Fmr Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on chips, China, and lessons from Andy Grove

Pat Gelsinger is the former CEO of Intel and longtime Silicon Valley leader. He joins Auren to unpack the forces reshaping technology, geopolitics and leadership. After more than 30 years at Intel (including serving as its first CTO) and nearly a decade as CEO of VMware, Pat now sits at the intersection of deep tech and purpose-driven innovation as executive chair and head of technology at Gloo and general partner at Playground Global. In this episode of Summation, Pat and Auren discuss...

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

• 0:00Auren Hoffman?

  Hello data nerds. My guest today is Pat Gelsinger. Pat is the chairman of Glue, which builds tech products for faith-based communities. Pat previously served as the CEO of Intel, which is one of the world's most important companies and a company I truly admire. Also spent 30 years at Intel, became the first ever CTO. He was also the CEO of VMware for nearly a decade, and he's a general partner at Playground Global and executive chairman at Xlight, a semiconductor startup developing free electron lasers. Pat, welcome to some nation.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Thank you, Aron. Great to be with you today.

• 0:34Auren Hoffman?

  In like 1990, which wasn't that long ago, the US made about 40% of the world's chips. Today, it's like roughly 10%. Why did the US lose its edge during that time?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, in some regards, there was never a vote of Congress to get rid of that terrible semiconductor industry. To say that there was ever a decision, you know, and to some degree, I'll say, you know, as I like to frame it, there were decisions in Taiwan, China, Korea, right, to get this industry, right? You know, there were substantial and, you know, the chip war, you know, Chris Miller talks about something like that. There was long-term industrial policies put in places in other parts of the world, right? And the US, wow, that's capital intensive. You know, we can make better margins on software, right? You know,

• 1:27Speaker 01

  why should I commit, you know, $10 billion to a fab project where you don't get cash flow for five years? You don't turn, you know, a positive profit for eight years. That's hard, right?

• 1:40Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So all of a sudden, you saw our supply chains starting to migrate to where the industrial policies were reinforcing the value of long-term, capital-heavy manufacturing industries. And then three decades later, what happened, right? You know, the entire industry has migrated to Asia. Then we wake up and then it's sort of like, oh my, we care about these things. Then COVID happens and Chipzack happens. We gotta do something. Well, we weren't doing something for 30 years, right? And all of our Wall Street, you know, near-termism, you know, focus on higher profits, you know, leveraging other people to do the hard work.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Okay, we woke up.

• 2:25Auren Hoffman?

  If there, if we want to go from like 10% back to 30 or 40%, like is there some sort of realistic timeline? Is there some sort of like realistic plan for us to get there?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think, you know, it took three decades for our supply chains to set them in there.

• 2:42Auren Hoffman?

  Right.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  So to think that they're going to come back quickly is just naive. It was always this, hey, you know, if we sort of take a decade long view, can I make a difference in a decade? And the answer to that in my mind is yes, right? But you have to take a decade long view. You need meaningful pools of capital, right? You need consistent industrial capital, right? You know, investments, you know, I need, you know, you know, big dollars, you know, going into this. I need real policy support, you know, and ultimately I need to create economic advantage to doing this in the US.

• 3:17Auren Hoffman?

  Do you, do you think you need government capital or do you just need the government willingness to say you're allowed to build the plants? You're allowed to, you know, more, more like deregulation or kind of change regulations around it?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and I think it is so hard to move supply chains or, right? I mean, it's just so hard, right? That I think without the government being involved, right? You know, to say that the private industry is going to fix this? Okay. To me, that just seems naive, right? You know, private industry allowed us to migrate away, right? So why would you think that private industry can bring this back without substantial government involvement? I think that's just naive, wishful thinking as black swans have shown, right? You know, as people like Ray Dalio talk about extensively, you know, markets do not, right?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  You know, price in long-term risk, right? So the markets will not get us here, right? You need industrial policy, right? With real economic policy to make this happen. So when we started CHIPS Act, it was clearly, right? You know, hey, we need long-term R and D, check, right? We need real shifts in capital pools, check. You know, the thing that we didn't do yet in my mind, and you know, this administration has been emphasizing tariffs and others to create economic value and advantage to being in the US. But you need all of those to come together and you need to stay consistent on that, you know, for a decade or more because it takes you that long.

• 4:50Auren Hoffman?

  We're a few years now in like the chip sack, like, is it working?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  You know, it's having some benefit because clearly, you know, we've seen big expansions of TSMC in Arizona, Intel's investment, you know, Samsung building, et cetera. You know, so clearly we have more fab starts occurring in the US than we were before. You know, next would be some of the memory work. We've seen Micron, you know, big expansion announcements and, you know, they were like, you know, in New York. So I'll say, you know, it seems to have some of the right characteristics, but we still have a long way to go. Now, I'm still, you know, critical that we have no leading edge TSMC in the US. No leading edge TSMC R and D in the US.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  It would still have way too much dependency, right, on many of the, you know, our long-term R and D pieces are not in the US. So we still have a ways to go, but I'd say some of the early, early indications are more positive than they were in the prior decade. But we have a long way to go, right? And I also argue, hey, I think tariffs are right, you know, a factor to drive the economic value back to the US. You know, but they need to be very consistent over a long period of time and big enough. Make it valuable for the users, you know, most of the, you know, purchasers of fabs are, you know, the people who are buying wafers, who are the fabulous companies today, the Nvidia, the Apple, you know, the Qualcomm, the AMD, et cetera.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  They need to see real economic demand for them to be back in the US.

• 6:28Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, and the tariffs are tough, too. It's hard to figure out because, you know, all of these semiconductors, they're made up of all these other components. By definition, like so many of those components are global. Instead of here, you have to figure out, okay, like, we have to really target it very, very specifically. We're about to tariff here, but we might not put this tariff on this other component because that's actually important to bring semiconductors to the US.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very intricate, you know, supply chains are very complicated, right? You know, where's the packaging? Where's the testing? Where's the substrates, you know, right here? You're not one, you know, so, you know, and that's why I say you need good industrial policy over a long period of time with real economic incentives.

• 7:09Auren Hoffman?

  And you've also called for a US sovereign wealth fund as a way to counter China's tech investment. Walk us through that idea.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And obviously, hey, the sovereign wealth fund, you know, we got Singapore, we got Australia, we got China, we got the Norwegians, et cetera. So the idea of a sovereign wealth fund, okay. I mean, you know, for the most part, you know, the US has chosen to debt finance, you know, many of the things where other countries are choosing to investment finance, many of the things. So I just say in that regard, you know, and I think most people are starting to wake up and saying, boy, you know, I'd, I'd prefer, you know, my retirement going into an investment fund as opposed to a debt fund. Right? So the idea, right, of a sovereign wealth fund is something that I think the time is long overdue in the US. We see what some of the

• 8:01Speaker 01

  things like the superannuation fund in Australia, you know, they now have trillions of dollars that they get to start pouring into their national agenda. So first I'd say that the idea for the US is long overdue, right, in that respect. But then you peel the second face of it and you sort of say, well, what are we going to invest in? Right? If we have a sovereign wealth fund, you know, how do we decide what to invest in? Right? And obviously, the, the risk of that is, you know, we influenced by geopolitic and all of that kind of, you know, stuff becomes too influential here. But, you know, I'd say, yeah, boy, if we would look at it today, if you and I were, you know, would get the 10 most important, you know, academic

• 8:45Speaker 01

  and policy, you know, technological policy minded folks in the US, you know, we're going to agree pretty quickly, right?

• 8:53Auren Hoffman?

  You think so? I mean, because I'd be a little worried if we do agree.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Because we're going to say, you know, hey, I need long-term minerals in the US. You know, rare earth minerals and mineral, you know, right to enable it. Okay, got it. You know, second is I need semiconductors. It's the underlayment of everything, right, that we do. And third, I need energy.

• 9:14Auren Hoffman?

  If you have a wealth fund, the goal is to make a good IRR on the wealth fund. And, and, and, you know, some of these things are like, okay, we need the government to do this. So maybe, maybe, maybe it's actually not a good IRR, but it's still good for the long term economy. Good stability of the, of the country or something, right?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And a sovereign wealth fund, clearly you're overlaying, I want good return. But I also want to be targeting of things that we as a sovereign entity can take care of.

• 9:43Auren Hoffman?

  Cause we could do that today without a sovereign wealth fund like.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  But we're not, right? You know, those, those actions take extraordinary efforts. So remember how much shoe leather was burned to get CHIPS act across the line in the bipartisan way? Super hard. Or sovereign wealth fund could be a mechanism. Let's say it's the only one. I'm not saying Congress shouldn't do things like the CHIPS act. But boy, I think sovereign wealth fund, right? You know, with a good policy overlay, how we decide. And today, you know, if we picked those three areas and said, hey, we want a good IRR. But we want to make sure that you're doing those three things. Semiconductors, materials, right? And energy, those are the national priorities for the next decade. We can get consensus on that, you know, and let a good investment team go to work.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  I think it's going to enhance the power of the nation, not detriment in any way.

• 10:35Auren Hoffman?

  Most sovereign wealth funds in the world, they take their capital and they invest outside their country. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, the even like the, the Norway sovereign wealth fund is mostly taking it and putting it into America. We're getting that money from their sovereign wealth funds, right?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  And by the way, look at what was done in the tariff negotiations. With Japan and Korea.

• 10:59Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  We're essentially sucking their sovereign wealth funds.

• 11:02Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, we're like putting your money into us.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, you know, hey, my opinion, you know, I, I want to make those three industries straight. Yeah, let's make, you know, semiconductors, you know, energy, right? Minerals, rare earths, right? Yeah, those are foundational, right? To the nation. Make them good. I think sovereign wealth fund is one of the tools to do that. I think tariff policy is one of the tools to do that. You know, I think acts of Congress, right? With industrial policy is one of the tools to, to do that. You know, and frankly, given where we are on those topics, I think we need all three.

• 11:38Auren Hoffman?

  No, China is reportedly building like an EUV prototype with, with, you know, former ASML engineers that they've brought over and stuff. How have you, how do you assess their progress in advanced lithography? Cause that, that seems to be one of the big things that's holding them back. Like they can't buy the ASML stuff or they can't buy maybe some of the stuff that you're working on.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, the first thing is, you know, remember, you know, we're not letting the good stuff get to China.

• 12:08Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  You know, by international policy.

• 12:10Auren Hoffman?

  They've got to innovate on their side, right?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So they have a huge gap. You know, they have radically over invested in their semiconductor industry, right? They have chosen to aggressively capitalize that industry. And I think, you know, by most of, you know, from looking at some of the historical, uh, equipment purchase and, you know, indexes, you know, they've been buying equipment at more than 2X the rate that their market share in the world would justify. So essentially they are stockpiling, you know, deposition machines and, you know, etchers and wafer handler, you know, all this kind of stuff. So they are, you know, over capitalizing that industry. That was China has done in other industries, but they can't get the most advanced stuff.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  So every evidence is that they're investing heavily to have their own EUV because the world is not letting ASML's EUV machines get there. But they're also needing, and for that, they're also looking at leap aheads, right? Like free electron lasers as new light sources, you know, one of our companies, one of my companies, X-Lite, you know, that will work heavily. So, you know, I do believe that they're saying, you know, boy, you know, catching up with what they've done and then perfected, that's going to be hard. Can we, you know, are there leap ahead opportunities? So, yeah, I think they're pouring, you know, enormous amounts of energy here because largely, you know, they're sort of stuck at about 10 nanometers. So Intel proved you do seven nanometers without EUV, it's just hard, right?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Not for the, you know, so on, but the rest of the world is going from three to two to one and a half. You know, so that gap is, you know, about a decade, right, of lithographic capacity? And it's getting bigger because they don't have the EUV. So to some degree, you know, their, their motivation to get to the other side of EUV is increasing. Because the gap between their capabilities and where the rest of the world is, is increasing in the absence of that. Because they're never going much below seven nanometers without something like EUV. So of course they're looking to leap ahead.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  And hey, there's lots of things that would say that free electron laser is the next light source after LPP, which is used in the EUV machines of today. It's a big investment area for him, part of the reason I'm so motivated to move forward with X-Lite.

• 14:32Auren Hoffman?

  If you think about X-Lite, like, why is it viable now as opposed to a decade ago? Like, what has changed?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and there were tech, there were attempts, right, to use a free electron laser, you know, a decade ago, decade and a half ago.

• 14:48Auren Hoffman?

  ASML even looked at it, right? They tried it.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And essentially, you know, there's been a couple of breakthroughs that X-Lite has done, you know, to be able to create independent light sources of different wavelengths, energy levels, you know, in the free electron laser as opposed To pushing that separation of light of a single beam of light, you know, that is then essentially, you know, separated through mirrors and lenses because now you have the whole, you know, a thermal load hitting that first mirror, that first point of separation. Xlight has found a breakthrough that allows that to actually occur inside, right, of the free electron laser and the undulators associated with it and stuff.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  So they, you know, that was the problem that, you know, uh, let ASML say, oh, we can't make this work. And if, by the way, if I was, um, you know, you're looking at it from their view, right? This is a little thing, you know, if you're looking at it, you know, from I'm getting a laser and now how do I carve it up? Versus I'm creating a laser that's optimized for this. It's a, you know, the breakthrough that Xlight, you know, has now, uh, you know, clearly shown that we know how to make this work. That's what we're off with to do with Xlight. And, you know, the fact that we made LPP work, right? You know, we're dropping droplets of tin, hitting of lasers, collecting light. You know, it's just like an engineering marvel when you look at one of these things, Warren.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  I mean, it's really, you know, amazing, you know, but it's only ever, you know, it's a byproduct of the physics of tin. It's only ever going to be 13.5 nanometers. You know, we believe we can take Xlight and free electron lasers to two nanometers of below. You know, it really is pretty, um, pretty magical what we see as possible.

• 16:33Auren Hoffman?

  If you go to Taiwan, like a hundred percent of people will know what TSMC is. You could ask like the random cook and they'll know. It's just, it's the, it's like the key company in Taiwan. Everyone, everyone talks about it. I was in Amsterdam recently getting a tour of the Rijksmuseum by, by a very smart PhD, great tour guide who gave us a tour. And then, you know, at some point there's like a room and it was sponsored by ASML. So I started telling my kids what ASML is and the tour guide had never heard of ASML. She was Dutch, she had never heard of it. And I think it just, it hasn't pervaded in, it's, it's, it's not at the same level in Holland as TSMC is in Taiwan.

• 17:15Auren Hoffman?

  Like, why has not, why has it not captured the imagination of the population there?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, one, I find that surprising. But you remember, you know, TSMC Taiwan, right? The whole situation with the Taiwan Straits, China, right? You know, everybody in Taiwan knows what the Silicon Shield is.

• 17:38Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, good point. Okay. It's in the news every day. Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Every single.

• 17:42Auren Hoffman?

  No, no one's invading the Netherlands right now. I like, yeah, probably.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, so this is front of mind. And the portion of the economy that TSMC represents in the little island of Taiwan is a larger percentage of the total economy than ASML is in the Netherlands. So you have, I'll say, you know, the geopolitical importance, of course, you know, everybody knows, right, what the Taiwan Straits are and the situation is, you know, every single, you know, they probably, you know, like at two years old, they're already learning that.

• 18:14Auren Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, good point. Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  You know, so all like that. So I think that is just such, right, you know, a central aspect of the entire economy, society, you know, of Taiwan that, you know, I, you know, to me, it's unprecedented to think that a little, you know, what, you know, Taiwan is what, you know, 26 million people, right, you know, right, you know, it's not that big of a population.

• 18:37Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And I'll just say, you know, give you a little, you know, I was shocked by this fact that US now imports more from Taiwan than we do from China. Yes.

• 18:51Auren Hoffman?

  What?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  You know, this, this to me, you know, this.

• 18:55Auren Hoffman?

  That's insane. If that is, if that's true, if it's even like 20% of China, that seems crazy to me. Like you're saying, well, you're saying more than 100% of China.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  You know, and just to give you the numbers, right, you can go do some research on this yourself, right, that because of terrorists, because of this administration, some of the actions they've taken.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Import from China has decayed from 500 plus billion to less than 300 billion. And in that same period of time, the emphasis on supply chains, AI chips, the acceleration of TS and C's import, you know, we have gone over the last decade from 20 plus million to over 300 billion from Taiwan. Taiwan is now a bigger importer to the US than China is as of the last quarter. Stunning.

• 19:49Auren Hoffman?

  Holy macro, that is crazy. I hadn't, I was not aware of that, actually.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:55Auren Hoffman?

  That's, that's insane.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Right at that point. Now, of course, you could say, hey, some of that, you know, stuff that was done in China that's now being followed through Taiwan. You know, I'm sure there's some nonsense. I'm sure there's some nonsense in those numbers and how it's reported, you know, given some of that tariff and other things like that. But even if, even if it's close, that is such a dramatic geopolitical trade statement, right? That we are now more dependent on Taiwan as an importer than China. Wow. Right? And it's also a statement, you know, explosion of AI chips, the explosion of wafers and so on like that. But that just shows.

• 20:35Auren Hoffman?

  And by the way, I am, I am literally fact checking you as you're talking, using a few AIs and you're, at least according to these AIs, they agree with you. Like, I am, I am completely shocked. I had no idea that this was true.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Everybody, everybody needs to see the summation show because they don't realize how current, important and factual we are together, Orin. Isn't this great?

• 20:59Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. This is crazy. I, I, I just, this alone is like the biggest stat that like, I'm gonna like start telling Aaron, I had no idea. It's interesting because I've never heard this said before. So I would have thought that this would have been more in the news. Like, that is, that's an insane stat. So does that basically mean that outside of like Canada and Mexico, it's like the number one country we import from?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  You know, I think it now, you know, sits in the top five.

• 21:25Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 21:28Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  A nation of 20, you know, again, this is less than 30 million people, a small island.

• 21:34Auren Hoffman?

  So it really shows you how important TSMC is like that.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:37Auren Hoffman?

  Cause a lot of that is probably TSMC, Craig.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Now, let me give you an next factoid, right? That, you know, our minds were just blown by realizing we import more from Taiwan than China. Wow. Now, the next factoid is Taiwan runs on imported LNG. The reserves of Taiwan are less than three weeks. So a blockade of the Taiwan Straits for more than three weeks is out the island. If a fab goes down, right? It takes months to restart it, right? You know, very long supply chain.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  So literally, you know, we've had multiple blockades over the Taiwan Straits over the last 10 years, right? The longest of which, if my memory is correct, is 13 days, right? So essentially more than three weeks and you become right entirely just, you know, undermining the semiconductor supply chain. A study by BCG last year said, right? You know, if the supply chain of Taiwan to the semiconductor industry goes offline, right? It has twice the economic impact of the Great Depression.

• 22:56Auren Hoffman?

  And why don't they stock six weeks? Like, why? It's not that hard. Like, why, why have they only done that?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Hey, you know, I mean, it's like just in time supply, right? And you have to build new storage tanks, all those kinds of things, right? To me, you know, I'd say if you want to have a resilient Taiwan, the best thing that you could do is build more energy resilience. You know, politically, they were building a new nuclear reactor, right? They stopped it. It's essentially built, you know, not activated. You know, to me, I'm more interested in them, you know, buying energy infrastructure and stores than them and them, you know, buying defense capacity.

• 23:32Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  So anyway, those are your two factoids of the day, Orange. So

• 23:38Auren Hoffman?

  That's super interesting. You're also like, you're investing in deep tech and real deep tech, not just like, you know, someone writing some software and stuff. Like, how do you, when you're doing it, how do you underwrite the technology risk? Like, how do you, how do you actually make that investment?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  I joined Playground a year ago. Part of the reason I joined is because it's, you know, it's investing, you know, we're venture capitalists, we're out to make a return, you know, give a, you know, a good, you know, payday to our limited partners, you know, but fundamentally, all of our investment people at Playground are deep tech folk. You know, we're PhDs, right? We're professors. Most of the venture capital firms have forgotten how to do hard. Right? They're over here doing the next AI-driven dating app, right? And I'm sure that's important, but yeah, hey, we do hard.

• 24:33Auren Hoffman?

  The thing is, like, if you're putting in hundreds of millions of dollars in like more traditional venture capital, like, you're doing it at a point you already know it's working, and now you're fueling the fire. In your case, like, you, how do you know it's the right bet? Like, where, you know, is this different signals? Or it's the science? You really have to dive into the, you know, understand the science of something?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are going deep on the science.

• 25:00Auren Hoffman?

  It's almost more like, you're almost more like biotech or something, like you have to go super deep, right?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, we have energy projects, we have semiconductor projects, you know, quantum computing, you know, you know, new thermal, you know, superconducting, you know, those are the things and biotech, right? You know, robotics efforts as well, you know, those are the areas that we're in, you know, because we think that our differentiator is, given that we're a bunch of geeks making investments, you know, that we're better able to assess the technology risk than we are the market risk.

• 25:33Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  If I create a superconducting, right, you know, capability, that's a hundred.

• 25:38Auren Hoffman?

  You know, that's gonna, it's like biotech. You know, like this drug would be worth a gazillion dollars if it worked. The hard part is just getting it to work. Right?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And we can make those judgments better than other venture firms, right? You know, because we go deep in the diligence early in that life, you know, that's, hey, you know, if we make this quantum effect work, right, and platonics, okay, we could do a lot of them, you know, if we could make superconducting work, we could do.

• 26:02Auren Hoffman?

  You don't think any market risk at all. You're taking a hundred percent on the tech risk, right?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what we do. Right. And by the way, you know, I've been a deep tech guy for my entire career. You know, so at this phase of my career, Aron, it's sort of like, yeah, this fits me.

• 26:17Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, I get to leverage also the, the unique network that I've built. Imagine if we're creating a new power delivery technology. Everybody who consumes power delivery is in my Rolodex, if you know what that is. Yeah, I know those folks, we can accelerate, you know, and, you know, benefit from, you know, my decades of experience in the industry and bring unique and powerful what is.

• 26:42Auren Hoffman?

  Now, if I had to, um, rank order, the best managers of all time ever in history, I would almost certainly put Andy Grove in the top five and maybe even the top one. Um, you actually worked with him. What did you learn from him?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Well, you know, and just, uh, you know, maybe a fun story for your listeners here. So I'm a, uh, I am in, in charge of the eighty-three, eighty-six tape out. Okay, so this is in nineteen, you know, eighty, right, you know, or nineteen eighty-three, we're assembling the eighty-three, eighty-six, right? You know, putting the whole database together and so on. I'm the young engineer who's doing that work, right? You know, getting the database assembling and I'm giving an update to the executive staff of Inca. Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Andy Grove. Noyce is still there and AD, he's still there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's still very much there. Wow. Okay.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  So, you know, I, you know, I have.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  This is like legends. You must have been shaking. So I'm this young, right? You know, aggressive engineer, right? You know, I'm barely past puberty, as I say. Yeah. Right? You know, at this point, you know, I was at, you know, meeting with them and I am yelling at them because the computers aren't stable. Right? They made some change, you know, and I need them to fix the computers if I'm going to get my chip out the door. So you need to go. Right? You know, I mean, what, what a precocious young rat I was, right? You know, with the gods of the industry in front of me. My phone rings, right? You know, when, when phones used to ring, right? You know? Yeah. Pick up the phone. There's about, you know, a few days after this meeting, right? And I said, hello?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  And I said, who is it? Right? He says, Andy. Andy who? Right? And the voice comes back, Andy Grove. You know, I am just like.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  You didn't know it with his Hungarian accent or something? Oh, hey, you know, I'm just a young engineer trying to get the chip out the door. Right? And then he starts shelling me with questions. Right? You know, what do you read? What are you studying? What's your next job? What do you want to do? What's your career? You know, when I'm just like, huh? Right? And I'm just like barely able to fumble out the answer. I'm now so shocked that I'm talking to the founders, you know, one of the founders. And he says, those are lousy answers. Be in my office in a week with better ones, right? You know, you either show up or you leave the country, right? You know, right? And that began a mentoring relationship that lasted for 35 years. Right? Literally, you know, to the day Andy died.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  And I joke that mentoring with Andy was like going to the dentist without no the cane.

• 29:29Auren Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Tough, hard, demanding, and you know, absolute pursuit of right. You know, what's the data, right? You know, asking the hard questions, you know, where is truth? You know, amongst it, have you done your homework? Right, you know, have you gotten the best opinions from the best people in the industry? Right, you know, thank you very much for your opinion, Aron, but if you don't have data to support it, right, I can get an opinion, you know, from the National Enquirer, show up with an opinion and data to support it and be ready to defend your perspectives. And we're gonna have the meeting in the meeting, right?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  You know, just so many things from Andy, you know, over the decades.

• 30:13Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I remember when I started my first tech company in 21, like, the first book somebody gave me was High Output Management. And it was like, and then, you know, later, Only the Paranoid Survive. And then I read his memoir, I think it was called Swimming Across, something which was like, beautifully written, I mean, I think it's a very underrated book, just, you know, it's an incredibly beautiful memoir. He is just like a next level thinker.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it just, you know, and I was in the meetings with him when he was arguing with Bill Gates. I know, you know, had a like, you know, I was in the meetings with him, right, with Steve Jobs. You know, I was there, I was in the meetings with him with Michael Dell, right? You know, so, you know, I mean, it's just, you know, extraordinary, you know, experiences.

• 30:59Auren Hoffman?

  Now, we have these like formerly great engineering companies, Boeing, General Electric, they kind of seem to have lost their way, especially when it comes to R and D, when they're creating things, like, how did that happen?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and my perspective is, you know, that technology companies need to be run by technologists.

• 31:21Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, some of these end up being run by a well, a lawyer, a business person, a finance person, all good people, but they weren't core to what the mission of that company was.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and it's just super hard to run a technology company because, you know, the, you know, the winds of fortune move so dramatically.

• 31:40Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Right, you know, you know, based on technology and Intel, you know, essentially had almost two decades that it did not have a technologist in the helm.

• 31:48Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:50Auren Hoffman?

  To that, how did that happen? Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:54Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, I see how it happens, right? Because it's like, you know, the people leave and you promote the very competent salesperson, you promote the very competent CFO, and they're great at that thing that they do.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:07Auren Hoffman?

  But then they're not pushing on like innovating, they're not in the engineering system and it's just not key, like in some ways, like if you're a great finance person, like you should run Citibank. Um, like that's, that's the perfect place for you. Like go run Citibank, right? But don't run like the tech talk.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and you know, as one example, you know, when I took over, when I came back to Intel and took over, you know, Intel gave $70 billion back to shareholders in the five years before my return. What I wouldn't have done for $70 billion, Intel hadn't built a new fab for a decade. We had chosen not to invest in EUV. We gave up our position in ASML essentially for nothing, right? Uh, at the time, you know, we owned the supply chain for all the EUV machines. And we gave it all away because it wasn't the financial interest that's driven by CFO, salesman, you know?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  And, you know, that, you know, that was the state when I came back and, you know, rebuilding the, the technical bona fides of the company, rebuilding manufacturing, et cetera. And those things are hard, heavy, expensive, you know, and take a decade to realize the value of those investments.

• 33:19Auren Hoffman?

  I also want to talk about glue. So it's a kind of, it's focused on like the faith ecosystem in what you call kind of like values aligned AI. What, what does that mean in practice?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So first let's define what we're doing a little bit, you know, and then what it means to bring values aligned AI to that. You know, so imagine, you know, uh, you know, you have many, many charities. Many of them are faith driven, you know, charities. These might be campus ministries, like Campus Crusade, you know, that could be humanitarian organizations like World Vision, right? Compassion, you know, it could be, you know, church denominations, Assemblies of God, Southern Baptist. It could also be, you know, uh, you know, things like International Justice Mission for, you know, slavery and trafficking and, you know, so on. So all of those organizations. And when you think about them, this is enormous.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Right? Over $250 billion are given in church offering plates on a yearly basis. Right? If you add up all of those humanitarian and charitable organizations, well over a trillion dollars. Big, fragmented, venerable, and growing faster than the GDP. Right? Even as we went through COVID, right? You can say less people in church, well, you know, all that kind of stuff. Right? You know, essentially, the economics have continued to expand. We've become more philanthropic as a nation through periods like COVID, not less. And, you know, it's quite stunning, right? You know, so on.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  And so you have all of those organizations, many of those are churches, but these faith driven organizations, et cetera. Christian universities, 900, you know, faith or, you know, universities in the US today, you know, enormous. And their technology sucks.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Cause their mission driven organizations, you know, generally they, you know,

• 35:20Auren Hoffman?

  That's probably true of most universities and most nonprofits. And it's not just, it's not just faith based, right?

• 35:26Speaker 01

  They just don't do a good job with tech. And what's happened is, you know, they've been trying to keep up, trying to keep up, trying to keep up. And then AI happened. It's sort of like, oh, you know, we, we, we already were a decade behind, you know? And now the, you know, somebody, you know, turned the music up, right? And into that comes glue. Right? And we're saying, we're going to do, right? You know, two things for that community. Right? One is we're going to power their technology, powering tech. And the other is we're going to power their reach, you know, make them more effective to donors and philanthropists as well. So power tech, power reach with the superpower of AI. Right? And so that's what glue is doing.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  And, you know, for that, you know, imagine, you know, and literally we are taking over and running the technologies for many of these organizations now. Right? Where those become our people, we take over, you know, the full thing. And then we're turning what might be two or three decade old technology experiences into modern AI driven agentic workflows that are far more efficient, far more modern. And today, if you would give a dollar to one of those organizations, because their tech sucks, you're probably getting 80 cents worth of value. Right? You know, tomorrow, the vision is you get a dollar twenty or a dollar. You know, this is an extraordinary mission and economic unleash for us.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  And today, you know, this year, uh, glue will be about a hundred and eighty-five million in revenue. So, you know, building a real big. Yeah. You know, we took it public just before Thanksgiving of last year, right? We snuck out, uh, when the government was almost open, right? You know, afford to get it public and, you know, we're growing, uh, you know, organically well over forty percent year on year, right? We're also doing some acquisitions to grow. It will be, you know, analysts have us about three hundred million, right? Return profit in the second half of this year. And we want to influence not just the use of technology, but the very essence of what AI needs, right?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  And I, you know, the way I've described this, Arne, is, you know, the faith community did not show up for social media, right? You know, it's, you know, imagine, right? Imagine the label that says, we're going to make you more disengaged, right? We're going to lower your academic performance. We're going to make you, right, you know, more susceptible, right? You know, it's a social ills, right? You know, uh, as well, you know? And, you know, in that, right, you know, that is social media, right? That's what the facts have said. We would never, right, do that. But the faith community didn't show up demanding that it was for good. And to, so a lot of what we're working to do then also is saying, we want to make AI flourishing.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  We want AI to be shaped for good because, hey, you know, the algorithm for social media, maybe it was bad, but how we embed the values of humanity into L L N is far more important. Right? You know, it's going to be far more leverageable, you know, right? You know, does the automated vehicle have values, right? You know, does the robotic experience have human values? Does the online experience reflect human values? When I ask it, you know, to help me tie a noose, is it going to say, no, we, we, we need to get you to a suicide clinic, right? You know, and that was the Adam Rain story, right? You know, all of those things, we believe that this is the most powerful technology in the history of humanity.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Let's make sure it's shaped and used for good.

• 39:11Auren Hoffman?

  Now, as someone who practices faith yourself, like, how did that inform you as a leader, especially in the technology world?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, very early, you know, when I'm 18 years old, you know, essentially, I had my spiritual awakening, right? You know, at 18 years old, you know, became a Christian at that point, accepted Christ, you know, and went through his spirits, you know, right? I felt like I was being called into ministry at the time, you know, you know, it's like, I don't want to be a minister, I love tech, right? And so on. And then the answer from God was, the workplace is your ministry. So I've always said, I'm a full-time minister in the workplace. You know, my wife and I, we've started a number of philanthropies, you know, one of them, we have 32,000 kids in the schools that we've been helping, you know, to create in Africa,

• 40:07Speaker 01

  right? You know, we started an organization called Transforming the Bay with Christ. So we've always been involved, you know, with philanthropies, with the faith community. Now, how can we use the extraordinary

• 40:22Speaker 01

  platform that God has given us, right? You know, the wealth that he has given us, you know, on a yearly basis, we're giving well over 50% of our yearly gross income to philanthropic work now. You know, how do we use what we've been given, you know, both, you know, in wealth, also in network capacity? So, you know, I was always sort of doing it, but sort of, you know, I did this and I worked hard, right? And now with Blue, I got to put the two together.

• 40:49Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, which is really nice.

• 40:52Auren Hoffman?

  When I used to meet engineers in San Francisco, where I spent most of my life,

• 41:00Auren Hoffman?

  I would, I would say, a very high percentage of them, especially coming on the bleeding edge, were atheists. And then sometime in the last five years,

• 41:11Auren Hoffman?

  A very high percentage of them have become creationists like they believe they're in a simulation, which essentially believes there's like, uh, there's some sort of intelligent design, right? They've kind of moved from atheist to creationist in some sort of way. They might not believe in the same God as a Christian or so, but they believe in some sort of technological type of thing. But in some ways are much more closer to our creation. Like, how is this shift? Are you seeing like a shift in people or people looking more for spirituality now?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and I'll say, you know, probably two different things there, you know, one, you know, and, you know, people that share a faith, you like me, you know, include people like Gary Tan, who runs Y Combinator, you know, Trey Stevens, you know, who is running, you know, Founder's Fund and Andorol and so on. Peter Thiel, you know, we, we, we share our faith tradition on this.

• 42:02Auren Hoffman?

  And I do think By the way, almost all of them have been guests on this podcast. So, yeah, yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  And, you know, I'll say, you know, with that, they're sort of like, a lot of, a lot of them weren't visible for their faith before. And, you know, certainly one of the journeys that I have, you know, is, you know, all of a sudden people say, well, hey, Pat's super public about his faith. I can too, right? And I do think there's this, you know, they, they were there. They were just, you know, okay, I showed up for work. I did my work and then I could go be, you know, so I think one is you're seeing that. I think the second thing that you're seeing is there's almost a presumption of success now in Silicon Valley. So, oh yeah, yeah. My, my startup's going to be successful and I'm going to become a millionaire. But then it becomes a question of, is it significant?

• 42:53Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Right? You know, and I do think this idea of moving from success to significance, you know, was sort of in the water, if you could, or in the air of Silicon Valley. Where all of a sudden people are asking harder questions. And we've clearly seen more churches, more attendance of churches. You know, in this place where, you know, hey, people are showing up and they want to be, you know, and, and maybe the last thing is they want to be in community.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  You know, I had a, you know, a very significant, you know, a very close individual to my life. I'm not sure if I believe like in church, but I believe I must be in community of church. Right. So I think you're seeing, you know, some of that's post COVID, right? We lost some of that relational, you know, God created us to be in community in relationship. Right. I, you know, I go back, you know, when I spoke at the Super Bowl breakfast. Right. I, I read, you know, in Genesis and said, you know, God created and it was good. God created and it's good, right? Go through all of it. And then he gets the God created man and it was not good until he created woman to put him in relationship.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  So, you know, right, you know, we're created, you know, we as human beings, we want to be in relationship. Right. You know, for that, right. And COVID and so much of this, you know, view of, you know, the science and science only has driven us from relationship. And I do think there's this idea of being again in community. And for that, you know, much of those communities are spiritual life, right as well. So I think all three of those, right, you know, factors, people becoming more visible for their faith. They have role models they believe in, right? There is this move from, you know, success to significance. And then, right, you know, we have to be in relationship.

• 44:42Auren Hoffman?

  If you think of the evangelical side of Christianity specifically, it is very much like a startup. It's like every little church is its own startup in a way. Most of them started with like nothing and then there's some story about it, right? Of them and sometimes, and sometimes they grow. And then of course, like there's a lot of competition, so they get killed. And a lot of creative, like they're, they're competing with each other all the time. And so it does, it does seem to mirror a little bit more of the startup scene, right?

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's quite interesting when you look at the statistics, almost all of what are called the mainline denominations. Oh, you know, Methodist and Presbyterians and Anglicans and Lutherans and so on. You know, their attendance is declining, you know, as the non-denominational, the Christian churches, the evangelicals are climbing, right? You know, so you're seeing this sort of like, well, the old guard companies, well, you know, they're dying and the new companies, you know, startups are regurgitating, right? And then there's also this wider scene in the evangelical movement where somewhat like, well, the founders of this startup company go, well, they came out of that startup company. So many of those are played to new churches as well.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  But the difference is, is like, you know, well, hey, if I'm, you know, I'm not necessarily trying to start my new church, you know, my new business and send my, you know, founders out to be a new business. I'm going to keep them here and the church community actually do. They're partnering to help those new churches get started as well. And in fact, the organization that I started, TBC, Transforming the Bay with Christ, you know, we have about 50 active church plants underway in the Bay Area.

• 46:24Auren Hoffman?

  Now, if we go back to AI, how are you personally using it? Like whether it's like for business to make your business better or for your, you know, I don't know, your life. Like, how are you, how are you diving into it and playing with it?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'd say first, I've got myself too busy between my two hats that I'm not using it personally as much as I want to. Right? You know?

• 46:44Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. And by the way, I, I am, I find myself canceling all these meetings all my, like just so I have time to play with it. Cause it's, things are changing so fast.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, they really are. But, you know, and, and maybe, you know, you know, personally, I'm primarily using it as my research.

• 47:01Auren Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Right? You know, just help me get smarter. You know, I had this one, you know, you know, Raglu Ragelwam, right? Who became my successor at VMware CEO, right? You know, super smart guy, right? And when I, on Fridays, I would always walk into his office and ask him a hard question.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Because I knew over the weekend, he worked on the hard question. I'll have an answer by Monday morning. So I named my first research, uh, you know, uh, agent, Raghu.

• 47:34Auren Hoffman?

  Nice.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, okay, Raghu is gonna go work on this and I'll go get my hard.

• 47:40Auren Hoffman?

  Right, right. I'll go, I'll go, I'll go get myself a coffee while.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Well, Raghu goes or works in this question. And trust me, as a deep tech investor, I have a lot of questions.

• 47:50Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Right, you know, my.

• 47:53Auren Hoffman?

  So you have like certain skills or whatever that you, okay, hey, go, go do these things. You're go look at these things.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, hey, we're working on one the other day, you know, tell me about the cryogenic industry. Right? You know, cryo coolers and the different thing and so like, you know, I don't know anything about cryogenics, but man, I, I need to get smart on that. Well, right. You know, you know, things were, so that's probably the primary personal use, right, that I'm using. And, you know, I'm, I'm, uh, now, you know, if I go to a, a search engine, you know, versus a chat interface, I'm probably now about 20 to one in the chat interface. Right? You know, it's like every once in a while, it's like, oh, that's kind of doing a search engine versus a chat interface. But yeah, this is so much better of a user interface.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Right? And it really becomes, you know, I sort of say, you know, you know, for, you know, 60 years, computers were, you know, humans had to adapt to computers. With AI, computers adapt to humans.

• 48:51Auren Hoffman?

  Have you yet given access to, for an agent to your email, to your calendar, to those types of things?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  I've been playing with it. I've been playing with it. I'm actually sort of excited because, you know, Open Claw had so many security vulnerabilities that, you know, I played with it, turned most of them off, you know, for, you know, all of the security, you know, folks, you know, started to yell at me for what I shouldn't be doing with it. So anyway, so I turned most of those off. But now that, you know, I mean, they're starting to become a part of the core engines, I think, in better ways and, you know, what.

• 49:22Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. And you can use, obviously Claude Coolwork is kind of like that or.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:26Auren Hoffman?

  Complexity, Complexity Computer has a lot of those things kind of built in a little bit more secure.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  So it's gonna get good enough and secure enough soon that, you know, essentially, you know, everybody will feel more comfortable with it. You know, but like on the glue side, you know, we're now, uh, you know, as part of our core glue offerings. Or now, how do we turn them into agents as fast as possible?

• 49:46Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  There's a lot of that stuff.

• 49:47Auren Hoffman?

  Especially if it's marketing, whether it's to new members or for, uh, for donors or something like that's a perfect use case for all these AI agents.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  But even more meat and potatoes kind of stuff like, you know, code submissions, you'll have to go through all the security checks. Right? You know, that we have, and we have a formal process, you know, so that portal process is now a agent process. You know, then it might prompt for some inputs a couple of points along the way, but we're able to do, you know, essentially, you know, a four or five day. You know, a security review process all through a tangential flow today. So some of it's very, you know, meat and potatoes. You know, some of it's, uh, hey, let's explode your marketing pipeline with a much more refined, you know, database of, you know, potential target, uh, donors. Right? So some of these are just, you know, very quickly becoming, okay, that's good. That's powerful.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Right? Every one of our coders, you know, we're now, you know, turning them into a, you know, a Gentic stack where, you know, we'll start measuring on how many tokens, uh, per, uh, coder they're using. And, you know, you'll know those who are using the tools versus nots. And, you know, anyway, it's just extraordinary period.

• 50:58Auren Hoffman?

  Now you started until I think like when you're 18 is like a quality control technician, right? With an associate's degree or, you know, um, nothing fancy. And then you then rose up to become the first CTO. That path seems somewhat very, almost impossible today. I like your path. Everyone is blooming at different stages of their life. They, it's not everyone who scores a 1600 when they're on an SAT when they're 16 years old, right? What do we need to change to do that for more people?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, I mean, my journey, I would say it's the right one for everybody. Yeah, but you know, I am the American success story. You know, both of my parents had first through eighth grade educations in one-room schoolhouses. Neither of them went to high school or college. Right? You know, growing up, get your PhD, get your PhD. You know, part of the reason I started at Intel was I couldn't afford college. So Intel paid for my college. I lived in fear, Orin, that I wasn't going to get a passing grade because I needed a B or better to get tuition reimbursement from Intel. I had no money to pay for tuition. Right? You know, so I put it on a credit card, the first debt of my life. I lived in fear of not getting a B or better, right?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  You know, the fear is a great motivator to study. Right? Yeah. And, you know, obviously, you know, Intel just gave me extraordinary opportunities. It was very much a meritocracy, as Andy Grove, you know, going back to our Andy comments. It was well, where, hey, I worked, I say, you may be smarter than me, Orin. Right? You may be more talented than me, Orin.

• 52:37Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, you're not going to outwork me, though, right?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I grew up as a farm kid. I knew how to work, right? All right, you know, for, and, you know, to me, I mean, that's part of, you know, like so many immigrants. Right? You know, have that same sort of thing, you know? Hey, just give me a chance. Right? And to me, you know, the, the, the magic of, you know, my career, and I think of so many others. Just give me a chance. And I think what we need to do, right, you know, is give that same, just give me a chance. You know, give me that first internship. You know, give me an opportunity to get my first associate's degree. Give me a chance.

• 53:15Auren Hoffman?

  A long time ago or something, if you want to become a lawyer, you would go like apprentice at a law firm. And you do like a lot of the grunt work, you'd be like sweeping the floors too. But you'd also get some books and they would help you and they would help you study. And eventually you would, you would, you'd be, you'd get to the point where you could take the bar and you could become a lawyer. Uh, and now it's like, it's like we've outsourced that to school. No, no, you have to go to law, you have to go to law school to go do that. And then you can come, uh, it's the same thing for everything. It's like, you don't apprentice, like, no, no, you have to, you don't apprentice to become an electrician. You have to go to electrician's school or something. It seems like we've kind of changed the, the model for some reason.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in fact, you know, I mean, there, you know, uh, many of the trades. You know, for instance, today, you know, how many people do we have that are, you know, I mean, skilled, you know, people doing civil engineering work, right? You know, or civil building and welding, you know, we lost shipbuilding and, you know, nuclear reactors and so on like this. You know, the apprentices program of Europe, you know, has never stopped.

• 54:18Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Right? You know, and so.

• 54:20Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's one of the things they do very well, actually.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that's part of the reason they're stronger in some of those areas than the US, because we stopped doing that. And I do think this power of apprenticeship, you know, across so many different aspects of the manufacturing in particular, is so healthy, right? You know, for the nation. And, you know, to me, that's one of the side effects of losing that manufacturing. Oh, we'll just outsource that to Asia. You know, we also hollowed out the entire middle of the nation and middle of the social economics stack. And I think that's dreadful.

• 54:54Auren Hoffman?

  Now, last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I do think the, you know, I mean, we just touched on one of them, right?

• 55:07Auren Hoffman?

  I thought it was a good one. Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, super good. You know, and I would just say, hey, find your way, right? You know, and to me, I tell everybody, your first job, the most important thing is who you're working for. You need the Andy Grove, to me, I wouldn't be sitting there.

• 55:23Auren Hoffman?

  Someone who's gonna see the potential in you, push you to become the best version of yourself.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Right? You know, right? So if you gave me the choice of a great first job, right, with the first boss, right? Even if it was a sub-tier university that I went to, a sub-tier, right, first job, but I had a great first boss who's gonna beat the snot out of me and make me good. Way more valuable than going to Harvard.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, than going to Stanford, right? You just need, right? Yeah, that kind of influence your life. I'd like to become a champion for you, right? You know, for the entirety, you know, of your life, you know? And I am such a believer in mentoring. Where, you know, all of us need, you know, what Andy Grove was to be, you know? I joke that people need, right? In biblical terms, they need a Paul or Barnabas as a Timothy. Right? They need a Paul like Andy Grove breathing into you. You need a Barnabas, somebody who's on the journey with you. And then finally, pay it forward. You know, you need a Timothy, somebody that you're pouring into their life and journey.

• 56:29Auren Hoffman?

  Hmm. I love that. This is amazing. This is a great place to end. Thank you, Pat Gelsinger, for joining us on Summation. I follow you at P Gelsinger on X. I encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been really enlightening and a ton of fun.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much, Aron. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show. You know, to all of your, uh, you know, listeners and viewers, right? You know, this is the greatest time in history to be a technologist.

• 56:59Auren Hoffman?

  Hundred percent agree.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just couldn't be better. And to be able to say the, you know, I'll say the enlivening of faith in the face of the greatest technological. I call it the AI moment, right? And if I could, Aron, just as we finish up here, you know, this is one of my favorite gifts that I've ever given. That's a page of the original Gutenberg Bible. I have a page, right? You know, and, you know, Gutenberg, right? Inventing printing, changed humanity. Martin Luther made it good, right? You know, he changed society in the most positive and meaningful way. You know, we live in the Gutenberg moment with AI today. Let's make it good.

• 57:37Auren Hoffman?

  I love it. All right. Thank you, Pat. This has been incredible.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Thank you. Take care.

• 57:41Auren Hoffman?

  One more thing before we go. I read a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity, and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.