about funds? You know, I get approached by a lot of people offshore, et cetera. Hey, take your next seed fund, you're going to do a $50 million fund, let's put it on the chain. And then, hey, if you were one of my LPs and you were like, oh, I need liquidity, I could just sell it to somebody else. Or if I was an LP in a Sequoia fund and I wanted to sell you the interest, you could buy it for me and we could just take our wallets out and zip, zip.

• 21:13Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely going to happen. I mean, Coinbase launched a product actually called Coinbase Tokenized. So we're helping any fund or real estate project or anybody who wants to tokenize their products. And it just democratizes access, it increases demand, it gets rid of a lot of the back office fees, gets rid of the settlement risk because it can be settled instantly on chain. And there's some very innovative companies, I mean, like BlackRock, Apollo, like the top funds in the world are putting, they've come out publicly and said they want to tokenize every single one of their products. It's absolutely happening.

• 21:42Jason Calacanis?

  How do they keep control of it? Because you have this more liquid, back to unintended consequences. This would be downstream effects, second order effects, third order effects. What are the third, second and third order effects that would happen if a venture fund or a REIT were on chain? Have you thought that through? Have you thought it through?

• 22:01Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, I mean, there's different types of funds. Some are going to be only available to institutions accredited, some would be open to retail. And so for the retail side, I mean, you could actually get. I don't know, like tens of millions of people around the world in five minutes to all put in. The average price might be a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars, right? So it starts to really democratize access. I mean, we actually just published this this report recently and people have heard about the unbanked. But there's actually four billion adults who are unbrokered as well, which means they don't have any ability to invest in these high quality assets. So it's like, this is the engine of wealth creation for capitalists, you know, like you and I. A lot of people are just stuck. The only way they can earn is from their labor, right? And they they want to probably put like, even if they have a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars, they might want to put

• 22:47Brian Armstrong?

  10% of that into the S and P 500 or Coinbase stock or whatever, Nvidia, whatever. And they can't do that.

• 22:52Jason Calacanis?

  But they can use PrizePix, they could use some other thing. No, and I like PrizePix, I use PrizePix to bet on Knicks parlays. But they they wind up putting it somewhere else. And why not being able to, you know, if they want to bet on the Knicks, that's fine, but or go to Vegas, that's fine too. And play in a poker tournament, but yeah, maybe they hear about this company LinkedIn because they work in the HR department. And everybody in the HR department's over the moon about it. That rank and file 75K person working in HR, they understand what the next big product will be. They'll know Indeed or LinkedIn's going to work and they can make a life changing bet with just a thousand dollars. They make it a thousand X return.

• 23:30Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's a financial literacy component to this as well. And I think actually the AI agents are now getting really good. We've integrated one into Coinbase app. It can kind of teach people about dollar cost averaging and, you know, tax loss harvesting. So there's a the financial literacy is a part of it. But then, yeah, let's make high quality investments available to them and it's just like lifting people out of poverty. It's great.

• 23:53Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you're thinking about the whole globe, but just thinking in the United States, a lot of what people are upset about. And the topic we've been talking about a lot is the rise of socialism in

• 24:04Jason Calacanis?

  New York, specifically California. I'm not sure if you're still a resident, I won't put you on the spot here, but.

• 24:09Brian Armstrong?

  Considering options.

• 24:10Jason Calacanis?

  Considering, I mean.

• 24:11Brian Armstrong?

  As we all are.

• 24:12Jason Calacanis?

  I, two years ago, I moved to, three years ago, I moved to Austin. I was like, I'm done. I just the social issues and, you know, I saw the writing on the wall. I mean, I actually think there's a chance that that California goes bankrupt. And I said that on the podcast, like, this feels like it's trending towards insolvency. I never thought they would get to the wealth tax of just seizing people's assets.

• 24:30Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Jason Calacanis?

  What's your take on all that?

• 24:33Brian Armstrong?

  I was reading something this morning which said that actually just the people have already left, which is probably like, my estimates would probably be 20% of the billionaires have already left in California, that it's already created a negative 10 billion tax hole, even with the amount that they hope to raise from the people who stay.

• 24:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Brian Armstrong?

  So, it's one of the biggest cell phones I've ever seen. It's a disaster. And I, you know, I'm torn actually because there's always kind of this question of voice or exit, right? Like, voice, do you try to fix it from within? Exit, do you leave, like you did? And I think the incentives are strange because on the one hand, like, I love California, but on the other hand, it's been kind of a, it's like an abusive relationship, you know, it just keeps coming back with another thing and another thing. And in some ways, like, if you do make the decision to leave, you don't have really much incentive to try to fix it at that point. You actually want to get a lot of the builders and the top talent out of California at that point and just all resettle in a new place that is welcoming to us and businesses.

• 25:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't think people understand how easy it is for somebody who's in a certain strata to, is already operating globally. I'm on planes and on four different continents every year, you know, like, it doesn't matter where I am. It matters my wife and my kids are happy and they love the place we live and we love Austin. And then, the thing I've seen, probably one of the hardest thing you had to deal with, with your employees and your team at Coinbase is the price of their housing. Like, how many times did you try to recruit somebody to come to California?

• 26:02Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Jason Calacanis?

  And it's like a family of, you know, four, and they need private school, they need a house, and you're like, oh my God, what is their nut going to be here?

• 26:10Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. The nut, I love that expression. There was a great South Park episode on that. But, yeah, I mean, you're right, that's a major barrier whenever we make an offer to somebody in California, you know, for New Limit, the biotech, like, that's always like, well, my cost of living is going to double. Like, you need to pay me more. So, it's getting expensive.

• 26:29Jason Calacanis?

  It winds up flowing through to you, the business owner.

• 26:30Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, it does. I mean, San Francisco had this kind of like revenue-based tax that was very punitive on financial services companies. Stripe moved out when that happened.

• 26:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think Marc Benioff regrets supporting that one.

• 26:44Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 26:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. But, in fairness, he did want to... Finance the homeless industrial complex, which has been completely ineffective in reducing the number of homeless individuals because they're not homeless, they're addicted to drugs. A home doesn't help that problem.

• 27:01Brian Armstrong?

  Exactly. I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here. But yeah, I think people would have a lot more tolerance to pay higher taxes if they felt like it was working. But the history of the last 10 years in California is that the budget has gone up dramatically and the services have gotten worse. It's like, it's actually creating the wrong incentives. Like, the more money we spend on homelessness, the more homeless people are. So, you know, and then the waste and fraud, oh my gosh. Like, you guys interviewed Nick Shirley and all that. I think so.

• 27:29Jason Calacanis?

  What do you, I mean, what could we even guess is the level of abuse in California? It's gonna, it's gonna make Minnesota look like peanuts.

• 27:37Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  Such a big economy with so many NGOs and so many homeless organizations, taking down hundreds of millions of dollars in San Francisco alone.

• 27:47Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Jason Calacanis?

  So, tell everybody about the side hustle, your other company.

• 27:54Brian Armstrong?

  The biotech?

• 27:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, well, when Coinbase went public in 2021, you know, I got some liquidity from that. And I just, I thought it through and I was like, all right, I want to be CEO, continue to be CEO of Coinbase. Being a public company CEO is a really cool thing. I just feel like we're at the beginning of our journey. But I also felt like I wanted to start to use some of that capital to go after these like, big bets, right? I was kind of a little inspired by Elon, actually. I think, you know, he did the thing with PayPal and X. And then, you know, he went into these like, the world of atoms, not bits, right? It's actually like, in software is more forgiving. Startups are all hard, but software is a little more forgiving because you have higher margins. The world of atoms is much less forgiving. So, anyway, I was lucky enough to meet some really amazing co-founders that came together with this idea in the longevity space.

• 28:40Brian Armstrong?

  And it's called, you know, there's the fundamental science behind it. It's called epigenetic reprogramming. It's sort of, you can reprogram your cells to restore function they had when they were younger. There was some really cool research being done. I hosted a couple dinners. Anyway, I decided to fund these guys and a bunch of other people have invested now. And I'm a board member. I've been helping them in certain

• 28:58Jason Calacanis?

  And the name of it is?

• 28:59Brian Armstrong?

  New Limit, yes.

• 29:00Jason Calacanis?

  New Limits.

• 29:01Brian Armstrong?

  So they've been incredible progress.

• 29:03Jason Calacanis?

  When will they have a product? This feels like a 20-year investment, not a two or five.

• 29:08Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. Well, biotech does move more slowly, but it's moved faster than I would have thought. I thought this was going to be like five years of just basic research. But it turned out, actually, within the first two or three years, they were able to successfully demonstrate reprogramming of human cells to the sort of function they had when they were younger. And the first drug candidate is probably going to go into clinical trials next year. So.

• 29:29Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 29:29Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Jason Calacanis?

  That's super rewarding. Five minutes. Yeah. Okay, great. So

• 29:37Jason Calacanis?

  coming out of Davos, what's your take on the state of the world? Everybody, when they get here, seems to it seems like the ESG, DEI, kumbaya stuff has switched in the last year or two to, you know, brass tacks, deal making, whether it's between countries and businesses. Like, this is turning into a business conference that used to be this is whatever he's telling me on the streets, in the, you know, in the houses. It's about business now. And on the margins, there's a patina of, you know, globalization versus nationalism. What's your take on the state of the world in 2026? Talking to regulators, talking to, you know, people who work in government?

• 30:23Brian Armstrong?

  I think you're right. I mean, I've only been at Davos once before, but it did feel more, you know, how do we make a global government? How do we do lots of ESG and DEI? And that's really not what anyone's talking about now. I think partially it's because of Larry Fink coming in, the new leader, in fact, you know, more or less. And I also think it's because of Donald Trump.

• 30:43Jason Calacanis?

  I mean. Yeah, he shook it up.

• 30:44Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, like the numbers that the United States is putting up in terms of GDP growth and low inflation and just that business environment. It's like, hey, how do we all win? That's how you create prosperity for everyone in society. I do think it actually benefits everyone. Like, you know, even the poorest people in society are they do the best in high economic freedom countries that are, anyway.

• 31:02Jason Calacanis?

  Growth solves a lot of problems.

• 31:04Brian Armstrong?

  It does. It does.

• 31:05Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, and the growth is objectively, calling balls and strikes, spectacular. We have not seen this level of GDP since we pumped a bunch of money and printed a bunch of dollars during COVID.

• 31:16Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Jason Calacanis?

  5.6 GDP is pretty spectacular. Let's hope it keeps up. Unemployment, very reasonable, 4.6, lowest of our lifetime. I think 4.3 was the lowest it hit. Inflation, yeah, closer to 3 than 2, but you know, the actual average has been like 2.8, 2.9. So the 2 is the target. Yeah, and so we're right around the average, not hitting the target yet, but I think we'll get there. So, yeah, it seems like-

• 31:38Brian Armstrong?

  Growth does not come from government spending, right? That's like the key, this is Keynesian economic argument that I think is basically wrong. Like, growth comes from having deregulation, having low-cost energy, allow the private markets to build.

• 31:53Jason Calacanis?

  Let them cook.

• 31:54Brian Armstrong?

  And have clear rules about what's allowed and not, and then create a level playing field. Everyone competes, the consumer benefits, the companies benefit, all the employees, the shareholders. Like, capitalism is like the biggest win-win, you know, like someone had a great rant about that recently.

• 32:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Brian Armstrong?

  And so, we're seeing the private companies in the United States really cook. It's great.

• 32:10Jason Calacanis?

  Right. And if you're cooking, you create more jobs, hopefully, pay more taxes, all that just starts the cycle in the right direction. How do you? I'll end on AI. Big debate on the pod. You haven't been on with the four of us in a while, but when somebody gets sick, we'll definitely rotate you in. Everybody loves when you are on like the quartet. You're like a fanfare, by the way. But I'm curious what you think about AI and job displacement. Sax and I have been debating this. When is it going to be here? Is it here? Young people can't find jobs, but we're still at a pretty low unemployment rate overall. But then Elon's position and Bernie Sanders' position is in sync. Hey, listen, it's going to be a lot of job displacement. So, how do you think about it? Obviously, Amazon also is the one I'm watching because

• 32:53Jason Calacanis?

  the idea that somebody's going to drive packages or pack packages in the age of Optimus and RoboTaxi and Waymo sounds crazy. So those jobs are going away. How do you think about job displacement? And what are you seeing with the most AI-first employees in Coinbase?

• 33:09Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah, well, just zooming out for a second, I think crypto and AI are the two most important technology trends happening in the world. And what's cool, most people don't realize, actually, they're going to come together because AI agents need to get work done and they have to do payments. And the whole traditional financial system is built around kind of knowing you're a human behind every product with you upload your ID. Oh, know your customer, yeah. Yeah. So AI agents, I think, are going to use stable coins and crypto wallets. Know your agent. Well, I don't even know if you need to know that. It's just, but yeah, anyway, that's one of the important trends that we're trying to help happen. In terms of job displacement, I don't know, maybe this is a bit of a techno-optimist take, but I actually think, you know, if you go back and look at like the 19, early 1900s, I think it was like 80% of the US population was working in agriculture. Yeah.

• 33:54Brian Armstrong?

  And so that's like hard manual labor out in the fields. And when agriculture got automated, you know, now it's like 3% or something of the workforce working. Yeah, that would happen over 30 years, yeah. Yeah. And so I think they would look at what you and I do for a living, like, we're just having a cool conversation in Davos, talking, they'd be like, that's not a real job. Like, real job is like manual labor in the fields. Right. You're on vacation all the time. But we think of it as a job. And, you know, people who are like typing on a keyboard, but you get to sit in an air-conditioned office or whatever. It's stressful, that's for sure. It can be stressful, but that's just, I'd rather be doing that than be doing backbreaking labor in the sun, digging a ditch or something, right? So I think that job displacement is like not a bad thing, actually, if it means that people can do

• 34:38Brian Armstrong?

  new kinds of work and new kinds of job. Now, is there going to be a transition period? Yes. I basically, I think if the AI plays out as we all think it will with robots and a lot of, there will be job displacement, but it means that we'll be in a world of more abundance and people are going to have jobs that's like they're streaming on video games on YouTube or whatever. Like, I don't know what it's going to be, but. They'll think about the future. They'll think about like great philosophic, you know, philosophical works might be written.

• 35:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Brian Armstrong?

  Because we don't have to burden ourselves with like the tedium of packing boxes. So I, I'm basically an optimist on it. I think it'll be good.

• 35:12Jason Calacanis?

  I'm pretty optimist about it as well. I just, having watched the robot taxi self-driving thing.

• 35:19Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Jason Calacanis?

  And just watching the velocity that it's getting better and having watched the Uber story up close for 12 years, I'm like, yeah, that's gonna happen in six. I think it's just like the, it's gonna just.

• 35:30Brian Armstrong?

  Self-driving?

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, feels to me. And the thing I'm starting to see in the field is you have in Wuhan there and Beijing, they're having protests and they're saying, well, we're just gonna give out a certain number of self-driving license. We're gonna contain it. And then you have Boston and a couple, and California now, they're saying, hey, listen, we're only gonna allow a certain number of robot taxis. Or Boston's like, we're not gonna let you have them here. We're gonna protect these jobs. So this is gonna become, I think, one of these very class, you know, debates we're gonna have over the coming years. But what about employees in the company? You have the same number of employees as you had a couple of years ago? You over-hired for a bit, maybe, or hiring for growth? Now, how do you think about hiring versus hiring and training young people versus just

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  automating stuff or just having those AI? You must have some people on the staff who are using Claude Co-Work or.

• 36:20Brian Armstrong?

  Sure.

• 36:20Jason Calacanis?

  Something and they're just like 10x knowledge workers. Developers are obvious, but.

• 36:25Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 36:25Jason Calacanis?

  Talk to me about knowledge workers and what you're seeing with your most AI-first employees.

• 36:30Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. So one of the big pushes we made in the last year was we got our own internal hosted AI model that was connected to all of our data sources, right? So it's like every Slack message, every Google Doc, every Salesforce data confluence, you know. So now this is all linked up in one, like the data is all aggregated and you can ask these agents. So every team's legaling it, sorry, every team is using it, legal, finance, everything.

• 36:55Jason Calacanis?

  It's like the oracle of Coinbase.

• 36:57Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. And I've started to ask it really, it's not just like prompting it, hey, can you write this kind of memo for me or something? It's like, I'm asking these AI agents now.

• 37:07Brian Armstrong?

  As CEO, like, what should I be aware of in the company that I might not be aware of? And it'll tell me, did you know that like, there's actually disagreement on this team about the strategy? And I was like, actually, I didn't know that.

• 37:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 37:16Brian Armstrong?

  Because it can read every Slack message and every, every Google Doc. And then, you know, I've been prompting it like, it, I actually, Toby on my board, he, he said, this is like, it's called, he's calling it reverse.

• 37:26Jason Calacanis?

  Toby from Shopify.

• 37:27Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. He, he said, this is like reverse prompting. So instead of telling the AI agent what you want to do, you ask it what you should be thinking more about.

• 37:35Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 37:35Brian Armstrong?

  And.

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  It's a mentor.

• 37:37Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah.

• 37:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's a coach.

• 37:38Brian Armstrong?

  Yeah. Like, what could make me a better CEO? And it's like, well, I noticed, I looked at all, how you spent your time in the last quarter. And here's how you said that you wanted to spend it, but you actually spent like 32% of your time on this instead of 20. And it'll, I've asked it other questions like, you know, what's the thing that I changed my mind on the most over the last year? Things like that. So.

• 37:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Brian Armstrong?

  It's been, it's now becoming like, it'll, it'll like prompt you with information you should be thinking about instead of the other way around.

• 38:04Jason Calacanis?

  I recently did this, and I don't know if you play with Claude Co-Work yet? Have you played with it this week?

• 38:10Brian Armstrong?

  Played with, there's Claude Opus 4.5 or something.

• 38:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but there's Co-Work, which is kind of like, you describe what you want to do as a knowledge worker, and it starts to build it. So instead of doing vibe coding and saying, hey, I want to write code for this, you just describe like, what do you want the end application and the result to be? And then it kind of, like a wizard kind of takes you through it. It's pretty scary because I connected my Notion to it, my Slack to it, and my Google Docs, and it did the same type of thing. I was like, tell me about myself. And it was like, whoa, you need to spend more time with your founders that are winning, as opposed to more time with your internal team. It was really interesting to analyze your, your teams. And I think that's going to be like the future of this. All right, listen, Brian, you got a lot more meetings to do. Thanks for coming on the program. I'm thrilled because my guest started building AI chips seven, six, seven years,

• 38:58Jason Calacanis?

  six, seven years before ChatGPT was launched. Andrew Feldman is, of course, the CEO of Cerebra Systems, and they are building Wafer Scale Engine, WSE. Yep. That's the category of chips you're working on. And they're for inference? For inference or for training? Both. Or for training. And you have one with you.

• 39:18Andrew Feldman?

  I do. So here is a way for Scale Engine. Remember, usually chips are the size of a postage stamp.

• 39:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Andrew Feldman?

  And so this is, say, fifty-six times larger than a B200.

• 39:29Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 39:29Andrew Feldman?

  And it's a four-trillion transistor part. And for AI work, big chips process more information, and they deliver results in less time. So you can get faster results for your your query.

• 39:41Jason Calacanis?

  And what does that cost for the typical system today? And how does it compete with like the H100, 200s?

• 39:47Andrew Feldman?

  Well, the first one cost us half a billion to me.

• 39:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. First one I heard is the most expensive.

• 39:52Andrew Feldman?

  Turns out the first one's the kicker.

• 39:54Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 39:54Andrew Feldman?

  Right.

• 39:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 39:55Andrew Feldman?

  These come in a system.

• 39:56Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 39:57Andrew Feldman?

  All right. And we can deliver the system on-premise.

• 40:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Andrew Feldman?

  Or you can use it in our cloud.

• 40:02Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 40:02Andrew Feldman?

  On-premise, they're about a million, million and a half, depending on how you have it configured. And on, in the cloud, you can rent it by the token. So by the million tokens, it'll vary by different models, from fifty cents a million tokens to several dollars per million tokens. Or you can rent it by the month or the year.

• 40:20Jason Calacanis?

  How did you know, seven years before ChatGPT was launched, or did you, that the AI revolution would be this fast, furious, you know, unstoppable? It, I mean, it, and has what's happened in the last two years even surprised you?

• 40:37Andrew Feldman?

  For sure.

• 40:38Jason Calacanis?

  It has.

• 40:39Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah, I think anybody, except maybe Sam and Ilya.

• 40:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Andrew Feldman?

  Uh, who really saw it.

• 40:44Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 40:44Andrew Feldman?

  You know, we talked to them in 2015, and and what they were saying is now. It was unbelievable how how right they've been. But I I think what we saw was the rise of a new computational problem called AI. And it would put new and different pressure on a processor. And we saw this on the horizon, and we said, what would happen if this got giants? And we had no idea how big it would get or how fast it would come. But as a computer architect, you you try and think about, could I build a machine that's way faster at this new thing? And will there be enough of it to build a business around? And so we saw AI on the horizon. We said to ourselves, could we build a a processor that would be unique in its performance?

• 41:29Andrew Feldman?

  Could we build something not one or two or three or five times faster, but twenty or fifty times faster? And we came to believe we could. We chose an approach that solved a problem that had been open in the compute industry for 75 years. Nobody had ever built a chip this big. Many smart guys had failed. And we delivered it, and it's blisteringly fast.

• 41:51Jason Calacanis?

  What were the first applications? You know, Nvidia got to perfect their compute and really their company off of the backs of video game players, then Bitcoin and crypto. It was almost like there were just a number of waypoints before AI emerged. You didn't have those.

• 42:12Andrew Feldman?

  We didn't have that. And you know, if you look at Nvidia's stock price from 2004 to 2010, it was flat. Right? And they were trying to find a new market, right? They had a lot of the graphics market, and that market was sort of flat. They found love with gamers. They tried to go into the super compute world. We were focused entirely on AI. And so at first, we found love with the national labs, with the military, with some pharma.

• 42:44Jason Calacanis?

  What were the applications they were using?

• 42:47Andrew Feldman?

  They were training various types of models.

• 42:49Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And this is before large language models?

• 42:52Andrew Feldman?

  This is before language models existed.

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  So they were doing models for sequencing, you know, proteins?

• 43:00Andrew Feldman?

  Sequencing models. They were doing different forms of vision models. They were doing work at the edges of high-performance computing and AI.

• 43:10Jason Calacanis?

  What is now taking the most compute? We see a lot of applications now: images, video production, the training of the models, and really deep learning, deep thinking, I guess, where it's firing off many, many threaded jobs. Which one of those is the most compute-heavy, the most limited right now?

• 43:35Andrew Feldman?

  Deep research is, deep research uses an enormous amount of compute.

• 43:39Jason Calacanis?

  Explain to the audience what happens when they do one of those deep research queries. As an example, I've been playing with the latest Claude and they have a co-working, co-pilot-type application and I made a prompt every time we have a guest on the podcast and I had it do, you know, maybe 15 or 20 steps every podcast you've been on, every news item, a timeline.

• 44:04Andrew Feldman?

  Right.

• 44:04Jason Calacanis?

  And it was unbelievable when it makes this document. It's better than anything a human has ever made for me and I've been doing interviews for 20 years.

• 44:13Andrew Feldman?

  And you've had lots of pretty smart assistants whose job that exact thing was.

• 44:16Jason Calacanis?

  And when I tell you they would ask for 48 hours to do a dossier, that was 20% of what this does in under 10 minutes, I'm not even joking. And last year, I told them like, "You can use it to kind of get ideas and get some links, but you know, just keep doing it the old way." So it kind of cut their time from 16 hours to 8. Now it's 16 hours to I don't need them, literally don't need them to do this work.

• 44:40Andrew Feldman?

  Right. Now imagine if you could get it in 10 seconds.

• 44:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Andrew Feldman?

  Right, that's what we do.

• 44:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Andrew Feldman?

  That's it, exactly. And so what happens, remember, we make AI with training and we use AI with inference. All right, and that's the simplest way. The reason inference is going through the roof is because everybody's using AI. All right. A task that you kicked off, right, it starts a bunch of little threads and each of those asks queries and each of those queries deliver results that are the input to other queries. So you've got a cascade of queries that is going on.

• 45:13Jason Calacanis?

  It's wild.

• 45:14Andrew Feldman?

  And each of those requires more compute. And so you've got, you know, 20 different queries being kicked off, each query asks 20 queries, each one of those requires 10 or 15 or 20 seconds to get done in traditional compute. So you have this giant waterfall of time and answers. And we built this part so you can get all those answers back in four seconds, in 10 seconds.

• 45:38Jason Calacanis?

  And when does that happen? You know, right now, it seems like when I do these kind of deep research, it's, you know, grab a cup of coffee time.

• 45:45Andrew Feldman?

  Right.

• 45:45Jason Calacanis?

  Five minutes.

• 45:46Andrew Feldman?

  Right.

• 45:47Jason Calacanis?

  Not 15, but it seems like about five minutes is what it averages when you're doing an image or a five-second video. It seems like it's 90 seconds or so.

• 45:56Andrew Feldman?

  Yep.

• 45:56Jason Calacanis?

  When does that come down to, you know, the experience we had with dial-up going to, you know, fiber?

• 46:02Andrew Feldman?

  That's the, the perfect analogy, right? When, when the internet was slow, Netflix delivered DVDs in envelopes. I don't know if you remember this, right?

• 46:10Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I do.

• 46:11Andrew Feldman?

  When Netflix got fast, when the internet got fast, Netflix didn't get better at delivering DVDs. Netflix became a movie studio. It enabled them to be something different. It wasn't a change in degree. It was a fundamental change in kind. And what speed does for AI is the same. So we have customers like Cognition who use us to power their coding engine. All right? And if you read the tweets and you read people's comments, they're, they're awed. There is zero latency between their request and their answer. So they can stay in the flow as they write code. All right? And so this is the idea. The idea is you shouldn't have to wait at all.

• 46:51Andrew Feldman?

  And Claude is not a, Anthropic is not a customer, but we recently announced OpenAI.

• 46:57Jason Calacanis?

  Right. They were original investors.

• 46:59Andrew Feldman?

  They were.

• 46:59Jason Calacanis?

  And now they've just put in a major purchase order.

• 47:02Andrew Feldman?

  They have. And this is really exciting. And part of it, I think, was because what we could do is we could deliver extraordinary speed so that the user experience changed.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  And as we know, having watched Google, Larry and Sergey, Marissa, the team over there came to a conclusion, when we shave off milliseconds, it's the number one way we get usage to go up.

• 47:21Andrew Feldman?

  That's exactly right. Ubers published that paper years ago that said even milliseconds, even amounts of time that the individual user doesn't recognize as important.

• 47:31Jason Calacanis?

  Noticeable.

• 47:31Andrew Feldman?

  That's exactly.

• 47:32Jason Calacanis?

  What is it? G, what is the psychological, just noticeable perception, I believe? Your mom would know. She's a behavioral scientist.

• 47:39Andrew Feldman?

  She would know.

• 47:40Jason Calacanis?

  Just noticeable, it's 15% of whatever the number is. So like if you could cut 15% off the time, people.

• 47:46Andrew Feldman?

  They use it more, they leave less.

• 47:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 47:48Andrew Feldman?

  You know, there's a, Paul Graham had a, had a great tweet. He said, I'd, I'd use Google half as much if ChatGPT weren't so slow. And if you think about that, that's what happens, right? While you're waiting for Claude or you're waiting for ChatGPT, you get a coffee or you poke around somewhere else. And you've lost the customer. That's the cost of being slow is the customer has gone somewhere else.

• 48:13Jason Calacanis?

  Or you do what I do, which is I have a nice wide Dell monitor. I have three browser windows open. I pay for all three services. I have Gemini, I got Claude, I got ChatGPT. I pay for all of them. I'm paying probably close to six, $700 personally a month. So I'm spending $10,000 a year just for me.

• 48:31Andrew Feldman?

  Right.

• 48:32Jason Calacanis?

  And I just take the same query and I go bing, bing, bing, bing. And I start them all.

• 48:37Andrew Feldman?

  We start them all and

• 48:39Jason Calacanis?

  I'm probably burning like 10 trees. I mean, there's probably, you'd probably be a little greedy.

• 48:44Andrew Feldman?

  It's not 10 trees, but it, I think that's a really interesting way to manage how slow it is.

• 48:51Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 48:52Andrew Feldman?

  And so we exist to fix that problem. And what, what we partnered with OpenAI to do is to, to deliver blisteringly fast speed across the world's most popular models.

• 49:01Jason Calacanis?

  What's the scope of the deal? Size of it?

• 49:04Andrew Feldman?

  What we announced was 750 megawatts is what was announced.

• 49:09Jason Calacanis?

  When did we switch from talking about the number of chips, the number of units being sold to the amount of power being sold? It's a little bit confusing for folks and it started probably about last summer.

• 49:22Andrew Feldman?

  So actually what happened was that the change has been coming a lot longer. We used to talk about data centers in terms of square footage. I got 100,000 square foot data center, right? And now nobody cares how many square feet that you have. They care about how much power you have. So the limiting constraint on data centers is always their power footprint. And right now for large deployments, the limiting constraint is how much power can be delivered. So by talking about how many, how much power is delivered, you're talking in, in the unit of the limiting constraint. And so the limiting constraint is power. We're trying to find this huge amount of power for OpenAI. It'll be delivered over several years.

• 50:00Jason Calacanis?

  And you're responsible for the power as well? Or is that like a joint effort?

• 50:03Andrew Feldman?

  So it's a cloud deal.

• 50:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so they're utilizing your cloud. So you've got to do all this work.

• 50:10Andrew Feldman?

  We are building the cloud infrastructure for it.

• 50:13Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Where are you building your data centers? What's the best location here in 2026 to be placing these things? Is it over nat gas? Is it near hydro? What's the state of the art now?

• 50:23Andrew Feldman?

  So the cheapest power in the world is hydro.

• 50:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Andrew Feldman?

  Without question. After that is natural gas. And so where places have natural gas, you have an abundance of relatively low cost power.

• 50:35Jason Calacanis?

  Which is Texas.

• 50:36Andrew Feldman?

  West Texas, Wyoming. Outside the US, in the Caribbean, in Guyana, you have a huge amount of natural gas.

• 50:42Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 50:43Andrew Feldman?

  You do. You have geothermal, which is its own thing in the Nordics. But natural gas is a very inexpensive way, particularly if it's coming from, as a byproduct from petroleum mining, where what you have is it used to do what's called flare off gas. They used to just throw it away. They used to just burn it at the top of it.

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  The Bitcoin miners found that first.

• 51:05Andrew Feldman?

  The Bitcoin miners found that, right?

• 51:06Jason Calacanis?

  Like, we'll take that.

• 51:07Andrew Feldman?

  That's right. Like, whoa, don't make that fire. Make, yeah.

• 51:10Jason Calacanis?

  So basically, you look for the existing flare off. And then tell me about hydro, because it does seem to me that people knew that for a long time. They were moving data centers there. Heat still an issue with your chips and others?

• 51:23Andrew Feldman?

  We're water cooled. And so water is an extremely efficient coolant. So, you know, we knew early on that we'd be going to water. We were some of the first production AI systems to use water. The TPU early on moved to water as well. Before that, there'd been some water cooling, mostly in the Department of Energy super compute labs. They'd use some water.

• 51:43Jason Calacanis?

  Now, does it matter? Because I remember early on when people were talking about water cool 10 years ago, the source of the water and how cold that water is coming in? Or just water's cool enough?

• 51:53Andrew Feldman?

  No.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  And you're fine?

• 51:54Andrew Feldman?

  It depends on your particular design. But you'd like cooler water.

• 52:00Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 52:00Andrew Feldman?

  It is better.

• 52:02Jason Calacanis?

  So Alaska and Canada feel pretty good about that?

• 52:04Andrew Feldman?

  Or you bring chillers. Or you cool the water. Right, you can, often you can take general groundwater or other forms of, other locations for water.

• 52:13Jason Calacanis?

  There's a huge misperception today that this water is not recycled and that AI is using all this water, what it's, it's not even comparable to golf courses, let's say.

• 52:23Andrew Feldman?

  First, golf courses are extremely water inefficient. Most of our data centers use a closed loop.

• 52:30Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 52:31Andrew Feldman?

  So, we're, we're passing the water by the back of our chip. They pull the heat off, they warm the water. The warm water goes down and through a closed loop system is chilled and pumped back. And so you're not using...

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  And the water's not damaged.

• 52:47Andrew Feldman?

  The water's not damaged, it's just moving heat.

• 52:49Jason Calacanis?

  Not like some chemicals or anything that gets put into them.

• 52:51Andrew Feldman?

  No, not at all.

• 52:52Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot of misperceptions about AI right now.

• 52:55Andrew Feldman?

  A lot.

• 52:55Jason Calacanis?

  There's a bit of a, it seems like it's almost like there's some dark PR forces at work, trying to make the data center build out seem worse than it is.

• 53:06Andrew Feldman?

  Yep.

• 53:06Jason Calacanis?

  And then there's also, I think maybe some valid concerns around jobs. When you look at each one of those issues, what do you think is, you know, the ones that are most frustrating as an AI executive building data centers?

• 53:18Andrew Feldman?

  It's a really good point. I think some of the hyperscalers sort of, they, they made a bad call in the way they, they went into some of these rural communities, right? So what are you looking for? You're looking for a place that land is cheap, that has an abundance of power. And they went to these communities and they didn't do a good job talking to people.

• 53:35Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 53:36Andrew Feldman?

  Right?

• 53:36Jason Calacanis?

  And tech people didn't do a good job talking to humans.

• 53:39Andrew Feldman?

  To humans, right. What a surprise. And they went into these communities and they cut deals with the power company. And the power company was looking to build new infrastructure to support them.

• 53:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 53:50Andrew Feldman?

  And traditionally, the regulated power industry would then amortize that cost over 20 or 30 years. So they ended up increasing the local people's... Power rates, right? And so the people got upset.

• 54:03Jason Calacanis?

  Reasonable.

• 54:04Andrew Feldman?

  Very reasonable, very reasonable. If instead you have gone in and said, look, we're going to be good citizens. We're going to be big taxpayers here. Let's build more schools. We could build a school for you. It's a rounding error in the cost of this facility. We're going to make a bunch of construction jobs, and we're going to be good citizens.

• 54:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 54:25Andrew Feldman?

  They would have had a very different approach.

• 54:27Jason Calacanis?

  And not only that, they kind of were a little heavy-handed early on, where they said, we're going to play three communities off each other.

• 54:34Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Jason Calacanis?

  And who's going to give us the biggest tax discount?

• 54:36Andrew Feldman?

  Right.

• 54:37Jason Calacanis?

  That was another cellphone mistake, yeah.

• 54:39Andrew Feldman?

  Now, what I just saw is that Microsoft just put out...

• 54:42Jason Calacanis?

  We talked about it this week on the show.

• 54:43Andrew Feldman?

  I thought it was a very thoughtful and reasonable sort of approach for a company that's sort of a national champion, right? That they're going to be good citizens. They want to make sure that your rates don't go up.

• 54:54Jason Calacanis?

  They basically said, just to catch the audience up, we guarantee you our usage of energy will not increase the...

• 55:00Andrew Feldman?

  Cost of your utilities.

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  The cost of your utilities.

• 55:02Andrew Feldman?

  That's fair.

• 55:03Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, very reasonable. And I think the next step, we were brainstorming on the pod. There are people putting solar on roofs, and there's base power. Michael Dell's son doing a really interesting project.

• 55:14Andrew Feldman?

  Cool things.

• 55:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, where they just put batteries on the side of your house. They don't have to be super intricate. And they load those batteries up when there's extra power, and it's cheap, and they deploy it when, you know, the duck curve or whatever, and the demand hits. So if you think Microsoft, and you're talking about rounding errors, well, if you give everybody a battery at home to store some energy when it's cheap, and then that can be used to flow back into the data centers? I think we could live in a world where you say, hey, we're going to put a data center here, and everybody's energy is free.

• 55:43Andrew Feldman?

  I think, well, there are a couple things. First is, we chose as a nation not to invest in our grid for 40 or 50 years, right? And so our grid is behind and vastly in need of improvement, right? Our grid is decrepit compared to other advanced nations, and in particular compared to what China has done. I think the ability to store power at your home and to use it when power's the most expensive is obviously a reasonable thing to do, right? Obviously the reasonable thing to do.

• 56:18Jason Calacanis?

  And it takes load off the grid as well. And people like the idea of being a little resilient, right?

• 56:22Andrew Feldman?

  They do.

• 56:23Jason Calacanis?

  If you do lose your power, which in California... I think they turn it off about on the peninsula. Was it about a half dozen times a year for you?

• 56:31Andrew Feldman?

  Only when it's really hot or really cold.

• 56:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Andrew Feldman?

  Either, either one.

• 56:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And they'll leave it off for two days because it's wind and it's just a complete disaster. Oh, and by the way, I don't know if you knew this. There were subsidies given for nuclear where the people living around nuclear power plants in France is where they just said, in exchange for living near a nuclear power plant, which some people might have concerns about, maybe they're reasonable, maybe they're unreasonable. Put that aside, we're going to just give you free energy for life. Very interesting. What is your thought on small modular and nuclear? It's just, it's too far out, yeah, for you to be concerned with right now?

• 57:09Andrew Feldman?

  I think it's both the obviously the right thing to do and probably not the source of data centers for the next three or four years.

• 57:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Andrew Feldman?

  Both, right? That obviously we need to be working on that. Obviously, it's an extremely efficient form of power creation. Nuclear has, over 20 or 30 years, is vastly more efficient than any other power we know how to, how to create. It has a disadvantage in upfront. It's a little more expensive, right? So the fees are, are upfront and then you get the benefit over years. But clearly, we should be working on this.

• 57:43Jason Calacanis?

  And if you had the ability to do it, you would do it?

• 57:45Andrew Feldman?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 57:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Andrew Feldman?

  And you're seeing some of that in the more aggressive nations. The UAE is building modular nuclear data, based data centers, putting huge amounts of power on the grid with nuclear. And what a great idea.

• 58:00Jason Calacanis?

  I went to see Elon a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon. We're talking. He really thinks about putting data centers and chips in space. Cooling's pretty easy in space. Solar is much more effective. What do you think? And he's been talking about this publicly, so I'm not speaking out of school, but what do you think about data centers in space? Have you started researching?

• 58:21Andrew Feldman?

  We have. I think first betting against Elon's ideas is, is probably

• 58:25Jason Calacanis?

  Long-term.

• 58:26Andrew Feldman?

  Long-term.

• 58:26Jason Calacanis?

  Not a good betting strategy.

• 58:27Andrew Feldman?

  However, getting the timing right is something that has been less, a less

• 58:35Jason Calacanis?

  He's never wrong. He's frequently late.

• 58:37Andrew Feldman?

  That's right.

• 58:37Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I always tell him.

• 58:38Andrew Feldman?

  Look, I, I think that's both the blessing and the curse of visionary.

• 58:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Andrew Feldman?

  Is you see things other people can't see. And in your mind, there are just some technical hurdles to overcome.

• 58:50Jason Calacanis?

  It took a couple of years to build that.

• 58:51Andrew Feldman?

  It took, took a couple of years.

• 58:52Jason Calacanis?

  Were you on time?

• 58:54Andrew Feldman?

  We were plus or minus a year in delivery of something that nobody had ever done.

• 59:00Jason Calacanis?

  It's hard to predict.

• 59:01Andrew Feldman?

  It's really hard. I think the idea of using space to grab solar power is obviously a smart idea.

• 59:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Andrew Feldman?

  Right? You're miles closer to the sun, you have much thinner atmosphere blocking the rays, so you can gather up the power. I think there's a lot of technical work to be done. Yes, it's cold there, but you're also in a vacuum. So the actual cooling isn't an easy problem, it's a solvable problem. I think the communication among satellites is a real issue. And figuring out which technology you want to do to get the data back to Earth. Right? Remember when you got your cable TV? When you tried to get internet from those satellites, it was really glitchy. There were these big delays.

• 59:55Andrew Feldman?

  Now, those were higher orbit satellites, the ones he's thinking about are much lower orbit, they'd have lower latency. But there's some real work to be done. I think it's in the eight to 10 year category, not in the three to five.

• 1:00:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think it may be split the difference, but yeah. All of these are worth pursuing if you believe that we're not going to overbuild. So, knowing what you know and watching this build out, is it possible that we're overbuilding right now and will need a digestion period? Or do you think, you know, based on what we're seeing, there's just going to be the next workload, next workload, next workload?

• 1:00:33Andrew Feldman?

  I think we are still really early in the demand for AI compute. And I think if you think about, you know, what portion of enterprises have really adopted AI in a meaningful way that has changed their workflow? It's tiny. I think even the most frequent users at the consumer level are going six, eight times a day. What happens when they go to 100 times a day? What happens when all their devices are going for them? What happens when everybody in GNA, right? When every engineer is using it as a coding copilot, right? We're going to see enormous amounts of demand for inference. The models are getting better, more people are using, they're using more often.

• 1:01:17Andrew Feldman?

  And the amount of compute taken with each usage.

• 1:01:22Andrew Feldman?

  is increasing. So I think we're just at the beginning.

• 1:01:25Jason Calacanis?

  How do you portion off the effort when you're making systems right now in terms of energy efficiency, the raw horsepower, and then the transport layer? These seem to be the three most important parts of what you're doing.

• 1:01:40Jason Calacanis?

  Correct me if I'm wrong, and then how do you allocate with engineers and your overall team tackling those three major issues?

• 1:01:47Andrew Feldman?

  One way to think about it that I don't hear often enough is the way you make a computer is you think about three things, right? How fast you can do a calculation, where you can store the result.

• 1:02:00Jason Calacanis?

  Memory.

• 1:02:01Andrew Feldman?

  Memory, and how fast you can get the result to somebody who wants to use it.

• 1:02:05Jason Calacanis?

  Transport.

• 1:02:06Andrew Feldman?

  Not transport. These are the three things that make a computer. And if you do really fast calculations, but your storage is slow.

• 1:02:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, bottlenecked.

• 1:02:15Andrew Feldman?

  You're bottlenecked. If you can do fast calculations, you can store it, but your I/O is slow, then you can't get it to the user. You are constantly thinking about, as a computer architect, the balance of these three dimensions, right? And so you make a jump in your, in the performance of calculation, you've got to think about storage, all right? Then you've got to think, I mean, it is a constant.

• 1:02:38Jason Calacanis?

  Are you thinking about those three simultaneously?

• 1:02:41Andrew Feldman?

  Always.

• 1:02:41Jason Calacanis?

  Or are there teams grinding out each one of those individual verticals? How do you architecturally build a group of engineers to do that?

• 1:02:49Andrew Feldman?

  So usually, your most senior architects, your CTO and your technical leads are thinking about that as the basis of a design, right? I mean, it doesn't matter how fast a car can go if it can't turn, right? It's not a good car, except maybe for drag racing, right? And so the designers are constantly thinking about where should we use power in the design? What, can we make the memory faster? Can we add memory? What is the cost of adding memory versus making it faster? The GPU, for example, has a lot of capacity of memory, but it's really slow. All right, and that's a huge bottleneck in inference. It's why they can't be fast.

• 1:03:33Andrew Feldman?

  It's why they just spent $20 billion buying Grok. It's because they didn't have an answer for fast inference. Fast inference needs fast access to memory. And the GPU doesn't have it. So these are things we're constantly thinking of.

• 1:03:48Jason Calacanis?

  And we're having a massive memory shortage right now because of this? How does that get resolved? Is that like just a short-term bottleneck? Or is that going to be a long-term problem?

• 1:03:57Andrew Feldman?

  I think what... It's a crazy problem. I think everybody knew that the demand would increase. And this is true among the major memory makers. People get a little scared. And what happens is they place a full year's worth of demand. And they get the wrong answer back, which is, we don't exactly know when you can have it. So then their response is, all right, we'll give you 18 months of demand. So suddenly, everybody went from giving six months of demand to 18 months of demand.

• 1:04:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:04:26Andrew Feldman?

  All right. Everybody, all the supply chain is confused. All right. We were making the exact same amount of memory we are now as we were four months ago. All right. And what's happened is the signal into the makers has exploded. And it will take us about 18 months to digest. The prices will stay high. This is a known phenomenon on the memory market. This happens every six or eight years. What's different right now is the GPUs are using a huge amount of HBM, which is a flavor of DRAM. And they're chewing through that. And that's maybe leaving a little less for other devices, consumer electronics.

• 1:05:02Jason Calacanis?

  How far along are the Chinese in catching up to your company, Nvidia, Grok? And how do you think about the geopolitics of the AI race? Like, is there a scenario where they win and we lose? We win, they lose? Or is that overblown in your mind?

• 1:05:21Andrew Feldman?

  I think the geopolitics are a real issue.

• 1:05:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:05:24Andrew Feldman?

  We are well ahead in chip making.

• 1:05:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:05:28Andrew Feldman?

  Within a few square miles of Santa Clara, you had Intel, you had AMD, you had Nvidia. You have our team, you have ARM. You have one of ARM's great teams. You have maybe six...

• 1:05:41Jason Calacanis?

  This is an identity of talent.

• 1:05:42Andrew Feldman?

  You have six of the world's great 10 chip teams. I think the way you get good at building high-speed chips is to build high-speed chips. And that's really how you do it.

• 1:05:53Jason Calacanis?

  You play the game, you get better at the game.

• 1:05:56Andrew Feldman?

  Turns out you get better at the game. And that's been a weakness in the Chinese chip making ecosystem. Now, they're running hard and they know they're behind on that. I think on the other side, I think they have pushed ahead in the open model category.

• 1:06:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, the open source models are impressive.

• 1:06:13Andrew Feldman?

  The open source model is an area where they've pushed ahead. I think because they're a top-down economy, they were able to make decisions like we're going to bring a huge amount of power onto our grid, we're going to modernize our grid. So they were able to bring on huge amounts of power. And that's something that we're behind on. I think it's unpleasant to think of them as adversaries and we've got to figure that out together. I think the world is a better place where we're not adversaries, but right now we are. And I think certainly in an industrial context, we're adversaries.

• 1:06:45Jason Calacanis?

  There's the industrial context and then there's, as we discussed, what impact does this actually have? What's downstream of us winning? And it's every developer being 100x developer. And then every knowledge worker being 100x knowledge worker and every biotech innovation.

• 1:07:03Andrew Feldman?

  Systems that are recursive, right? That build on themselves at rapid rates have a huge winner-take-all feel. Right? By getting ahead, you get further ahead, your iteration speed accelerates. And even small differences at the beginning are magnified very quickly. That's why this race is so important.

• 1:07:23Jason Calacanis?

  So here we are, we're at Davos. It's a lot of politicians. My friend David Sacks, co-host here on the pod. He's our AI czar. And Trump, whether you voted for him or not, is very focused on this issue. Biden, their team, wasn't courting Silicon Valley. In fact, they kind of looked at us as the problem, demonized to a certain extent. How do you think objectively? You know, independent of how you might feel about ICE agents in our cities or Greenland, etc. How do you think the Trump administration is doing on their AI policy and the support they're giving the AI industry?

• 1:08:03Andrew Feldman?

  I think in a lot of fronts, they're doing really well. I think we had made a mistake in the previous administration, keeping our chips from our allies. Let's keep China separate for a second, but the UAE is clearly an ally.

• 1:08:16Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:17Andrew Feldman?

  It's an ally, right? Moderate Arab nation, been a source of peace, made peace with Israel early on, huge Western influence, and we kept chips from them, right? We like KSA, we like Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to move in the same direction, kept chips from them, right?

• 1:08:34Jason Calacanis?

  Made no sense.

• 1:08:35Andrew Feldman?

  We then made a hierarchy that made the Danes feel second-rate, right? We said, "You are a number-two friend." Bad idea. We should be empowering our allies, right? So that's the first thing, and I don't think the previous administration did a good job. They didn't understand that at all, and Trump did a good job of that. Not only do we want those institutions, those nations and their institutions using our technology, we want them investing in the US. And we, under the previous administration, we had a CFIUS organization in Treasury that was difficult to work with. And that's, all of those, much improved.

• 1:09:15Jason Calacanis?

  They were unclear. They were not communicative.

• 1:09:18Andrew Feldman?

  They were impossible to deal with.

• 1:09:19Jason Calacanis?

  Impossible.

• 1:09:20Andrew Feldman?

  Impossible to deal with.

• 1:09:21Jason Calacanis?

  This is super important because, as David has said many times on this program, "Hey, we want to be the standard."

• 1:09:30Andrew Feldman?

  Right.

• 1:09:31Jason Calacanis?

  And then, all of that energy goes back into our standard now.

• 1:09:34Andrew Feldman?

  Into our ecosystem, into development on top of us, into the recursive system we just described.

• 1:09:39Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly, and if you look at Huawei.

• 1:09:40Andrew Feldman?

  Right.

• 1:09:41Jason Calacanis?

  And what they did with 5G, their networking up against Cisco and, you know, our national champions.

• 1:09:46Andrew Feldman?

  Yep.

• 1:09:47Jason Calacanis?

  They ran the table in a lot of countries.

• 1:09:48Andrew Feldman?

  They clobbered us in Africa, they clobbered us in the developing world, they absolutely ran the table.

• 1:09:54Jason Calacanis?

  Right, and now those places have spyware.

• 1:09:57Andrew Feldman?

  That's exactly right.

• 1:09:58Jason Calacanis?

  And it's a real...

• 1:10:00Andrew Feldman?

  It's a real issue.

• 1:10:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Andrew Feldman?

  It's a real issue. So I, I think that those were all areas where this, this administration did absolutely the right thing.

• 1:10:09Jason Calacanis?

  Energy?

• 1:10:09Andrew Feldman?

  Uh, energy, another area. Um, I, I think one of the things that kills a company like us is trying to grow extremely quickly is having to deal with different regulations in each of 14 localities we're trying to put data centers.

• 1:10:24Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:10:24Andrew Feldman?

  Right? That, that is brutal, right? What, what you don't want when you're trying to grow really quickly is to have 17 lawyers, each of whom is trying to figure out the, the local, right? And so his effort to try and say, "Look, let's get some reasonable laws across the board." That's obviously smart. And if we can get some money to, to improve the grid across the nation, that'd also be really helpful. So all of those are extremely positive. The work he's done with the Department of Energy.

• 1:10:51Jason Calacanis?

  Chris Wright.

• 1:10:52Andrew Feldman?

  Right. Under, uh, I think it's called, uh, is it the Genesis Program? I think it's sort of the equivalent of a Manhattan Project for AI. Of course, we need this. Of course, we need to be thinking among our researchers. Not how we can get a little bit faster, 10 or 20, but what can we use AI to, to increase the rate of research by 5X? By 10X?

• 1:11:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Andrew Feldman?

  And how can we get the, the things that impede government out of the way?

• 1:11:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Andrew Feldman?

  Right? So those are good. China's a really sticky problem. Um, and I, I'm not sure I agree with the, the current push to, to allow the selling of, of H100s there, but it's reasonable to disagree with me there.

• 1:11:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Andrew Feldman?

  I think it, it is not, it is not clear cut like some of the other ones at all. It's a hard problem. And I, I think there are going to be lots of different views there.

• 1:11:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And I don't know if you've been watching the news, but Canada just made a strong alliance with China, announced, I think, yesterday or today when we're taping this. And this is where, you know, maybe the Trump administration can improve is, you know, we, we do need to maintain this alliance with our neighbors so that they don't, they feel like they can trust us. This is what I've heard, you know, spending time in Japan, where Japanese feel like maybe we are not the most reliable partner. Canada feels we're not the most reliable partner because of the tariff issues, military issues, and maybe just... The constant changing of, you know...

• 1:12:13Andrew Feldman?

  Consistency is really important in policymaking.

• 1:12:16Jason Calacanis?

  And they have to know.

• 1:12:18Andrew Feldman?

  And I think for a country like Canada that has a huge amount of raw material exports, right? They have wheat, they have lumber, they have a huge amount of stuff that either we import or they gotta take elsewhere. We have to be aware of sort of the realpolitik of the situation. They have to sell their raw material, right? Which is a huge part of their export. They have to sell it somewhere, and China's a big buyer. Right? And so, it's... We have to go in understanding that.

• 1:12:44Jason Calacanis?

  There are nations which are proud, and if you're constantly attacking them and saying things to the populace there, well, then it gives the leaders the ability to say, "Well, hey, China is courting us, and they're going to invest, and so why don't we build some ports with them?"

• 1:13:01Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah, ports. You should do a whole show, if you haven't already, on the rise of Chinese ownership of major ports and shipping. It is crazy when you look... I mean, basically, they own the world's large shipping routes.

• 1:13:13Jason Calacanis?

  The Belt and Road strategy is working.

• 1:13:15Andrew Feldman?

  It's really... And then if you get out of sort of... I don't know, I'm not here in Switzerland very often, but if you go into many parts of the Third World, you begin to see BY... Was it BYD cars?

• 1:13:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they're gonna be shipping them to Canada now.

• 1:13:31Andrew Feldman?

  All over the rest of the world. We don't see it, but it's unbelievable.

• 1:13:35Jason Calacanis?

  I was just in Mexico City with the wife for a couple of days.

• 1:13:39Andrew Feldman?

  Isn't Mexico City fun?

• 1:13:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's my first time there. I had a delightful time. The food is great.

• 1:13:43Andrew Feldman?

  It's spectacular. I love it.

• 1:13:45Jason Calacanis?

  Who knew?

• 1:13:46Andrew Feldman?

  Really fun.

• 1:13:46Jason Calacanis?

  Who knew?

• 1:13:47Andrew Feldman?

  Really fun, trendy.

• 1:13:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Andrew Feldman?

  Great, great place.

• 1:13:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, good vibes, and every car's a BYD.

• 1:13:53Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Jason Calacanis?

  Every car's a BYD.

• 1:13:54Andrew Feldman?

  We gotta think about that.

• 1:13:56Jason Calacanis?

  And there, talking about national champions, there's no way that the government isn't subsidizing those by 30, 40, 50%. And I think what their goal is to put the Germans, you know, the English car manufacturers, they've been at it for a while, but the Germans are still making pretty great cars. And if these BYDs, which they're starting to get footholds in Europe, the same thing will happen. Like, who's gonna buy a 40, 50, 60,000 dollar Beamer, Volvo, Audi, when you can buy a 20, 30, 40,000 dollar BYD?

• 1:14:25Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah, they're nice cars.

• 1:14:27Jason Calacanis?

  They're price dumping, though. And that's what tariffs are meant to protect against.

• 1:14:32Andrew Feldman?

  They're subsidizing at the top of the finished product.

• 1:14:36Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:14:36Andrew Feldman?

  And that benefits the whole supply chain. Right. That's what they're trying to do. They think about it as the battery maker, the transmission maker. All these are benefiting while they subsidize at the very top.

• 1:14:49Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's end on employment. Let's put the crystal ball out there. Microsoft, Uber, Coinbase, Meta, Google. Four years ago, five years ago, more employees than they have now, or they're flat.

• 1:15:02Andrew Feldman?

  Yep.

• 1:15:02Jason Calacanis?

  Young people, unemployment's starting to hit 10, 20% among some college-age demographics.

• 1:15:08Andrew Feldman?

  Yep.

• 1:15:09Jason Calacanis?

  You know, David Sacks and I have this debate all the time. Is it AI? Is it entitled kids who don't have a work ethic? Is it the overfunding and the digestion or indigestion of tech companies that hired two years out? It's pretty clear to me, watching startups who are the most resourceful. They're doing so much with AI. They are AI-first. They're building agents. They're doing everything with AI. There's no world in which we're not going to have AI displacement.

• 1:15:34Andrew Feldman?

  100%. That's not why it's displaced now, but 100% it's coming.

• 1:15:38Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so when you look at it, you're in the camp of it's coming, but it's not an issue today. Define when it's coming.

• 1:15:46Andrew Feldman?

  Why it's not an issue today is when I look at the the people who have been let go in middle management in particular.

• 1:15:59Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, be candid, we're on All In. You can be honest.

• 1:16:01Andrew Feldman?

  I mean, this is middle management. What I think has happened is this is the delayed impact of good SaaS tools.

• 1:16:09Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 1:16:10Andrew Feldman?

  What's happened is your ability to extend your reach as a leader and as a manager, to stay abreast of what's happening. Your scope is much, much bigger. And so the role of middle management, which was frequently to move information.

• 1:16:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Andrew Feldman?

  To manage small teams and move information.

• 1:16:28Jason Calacanis?

  Keep people on track.

• 1:16:28Andrew Feldman?

  That's right. That job has shrunk in value. I don't think it's yet AI. I think-

• 1:16:36Jason Calacanis?

  Tech way there.

• 1:16:37Andrew Feldman?

  That's right. I think AI is coming. But I don't think that's what this is. And what happened was, there was this ballooning of these jobs, and, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya, they look one day and say, "Competition is coming, it is much more intense." What are these waves of people doing?

• 1:16:55Jason Calacanis?

  They're slowing us down, let's be honest.

• 1:16:57Andrew Feldman?

  That's right. And so they're flattening their organizations as well. So it's not just they're moving people out, but they're changing the shape of the organization, which is why I don't think it's AI yet.

• 1:17:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08Andrew Feldman?

  I think what we're gonna see down the road is whole categories that are vastly more efficient, and therefore need less people.

• 1:17:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty clear. And it's almost, rest in peace Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, but-

• 1:17:23Andrew Feldman?

  Huge fan.

• 1:17:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he just passed away this week.

• 1:17:25Andrew Feldman?

  I saw that.

• 1:17:26Jason Calacanis?

  What a giant.

• 1:17:27Andrew Feldman?

  What a giant of ridiculing corporate America. That exact-

• 1:17:32Jason Calacanis?

  That exact layer is gone.

• 1:17:34Andrew Feldman?

  ...of corporate America.

• 1:17:35Jason Calacanis?

  It's actually great that Scott got to see it-

• 1:17:37Andrew Feldman?

  Yes.

• 1:17:38Jason Calacanis?

  -happen-

• 1:17:39Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Jason Calacanis?

  -towards the tail end. And we didn't get to mention it on a previous episode, but rest in peace Scott Adams. I think it's a good place for us to end there, Andrew. I know you've got a lot to do here. Enjoy your time at Davos.

• 1:17:49Andrew Feldman?

  Thank you.

• 1:17:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. If you see any of the Germans, ask them why they turned off their nukes.

• 1:17:53Andrew Feldman?

  Alright.

• 1:17:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's my standard joke to them. How's Greta Thunberg? How's your Secretary of Energy doing, Greta Thunberg? Like, what are you doing? They turned off three of their six nuclear reactors.

• 1:18:04Andrew Feldman?

  I know. So they decided instead to import natural gas from Russia.

• 1:18:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, where'd they get it from?

• 1:18:08Andrew Feldman?

  Right, from Russia.

• 1:18:09Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, from Russia.

• 1:18:10Andrew Feldman?

  Yeah, bad, depended on Russia. Really not smart.

• 1:18:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Andrew Feldman?

  Not smart.

• 1:18:14Jason Calacanis?

  You know what? It's all because of Davos. I blame the WEF and Davos. They literally got so caught up in virtue signaling about the environment, they never just looked from first principles at how safe nuclear is compared to burning fossil fuels.

• 1:18:28Andrew Feldman?

  Nuclear is safe, and we can make it safer. We've got to put the time and effort in.

• 1:18:32Jason Calacanis?

  I was just in Japan last week. They're putting in new nuclear reactors and they just got over Fukushima and they realized, oh, we made some mistakes putting it below sea level.

• 1:18:41Jake Loosararian?

  Right.

• 1:18:41Jason Calacanis?

  We're not going to make those mistakes again. Nuclear is obviously the way to go.

• 1:18:44Jake Loosararian?

  Let's get better at it.

• 1:18:45Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, let's get better at it. That was awesome, dude.

• 1:18:47Jake Loosararian?

  Thank you.

• 1:18:47Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks for all the time and for a great discussion. You rocked it. All right, everybody. Welcome back. We're grifting, I mean, interviewing the top CEOs here at Davos, the World Economic Forum. It's our first time here and we're having a great time. Tons of CEOs. We've had hundreds of interview requests. We're going to try to do about a half dozen of them. A friend of the pod, Jake Lucerarian, is here. You've been on the pod before, both This Week in Startups and All In. You're, of course, the CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics. You've been at it for almost a decade now.

• 1:19:20Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Jason Calacanis?

  You build robots, as people who have seen the pod before know. Inspect. These are purpose-built robots that'll inspect ships, bridges, whatever it happens to be. And you started this long before ChatGPT and this recent AI revolution. I'm curious, these robots, which are very purpose-built, you know, I think very straightforward, have you started to put AI into them yet? Because I was just curious, thinking about your previous presentations. It was pretty straightforward, right? Like, we know the bridge.

• 1:19:49Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49Jason Calacanis?

  Inspect the bridge, but now can it do things and start thinking on its own and maybe be more adaptable because of AI?

• 1:19:55Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, good question. Well, I changed my title now. It's now Chief Grifting Officer.

• 1:19:58Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Chief Grifting Officer.

• 1:19:59Jake Loosararian?

  Thank you. Especially when I'm in Davos, this is my title.

• 1:20:01Jason Calacanis?

  You've been here a couple of times.

• 1:20:02Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:04Jason Calacanis?

  Did you catch the tail end of the DEI and ESG?

• 1:20:08Jake Loosararian?

  I came right at the, like, the heart of it.

• 1:20:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Jake Loosararian?

  And so it was, it was, you had to learn a different language, actually.

• 1:20:13Jason Calacanis?

  Really? Yes. Did they check your fluency in ESG, DEI buzzwords?

• 1:20:17Jake Loosararian?

  They did, they did.

• 1:20:17Jason Calacanis?

  No, but everything was super precious. And now, I guess, since Trump is here, it's kind of brass tacks, like doing business, negotiating and like, less of this performative stuff?

• 1:20:27Jake Loosararian?

  It's a lot, there's actually a performance tonight. But there's a lot, there's a lot more focus on, okay, let's get down to the, to the brass tacks. We hear a lot of CEOs talking about AI and, but actually, a lot of the conversations I'm having in the Congress that are already, it's just about, okay, like, where's the ROI from all the AI? It's actually business. It's actually trying to get to the first principles, to the roots of, okay, how do you actually get artificial intelligence to deliver on the promise? And funny enough, a lot of it comes down to this really interesting gap that exists in AI, which is like all the information and data set that you need to actually turn all of this into actual return on investment and productivity gains, especially for these like large infrastructure, large asset owners, like the energy or mining or manufacturing

• 1:21:11Jake Loosararian?

  companies of the world. And so that's a big focus and that's what

• 1:21:13Jason Calacanis?

  It really seems to be turning into a business conference. I was astounded by the amount of inbound I had. That was just pure business, capitalism, building products and services to make life better. Also, the world has changed a lot since you started the firm.

• 1:21:31Jason Calacanis?

  We've got a new sort of military 2.0 thing happening, and I think a lot of your customer base moved from just maintenance of bridges and tunnels and infrastructures to military. Tell us about that.

• 1:21:42Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah, that's right. We do about 30% of our business is defense. So we work, or Department of War, I guess I should say. So a lot of it's focused on, how do you actually use technology to, you know, fight against the speeds of development of countries like China, for example, in terms of manufacturing speeds? And a big part of that is actually understanding the quality and the welds, putting together the actual welds, puts pieces together. This is actually a huge bottleneck for the US. We have, you know, these manufacturing and forgers that are 100 years old, doing things 100 year old, you know, today that they did, you know, back then. And so the technology that we're using to deploy to help manufacture certain, you know, components of a submarine or be able to help expedite how fast a destroyer is in turnaround to get it out and patrolling

• 1:22:25Jake Loosararian?

  borders and deterring conflict. These are sort of the things that our robots are using to help to speed up decision-making process and make sure you're accurate. And so in some cases, Admiral Houston has talked about 90% improvements to speed of manufacturing using the technology that Echo builds. And, you know, you're seeing companies like Andro now, you know, working with us.

• 1:22:42Jason Calacanis?

  Shout out Palmer Lucky.

• 1:22:43Jake Loosararian?

  Palmer Lucky, yep, of course.

• 1:22:44Jason Calacanis?

  That's his helicopter up there. He might drop a bomb any minute.

• 1:22:47Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, I think he's doing a speech pretty soon. And so it's just amazing to see the adoption. But on the energy side. Right, like that's been the biggest, the biggest growth areas for our company has just been these large energy companies and power companies. They're trying to figure out, okay, all of these, all these hyperscalers are trying to figure out how to get infrastructure. They're focusing on CapEx a lot, right? Well, what if we started to play a game where, you know, we have access to these problems, to these really, you know, these GDP driver companies? What if we actually took an AI native, or in our case, what we've seen a lot of companies be is like, how do you robot native first? To support the AI initiatives by injecting and taking a very aggressive approach and how to implement and, and put robotics to use to help build up the, the data infrastructure to then layer on AI models.

• 1:23:32Jake Loosararian?

  And so that's at the heart of what Gecko does. That's why I started this company 13 years ago with this premise of data matters as it relates to being able to, to have all the gains.

• 1:23:40Jason Calacanis?

  And for people who don't know, the robots have sensors in them, different arrays that can inspect metal, whatever the fabrication is. Go right to the seams of a submarine and make sure this has all been done perfectly and measure it perfectly.

• 1:23:55Jake Loosararian?

  That's right. We build the robots and the sensors that go around and look at diagnosing the health of the built worlds. That means just like understanding and getting the largest inventory and database of information about the health of those structures, bridge, dams, submarine, whatever it is. Now, and along that journey, you're able to figure out that if you centralize all that information and data, and then layer on top of it, operational data, which exists, you know, for the most part, is a decent like infrastructure of, of sensor data at these companies. Well, wow, you get to make some pretty interesting decisions because you can figure out how to extend the useful life of an asset. And if I push an asset harder, can I produce more? Like, wow, my focus is how do I help to create cleaner as well as more barrels per day and at lower costs. Basically, I use the word cleaner.

• 1:24:33Jason Calacanis?

  So if you have a refinery or you have a nuclear power plant, you inspect it.

• 1:24:37Jake Loosararian?

  Robots should be dedicated to figuring out how to solve for the business problem, the business, what is the fundamental business problem that the customer is trying to, to solve for? If it's making a barrel or making a kilowatt or getting a ship out of dry dock faster, that is our initiative and our goal as a company to build robotic solutions towards that. Now, I haven't built, we haven't gotten into building the humanoids or playing the humanoid game. And that's actually, when I was on your podcast, actually the summit, I talked about, we're going to be the biggest purchasers of the Optimus robot. It's because the real question is how do you actually employ robots? How do you get robots to return ROI? Because, you know, folding laundry and cleaning dishes is not a high ROI use case. It's going to be the companies.

• 1:25:13Jason Calacanis?

  That's a $20 an hour use case.

• 1:25:14Jake Loosararian?

  You're not going to pay 40,000, you know, for, or 20,000, whatever it is, but. You know, US has to be the best in the world at figuring out how to use robots to make unfair advantages, you know, with these companies, whether it's oil and gas, whether it's power.

• 1:25:26Jason Calacanis?

  And there's gonna be need to be somebody between Tesla or Figure or Boston Dynamics. Those robots are gonna be sold. There's gonna be need to be an application layer and operational excellence in the field.

• 1:25:38Jake Loosararian?

  A nervous system.

• 1:25:38Jason Calacanis?

  Gecko will be that.

• 1:25:39Jake Loosararian?

  That's exactly what we are, the nervous system, to pull all this information from robots together. And then you can build and use AI models on top of that to use the information data to then also begin to take actions back into the real world.

• 1:25:50Jason Calacanis?

  So you actually see it find, not just right now, you find problems or monitor situations and confirm things are being built properly, that there's no potential problems with this nuclear power plant or this ship. But down the road, do you see yourself actually taking actions to build and/or repair?

• 1:26:09Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, that's exactly the roadmap for us. But first you have to figure out like what, what is the state of the built world? What is the state of the health? What sorts of actions should I take when it comes to repair? What sorts of automated welding solutions, for example, are the right ones? And which ones could use information about the, how well that weld was done? Is a feedback you've been to create a foundation model for welding, being the best in the world at welding. And so the architect-

• 1:26:29Jason Calacanis?

  Are you gonna build that, like the number one welder?

• 1:26:31Jake Loosararian?

  We're gonna, yeah, we're gonna be the, the company that builds robots to both identify and then solve for the most important and highest ROI problems for the customers, whether they're manufacturing new assets or they're, where they're trying to operate and maintain existing ones. Funny enough, like, I've been talking a lot about like, how do I reduce hazardous work hours for humans? How do I extend the useful life of assets for infrastructure? How do I, you know, increase the capacity and production and, and prevent, you know, catastrophic failures from assets? Funny enough, these are all very like easy to underwrite problems. And it's something that you don't hear roboticist or AI founders talk a lot about. But like, that's my bread and butter, that's the world I live in and I wear the steel toe boots to be able to understand the problems.

• 1:27:07Jason Calacanis?

  You're gonna need humans in the loop for some time to come. And there are, there's gonna be plenty of work for welders, but there might also be incremental jobs created because-

• 1:27:17Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Jason Calacanis?

  And you'll have one welder maybe supervising 10 of these robots? Is that what you think is gonna happen?

• 1:27:22Jake Loosararian?

  That's what's gonna happen. You want to be able to get the experience and the subject matter expertise to make sure the robot is actually- Understanding like what what are the sorts of ramifications if I do this action versus that action be able to you know you want you want also be able to you what we don't you know we need to understand too is it's going to be a lot of teleoperations you know with mobile robots in particular and so you're going to have humans in the loop just they might not be in the field as much they might be more you know in a an AC you know building you know being able to operate and and build build information and data to train the foundation model.

• 1:27:49Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if you think how risky some of these jobs are, it might be nice to not have a human risking their life to maintain you know this part of the bridge you know as brave and amazing it is they're doing that work and we obviously appreciate appreciate that over the centuries.

• 1:28:05Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Jason Calacanis?

  It might be nice to actually take the human out of the deep sea welding and out of the bridge climbing business.

• 1:28:11Jake Loosararian?

  That's exactly right. Well, I mean, the story of Gecko has been a story of building robots to help to reduce the barrier to entry of these like jobs that sometimes take 10,000 hours to be great at and actually making it something of you know you can attain within a few months of being able to you know use the technology in these fields and so you know whether it's manufacturing different parts and inspecting the quality of those parts or it's actually gathering information data set understanding what kind of decisions to make my goodness like you have a shortage of welders you have a shortage of inspectors you have a shortage of all these trades and you have to be able to augment and take a Home Depot employee in a couple of months make them you know able to create a you know make a hundred thousand hundred fifty thousand dollars you know running a robot doing it safely and so you know that's an exciting brave future I think the the key unlock for us you know in the robotics community is just like you gotta get your robotics into the field you gotta you gotta fail fast and also rapidly prototype really quickly and then manufacturing them is is the big is the big issue and so as we focus on these sorts of problems because you know in this journey and then over the next five years you know to be that company that's the best in the world of taking robots and making ROI from them you know we that's that's what we're focused on in terms of setting ourselves up to be the world dominant there.

• 1:29:14Jason Calacanis?

  And you wrote an editorial on the way here and dropped it. What was your take in the editorial?

• 1:29:19Jake Loosararian?

  It was basically on the concept that we're talking about here which is like you know I'm a I'm a I'm a I live in Pittsburgh you at some point Pittsburgh had like more millionaires in 1930 than New York it made 70% of the world's steel and it's you know the economy changed a bunch and then that doesn't happen anymore in in Pittsburgh and and so but but like the insights in the in the company.

• 1:29:37Jake Loosararian?

  There like there's still the backbone of our of our economy and and I was just inspired by you know in that time from the industrial revolution how steel you know was invented and then manufactured and then distributed to help create all the infrastructure that we rely on and you know that that fuels the energy or fuels the manufacturing sectors you know it was a there was the infrastructure that you needed to be able to have all these big gains that came from the industrial revolution same thing is is what I was talking about the editorial about is what we're doing with robotics collecting information and data sets to help support and create the avenue create the infrastructure for AI models to actually be able to you know return the kinds of returns that we're all betting on and so you know you it's this important people understand like that that robotics is the is the you know it's almost the it's almost the the foundation to be able to get the massive returns in the sectors that were that were mostly all here

• 1:30:27Jason Calacanis?

  Knowledge workers are great yeah being able to eliminate some Dilbert level middle managers who aren't adding value with you know some automation okay fine but we really need to get out there in the real world to get that serious ROI whether it's a robot taxi or self

• 1:30:44Jake Loosararian?

  And I think that the risk you have like with like I think this the form is like it's like you're saying it's changing right there's like a there's an ecosystem in a bubble when you live in a certain place talking a certain way in Silicon Valley we we only exist in the world of of the internet we we don't build the kind of technologies that started this Silicon Valley and so this world of energy of metal manufacturing of of mining all these like sectors defense like they're they're just not and and when I was starting the company they were like taboo to talk about yeah so you just don't think about the kind of you know applications and things

• 1:31:12Jason Calacanis?

  In some ways we ran out of things to solve for yeah like what's the next when I would be pitched 10 years ago on SaaS software it was like okay great and then it was okay this is the 50th SaaS software company in this vertical okay this is the 15th in this vertical we're kind of running out

• 1:31:27Jake Loosararian?

  Well it's crazy to me

• 1:31:28Jason Calacanis?

  Those verticals to go after

• 1:31:29Jake Loosararian?

  You're exactly right and this is why like you think of like an incredible invention like a humanoid robot and the first demo that me and you saw right was a folding laundry oh my goodness like the the like that that was the the thing that you know I do when I get home so that's what a robot should do there's so many other important like really important applications to use this technology for and I live in Pittsburgh Right? So I get to see a completely different world with a completely different little bubble. Um, and then, you know, going obviously and talking to CEOs of energy companies all day like it changes your world. And so like it really is an advantage and I encourage a bunch of the startups that you're talking to, you know, to to focus on like where the eyes are not, where the conversations are not, go out of the ecosystem and find the really important problem to solve.

• 1:32:08Jason Calacanis?

  If you think about it, we had Boston Dynamics doing backflips with these robots, you know, a decade ago. But they they didn't have an L L M behind them or a vision model or a world model yet.

• 1:32:21Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Jason Calacanis?

  And now when they have it, you'll be able to, I think, tell it, hey, I want to lay some bricks. And then it'll just go out to the web and find all the bricklaying YouTube videos and the history of bricklaying. And every manual on bricklaying and every SKU of every device ever used for bricklaying.

• 1:32:41Jake Loosararian?

  Right.

• 1:32:41Jason Calacanis?

  And it's going to know how to do it without ever having to be trained. Or is that the, you know, I'm just giving a very silly example.

• 1:32:50Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 1:32:51Jason Calacanis?

  When would we be able to just tell optimists, we need you to lay some bricks and it goes, I know Kung Fu, boom, and just does it?

• 1:32:57Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, that's right. I think the

• 1:32:58Jason Calacanis?

  How soon?

• 1:32:59Jake Loosararian?

  How soon? Uh, it's, I don't think that's going to be as far out. I think it's like, I, I take maybe take like more like the three year kind of timeframe for those kinds of things. I think you can kind of see this, these like, um, you know, these big bets like SoftBank and Nvidia, I think, just put a billion dollars into skilled AI, which is creating the brain for robots. Um, actually at a fourteen billion dollar valuation, the founder of which is in Pittsburgh, by the way, Deepa. Uh, but I think the, I mean, the big, the big problem, I think, with like that extrapolation is in the world of, the world that I live in every day, whether, you know, the energy, the, the, the, the defense, et cetera, et cetera. We don't have those videos. There is not a corpus of information and data set. And so I'm focused on that. I'm focused on

• 1:33:40Jason Calacanis?

  And how do you get that data? You put GoPro cameras and sensors on people's arms like I saw.

• 1:33:47Jake Loosararian?

  You can totally do that.

• 1:33:48Jason Calacanis?

  Training. Is that how the training will be done or where you're like modeling and actually watching a human do it? And then having the robot analyze it or?

• 1:33:57Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, it's about, uh, we, we think about like, you know, There's not many customers that are gonna pay for that because the ROI is just like not, not clear, not there, like no, no big like energy or, you know, manufacturing company is gonna be like, "Yeah, let's do that and I'll pay you like 10 million bucks a year to do that." And so like, we're collecting it by solving for, you know, important problems on critical infrastructure and assets of which like, you know, we're walking around these like Manhattan-sized refineries all the time. And so this information data says that we're just like building-

• 1:34:22Jason Calacanis?

  And the refinery inspection is done by a human today.

• 1:34:25Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Jason Calacanis?

  They take a bunch of pictures, they, they use a bunch of sensors and now the robot-

• 1:34:29Jake Loosararian?

  Yeah, they're 100 feet up in the air on a rope, collecting data by hand. It's, it's, you know, so if you use a robot that has a bunch more sensors to fuse together, it begins to create a world that doesn't exist on the internet, which gives Gekko a very big advantage.

• 1:34:41Jason Calacanis?

  That's a, that's a lot of world building you're doing.

• 1:34:44Jake Loosararian?

  That's exactly right.

• 1:34:44Jason Calacanis?

  All right, continued success.

• 1:34:46Jake Loosararian?

  Hey, thanks so much.

• 1:34:46Jason Calacanis?

  And we'll see you next time on the All In Interview Program. Bye-bye. Good job.

• 1:34:50Jake Loosararian?

  Nice.

• 1:34:50Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome.

• 1:34:51Jake Loosararian?

  That's fun.

• 1:34:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh man, cold out here, huh?