Podcasts about Capital

Why is iterating hardware so difficult and what would we do if it came time to start a business.In Episode #515 of 'Meanderings', Juan & I discuss: Clayton Christensen's 'The Innovator's Dilemma' book, why incumbents like IBM and Blockbuster struggled with disruptive shifts, how spin-outs can help large firms explore new markets, whether today's tech giants (NVIDIA, Amazon, Alphabet) are genuinely pivoting faster than past eras, the trap of single‑thesis bets (e.g., x402 via Coinbase/Circle), the difference between wealth and money via Paul Graham's classic essay, my slow‑ship shift toward building something around livestreaming/value-for-value/OpenClaw-style agents, Juan's practical plan to buy and streamline existing local service businesses and the enduring challenge of measuring value in a world awash with AI-generated content. No boostagrams but we do appreciate the streaming!Stan Link: https://stan.store/meremortalsTimeline:(00:00:00) Intro(00:00:36) The Innovator's Dilemma book(00:05:20) From hardware to software: DiSASSter(00:10:58) CapEx arms race: Nvidia up, Apple lagging(00:15:04) Incumbents can't buy their way out every time(00:19:13) Is AI truly disruptive? Capital, energy, and hype checks(00:24:50) Business cycles repeat: pivots, exits, and getting left behind(00:29:34) Investing today: concentration, tech dominance, and copper(00:34:05) Investing is prediction: outcomes vs decisions(00:38:02) Finding exposure: beware tiny bets inside behemoths(00:41:01) Boostagram Lounge and supporter shout-outs(00:42:04) Micropayments, value, and streaming money(00:45:19) Why Lightning may not fit continuous payments(00:49:53) Two paths: analogue community vs full-tilt AI grind(00:53:41) A niche edge: 'human-made' as a selling point(01:03:31) A creator's plan: livestreaming with OpenClaw automation(01:08:02) Work futures: lifestyle businesses and human uniqueness(01:14:58) Zero-to-one vs sustainment: knowing your role(01:20:04) Juan's near-term play: buy, streamline, and bundle SMBs(01:23:40) Wrap-up and sign-off Connect with Mere Mortals:Website: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReUTwitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspodsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcasts/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcastsValue 4 Value Support:Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcasts.com/supportPaypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcast

“...Some are dancing, some are drowning, but in the end everybody's going to go under.”Dr. Ali Kadri (Sun Yat-sen University), author of the Unmaking of Arab Socialism, joins Steve to talk about imperialism, development, and why the Arab world keeps getting put through the capitalist meat grinder. Ali argues that capitalism isn't just markets and greed. It's a destructive social relationship. Once you look at it that way, many of the world's mysteries stop being mysterious: war, austerity, pollution, and mass deaths aren't accidents that occasionally happen to capitalism. They are outcomes to be monetized.The conversation moves to imperialism as capitalism in its concentrated, caffeinated, and brutal form, especially under finance-dominance. Ali describes genocide as both direct (bombs, occupation, ethnic cleansing) and structural (avoidable hunger, disease, debt-driven collapse). He frames the destruction of Arab socialist and anti-colonial projects as strategic for empire: control of oil, geography, and the political threat of regional solidarity.They talk about MMT's explanation of currency and how the dollar functions as a lever. Ali sees the dollar as power, representing control over global resources and labor. Debt dependence becomes a kind of colonization by spreadsheet.“If the dollar stops for a minute or for a month or so, then we have people going hungry. And so this is a form of colonization, a form of death by the dollar.”They close by pulling democracy down from the clouds. Steve suggests bourgeois elections merely deliver a reshuffling of managers for the same system, and Ali produces a simple metaphor: a multiple-choice exam. The choices have been pre-loaded. And in elections, the result is still class rule.Dr. Ali Kadri is a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-sen University. He has previously held senior roles at the National University of Singapore and the London School of Economics. His academic work focuses on the political economy of development, imperialism, and the Arab world. He is the author of several important books, including The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction; China's Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism; and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.

Інвестиційна компанія Horizon Capital отримала погодження від АМКУ на купівлю частки кіпрської компанії, яка володіє виробником солодощів Bob Snail. Компанія представлена у 42 країнах світу та в найбільших мережах світу. Що вона запланувала? Відповідь – у новому епізоді подкасту Найцікавіші тексти NV. Більше озвучених текстів – у розділі Аудіоверсії матеріалів на сайті NV за підпискою. 

Preview for later today. Jim McTague observes that Washington foot traffic and influence peddling are vividly rebounding, indicating a strong resurgence of corporate lobbying activity within the nation's capital.1890 ERIE RAILROAD

In this episode, Scott Becker examines Blue Owl's decision to halt retail fund redemptions, recent asset sales to meet withdrawals, and what the move signals about broader stress and exit challenges across the private credit market.

As a teacher, patent examiner, and workforce development manager, Omi Bell consistently rose to leadership only to encounter institutional resistance to meaningful change. Rather than continue fighting from within, she built Black Girl Ventures in 2016 to address a staggering reality: less than one percent of Black and Brown people access venture capital. Her unique dual background as artist and computer scientist enabled her to see systemic gaps clearly and imagine scalable solutions. Omi's philosophy of diplomatic radicalism offers a counterintuitive path to systemic change: engage opposing viewpoints with genuine curiosity rather than confrontation. During her Congressional testimony on expanding the accredited investor definition, she identified shared values across political divides—both Democrats and Republicans care about financial inclusion. By starting conversations from agreement rather than disagreement, she creates space for dialogue that transforms policy. This approach extends beyond finance into community organizing and neighborhood problem-solving. Ready to invest in your own nervous system regulation and join leaders committed to systemic change? Explore Omi Bell's transformative work here, where you'll find comprehensive breathwork sessions, Yoga Nidra guidance, and the option to set up individual breathwork sessions tailored to your needs. For the accessible version of the podcast, go to our Ziotag gallery.We're happy you're here! Like the pod?Support the podcast and receive discounts from our sponsors: https://yourbrandamplified.codeadx.me/Leave a rating and review on your favorite platformFollow @yourbrandamplified on the socialsTalk to my digital avatar Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wanna work with us? Schedule a call here: https://go.oncehub.com/bookacall The Private Lender's Playbook for Protecting Your Capital - #328 Protect your capital and make smarter loans in this episode of the Private Lenders Podcast! Jason from Hard Money Bankers breaks down 19 years of private lending experience, sharing key strategies to avoid costly mistakes. Learn how to: Safeguard your day-one exposure Evaluate borrower quality and execution ability Underwrite using as-is value vs. after repair value (ARV) Decide when loan loss reserves are necessary Handle defaults with real-life case studies Whether you're a new or seasoned hard money lender, these tips will help you reduce risk, protect your principal, and write safer, profitable loans. ✅ Please like, subscribe, and share! ✅ Are you a new or experienced private lender or hard money lender? Join Jason Balin and Chris Haddon from Hard Money Bankers as they draw from their extensive experience running a successful hard money lending company since 2007. Tune in weekly with episodes related to all aspects of private lending. From discovering lucrative loan opportunities to securing private capital, effectively managing your loan portfolio, handling defaults, and much more, we've got you covered. ✔️ Tune in now and watch the full video podcast at www.privatelenderspodcast.com ✔️If you enjoyed this podcast we would appreciate a positive review... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/private-lenders-podcast/id1476153070 ✔️Make sure to check out the #1 Online Community For New and Experienced Private and Hard Money Lenders.. Create your account at www.hardmoneymastermind.com FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL Get updates or reach out to Get updates on our Social Media Profiles! ✅ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hardmoneymastermind/ ✅ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hardmoneymastermind  

On this episode of the cajun Knight Live we start off by talking about DARPA's Fleetwood program and the new unveiling of the Lomgshot air-to-air missle system. We also talk about the Space Force exceeding their recruiting quotas already for the year! New Zealand has created a system where anti gravity can be acheived, and they belive this may be the perfect enviroment to make nuclear fusion happen. Iraq has pushed forward with removing Russia from their oil fields and Chevron is moving in this year. Doctors have discovered screen time for kids is actually effecting white matter of the brain in their development! US troops are getting pulled from Syria, and at the same time US troops are being sent to Nigeria. An 18 year old attempted to run into the Capital building with a shotgun, and was stopped by Captal City Police. Spokeswoman for the Dept of Homeland Security has stepped down amid ICE scrutiny. And we finish with Zoran doing exactly what we thought he would...Run NYC into the groud in WEEKS of taking office.To join in on the conversation next week come to patreon.com/CajunKnightBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/cult-of-conspiracy--5700337/support.

a16z's Martin Casado and Sarah Wang join Latent Space hosts Alessio Fanelli and Swyx to discuss what makes this AI investment cycle unlike anything in the history of venture capital. They cover why the lines between venture and growth, apps and infrastructure are blurring, how frontier model companies can raise more than the aggregate of everyone built on top of them, and why the industry-wide gap between perception and reality has never been wider.   Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Frank Benton shares his inspiring journey from a troubled upbringing in Philadelphia to becoming a successful entrepreneur in the construction industry. He discusses the challenges he faced, including time in prison, and how he transformed his life by focusing on personal development, education, and building a business that offers second chances to others. Frank emphasizes the importance of core values in his company and the impact of mentorship and education on his employees' lives. He also shares valuable book recommendations that have influenced his mindset and success. Ultimate Show Notes:  00:00 Introduction to Frank Benton's Journey 01:48 From Adversity to Opportunity: Frank's Transformation 06:04 Building a Business: The Road to Success 10:02 Creating a Culture of Second Chances 13:39 Core Values and Company Growth 18:47 Empowering Employees Through Education 23:47 Books That Inspire: Frank's Recommendations Connect with Frank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrlojXDd9dk https://www.instagram.com/quite_frank_lee/  Learn More About Accountable Equity: Visit Us: http://www.accountableequity.com/    Access eBook: https://accountableequity.com/case-study/#registerTurn your unique talent into capital and achieve the life you were destined to live. Join our community!We believe that Capital is more than just Cash. In fact, Human Capital always comes first before the accumulation of Financial Capital. We explore the best, most efficient, high-integrity ways of raising capital (Human & Financial). We want our listeners to use their personal human capital to empower the growth of their financial capital. Together we are stronger. LinkedinFacebookInstagramApple PodcastSpotify

Patent attorney and former chemist Josh Goldberg joins me to unpack how intellectual property strategy determines whether innovation gets funded—or quietly dies.Most startup conversations focus on product, growth, and pitch decks. This episode focuses on what founders often ignore until it's too late: protection. Josh shares why he left drug formulation chemistry to go to law school, and how he now helps innovators—particularly in green tech and scientific industries—turn inventions into defensible assets.We walk through the uncomfortable reality that patents don't let you do anything. They let you stop others. That negative right, however, is often the very thing investors care about most.From first-to-file rules and accidental public disclosures to the difference between patents, trademarks, and copyrights, this episode breaks down how smart founders think about timing, leverage, and risk before litigation ever enters the picture.This isn't a conversation about legal theory.It's about strategic sequencing.Because innovation without protection doesn't attract capital. It attracts competition.TL;DR* In green tech and scientific startups, patents often are the product* Investors evaluate risk before they evaluate brilliance* Publishing before filing can permanently destroy international patent rights* The U.S. has a one-year grace period; most other countries do not* Patents protect inventions; trademarks protect brands; copyrights protect creative works* Litigation is expensive—early strategy prevents most of it* Founders need business planning as much as scientific expertise* IP strategy should be integrated into the business plan from day oneMemorable Lines* “Having a patent doesn't let you do something—it lets you stop someone else.”* “It's a race to the patent office.”* “If you don't know where you're going, wherever you wind up is going to be fine.”* “Innovation without protection makes funding harder, not easier.”* “The earlier I get involved, the fewer mistakes we have to untangle.”GuestJosh Goldberg — Patent attorney and former chemistIntellectual property strategist focused on green technology, scientific innovation, and helping startups build defensible patent portfolios before going to market.

*Originally released in 2022Today on Fast Frontiers, Upal Basu of ngp capital stops by to talk to host Tim Schigel about what Upal has learned as an investor, and about current events in SaaS, software, and edge computing. Upal is the a general partner at ngp capital, and in this role manages more than a billion and a half dollars in assets. He'll also talk today about lessons learned throughout his career as an investor.

In this episode of Excess Returns, Jason Hsu returns for a wide-ranging conversation on China's economy, the global AI race, emerging markets, factor investing, and what the next phase of globalization could mean for U.S. investors. We explore how China's fiercely competitive domestic capitalism contrasts with common Western narratives, why AI could reshape professional services the way globalization reshaped manufacturing, and how investors should think about portfolio allocation in a shifting G2 world.This discussion covers China manufacturing dominance, Chinese EV competition, U.S. vs. China AI strategy, emerging markets investing, factor investing in inefficient markets, and how machine learning is changing quantitative portfolio management.Main topics coveredWhy U.S. investors misunderstand China's economic system and the role of competition inside its domestic marketHow China became the world's manufacturing powerhouse and what that means for tariffs and trade warsThe Chinese government's role as a venture-style capital allocator rather than a central plannerThe real estate reset in China and the shift toward technology, AI, and advanced manufacturingAI as the next wave of globalization and its impact on professional services and labor marketsWhether the U.S. vs. China AI competition is truly winner-take-allCapital expenditure intensity in the U.S. vs. capital efficiency and open-source innovation in ChinaU.S. exceptionalism, G2 geopolitics, and portfolio diversification beyond a U.S.-centric allocationWhy emerging markets ex-China may differ from China tech exposureThe case for separating China from emerging markets in asset allocationThe concept of China as an alpha reservoir due to retail-driven market inefficienciesWhy traditional value and factor strategies have struggled in the U.S. but still work in ChinaHow machine learning and AI are changing quantitative investing and factor constructionThe launch of CNQQ and accessing large-cap China technology exposureTimestamps00:00 China as the world's factory and the role of fierce internal competition01:02 Why U.S. investors misunderstand China's economy03:48 Is China capitalist despite the Communist Party label05:33 The government as a VC-style investor rather than central planner07:45 China EV competition and manufacturing dominance09:23 Tariffs, trade leverage, and manufacturing monopoly dynamics12:18 China's bear market and valuation opportunity13:59 The real estate reset and shift toward productive capital16:00 AI as the next wave of globalization18:01 Labor force participation and economic disruption from AI19:46 Jobs that may survive in an AI-dominated world22:00 Is U.S. vs. China AI a winner-take-all battle24:13 Chip restrictions and long-term innovation incentives26:54 Capital efficiency in China vs. heavy AI capex in the U.S.29:27 Rebalancing away from U.S.-centric portfolios31:18 The end of U.S. exceptionalism and the move toward a G2 world34:00 How endowments approach U.S., developed, and emerging markets36:35 CNQQ and accessing China large-cap technology40:45 China as the great alpha reservoir45:49 The future of factor investing in efficient vs. inefficient markets49:06 Machine learning, factor decay, and next-generation quant strategies55:17 Can AI replace active portfolio managersIf you enjoy deep conversations on global markets, AI investing, China technology, emerging markets, and quantitative strategies, make sure to subscribe to Excess Returns for more interviews with leading investors and thinkers.

In this episode of the Investor Fuel podcast, Olivia interviews Nicole Daeila, Director of Capital Markets at MAG Capital Partners. They discuss the intricacies of industrial real estate, focusing on the sale leaseback strategy, the importance of networking, and the challenges faced in real estate investments. Nicole shares her experiences with tenant defaults, the transition to institutional capital, and the significance of building genuine relationships in the industry. The conversation emphasizes the need for due diligence and risk management in real estate investments.   Professional Real Estate Investors - How we can help you: Investor Fuel Mastermind:  Learn more about the Investor Fuel Mastermind, including 100% deal financing, massive discounts from vendors and sponsors you're already using, our world class community of over 150 members, and SO much more here: http://www.investorfuel.com/apply   Investor Machine Marketing Partnership:  Are you looking for consistent, high quality lead generation? Investor Machine is America's #1 lead generation service professional investors. Investor Machine provides true 'white glove' support to help you build the perfect marketing plan, then we'll execute it for you…talking and working together on an ongoing basis to help you hit YOUR goals! Learn more here: http://www.investormachine.com   Coaching with Mike Hambright:  Interested in 1 on 1 coaching with Mike Hambright? Mike coaches entrepreneurs looking to level up, build coaching or service based businesses (Mike runs multiple 7 and 8 figure a year businesses), building a coaching program and more. Learn more here: https://investorfuel.com/coachingwithmike   Attend a Vacation/Mastermind Retreat with Mike Hambright: Interested in joining a "mini-mastermind" with Mike and his private clients on an upcoming "Retreat", either at locations like Cabo San Lucas, Napa, Park City ski trip, Yellowstone, or even at Mike's East Texas "Big H Ranch"? Learn more here: http://www.investorfuel.com/retreat   Property Insurance: Join the largest and most investor friendly property insurance provider in 2 minutes. Free to join, and insure all your flips and rentals within minutes! There is NO easier insurance provider on the planet (turn insurance on or off in 1 minute without talking to anyone!), and there's no 15-30% agent mark up through this platform!  Register here: https://myinvestorinsurance.com/   New Real Estate Investors - How we can work together: Investor Fuel Club (Coaching and Deal Partner Community): Looking to kickstart your real estate investing career? Join our one of a kind Coaching Community, Investor Fuel Club, where you'll get trained by some of the best real estate investors in America, and partner with them on deals! You don't need $ for deals…we'll partner with you and hold your hand along the way! Learn More here: http://www.investorfuel.com/club   —--------------------

Tickets for AIEi Miami and AIE Europe are live, with first wave speakers announced!From pioneering software-defined networking to backing many of the most aggressive AI model companies of this cycle, Martin Casado and Sarah Wang sit at the center of the capital, compute, and talent arms race reshaping the tech industry. As partners at a16z investing across infrastructure and growth, they've watched venture and growth blur, model labs turn dollars into capability at unprecedented speed, and startups raise nine-figure rounds before monetization.Martin and Sarah join us to unpack the new financing playbook for AI: why today's rounds are really compute contracts in disguise, how the “raise → train → ship → raise bigger” flywheel works, and whether foundation model companies can outspend the entire app ecosystem built on top of them. They also share what's underhyped (boring enterprise software), what's overheated (talent wars and compensation spirals), and the two radically different futures they see for AI's market structure.We discuss:* Martin's “two futures” fork: infinite fragmentation and new software categories vs. a small oligopoly of general models that consume everything above them* The capital flywheel: how model labs translate funding directly into capability gains, then into revenue growth measured in weeks, not years* Why venture and growth have merged: $100M–$1B hybrid rounds, strategic investors, compute negotiations, and complex deal structures* The AGI vs. product tension: allocating scarce GPUs between long-term research and near-term revenue flywheels* Whether frontier labs can out-raise and outspend the entire app ecosystem built on top of their APIs* Why today's talent wars ($10M+ comp packages, $B acqui-hires) are breaking early-stage founder math* Cursor as a case study: building up from the app layer while training down into your own models* Why “boring” enterprise software may be the most underinvested opportunity in the AI mania* Hardware and robotics: why the ChatGPT moment hasn't yet arrived for robots and what would need to change* World Labs and generative 3D: bringing the marginal cost of 3D scene creation down by orders of magnitude* Why public AI discourse is often wildly disconnected from boardroom reality and how founders should navigate the noiseShow Notes:* “Where Value Will Accrue in AI: Martin Casado & Sarah Wang” - a16z show* “Jack Altman & Martin Casado on the Future of Venture Capital”* World Labs—Martin Casado• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/• X: https://x.com/martin_casadoSarah Wang• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-wang-59b96a7• X: https://x.com/sarahdingwanga16z• https://a16z.com/Timestamps00:00:00 – Intro: Live from a16z00:01:20 – The New AI Funding Model: Venture + Growth Collide00:03:19 – Circular Funding, Demand & “No Dark GPUs”00:05:24 – Infrastructure vs Apps: The Lines Blur00:06:24 – The Capital Flywheel: Raise → Train → Ship → Raise Bigger00:09:39 – Can Frontier Labs Outspend the Entire App Ecosystem?00:11:24 – Character AI & The AGI vs Product Dilemma00:14:39 – Talent Wars, $10M Engineers & Founder Anxiety00:17:33 – What's Underinvested? The Case for “Boring” Software00:19:29 – Robotics, Hardware & Why It's Hard to Win00:22:42 – Custom ASICs & The $1B Training Run Economics00:24:23 – American Dynamism, Geography & AI Power Centers00:26:48 – How AI Is Changing the Investor Workflow (Claude Cowork)00:29:12 – Two Futures of AI: Infinite Expansion or Oligopoly?00:32:48 – If You Can Raise More Than Your Ecosystem, You Win00:34:27 – Are All Tasks AGI-Complete? Coding as the Test Case00:38:55 – Cursor & The Power of the App Layer00:44:05 – World Labs, Spatial Intelligence & 3D Foundation Models00:47:20 – Thinking Machines, Founder Drama & Media Narratives00:52:30 – Where Long-Term Power Accrues in the AI StackTranscriptLatent.Space - Inside AI's $10B+ Capital Flywheel — Martin Casado & Sarah Wang of a16z[00:00:00] Welcome to Latent Space (Live from a16z) + Meet the Guests[00:00:00] Alessio: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space podcast, live from a 16 z. Uh, this is Alessio founder Kernel Lance, and I'm joined by Twix, editor of Latent Space.[00:00:08] swyx: Hey, hey, hey. Uh, and we're so glad to be on with you guys. Also a top AI podcast, uh, Martin Cado and Sarah Wang. Welcome, very[00:00:16] Martin Casado: happy to be here and welcome.[00:00:17] swyx: Yes, uh, we love this office. We love what you've done with the place. Uh, the new logo is everywhere now. It's, it's still getting, takes a while to get used to, but it reminds me of like sort of a callback to a more ambitious age, which I think is kind of[00:00:31] Martin Casado: definitely makes a statement.[00:00:33] swyx: Yeah.[00:00:34] Martin Casado: Not quite sure what that statement is, but it makes a statement.[00:00:37] swyx: Uh, Martin, I go back with you to Netlify.[00:00:40] Martin Casado: Yep.[00:00:40] swyx: Uh, and, uh, you know, you create a software defined networking and all, all that stuff people can read up on your background. Yep. Sarah, I'm newer to you. Uh, you, you sort of started working together on AI infrastructure stuff.[00:00:51] Sarah Wang: That's right. Yeah. Seven, seven years ago now.[00:00:53] Martin Casado: Best growth investor in the entire industry.[00:00:55] swyx: Oh, say[00:00:56] Martin Casado: more hands down there is, there is. [00:01:00] I mean, when it comes to AI companies, Sarah, I think has done the most kind of aggressive, um, investment thesis around AI models, right? So, worked for Nom Ja, Mira Ia, FEI Fey, and so just these frontier, kind of like large AI models.[00:01:15] I think, you know, Sarah's been the, the broadest investor. Is that fair?[00:01:20] Venture vs. Growth in the Frontier Model Era[00:01:20] Sarah Wang: No, I, well, I was gonna say, I think it's been a really interesting tag, tag team actually just ‘cause the, a lot of these big C deals, not only are they raising a lot of money, um, it's still a tech founder bet, which obviously is inherently early stage.[00:01:33] But the resources,[00:01:36] Martin Casado: so many, I[00:01:36] Sarah Wang: was gonna say the resources one, they just grow really quickly. But then two, the resources that they need day one are kind of growth scale. So I, the hybrid tag team that we have is. Quite effective, I think,[00:01:46] Martin Casado: what is growth these days? You know, you don't wake up if it's less than a billion or like, it's, it's actually, it's actually very like, like no, it's a very interesting time in investing because like, you know, take like the character around, right?[00:01:59] These tend to [00:02:00] be like pre monetization, but the dollars are large enough that you need to have a larger fund and the analysis. You know, because you've got lots of users. ‘cause this stuff has such high demand requires, you know, more of a number sophistication. And so most of these deals, whether it's US or other firms on these large model companies, are like this hybrid between venture growth.[00:02:18] Sarah Wang: Yeah. Total. And I think, you know, stuff like BD for example, you wouldn't usually need BD when you were seed stage trying to get market biz Devrel. Biz Devrel, exactly. Okay. But like now, sorry, I'm,[00:02:27] swyx: I'm not familiar. What, what, what does biz Devrel mean for a venture fund? Because I know what biz Devrel means for a company.[00:02:31] Sarah Wang: Yeah.[00:02:32] Compute Deals, Strategics, and the ‘Circular Funding' Question[00:02:32] Sarah Wang: You know, so a, a good example is, I mean, we talk about buying compute, but there's a huge negotiation involved there in terms of, okay, do you get equity for the compute? What, what sort of partner are you looking at? Is there a go-to market arm to that? Um, and these are just things on this scale, hundreds of millions, you know, maybe.[00:02:50] Six months into the inception of a company, you just wouldn't have to negotiate these deals before.[00:02:54] Martin Casado: Yeah. These large rounds are very complex now. Like in the past, if you did a series A [00:03:00] or a series B, like whatever, you're writing a 20 to a $60 million check and you call it a day. Now you normally have financial investors and strategic investors, and then the strategic portion always still goes with like these kind of large compute contracts, which can take months to do.[00:03:13] And so it's, it's very different ties. I've been doing this for 10 years. It's the, I've never seen anything like this.[00:03:19] swyx: Yeah. Do you have worries about the circular funding from so disease strategics?[00:03:24] Martin Casado: I mean, listen, as long as the demand is there, like the demand is there. Like the problem with the internet is the demand wasn't there.[00:03:29] swyx: Exactly. All right. This, this is like the, the whole pyramid scheme bubble thing, where like, as long as you mark to market on like the notional value of like, these deals, fine, but like once it starts to chip away, it really Well[00:03:41] Martin Casado: no, like as, as, as, as long as there's demand. I mean, you know, this, this is like a lot of these sound bites have already become kind of cliches, but they're worth saying it.[00:03:47] Right? Like during the internet days, like we were. Um, raising money to put fiber in the ground that wasn't used. And that's a problem, right? Because now you actually have a supply overhang.[00:03:58] swyx: Mm-hmm.[00:03:59] Martin Casado: And even in the, [00:04:00] the time of the, the internet, like the supply and, and bandwidth overhang, even as massive as it was in, as massive as the crash was only lasted about four years.[00:04:09] But we don't have a supply overhang. Like there's no dark GPUs, right? I mean, and so, you know, circular or not, I mean, you know, if, if someone invests in a company that, um. You know, they'll actually use the GPUs. And on the other side of it is the, is the ask for customer. So I I, I think it's a different time.[00:04:25] Sarah Wang: I think the other piece, maybe just to add onto this, and I'm gonna quote Martine in front of him, but this is probably also a unique time in that. For the first time, you can actually trace dollars to outcomes. Yeah, right. Provided that scaling laws are, are holding, um, and capabilities are actually moving forward.[00:04:40] Because if you can put translate dollars into capabilities, uh, a capability improvement, there's demand there to martine's point. But if that somehow breaks, you know, obviously that's an important assumption in this whole thing to make it work. But you know, instead of investing dollars into sales and marketing, you're, you're investing into r and d to get to the capability, um, you know, increase.[00:04:59] And [00:05:00] that's sort of been the demand driver because. Once there's an unlock there, people are willing to pay for it.[00:05:05] Alessio: Yeah.[00:05:06] Blurring Lines: Models as Infra + Apps, and the New Fundraising Flywheel[00:05:06] Alessio: Is there any difference in how you built the portfolio now that some of your growth companies are, like the infrastructure of the early stage companies, like, you know, OpenAI is now the same size as some of the cloud providers were early on.[00:05:16] Like what does that look like? Like how much information can you feed off each other between the, the two?[00:05:24] Martin Casado: There's so many lines that are being crossed right now, or blurred. Right. So we already talked about venture and growth. Another one that's being blurred is between infrastructure and apps, right? So like what is a model company?[00:05:35] Mm-hmm. Like, it's clearly infrastructure, right? Because it's like, you know, it's doing kind of core r and d. It's a horizontal platform, but it's also an app because it's um, uh, touches the users directly. And then of course. You know, the, the, the growth of these is just so high. And so I actually think you're just starting to see a, a, a new financing strategy emerge and, you know, we've had to adapt as a result of that.[00:05:59] And [00:06:00] so there's been a lot of changes. Um, you're right that these companies become platform companies very quickly. You've got ecosystem build out. So none of this is necessarily new, but the timescales of which it's happened is pretty phenomenal. And the way we'd normally cut lines before is blurred a little bit, but.[00:06:16] But that, that, that said, I mean, a lot of it also just does feel like things that we've seen in the past, like cloud build out the internet build out as well.[00:06:24] Sarah Wang: Yeah. Um, yeah, I think it's interesting, uh, I don't know if you guys would agree with this, but it feels like the emerging strategy is, and this builds off of your other question, um.[00:06:33] You raise money for compute, you pour that or you, you pour the money into compute, you get some sort of breakthrough. You funnel the breakthrough into your vertically integrated application. That could be chat GBT, that could be cloud code, you know, whatever it is. You massively gain share and get users.[00:06:49] Maybe you're even subsidizing at that point. Um, depending on your strategy. You raise money at the peak momentum and then you repeat, rinse and repeat. Um, and so. And that wasn't [00:07:00] true even two years ago, I think. Mm-hmm. And so it's sort of to your, just tying it to fundraising strategy, right? There's a, and hiring strategy.[00:07:07] All of these are tied, I think the lines are blurring even more today where everyone is, and they, but of course these companies all have API businesses and so they're these, these frenemy lines that are getting blurred in that a lot of, I mean, they have billions of dollars of API revenue, right? And so there are customers there.[00:07:23] But they're competing on the app layer.[00:07:24] Martin Casado: Yeah. So this is a really, really important point. So I, I would say for sure, venture and growth, that line is blurry app and infrastructure. That line is blurry. Um, but I don't think that that changes our practice so much. But like where the very open questions are like, does this layer in the same way.[00:07:43] Compute traditionally has like during the cloud is like, you know, like whatever, somebody wins one layer, but then another whole set of companies wins another layer. But that might not, might not be the case here. It may be the case that you actually can't verticalize on the token string. Like you can't build an app like it, it necessarily goes down just because there are no [00:08:00] abstractions.[00:08:00] So those are kinda the bigger existential questions we ask. Another thing that is very different this time than in the history of computer sciences is. In the past, if you raised money, then you basically had to wait for engineering to catch up. Which famously doesn't scale like the mythical mammoth. It take a very long time.[00:08:18] But like that's not the case here. Like a model company can raise money and drop a model in a, in a year, and it's better, right? And, and it does it with a team of 20 people or 10 people. So this type of like money entering a company and then producing something that has demand and growth right away and using that to raise more money is a very different capital flywheel than we've ever seen before.[00:08:39] And I think everybody's trying to understand what the consequences are. So I think it's less about like. Big companies and growth and this, and more about these more systemic questions that we actually don't have answers to.[00:08:49] Alessio: Yeah, like at Kernel Labs, one of our ideas is like if you had unlimited money to spend productively to turn tokens into products, like the whole early stage [00:09:00] market is very different because today you're investing X amount of capital to win a deal because of price structure and whatnot, and you're kind of pot committing.[00:09:07] Yeah. To a certain strategy for a certain amount of time. Yeah. But if you could like iteratively spin out companies and products and just throw, I, I wanna spend a million dollar of inference today and get a product out tomorrow.[00:09:18] swyx: Yeah.[00:09:19] Alessio: Like, we should get to the point where like the friction of like token to product is so low that you can do this and then you can change the Right, the early stage venture model to be much more iterative.[00:09:30] And then every round is like either 100 k of inference or like a hundred million from a 16 Z. There's no, there's no like $8 million C round anymore. Right.[00:09:38] When Frontier Labs Outspend the Entire App Ecosystem[00:09:38] Martin Casado: But, but, but, but there's a, there's a, the, an industry structural question that we don't know the answer to, which involves the frontier models, which is, let's take.[00:09:48] Anthropic it. Let's say Anthropic has a state-of-the-art model that has some large percentage of market share. And let's say that, uh, uh, uh, you know, uh, a company's building smaller models [00:10:00] that, you know, use the bigger model in the background, open 4.5, but they add value on top of that. Now, if Anthropic can raise three times more.[00:10:10] Every subsequent round, they probably can raise more money than the entire app ecosystem that's built on top of it. And if that's the case, they can expand beyond everything built on top of it. It's like imagine like a star that's just kind of expanding, so there could be a systemic. There could be a, a systemic situation where the soda models can raise so much money that they can out pay anybody that bills on top of ‘em, which would be something I don't think we've ever seen before just because we were so bottlenecked in engineering, and this is a very open question.[00:10:41] swyx: Yeah. It's, it is almost like bitter lesson applied to the startup industry.[00:10:45] Martin Casado: Yeah, a hundred percent. It literally becomes an issue of like raise capital, turn that directly into growth. Use that to raise three times more. Exactly. And if you can keep doing that, you literally can outspend any company that's built the, not any company.[00:10:57] You can outspend the aggregate of companies on top of [00:11:00] you and therefore you'll necessarily take their share, which is crazy.[00:11:02] swyx: Would you say that kind of happens in character? Is that the, the sort of postmortem on. What happened?[00:11:10] Sarah Wang: Um,[00:11:10] Martin Casado: no.[00:11:12] Sarah Wang: Yeah, because I think so,[00:11:13] swyx: I mean the actual postmortem is, he wanted to go back to Google.[00:11:15] Exactly. But like[00:11:18] Martin Casado: that's another difference that[00:11:19] Sarah Wang: you said[00:11:21] Martin Casado: it. We should talk, we should actually talk about that.[00:11:22] swyx: Yeah,[00:11:22] Sarah Wang: that's[00:11:23] swyx: Go for it. Take it. Take,[00:11:23] Sarah Wang: yeah.[00:11:24] Character.AI, Founder Goals (AGI vs Product), and GPU Allocation Tradeoffs[00:11:24] Sarah Wang: I was gonna say, I think, um. The, the, the character thing raises actually a different issue, which actually the Frontier Labs will face as well. So we'll see how they handle it.[00:11:34] But, um, so we invest in character in January, 2023, which feels like eons ago, I mean, three years ago. Feels like lifetimes ago. But, um, and then they, uh, did the IP licensing deal with Google in August, 2020. Uh, four. And so, um, you know, at the time, no, you know, he's talked publicly about this, right? He wanted to Google wouldn't let him put out products in the world.[00:11:56] That's obviously changed drastically. But, um, he went to go do [00:12:00] that. Um, but he had a product attached. The goal was, I mean, it's Nome Shair, he wanted to get to a GI. That was always his personal goal. But, you know, I think through collecting data, right, and this sort of very human use case, that the character product.[00:12:13] Originally was and still is, um, was one of the vehicles to do that. Um, I think the real reason that, you know. I if you think about the, the stress that any company feels before, um, you ultimately going one way or the other is sort of this a GI versus product. Um, and I think a lot of the big, I think, you know, opening eyes, feeling that, um, anthropic if they haven't started, you know, felt it, certainly given the success of their products, they may start to feel that soon.[00:12:39] And the real. I think there's real trade-offs, right? It's like how many, when you think about GPUs, that's a limited resource. Where do you allocate the GPUs? Is it toward the product? Is it toward new re research? Right? Is it, or long-term research, is it toward, um, n you know, near to midterm research? And so, um, in a case where you're resource constrained, um, [00:13:00] of course there's this fundraising game you can play, right?[00:13:01] But the fund, the market was very different back in 2023 too. Um. I think the best researchers in the world have this dilemma of, okay, I wanna go all in on a GI, but it's the product usage revenue flywheel that keeps the revenue in the house to power all the GPUs to get to a GI. And so it does make, um, you know, I think it sets up an interesting dilemma for any startup that has trouble raising up until that level, right?[00:13:27] And certainly if you don't have that progress, you can't continue this fly, you know, fundraising flywheel.[00:13:32] Martin Casado: I would say that because, ‘cause we're keeping track of all of the things that are different, right? Like, you know, venture growth and uh, app infra and one of the ones is definitely the personalities of the founders.[00:13:45] It's just very different this time I've been. Been doing this for a decade and I've been doing startups for 20 years. And so, um, I mean a lot of people start this to do a GI and we've never had like a unified North star that I recall in the same [00:14:00] way. Like people built companies to start companies in the past.[00:14:02] Like that was what it was. Like I would create an internet company, I would create infrastructure company, like it's kind of more engineering builders and this is kind of a different. You know, mentality. And some companies have harnessed that incredibly well because their direction is so obviously on the path to what somebody would consider a GI, but others have not.[00:14:20] And so like there is always this tension with personnel. And so I think we're seeing more kind of founder movement.[00:14:27] Sarah Wang: Yeah.[00:14:27] Martin Casado: You know, as a fraction of founders than we've ever seen. I mean, maybe since like, I don't know the time of like Shockly and the trade DUR aid or something like that. Way back in the beginning of the industry, I, it's a very, very.[00:14:38] Unusual time of personnel.[00:14:39] Sarah Wang: Totally.[00:14:40] Talent Wars, Mega-Comp, and the Rise of Acquihire M&A[00:14:40] Sarah Wang: And it, I think it's exacerbated by the fact that talent wars, I mean, every industry has talent wars, but not at this magnitude, right? No. Yeah. Very rarely can you see someone get poached for $5 billion. That's hard to compete with. And then secondly, if you're a founder in ai, you could fart and it would be on the front page of, you know, the information these days.[00:14:59] And so there's [00:15:00] sort of this fishbowl effect that I think adds to the deep anxiety that, that these AI founders are feeling.[00:15:06] Martin Casado: Hmm.[00:15:06] swyx: Uh, yes. I mean, just on, uh, briefly comment on the founder, uh, the sort of. Talent wars thing. I feel like 2025 was just like a blip. Like I, I don't know if we'll see that again.[00:15:17] ‘cause meta built the team. Like, I don't know if, I think, I think they're kind of done and like, who's gonna pay more than meta? I, I don't know.[00:15:23] Martin Casado: I, I agree. So it feels so, it feel, it feels this way to me too. It's like, it is like, basically Zuckerberg kind of came out swinging and then now he's kind of back to building.[00:15:30] Yeah,[00:15:31] swyx: yeah. You know, you gotta like pay up to like assemble team to rush the job, whatever. But then now, now you like you, you made your choices and now they got a ship.[00:15:38] Martin Casado: I mean, the, the o other side of that is like, you know, like we're, we're actually in the job hiring market. We've got 600 people here. I hire all the time.[00:15:44] I've got three open recs if anybody's interested, that's listening to this for investor. Yeah, on, on the team, like on the investing side of the team, like, and, um, a lot of the people we talk to have acting, you know, active, um, offers for 10 million a year or something like that. And like, you know, and we pay really, [00:16:00] really well.[00:16:00] And just to see what's out on the market is really, is really remarkable. And so I would just say it's actually, so you're right, like the really flashy one, like I will get someone for, you know, a billion dollars, but like the inflated, um, uh, trickles down. Yeah, it is still very active today. I mean,[00:16:18] Sarah Wang: yeah, you could be an L five and get an offer in the tens of millions.[00:16:22] Okay. Yeah. Easily. Yeah. It's so I think you're right that it felt like a blip. I hope you're right. Um, but I think it's been, the steady state is now, I think got pulled up. Yeah. Yeah. I'll pull up for[00:16:31] Martin Casado: sure. Yeah.[00:16:32] Alessio: Yeah. And I think that's breaking the early stage founder math too. I think before a lot of people would be like, well, maybe I should just go be a founder instead of like getting paid.[00:16:39] Yeah. 800 KA million at Google. But if I'm getting paid. Five, 6 million. That's different but[00:16:45] Martin Casado: on. But on the other hand, there's more strategic money than we've ever seen historically, right? Mm-hmm. And so, yep. The economics, the, the, the, the calculus on the economics is very different in a number of ways. And, uh, it's crazy.[00:16:58] It's cra it's causing like a, [00:17:00] a, a, a ton of change in confusion in the market. Some very positive, sub negative, like, so for example, the other side of the, um. The co-founder, like, um, acquisition, you know, mark Zuckerberg poaching someone for a lot of money is like, we were actually seeing historic amount of m and a for basically acquihires, right?[00:17:20] That you like, you know, really good outcomes from a venture perspective that are effective acquihires, right? So I would say it's probably net positive from the investment standpoint, even though it seems from the headlines to be very disruptive in a negative way.[00:17:33] Alessio: Yeah.[00:17:33] What's Underfunded: Boring Software, Robotics Skepticism, and Custom Silicon Economics[00:17:33] Alessio: Um, let's talk maybe about what's not being invested in, like maybe some interesting ideas that you would see more people build or it, it seems in a way, you know, as ycs getting more popular, it's like access getting more popular.[00:17:47] There's a startup school path that a lot of founders take and they know what's hot in the VC circles and they know what gets funded. Uh, and there's maybe not as much risk appetite for. Things outside of that. Um, I'm curious if you feel [00:18:00] like that's true and what are maybe, uh, some of the areas, uh, that you think are under discussed?[00:18:06] Martin Casado: I mean, I actually think that we've taken our eye off the ball in a lot of like, just traditional, you know, software companies. Um, so like, I mean. You know, I think right now there's almost a barbell, like you're like the hot thing on X, you're deep tech.[00:18:21] swyx: Mm-hmm.[00:18:22] Martin Casado: Right. But I, you know, I feel like there's just kind of a long, you know, list of like good.[00:18:28] Good companies that will be around for a long time in very large markets. Say you're building a database, you know, say you're building, um, you know, kind of monitoring or logging or tooling or whatever. There's some good companies out there right now, but like, they have a really hard time getting, um, the attention of investors.[00:18:43] And it's almost become a meme, right? Which is like, if you're not basically growing from zero to a hundred in a year, you're not interesting, which is just, is the silliest thing to say. I mean, think of yourself as like an introvert person, like, like your personal money, right? Mm-hmm. So. Your personal money, will you put it in the stock market at 7% or you put it in this company growing five x in a very large [00:19:00] market?[00:19:00] Of course you can put it in the company five x. So it's just like we say these stupid things, like if you're not going from zero to a hundred, but like those, like who knows what the margins of those are mean. Clearly these are good investments. True for anybody, right? True. Like our LPs want whatever.[00:19:12] Three x net over, you know, the life cycle of a fund, right? So a, a company in a big market growing five X is a great investment. We'd, everybody would be happy with these returns, but we've got this kind of mania on these, these strong growths. And so I would say that that's probably the most underinvested sector.[00:19:28] Right now.[00:19:29] swyx: Boring software, boring enterprise software.[00:19:31] Martin Casado: Traditional. Really good company.[00:19:33] swyx: No, no AI here.[00:19:34] Martin Casado: No. Like boring. Well, well, the AI of course is pulling them into use cases. Yeah, but that's not what they're, they're not on the token path, right? Yeah. Let's just say that like they're software, but they're not on the token path.[00:19:41] Like these are like they're great investments from any definition except for like random VC on Twitter saying VC on x, saying like, it's not growing fast enough. What do you[00:19:52] Sarah Wang: think? Yeah, maybe I'll answer a slightly different. Question, but adjacent to what you asked, um, which is maybe an area that we're not, uh, investing [00:20:00] right now that I think is a question and we're spending a lot of time in regardless of whether we pull the trigger or not.[00:20:05] Um, and it would probably be on the hardware side, actually. Robotics, right? And the robotics side. Robotics. Right. Which is, it's, I don't wanna say that it's not getting funding ‘cause it's clearly, uh, it's, it's sort of non-consensus to almost not invest in robotics at this point. But, um, we spent a lot of time in that space and I think for us, we just haven't seen the chat GPT moment.[00:20:22] Happen on the hardware side. Um, and the funding going into it feels like it's already. Taking that for granted.[00:20:30] Martin Casado: Yeah. Yeah. But we also went through the drone, you know, um, there's a zip line right, right out there. What's that? Oh yeah, there's a zip line. Yeah. What the drone, what the av And like one of the takeaways is when it comes to hardware, um, most companies will end up verticalizing.[00:20:46] Like if you're. If you're investing in a robot company for an A for agriculture, you're investing in an ag company. ‘cause that's the competition and that's surprising. And that's supply chain. And if you're doing it for mining, that's mining. And so the ad team does a lot of that type of stuff ‘cause they actually set up to [00:21:00] diligence that type of work.[00:21:01] But for like horizontal technology investing, there's very little when it comes to robots just because it's so fit for, for purpose. And so we kinda like to look at software. Solutions or horizontal solutions like applied intuition. Clearly from the AV wave deep map, clearly from the AV wave, I would say scale AI was actually a horizontal one for That's fair, you know, for robotics early on.[00:21:23] And so that sort of thing we're very, very interested. But the actual like robot interacting with the world is probably better for different team. Agree.[00:21:30] Alessio: Yeah, I'm curious who these teams are supposed to be that invest in them. I feel like everybody's like, yeah, robotics, it's important and like people should invest in it.[00:21:38] But then when you look at like the numbers, like the capital requirements early on versus like the moment of, okay, this is actually gonna work. Let's keep investing. That seems really hard to predict in a way that is not,[00:21:49] Martin Casado: I think co, CO two, kla, gc, I mean these are all invested in in Harvard companies. He just, you know, and [00:22:00] listen, I mean, it could work this time for sure.[00:22:01] Right? I mean if Elon's doing it, he's like, right. Just, just the fact that Elon's doing it means that there's gonna be a lot of capital and a lot of attempts for a long period of time. So that alone maybe suggests that we should just be investing in robotics just ‘cause you have this North star who's Elon with a humanoid and that's gonna like basically willing into being an industry.[00:22:17] Um, but we've just historically found like. We're a huge believer that this is gonna happen. We just don't feel like we're in a good position to diligence these things. ‘cause again, robotics companies tend to be vertical. You really have to understand the market they're being sold into. Like that's like that competitive equilibrium with a human being is what's important.[00:22:34] It's not like the core tech and like we're kind of more horizontal core tech type investors. And this is Sarah and I. Yeah, the ad team is different. They can actually do these types of things.[00:22:42] swyx: Uh, just to clarify, AD stands for[00:22:44] Martin Casado: American Dynamism.[00:22:45] swyx: Alright. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I actually, I do have a related question that, first of all, I wanna acknowledge also just on the, on the chip side.[00:22:51] Yeah. I, I recall a podcast that where you were on, i, I, I think it was the a CC podcast, uh, about two or three years ago where you, where you suddenly said [00:23:00] something, which really stuck in my head about how at some point, at some point kind of scale it makes sense to. Build a custom aic Yes. For per run.[00:23:07] Martin Casado: Yes.[00:23:07] It's crazy. Yeah.[00:23:09] swyx: We're here and I think you, you estimated 500 billion, uh, something.[00:23:12] Martin Casado: No, no, no. A billion, a billion dollar training run of $1 billion training run. It makes sense to actually do a custom meic if you can do it in time. The question now is timelines. Yeah, but not money because just, just, just rough math.[00:23:22] If it's a billion dollar training. Then the inference for that model has to be over a billion, otherwise it won't be solvent. So let's assume it's, if you could save 20%, which you could save much more than that with an ASIC 20%, that's $200 million. You can tape out a chip for $200 million. Right? So now you can literally like justify economically, not timeline wise.[00:23:41] That's a different issue. An ASIC per model, which[00:23:44] swyx: is because that, that's how much we leave on the table every single time. We, we, we do like generic Nvidia.[00:23:48] Martin Casado: Exactly. Exactly. No, it, it is actually much more than that. You could probably get, you know, a factor of two, which would be 500 million.[00:23:54] swyx: Typical MFU would be like 50.[00:23:55] Yeah, yeah. And that's good.[00:23:57] Martin Casado: Exactly. Yeah. Hundred[00:23:57] swyx: percent. Um, so, so, yeah, and I mean, and I [00:24:00] just wanna acknowledge like, here we are in, in, in 2025 and opening eyes confirming like Broadcom and all the other like custom silicon deals, which is incredible. I, I think that, uh, you know, speaking about ad there's, there's a really like interesting tie in that obviously you guys are hit on, which is like these sort, this sort of like America first movement or like sort of re industrialized here.[00:24:17] Yeah. Uh, move TSMC here, if that's possible. Um, how much overlap is there from ad[00:24:23] Martin Casado: Yeah.[00:24:23] swyx: To, I guess, growth and, uh, investing in particularly like, you know, US AI companies that are strongly bounded by their compute.[00:24:32] Martin Casado: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I, I would view, I would view AD as more as a market segmentation than like a mission, right?[00:24:37] So the market segmentation is, it has kind of regulatory compliance issues or government, you know, sale or it deals with like hardware. I mean, they're just set up to, to, to, to, to. To diligence those types of companies. So it's a more of a market segmentation thing. I would say the entire firm. You know, which has been since it is been intercepted, you know, has geographical biases, right?[00:24:58] I mean, for the longest time we're like, you [00:25:00] know, bay Area is gonna be like, great, where the majority of the dollars go. Yeah. And, and listen, there, there's actually a lot of compounding effects for having a geographic bias. Right. You know, everybody's in the same place. You've got an ecosystem, you're there, you've got presence, you've got a network.[00:25:12] Um, and, uh, I mean, I would say the Bay area's very much back. You know, like I, I remember during pre COVID, like it was like almost Crypto had kind of. Pulled startups away. Miami from the Bay Area. Miami, yeah. Yeah. New York was, you know, because it's so close to finance, came up like Los Angeles had a moment ‘cause it was so close to consumer, but now it's kind of come back here.[00:25:29] And so I would say, you know, we tend to be very Bay area focused historically, even though of course we've asked all over the world. And then I would say like, if you take the ring out, you know, one more, it's gonna be the US of course, because we know it very well. And then one more is gonna be getting us and its allies and Yeah.[00:25:44] And it goes from there.[00:25:45] Sarah Wang: Yeah,[00:25:45] Martin Casado: sorry.[00:25:46] Sarah Wang: No, no. I agree. I think from a, but I think from the intern that that's sort of like where the companies are headquartered. Maybe your questions on supply chain and customer base. Uh, I, I would say our customers are, are, our companies are fairly international from that perspective.[00:25:59] Like they're selling [00:26:00] globally, right? They have global supply chains in some cases.[00:26:03] Martin Casado: I would say also the stickiness is very different.[00:26:05] Sarah Wang: Yeah.[00:26:05] Martin Casado: Historically between venture and growth, like there's so much company building in venture, so much so like hiring the next PM. Introducing the customer, like all of that stuff.[00:26:15] Like of course we're just gonna be stronger where we have our network and we've been doing business for 20 years. I've been in the Bay Area for 25 years, so clearly I'm just more effective here than I would be somewhere else. Um, where I think, I think for some of the later stage rounds, the companies don't need that much help.[00:26:30] They're already kind of pretty mature historically, so like they can kind of be everywhere. So there's kind of less of that stickiness. This is different in the AI time. I mean, Sarah is now the, uh, chief of staff of like half the AI companies in, uh, in the Bay Area right now. She's like, ops Ninja Biz, Devrel, BizOps.[00:26:48] swyx: Are, are you, are you finding much AI automation in your work? Like what, what is your stack.[00:26:53] Sarah Wang: Oh my, in my personal stack.[00:26:54] swyx: I mean, because like, uh, by the way, it's the, the, the reason for this is it is triggering, uh, yeah. We, like, I'm hiring [00:27:00] ops, ops people. Um, a lot of ponders I know are also hiring ops people and I'm just, you know, it's opportunity Since you're, you're also like basically helping out with ops with a lot of companies.[00:27:09] What are people doing these days? Because it's still very manual as far as I can tell.[00:27:13] Sarah Wang: Hmm. Yeah. I think the things that we help with are pretty network based, um, in that. It's sort of like, Hey, how do do I shortcut this process? Well, let's connect you to the right person. So there's not quite an AI workflow for that.[00:27:26] I will say as a growth investor, Claude Cowork is pretty interesting. Yeah. Like for the first time, you can actually get one shot data analysis. Right. Which, you know, if you're gonna do a customer database, analyze a cohort retention, right? That's just stuff that you had to do by hand before. And our team, the other, it was like midnight and the three of us were playing with Claude Cowork.[00:27:47] We gave it a raw file. Boom. Perfectly accurate. We checked the numbers. It was amazing. That was my like, aha moment. That sounds so boring. But you know, that's, that's the kind of thing that a growth investor is like, [00:28:00] you know, slaving away on late at night. Um, done in a few seconds.[00:28:03] swyx: Yeah. You gotta wonder what the whole, like, philanthropic labs, which is like their new sort of products studio.[00:28:10] Yeah. What would that be worth as an independent, uh, startup? You know, like a[00:28:14] Martin Casado: lot.[00:28:14] Sarah Wang: Yeah, true.[00:28:16] swyx: Yeah. You[00:28:16] Martin Casado: gotta hand it to them. They've been executing incredibly well.[00:28:19] swyx: Yeah. I, I mean, to me, like, you know, philanthropic, like building on cloud code, I think, uh, it makes sense to me the, the real. Um, pedal to the metal, whatever the, the, the phrase is, is when they start coming after consumer with, uh, against OpenAI and like that is like red alert at Open ai.[00:28:35] Oh, I[00:28:35] Martin Casado: think they've been pretty clear. They're enterprise focused.[00:28:37] swyx: They have been, but like they've been free. Here's[00:28:40] Martin Casado: care publicly,[00:28:40] swyx: it's enterprise focused. It's coding. Right. Yeah.[00:28:43] AI Labs vs Startups: Disruption, Undercutting & the Innovator's Dilemma[00:28:43] swyx: And then, and, but here's cloud, cloud, cowork, and, and here's like, well, we, uh, they, apparently they're running Instagram ads for Claudia.[00:28:50] I, on, you know, for, for people on, I get them all the time. Right. And so, like,[00:28:54] Martin Casado: uh,[00:28:54] swyx: it, it's kind of like this, the disruption thing of, uh, you know. Mo Open has been doing, [00:29:00] consumer been doing the, just pursuing general intelligence in every mo modality, and here's a topic that only focus on this thing, but now they're sort of undercutting and doing the whole innovator's dilemma thing on like everything else.[00:29:11] Martin Casado: It's very[00:29:11] swyx: interesting.[00:29:12] Martin Casado: Yeah, I mean there's, there's a very open que so for me there's like, do you know that meme where there's like the guy in the path and there's like a path this way? There's a path this way. Like one which way Western man. Yeah. Yeah.[00:29:23] Two Futures for AI: Infinite Market vs AGI Oligopoly[00:29:23] Martin Casado: And for me, like, like all the entire industry kind of like hinges on like two potential futures.[00:29:29] So in, in one potential future, um, the market is infinitely large. There's perverse economies of scale. ‘cause as soon as you put a model out there, like it kind of sublimates and all the other models catch up and like, it's just like software's being rewritten and fractured all over the place and there's tons of upside and it just grows.[00:29:48] And then there's another path which is like, well. Maybe these models actually generalize really well, and all you have to do is train them with three times more money. That's all you have to [00:30:00] do, and it'll just consume everything beyond it. And if that's the case, like you end up with basically an oligopoly for everything, like, you know mm-hmm.[00:30:06] Because they're perfectly general and like, so this would be like the, the a GI path would be like, these are perfectly general. They can do everything. And this one is like, this is actually normal software. The universe is complicated. You've got, and nobody knows the answer.[00:30:18] The Economics Reality Check: Gross Margins, Training Costs & Borrowing Against the Future[00:30:18] Martin Casado: My belief is if you actually look at the numbers of these companies, so generally if you look at the numbers of these companies, if you look at like the amount they're making and how much they, they spent training the last model, they're gross margin positive.[00:30:30] You're like, oh, that's really working. But if you look at like. The current training that they're doing for the next model, their gross margin negative. So part of me thinks that a lot of ‘em are kind of borrowing against the future and that's gonna have to slow down. It's gonna catch up to them at some point in time, but we don't really know.[00:30:47] Sarah Wang: Yeah.[00:30:47] Martin Casado: Does that make sense? Like, I mean, it could be, it could be the case that the only reason this is working is ‘cause they can raise that next round and they can train that next model. ‘cause these models have such a short. Life. And so at some point in time, like, you know, they won't be able to [00:31:00] raise that next round for the next model and then things will kind of converge and fragment again.[00:31:03] But right now it's not.[00:31:04] Sarah Wang: Totally. I think the other, by the way, just, um, a meta point. I think the other lesson from the last three years is, and we talk about this all the time ‘cause we're on this. Twitter X bubble. Um, cool. But, you know, if you go back to, let's say March, 2024, that period, it felt like a, I think an open source model with an, like a, you know, benchmark leading capability was sort of launching on a daily basis at that point.[00:31:27] And, um, and so that, you know, that's one period. Suddenly it's sort of like open source takes over the world. There's gonna be a plethora. It's not an oligopoly, you know, if you fast, you know, if you, if you rewind time even before that GPT-4 was number one for. Nine months, 10 months. It's a long time. Right.[00:31:44] Um, and of course now we're in this era where it feels like an oligopoly, um, maybe some very steady state shifts and, and you know, it could look like this in the future too, but it just, it's so hard to call. And I think the thing that keeps, you know, us up at [00:32:00] night in, in a good way and bad way, is that the capability progress is actually not slowing down.[00:32:06] And so until that happens, right, like you don't know what's gonna look like.[00:32:09] Martin Casado: But I, I would, I would say for sure it's not converged, like for sure, like the systemic capital flows have not converged, meaning right now it's still borrowing against the future to subsidize growth currently, which you can do that for a period of time.[00:32:23] But, but you know, at the end, at some point the market will rationalize that and just nobody knows what that will look like.[00:32:29] Alessio: Yeah.[00:32:29] Martin Casado: Or, or like the drop in price of compute will, will, will save them. Who knows?[00:32:34] Alessio: Yeah. Yeah. I think the models need to ask them to, to specific tasks. You know? It's like, okay, now Opus 4.5 might be a GI at some specific task, and now you can like depreciate the model over a longer time.[00:32:45] I think now, now, right now there's like no old model.[00:32:47] Martin Casado: No, but let, but lemme just change that mental, that's, that used to be my mental model. Lemme just change it a little bit.[00:32:53] Capital as a Weapon vs Task Saturation: Where Real Enterprise Value Gets Built[00:32:53] Martin Casado: If you can raise three times, if you can raise more than the aggregate of anybody that uses your models, that doesn't even matter.[00:32:59] It doesn't [00:33:00] even matter. See what I'm saying? Like, yeah. Yeah. So, so I have an API Business. My API business is 60% margin, or 70% margin, or 80% margin is a high margin business. So I know what everybody is using. If I can raise more money than the aggregate of everybody that's using it, I will consume them whether I'm a GI or not.[00:33:14] And I will know if they're using it ‘cause they're using it. And like, unlike in the past where engineering stops me from doing that.[00:33:21] Alessio: Mm-hmm.[00:33:21] Martin Casado: It is very straightforward. You just train. So I also thought it was kind of like, you must ask the code a GI, general, general, general. But I think there's also just a possibility that the, that the capital markets will just give them the, the, the ammunition to just go after everybody on top of ‘em.[00:33:36] Sarah Wang: I, I do wonder though, to your point, um, if there's a certain task that. Getting marginally better isn't actually that much better. Like we've asked them to it, to, you know, we can call it a GI or whatever, you know, actually, Ali Goi talks about this, like we're already at a GI for a lot of functions in the enterprise.[00:33:50] Um. That's probably those for those tasks, you probably could build very specific companies that focus on just getting as much value out of that task that isn't [00:34:00] coming from the model itself. There's probably a rich enterprise business to be built there. I mean, could be wrong on that, but there's a lot of interesting examples.[00:34:08] So, right, if you're looking the legal profession or, or whatnot, and maybe that's not a great one ‘cause the models are getting better on that front too, but just something where it's a bit saturated, then the value comes from. Services. It comes from implementation, right? It comes from all these things that actually make it useful to the end customer.[00:34:24] Martin Casado: Sorry, what am I, one more thing I think is, is underused in all of this is like, to what extent every task is a GI complete.[00:34:31] Sarah Wang: Mm-hmm.[00:34:32] Martin Casado: Yeah. I code every day. It's so fun.[00:34:35] Sarah Wang: That's a core question. Yeah.[00:34:36] Martin Casado: And like. When I'm talking to these models, it's not just code. I mean, it's everything, right? Like I, you know, like it's,[00:34:43] swyx: it's healthcare.[00:34:44] It's,[00:34:44] Martin Casado: I mean, it's[00:34:44] swyx: Mele,[00:34:45] Martin Casado: but it's every, it is exactly that. Like, yeah, that's[00:34:47] Sarah Wang: great support. Yeah.[00:34:48] Martin Casado: It's everything. Like I'm asking these models to, yeah, to understand compliance. I'm asking these models to go search the web. I'm asking these models to talk about things I know in the history, like it's having a full conversation with me while I, I engineer, and so it could be [00:35:00] the case that like, mm-hmm.[00:35:01] The most a, you know, a GI complete, like I'm not an a GI guy. Like I think that's, you know, but like the most a GI complete model will is win independent of the task. And we don't know the answer to that one either.[00:35:11] swyx: Yeah.[00:35:12] Martin Casado: But it seems to me that like, listen, codex in my experience is for sure better than Opus 4.5 for coding.[00:35:18] Like it finds the hardest bugs that I work in with. Like, it is, you know. The smartest developers. I don't work on it. It's great. Um, but I think Opus 4.5 is actually very, it's got a great bedside manner and it really, and it, it really matters if you're building something very complex because like, it really, you know, like you're, you're, you're a partner and a brainstorming partner for somebody.[00:35:38] And I think we don't discuss enough how every task kind of has that quality.[00:35:42] swyx: Mm-hmm.[00:35:43] Martin Casado: And what does that mean to like capital investment and like frontier models and Submodels? Yeah.[00:35:47] Why “Coding Models” Keep Collapsing into Generalists (Reasoning vs Taste)[00:35:47] Martin Casado: Like what happened to all the special coding models? Like, none of ‘em worked right. So[00:35:51] Alessio: some of them, they didn't even get released.[00:35:53] Magical[00:35:54] Martin Casado: Devrel. There's a whole, there's a whole host. We saw a bunch of them and like there's this whole theory that like, there could be, and [00:36:00] I think one of the conclusions is, is like there's no such thing as a coding model,[00:36:04] Alessio: you know?[00:36:04] Martin Casado: Like, that's not a thing. Like you're talking to another human being and it's, it's good at coding, but like it's gotta be good at everything.[00:36:10] swyx: Uh, minor disagree only because I, I'm pretty like, have pretty high confidence that basically open eye will always release a GPT five and a GT five codex. Like that's the code's. Yeah. The way I call it is one for raisin, one for Tiz. Um, and, and then like someone internal open, it was like, yeah, that's a good way to frame it.[00:36:32] Martin Casado: That's so funny.[00:36:33] swyx: Uh, but maybe it, maybe it collapses down to reason and that's it. It's not like a hundred dimensions doesn't life. Yeah. It's two dimensions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like and exactly. Beside manner versus coding. Yeah.[00:36:43] Martin Casado: Yeah.[00:36:44] swyx: It's, yeah.[00:36:46] Martin Casado: I, I think for, for any, it's hilarious. For any, for anybody listening to this for, for, for, I mean, for you, like when, when you're like coding or using these models for something like that.[00:36:52] Like actually just like be aware of how much of the interaction has nothing to do with coding and it just turns out to be a large portion of it. And so like, you're, I [00:37:00] think like, like the best Soto ish model. You know, it is going to remain very important no matter what the task is.[00:37:06] swyx: Yeah.[00:37:07] What He's Actually Coding: Gaussian Splats, Spark.js & 3D Scene Rendering Demos[00:37:07] swyx: Uh, speaking of coding, uh, I, I'm gonna be cheeky and ask like, what actually are you coding?[00:37:11] Because obviously you, you could code anything and you are obviously a busy investor and a manager of the good. Giant team. Um, what are you calling?[00:37:18] Martin Casado: I help, um, uh, FEFA at World Labs. Uh, it's one of the investments and um, and they're building a foundation model that creates 3D scenes.[00:37:27] swyx: Yeah, we had it on the pod.[00:37:28] Yeah. Yeah,[00:37:28] Martin Casado: yeah. And so these 3D scenes are Gaussian splats, just by the way that kind of AI works. And so like, you can reconstruct a scene better with, with, with radiance feels than with meshes. ‘cause like they don't really have topology. So, so they, they, they produce each. Beautiful, you know, 3D rendered scenes that are Gaussian splats, but the actual industry support for Gaussian splats isn't great.[00:37:50] It's just never, you know, it's always been meshes and like, things like unreal use meshes. And so I work on a open source library called Spark js, which is a. Uh, [00:38:00] a JavaScript rendering layer ready for Gaussian splats. And it's just because, you know, um, you, you, you need that support and, and right now there's kind of a three js moment that's all meshes and so like, it's become kind of the default in three Js ecosystem.[00:38:13] As part of that to kind of exercise the library, I just build a whole bunch of cool demos. So if you see me on X, you see like all my demos and all the world building, but all of that is just to exercise this, this library that I work on. ‘cause it's actually a very tough algorithmics problem to actually scale a library that much.[00:38:29] And just so you know, this is ancient history now, but 30 years ago I paid for undergrad, you know, working on game engines in college in the late nineties. So I've got actually a back and it's very old background, but I actually have a background in this and so a lot of it's fun. You know, but, but the, the, the, the whole goal is just for this rendering library to, to,[00:38:47] Sarah Wang: are you one of the most active contributors?[00:38:49] The, their GitHub[00:38:50] Martin Casado: spark? Yes.[00:38:51] Sarah Wang: Yeah, yeah.[00:38:51] Martin Casado: There's only two of us there, so, yes. No, so by the way, so the, the pri The pri, yeah. Yeah. So the primary developer is a [00:39:00] guy named Andres Quist, who's an absolute genius. He and I did our, our PhDs together. And so like, um, we studied for constant Quas together. It was almost like hanging out with an old friend, you know?[00:39:09] And so like. So he, he's the core, core guy. I did mostly kind of, you know, the side I run venture fund.[00:39:14] swyx: It's amazing. Like five years ago you would not have done any of this. And it brought you back[00:39:19] Martin Casado: the act, the Activ energy, you're still back. Energy was so high because you had to learn all the framework b******t.[00:39:23] Man, I f*****g used to hate that. And so like, now I don't have to deal with that. I can like focus on the algorithmics so I can focus on the scaling and I,[00:39:29] swyx: yeah. Yeah.[00:39:29] LLMs vs Spatial Intelligence + How to Value World Labs' 3D Foundation Model[00:39:29] swyx: And then, uh, I'll observe one irony and then I'll ask a serious investor question, uh, which is like, the irony is FFE actually doesn't believe that LMS can lead us to spatial intelligence.[00:39:37] And here you are using LMS to like help like achieve spatial intelligence. I just see, I see some like disconnect in there.[00:39:45] Martin Casado: Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I think, you know, I think, I think what she would say is LLMs are great to help with coding.[00:39:51] swyx: Yes.[00:39:51] Martin Casado: But like, that's very different than a model that actually like provides, they, they'll never have the[00:39:56] swyx: spatial inte[00:39:56] Martin Casado: issues.[00:39:56] And listen, our brains clearly listen, our brains, brains clearly have [00:40:00] both our, our brains clearly have a language reasoning section and they clearly have a spatial reasoning section. I mean, it's just, you know, these are two pretty independent problems.[00:40:07] swyx: Okay. And you, you, like, I, I would say that the, the one data point I recently had, uh, against it is the DeepMind, uh, IMO Gold, where, so, uh, typically the, the typical answer is that this is where you start going down the neuros symbolic path, right?[00:40:21] Like one, uh, sort of very sort of abstract reasoning thing and one form, formal thing. Um, and that's what. DeepMind had in 2024 with alpha proof, alpha geometry, and now they just use deep think and just extended thinking tokens. And it's one model and it's, and it's in LM.[00:40:36] Martin Casado: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.[00:40:37] swyx: And so that, that was my indication of like, maybe you don't need a separate system.[00:40:42] Martin Casado: Yeah. So, so let me step back. I mean, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, these things are like nodes in a graph with weights on them. Right. You know, like it can be modeled like if you, if you distill it down. But let me just talk about the two different substrates. Let's, let me put you in a dark room.[00:40:56] Like totally black room. And then let me just [00:41:00] describe how you exit it. Like to your left, there's a table like duck below this thing, right? I mean like the chances that you're gonna like not run into something are very low. Now let me like turn on the light and you actually see, and you can do distance and you know how far something away is and like where it is or whatever.[00:41:17] Then you can do it, right? Like language is not the right primitives to describe. The universe because it's not exact enough. So that's all Faye, Faye is talking about. When it comes to like spatial reasoning, it's like you actually have to know that this is three feet far, like that far away. It is curved.[00:41:37] You have to understand, you know, the, like the actual movement through space.[00:41:40] swyx: Yeah.[00:41:40] Martin Casado: So I do, I listen, I do think at the end of these models are definitely converging as far as models, but there's, there's, there's different representations of problems you're solving. One is language. Which, you know, that would be like describing to somebody like what to do.[00:41:51] And the other one is actually just showing them and the space reasoning is just showing them.[00:41:55] swyx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Got it, got it. Uh, the, in the investor question was on, on, well labs [00:42:00] is, well, like, how do I value something like this? What, what, what work does the, do you do? I'm just like, Fefe is awesome.[00:42:07] Justin's awesome. And you know, the other two co-founder, co-founders, but like the, the, the tech, everyone's building cool tech. But like, what's the value of the tech? And this is the fundamental question[00:42:16] Martin Casado: of, well, let, let, just like these, let me just maybe give you a rough sketch on the diffusion models. I actually love to hear Sarah because I'm a venture for, you know, so like, ventures always, always like kind of wild west type[00:42:24] swyx: stuff.[00:42:24] You, you, you, you paid a dream and she has to like, actually[00:42:28] Martin Casado: I'm gonna say I'm gonna mar to reality, so I'm gonna say the venture for you. And she can be like, okay, you a little kid. Yeah. So like, so, so these diffusion models literally. Create something for, for almost nothing. And something that the, the world has found to be very valuable in the past, in our real markets, right?[00:42:45] Like, like a 2D image. I mean, that's been an entire market. People value them. It takes a human being a long time to create it, right? I mean, to create a, you know, a, to turn me into a whatever, like an image would cost a hundred bucks in an hour. The inference cost [00:43:00] us a hundredth of a penny, right? So we've seen this with speech in very successful companies.[00:43:03] We've seen this with 2D image. We've seen this with movies. Right? Now, think about 3D scene. I mean, I mean, when's Grand Theft Auto coming out? It's been six, what? It's been 10 years. I mean, how, how like, but hasn't been 10 years.[00:43:14] Alessio: Yeah.[00:43:15] Martin Casado: How much would it cost to like, to reproduce this room in 3D? Right. If you, if you, if you hired somebody on fiber, like in, in any sort of quality, probably 4,000 to $10,000.[00:43:24] And then if you had a professional, probably $30,000. So if you could generate the exact same thing from a 2D image, and we know that these are used and they're using Unreal and they're using Blend, or they're using movies and they're using video games and they're using all. So if you could do that for.[00:43:36] You know, less than a dollar, that's four or five orders of magnitude cheaper. So you're bringing the marginal cost of something that's useful down by three orders of magnitude, which historically have created very large companies. So that would be like the venture kind of strategic dreaming map.[00:43:49] swyx: Yeah.[00:43:50] And, and for listeners, uh, you can do this yourself on your, on your own phone with like. Uh, the marble.[00:43:55] Martin Casado: Yeah. Marble.[00:43:55] swyx: Uh, or but also there's many Nerf apps where you just go on your iPhone and, and do this.[00:43:59] Martin Casado: Yeah. Yeah. [00:44:00] Yeah. And, and in the case of marble though, it would, what you do is you literally give it in.[00:44:03] So most Nerf apps you like kind of run around and take a whole bunch of pictures and then you kind of reconstruct it.[00:44:08] swyx: Yeah.[00:44:08] Martin Casado: Um, things like marble, just that the whole generative 3D space will just take a 2D image and it'll reconstruct all the like, like[00:44:16] swyx: meaning it has to fill in. Uh,[00:44:18] Martin Casado: stuff at the back of the table, under the table, the back, like, like the images, it doesn't see.[00:44:22] So the generator stuff is very different than reconstruction that it fills in the things that you can't see.[00:44:26] swyx: Yeah. Okay.[00:44:26] Sarah Wang: So,[00:44:27] Martin Casado: all right. So now the,[00:44:28] Sarah Wang: no, no. I mean I love that[00:44:29] Martin Casado: the adult[00:44:29] Sarah Wang: perspective. Um, well, no, I was gonna say these are very much a tag team. So we, we started this pod with that, um, premise. And I think this is a perfect question to even build on that further.[00:44:36] ‘cause it truly is, I mean, we're tag teaming all of these together.[00:44:39] Investing in Model Labs, Media Rumors, and the Cursor Playbook (Margins & Going Down-Stack)[00:44:39] Sarah Wang: Um, but I think every investment fundamentally starts with the same. Maybe the same two premises. One is, at this point in time, we actually believe that there are. And of one founders for their particular craft, and they have to be demonstrated in their prior careers, right?[00:44:56] So, uh, we're not investing in every, you know, now the term is NEO [00:45:00] lab, but every foundation model, uh, any, any company, any founder trying to build a foundation model, we're not, um, contrary to popular opinion, we're

In this episode, Adam Torres and Joe Rinderknecht, Founder of Cowboy Capital. Joe shares how his ranching roots and early exposure to financial education led him into multifamily investing, including recent acquisitions totaling 419 units and over $14M raised. He also discusses his nonprofit Tiny's Tribe, created in honor of his late brother and grandmother, which supports families after major loss through financial stability, food support, home renovations, and mindset resources. About Joe Rinderknecht Joe Rinderknecht is the founder of Cowboy Capital (GP Sponsor) and Upgrade Partners Capital (Fund of Funds). Cowboy Capital is a real estate investment firm specializing in acquiring and operating value-add apartment buildings under 100 units. He focuses on deals within a four-hour drive of his home, ensuring hands-on management and strong market expertise. His latest acquisition, a 54-unit property built in 1998, has seen a $2.5 million value increase in just six months through strategic improvements and operational efficiencies. Follow Adam on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/ Visit our website: https://missionmatters.com/ More FREE content from Mission Matters here: https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Magical Kenya Open | Zuhura Odhiambo on Capital In The Morning by Capital FM

In this episode, ⁠Adam Torres⁠ and ⁠Joe Rinderknecht⁠, Founder of Cowboy Capital. Joe shares how his ranching roots and early exposure to financial education led him into multifamily investing, including recent acquisitions totaling 419 units and over $14M raised. He also discusses his nonprofit Tiny's Tribe, created in honor of his late brother and grandmother, which supports families after major loss through financial stability, food support, home renovations, and mindset resources. About ⁠Joe Rinderknecht⁠ Joe Rinderknecht is the founder of Cowboy Capital (GP Sponsor) and Upgrade Partners Capital (Fund of Funds). Cowboy Capital is a real estate investment firm specializing in acquiring and operating value-add apartment buildings under 100 units. He focuses on deals within a four-hour drive of his home, ensuring hands-on management and strong market expertise. His latest acquisition, a 54-unit property built in 1998, has seen a $2.5 million value increase in just six months through strategic improvements and operational efficiencies. Follow Adam on Instagram at ⁠https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/⁠ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: ⁠https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/⁠ Visit our website: ⁠https://missionmatters.com/⁠ More FREE content from Mission Matters here: ⁠https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most aspiring apartment investors quit right before momentum starts.What looks like failure is often the final friction point before proof of concept.In this conversation, we unpack what happens between learning and actually closing — and why that gap breaks most people.If you're serious about building real momentum instead of collecting education, the conversation doesn't stop here. Inside the Tribe of Titans multifamily investing community, we work through real deals together — live underwriting, capital raising conversations, and operator-level decision making.

Self Created Valuation Boosts Apple Announces new Podcast push AI – A breakdown Playing them like a fiddle – Warner Brothers PLUS we are now on Spotify and Amazon Music/Podcasts! Click HERE for Show Notes and Links DHUnplugged is now streaming live - with listener chat. Click on link on the right sidebar. Love the Show? Then how about a Donation? Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter Warm-Up - A NEW CTP just announced - China releasing new AI models - AI - A breakdown - we are on overload - Big Employment news.... Markets - Self Created Valuation Boosts - Apple Announces new Podcast push - Playing them like a fiddle - Warner Brothers Quick Note - Going to rip up the playbook on something this week on TDI Podcast. Anyone who owns an annuity should listen to what is about to come on next Sundays show.....  No Agenda... Olympics - Anything to discuss? MONEY FOR ALL - The average tax refund is 10.9% higher so far this season, compared to about the same point in 2025, according to early filing data from the IRS. - The 2026 tax season opened Jan. 26, and the average refund amount was $2,290 as of Feb. 6, up from $2,065 about one year prior, the IRS reported Friday night. - As of Feb. 6, the total amount refunded was more than $16.9 billion, up 1.9% compared to last year, according to the IRS release. That figure reflects current-year returns only. - This is partly because there were excess-witholdings from last year on the rules changed and paycheck withholdings were not adjusted. This is a one time situation.. Emplyment - 4.3% - "Better" than expected payrolls number - A major revision was released last Wednesday. Overall 2025 job growth was much weaker than initially reported. The total net change for the full year 2025 was revised down from +584,000 jobs to just +181,000 jobs (seasonally adjusted) — an average of only about 15,000 jobs added per month instead of ~49,000. This made 2025 one of the weakest years for job creation in recent non-recession periods. - Employment levels were consistently overstated throughout 2025 by roughly 800,000 to over 1 million jobs, peaking around mid-year. For example: By March 2025, the level was revised down by 898,000. By December 2025 (preliminary), down by 1,029,000. - Monthly changes were also adjusted downward in most cases (e.g., August's originally reported -26,000 became a larger loss of -70,000; September's +108,000 became +76,000). - The revisions reflect normal annual benchmarking, but this one was unusually large (larger than the typical 0.2% average over the prior decade), likely due to factors like overestimation of business births or other data mismatches. - In short, the data reveals that the U.S. labor market in 2025 was significantly softer than the monthly headlines suggested at the time — job growth was overstated by a substantial margin, painting a picture of a much weaker employment picture for the year. AI Updates - While U.S. markets have been focused on the impact of Anthropic and Altruist's tools on software and financial services, China's tech giants have released AI models this week that have shown advancements in robotics and video generation. - Google is reporting that China's AI models are just MONTHS behind western models - However - is this progress? In a video demo, Alibaba showed a robot with pincers for hands that appeared to be able to count oranges, pick them up and place them in a basket. It was also shown taking milk out of a fridge. - Alibaba on Monday unveiled a new artificial intelligence model Qwen 3.5 designed to execute complex tasks independently, with big improvements in performance and cost that the Chinese tech giant claims beat major U.S. rival models on several benchmarks. - Zhipu AI — which trades as Knowledge Atlas Technology in Hong Kong said the model approaches Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 in coding benchmarks while surpassing Google's Gemini 3 Pro on some tests. - Shares of MiniMax also jumped Thursday after it launched its updated M2.5 open-source model with enhanced AI agent tools. Grok Update - Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, has been gaining ground in the U.S. over the past months, data showed, even as it draws global censure and regulatory scrutiny after being used to generate a wave of non-consensual sexualized images of women and minors. - U.S. market share of the tool rose to 17.8% last month from 14% in December, and 1.9% in January 2025, according to data from research firm Apptopia. - Men are still the largest % users of Grok ~ 78% (down from 89% in April 2025) AI Market Share - ChatGPT's share slumped to 52.9% last month from 80.9% in January last year, while Gemini's grew to 29.4% from 17.3% over the same period. AI Market Share InfoGrapic and AI Understanding - Have we gone through this? - At its core, AI is technology that lets machines perform tasks that normally require human intelligence — things like understanding language, recognizing images, making decisions, or solving problems. - Modern AI (especially since ~2022) is dominated by machine learning — systems that learn patterns from huge amounts of data instead of being explicitly programmed rule-by-rule. - Inference is the "using" or "applying" phase of AI — when a trained model takes new input and produces an output / prediction / answer. Contrast with training (the "learning" phase): ------ Training ? Like a student studying for years: very compute-heavy, expensive, done once (or rarely) on massive servers/GPUs, adjusts billions of parameters based on examples. ------ Inference ? Like the student taking a test or doing their job: much faster, cheaper, runs on your phone/laptop/cloud, uses the fixed knowledge from training to respond instantly. - gentic AI takes regular AI (like chat models) to the next level: instead of just answering questions or generating text, these systems act autonomously to achieve goals with minimal human help. "Agentic" comes from "agency" — the ability to make decisions, plan, use tools, take actions, adapt, and even learn from results — like a smart digital employee rather than just a smart answer machine. AI Infographic Last AI Item - A shortage of memory chips is hammering profits, derailing corporate plans, and inflating price tags on various products, with the crunch expected to get worse. - The fundamental reason for the squeeze is the buildout of AI data centers, with companies like Alphabet and OpenAI buying up large shares of memory chip production, leaving consumer electronics producers fighting over a dwindling supply. - The resulting price spikes are causing concern, with some warning of "RAMmageddon" and others predicting that memory chip prices will go "parabolic", bringing lavish profits to some companies but painful prices to the rest of the electronics sector. Here is something: - Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after nearly 90 years - Founded by George Gallup in 1935, the Washington, DC-based management company began tracking the president's job performance 88 years ago. - Gallup told USA TODAY it will no longer publish "favorability ratings of political figures," a decision it said "reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership." - Gallup said the ratings are now "widely produced, aggregated and interpreted, and no longer represent an area where Gallup can make its most distinctive contribution." - "Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people's lives," the company wrote, adding that its work will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll and more. - Seems like they are unable to SHAPE opinion due to social media etc.....? Apple Podcast Update - Big news! - Apple on Monday announced that it will bring a new integrated video podcast experience to Apple Podcasts this spring. - The move comes as video viewership continues to reshape podcasting. About 37% of people over age 12 watch video podcasts monthly, according to Edison Research. - The update brings Apple Podcasts more in-line with its competitors Spotify, YouTube and now Netflix, which have increasingly leaned into video podcasting. -“Twenty years ago, Apple helped take podcasting mainstream by adding podcasts to iTunes, and more than a decade ago, we introduced the dedicated Apple Podcasts app,” said Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Services, in a statement. “ - By bringing a category-leading video experience to Apple Podcasts, we're putting creators in full control of their content and how they build their businesses, while making it easier than ever for audiences to listen to or watch podcasts.” M&A - Texas Instruments Inc. has reached an agreement to buy Silicon Laboratories Inc. for about $7.5 billion, deepening its exposure to several markets for chips. - Silicon Labs investors will receive $231 in cash for each share of the company's common stock and the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027. - The transaction still needs to win approval by investors in Silicon Labs and shares of Silicon Labs surged by 51% to $206.48 after the announcement. Inflation - This helps - PepsiCo, will cut prices on core brands such as Lay's and Doritos by up to 15% following a consumer backlash against several previous price hikes, the snacks and beverage maker said on Tuesday after it topped fourth-quarter results. Miran - Moving - Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran is leaving his post as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, CNBC has confirmed. - He joined the CEA in January 2025, but had been on leave from that post since last September when he filled the unexpired term of former Fed Governor Adriana Kugler.- He reamins on Fed board No Biggie???? - There are some astonishing cased being reported of Bad AI in the operating room - JNJ's TruDi Navigation System - Since AI was added to the device, the FDA has received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events. - At least 10 people were injured between late 2021 and November 2025, according to the reports. Most allegedly involved errors in which the TruDi Navigation System misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients' heads during operations. - Cerebrospinal fluid reportedly leaked from one patient's nose. In another reported case, a surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a patient's skull. In two other cases, patients each allegedly suffered strokes after a major artery was accidentally injured. Cuba - The main airport has putt out a bulletin that they are out of Jet Fuel - Blackouts and lack of other fuels are creating big problems - No airlines have stopped running at this point, but many will as they cannot refuel - This is a bigger problem for cargo planes (supplies) that may not be able to risk flying to Cuba as they will not be able to get out. Dalio Warning -  Legendary investor Ray Dalio said on Tuesday the world was “on the brink” of a capital war. - He said central banks and sovereign wealth funds were already preparing for measures like foreign exchange and capital controls. - "When money is weaponized using measures like trade embargoes, blocking access to capital markets, or using ownership of debt as leverage." - “Capital, money, matters,” Dalio said Tuesday. “We're seeing capital controls … taking place all over the world today, and who will experience that is questionable. So, we are on the brink — that doesn't mean we are in [a capital war now], but it means that it's a logical concern.” - Could this be why gold and siver are being hoarded (physical assets over digital currency? - Is China's edict to banks to diversify away from US Treasuries a sign? Self Boosted Valuation - Waymo is aiming to raise about $16 billion in a financing-round that would value it at nearly $110 billion, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. - Alphabet would provide about $13 billion to the autonomous driving firm while the rest would come from investors including Sequoia Capital, DST Global and Dragoneer Investment Group, the report added. - Soooooo - Waymo is a unit of Alphabet.... Alphabet providing 80% of the funding that boosts valuations..... Hmmmmmmmm Warner Brothers -  Warner Bros Discovery Inc is considering reopening sale talks with Paramount Skydance Corp after receiving its amended offer. - The Warner Bros board is discussing whether Paramount could offer a path to a superior deal, which may ignite a second bidding war with Netflix Inc. - Paramount submitted amended terms that addressed several concerns, including covering a fee owed to Netflix and offering to backstop a Warner Bros debt refinancing. Economics Coming Up - Short Week - plenty of Reports - Wednesday - Durable Goods, Housing Starts, Industrial Production, FOMC Minutes - Thursday - Philly Fed, Initial Claims - Friday: PCE, Personal Income and Spending, GDP for Q4 (3.6%) ----- New Home Sales, UMich Feb Final   Love the Show? Then how about a Donation? ANNOUNCING THE THE CLOSEST TO THE PIN for CATERPILLAR Winners will be getting great stuff like the new "OFFICIAL" DHUnplugged Shirt!     FED AND CRYPTO LIMERICKS   See this week's stock picks HERE Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter

Episode Summary Most people think they live in capitalism. They don't. They live in a permission-based money system—where access to capital requires approval, delays, or debt. In this episode, Curtis breaks down what capitalism actually is, why most households aren't participating in it, and how Infinite Banking represents household-level capitalism in action. This isn't political. It's structural. What you'll learn -Why your biggest money problem is usually lack of liquidity, not lack of income -The difference between capitalism, corporatism, and crony finance -Why most people are trained to save money they can't access -How "buy term and invest the difference" often creates cash-poor households -The three pillars of real financial control: liquidity, control, continuity Key takeaway If you don't control liquidity, you don't control decisions. And if you don't control decisions, you're not practicing capitalism—you're reacting. If this episode exposed cracks in your money system, don't try to budget harder. Fix the structure. Go to practicalwealth.net and book a 15–20 minute Clarity Call to identify where control is leaking and what to fix first. Links & Resources Episode Resources Take the Next Step with Curtis May: Business Owners: Assess Your Challenges with Cash Flow → https://curtis-73no5r8j.scoreapp.com Private Banking Readiness Assessment → https://curtis-qljorw8q.scoreapp.com How Ready Are You to Be Your Own Bank? → https://curtis-hzw1jezd.scoreapp.com The Practical Wealth Show with Curtis May Keywords Household economics Personal economy Capitalism without apology Infinite banking Liquidity and control Private reserve strategy Permission-based spending Debt paradigm Capital storage Financial independence Institutional finance Cash flow control Episode Highlights 00:00–01:06 - Capitalism without apology and the idea of a personal economy 01:06–02:04 - Why you can't control the global economy—but you can control your household economy 02:04–02:45 - Capitalism as control, not investments or rates of return 02:45–03:34 - Liquidity defined: why access to money determines decision-making 03:34–05:07 - High income, low liquidity—and why professionals still feel tight 05:07–06:15 - Debt as a symptom of illiquidity, not irresponsibility 06:15–07:36 - What capitalism actually is (and what it isn't) 07:36–08:51 - How locking money away forces life to be financed with debt 08:51–10:01 - The debt paradigm vs the "pay cash" illusion 10:01–11:37 - Institutional rules that shape how people are taught to use money 11:37–12:55 - Why most personal economies show no evidence of financial freedom 12:55–14:15 - Signals, interest rates, and distorted financial behavior 14:15–15:49 - Infinite banking as a system—not a product 15:49–17:16 - Liquidity, control, and uninterrupted compounding 17:16–18:17 - Outsourcing knowledge and control to institutions 18:17–20:12 - Capitalism practiced at the household level—and the call to action

Matthew Medrano breaks down how real estate investors can scale faster using asset-based lending instead of traditional bank financing. From 100% loan-to-cost rehab loans to long-term DSCR financing, Matthew explains how private credit works, why control of capital matters, and how investors can adapt their strategy in changing rate environments, without relying on W-2 income or tax returns.   Key Takeaways To Listen For Why asset-based lending unlocks scale when traditional banks cap investor growth How DSCR loans really work and what lenders actually care about What 100% loan-to-cost financing looks like in real-world rehab deals The hidden risks of relying on outside capital partners and liquidity events A strong private lender vs. a deal killer in DSCR underwriting   Resources/Links Mentioned In This Episode Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey | Hardcover and Audiobook Poems & Prayers by Matthew McConaughey | Kindle and Hardcover   About Matthew MedranoMatthew Medrano is the Managing Partner and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Dynamo Capital, a multifamily real estate investment firm focused on acquiring and operating workforce housing across the Midwest and Southeast. At Dynamo, Matthew leads capital formation, investor relations, and strategic partnerships, helping the firm scale responsibly while maintaining a strong investor-first culture. With a background in sales leadership, marketing, and relationship-driven growth, he is known for his transparent communication style and for helping passive investors understand multifamily fundamentals, risk, and long-term wealth strategy. Matthew is also an active educator and speaker in the real estate investing community.   Connect with Matthew Website: Dynamo Capital LinkedIn: Matthew Medrano Email: matthew@dynamocapital.com   Connect With UsIf you're looking to invest your hard-earned money into cash-flowing, value-add assets, reach out to us at https://bobocapitalventures.com/.   Follow Keith's social media pages LinkedIn: Keith Borie Investor Club: Secret Passive Cashflow Investors Club Facebook: Keith Borie X: @BoboLlc80554

Today on the Invest In Her podcast, host Catherine Gray talks with Lauren Grattan, Co-founder and Chief Community Officer of Mission Driven Finance. Lauren's background in nonprofit development made her eager to activate more capital for social change, ultimately leading her to co-found Mission Driven Finance, where she leads community-based strategy and shapes both internal culture and partner relationships. With nearly a decade of experience fundraising for organizations ranging from large universities to grassroots initiatives, Lauren brings a deeply values-driven perspective to capital allocation. Her blended Irish, Chinese, and Native Hawaiian heritage informs her commitment to reconnecting capital and community, and she has served in leadership roles with the Inclusive Capital Collective at Zebras Unite and Business for Good San Diego.  In this episode, Lauren and Catherine explore how traditional financial systems often overlook mission-driven entrepreneurs—and what it takes to redesign capital to serve people, not just profits. Lauren shares how Mission Driven Finance structures investments to support underestimated founders, especially women and entrepreneurs of color, while still delivering disciplined financial returns. They discuss the importance of trust-based relationships, creative capital stacks, and community-informed underwriting, as well as the mindset shift investors must make to prioritize long-term impact over short-term extraction. The conversation also highlights how women can step into the role of capital allocators—whether as founders, fund managers, or individual investors—to help close systemic funding gaps and build a more inclusive economic future. https://www.missiondrivenfinance.com/ https://www.showherthemoneymovie.com www.sheangelinvestors.com    Follow Us On Social Facebook @sheangelinvestors Twitter (X) @sheangelsinvest Instagram @sheangelinvestors & @catherinegray_investinher LinkedIn @catherinelgray & @sheangels   #InvestInHer #FinancialWellness #WomenInFinance #FinancialEmpowerment #MoneyMindset #InclusiveFinance #FintechForGood #BehavioralEconomics #WealthBuilding #FinancialHealth #EmpowerWomen #MoneyMatters #SheAngelInvestors #InvestInYourself #FinancialFreedom  

In this episode of Fast Casual Nation, hosts Paul Barron and Cherryh Cansler sit down with Lawrence Brown, Chief Development Officer at Rita's Italian Ice & Frozen Custard, to explore how one of America's largest specialty dessert franchises is scaling smart — from its iconic first-day-of-spring tradition and drive-through expansion strategy to franchisee unit economics, community-driven marketing, and what makes the ideal Rita's franchise partner in today's competitive QSR landscape.#FastCasualNation #FranchiseDevelopment #RitasItalianIceBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/fast-casual-nation--3598490/support.Get Your Podcast Now! Are you a hospitality or restaurant industry leader looking to amplify your voice and establish yourself as a thought leader? Look no further than SavorFM, the premier podcast platform designed exclusively for hospitality visionaries like you. Take the next step in your industry leadership journey – visit https://www.savor.fm/Capital & Advisory: Are you a fast-casual restaurant startup or a technology innovator in the food service industry? Don't miss out on the opportunity to tap into decades of expertise. Reach out to Savor Capital & Advisory now to explore how their seasoned professionals can propel your business forward. Discover if you're eligible to leverage our unparalleled knowledge in food service branding and technology and take your venture to new heights.Don't wait – amplify your voice or supercharge your startup's growth today with Savor's ecosystem of industry-leading platforms and advisory services. Visit https://www.savor.fm/capital-advisory

Hyperscalers are spending, but when will this capex help companies to improve returns? In this episode, Sean Kenney sits down with guests Erica Zieba and John Haddad to delve into the massive capex expansion in 2026, focusing on the underlying funding arrangements and, ultimately, generating returns. They also share examples on how equity and fixed income investors are working together to understand what it means across the capital structure and sectors. Listen in for unique insights to help you identify opportunities as well as warning flags.   Distributed by: U.S. – MFS Institutional Advisors, Inc. ("MFSI"), MFS Investment Management and MFS Fund Distributors, Inc., Member SIPC; Latin America – MFS International Ltd.; Canada – MFS Investment Management Canada Limited.; Note to UK and Switzerland readers: Issued in the UK and Switzerland by MFS International (U.K.) Limited ("MIL UK"), a private limited company registered in England and Wales with the company number 03062718, and authorised and regulated in the conduct of investment business by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. MIL UK, an indirect subsidiary of MFS®, has its registered office at One Carter Lane, London, EC4V 5ER.;  Note to Europe (ex UK and Switzerland) readers: Issued in Europe by MFS Investment Management (Lux) S.à r.l. (MFS Lux) – authorized under Luxembourg law as a management company for Funds domiciled in Luxembourg and which both provide products and investment services to institutional investors and is registered office is at S.a r.l. 4 Rue Albert Borschette, Luxembourg L-1246. 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Show Highlights: Why a co-op is a set of business lines, not "one co-op." [02:08] Assessing strategic clarity in business line optimization. [04:18] Where alignment breaks in grain, feed, agronomy, and energy lines. [08:25] Quick profiling of five co-op member segments. [14:44] Key diagnostic questions for co-op leaders to segment by line. [16:44] How legacy and inertia cause drag in co-op performance. [19:52] Capital allocation as the key signal of business line alignment. [21:27] Reality check questions for capital investment decisions. [24:46] What are the characteristics of aligned multiline co-ops? [26:54] Open invitation to leaders to share stories on the pod. [30:30] If you are interested in connecting with Joe, go to LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joemosher/, or schedule a call at www.moshercg.com.

Europe is not facing a crisis of ideas — it is facing a crisis of industrial depth.In this EUVC episode, Danijel Višević (Co-Founder & General Partner, World Fund), Heidi Lindvall (Founder & General Partner, Pale Blue Dot), Narina Mnatsakanian (Partner & Chief Impact Officer at Regeneration VC), Dr. Isabella Fandrych (Co-Founder and General Partner at Nucleus Capital), Jordan Billiald (Principal at IQ Capital), and Moritz Jungmann (GP at Future Energy Ventures) confront one of the defining questions of 2025:What does sovereignty actually mean?Danijel opens with history. In 1951, coal and steel powered conflict — so Europe integrated them. That integration was not symbolic. It was structural coordination under pressure. Europe repeated this reflex after the Berlin Wall, during COVID, and following the Russian gas shock. Europe does not collapse under pressure. It coordinates. But today, coordination must extend beyond policy — into capital markets and industrial systems.The structural gaps are stark. Europe produces less than 10% of the semiconductors it consumes. It imports the vast majority of rare earth materials. It raises significantly less venture capital than the United States. Only a fraction of European climate tech startups reach Series B. Europe can invent. It struggles to industrialize.Heidi reframes venture capital itself. Performance is necessary, but insufficient. Her equation is clear: Success = Performance × Trust. Trust — expressed through brand, values, and measurable impact — acts as a multiplier. Venture does not simply fund companies. It allocates the future. Narina reinforces the LP perspective: pension funds seek returns, but pensioners also seek stability, sustainability, and systemic resilience. Capital allocation is no longer purely financial. It is strategic.Dr. Isabella Fandrych shifts the conversation to materials. The energy transition is not just about electrons — it is about minerals: copper, lithium, nickel, manganese. Extraction today is geopolitically concentrated and environmentally destructive. Biology offers alternatives: microbes separating metals from rock, engineered proteins extracting minerals from waste streams, plants accumulating metals for harvest. Industrial decarbonisation is chemistry as much as energy policy.Jordan makes the case for baseload energy. Europe has reduced emissions partly through deindustrialization and outsourcing production. If Europe wants manufacturing, AI data centres, electrified transport, and economic resilience, it needs dense, dispatchable power. Renewables are essential — but intermittent. Nuclear remains one of the few proven zero-carbon baseload sources operating at scale. The debate, he argues, should be practical — not ideological.Moritz closes on infrastructure. Europe has built renewable capacity quickly. The constraint is no longer generation. It is grid orchestration. As energy systems decentralize, operators must manage volatile, distributed flows. The opportunity lies in software: orchestration, optimization, dynamic throughput management. Energy sovereignty is not just about producing electrons. It is about system design.Sovereignty in 2025 is not a slogan.It is an investment strategy.What's covered:00:30 Sovereignty redefined — from symbols to supply chains03:00 Europe under pressure — integration as a structural reflex06:00 The industrial gap — semiconductors, rare earths, and scale-up capital10:30 Venture as allocator — Success = Performance × Trust15:00 The LP lens — systemic capital and long-term responsibility19:00 The materials bottleneck — why decarbonisation is mineral-intensive23:00 Biology as infrastructure — new extraction paradigms27:00 Baseload power — nuclear as industrial policy32:00 The grid constraint — orchestration, optimization, software-defined systems38:00 Sovereignty as coordinated capital and industrial depth

After stepping off stage from moderating a panel, a Senior Frontend Developer from Capgemini waited to say hello. She asked for a quick photo, and within minutes, we were deep in conversation about hackathons, women in tech, mentoring, and the pride she felt watching Egypt host a platform of this scale. Her name is Alaa Ali Kortoma, and what began as a quick introduction turned into her very first podcast appearance. In today's episode, you will hear directly from someone on the ground in Cairo about what AI Everywhere means to her, to Egypt, and to a generation of more than 750,000 graduates entering the workforce each year. We talk about bridging the gap between academia and industry, shrinking the distance between startups and investors, and why she believes AI represents opportunity rather than replacement. If AI really is everywhere, it should look like a possibility. It should look like inclusion. It should look like young women mentoring at hackathons. It should look like national strategies focused on responsible adoption and skills development. So let me beam your ears to Cairo and introduce you to Alaa Ali Kortoma. And after spending three days at AI Everything MEA, what does AI Everywhere mean to me? It is not hype. It is not a headline. It is policymakers embedding AI into public services. It is engineers building Arabic language models tailored to local needs. It is healthcare systems using AI to detect disease earlier. It is investors listening to founders. It is young professionals investing in themselves. One phrase from this conversation will stay with me long after the microphones were turned off. Proud and full of possibility. Over the last decade, I have seen technology stories unfold across continents, but Cairo reminded me why I started this podcast in the first place. Technology becomes powerful when it connects people. When it builds confidence. When it proves that innovation is not reserved for a select few regions. AI is often framed as a Silicon Valley or East Asia story. What I witnessed in Egypt suggests something broader is taking shape. Capital is flowing differently. Partnerships are forming across Africa and the Middle East. Talent is visible. Voices are confident. So if AI can thrive beside the Nile, if it can empower graduates in Cairo to see opportunity rather than threat, then perhaps AI really is everywhere. The final question is this. What does AI Everywhere look like where you are, and what role are you playing in shaping it? Wherever you are listening from, I would love to hear your story too.

The League Episode #42 – Show Notes In episode 42 of The League, David Magid and Benoy Thanjan break down major developments shaping power markets, grid modernization, and clean energy investment. David highlights PJM's proposed emergency capacity auction featuring 15-year contracts, a potential game changer for project finance and new generation. He also covers Massachusetts' vehicle-to-grid pilot, signaling early progress toward virtual power plants. Benoy shares insights from DistribuTech, where AI-driven load growth, microgrids, and grid resiliency dominated conversations. He also reports from the Cleantech Forum, where venture capital is becoming more cautious and capital efficiency is now critical for startups. The big picture: the energy transition continues, but market signals, grid constraints, and tighter capital are reshaping how projects get built and financed.   Host Bio: Benoy Thanjan Benoy Thanjan is the Founder and CEO of Reneu Energy, solar developer and consulting firm, and a strategic advisor to multiple cleantech startups. Over his career, Benoy has developed over 100 MWs of solar projects across the U.S., helped launch the first residential solar tax equity funds at Tesla, and brokered $45 million in Renewable Energy Credits (“REC”) transactions. Prior to founding Reneu Energy, Benoy was the Environmental Commodities Trader in Tesla's Project Finance Group, where he managed one of the largest environmental commodities portfolios. He originated REC trades and co-developed a monetization and hedging strategy with senior leadership to enter the East Coast market.  As Vice President at Vanguard Energy Partners, Benoy crafted project finance solutions for commercial-scale solar portfolios. His role at Ridgewood Renewable Power, a private equity fund with 125 MWs of U.S. renewable assets, involved evaluating investment opportunities and maximizing returns. He also played a key role in the sale of the firm's renewable portfolio.  Earlier in his career, Benoy worked in Energy Structured Finance at Deloitte & Touche and Financial Advisory Services at Ernst & Young, following an internship on the trading floor at D.E. Shaw & Co., a multi billion dollar hedge fund. Benoy holds an MBA in Finance from Rutgers University and a BS in Finance and Economics from NYU Stern, where he was an Alumni Scholar. Connect with Benoy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benoythanjan/ Learn more: https://reneuenergy.com https://www.solarmaverickpodcast.com   Host Bio: David Magid David Magid is a seasoned renewable energy executive with deep expertise in solar development, financing, and operations. He has worked across the clean energy value chain, leading teams that deliver distributed generation and community solar projects. David is widely recognized for his strategic insights on interconnection, market economics, and policy trends shaping the U.S. solar industry. Connect with David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmagid/  If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at info@reneuenergy.com.  

This episode is a full-on 2025 Untappd Year-in-Review with Jeff, Jeff, and Doc: unique beer counts, top styles, favorite venues, and the bottles/pours that defined the year. Spoiler: when you combine the totals… it's basically 110 gallons of “research.” We also bring on San Diego Brewers Guild President Esthela Davila for our new ILB x Capital of Craft segment to talk all things #sdbeer.

Taxes. Filing status. Adjusted gross income. Capital gains. Just reading those words can make you want to close the tab and deal with it “later.” But here's the truth: taxes change after widowhood. Sometimes in ways no one warns you about. Filing status shifts. Income is calculated differently. Survivor benefits can become taxable. And all of it is happening while you're navigating one of the hardest transitions of your life. In this episode, Stacy Francis and Allen Sakkon walk through what really happens to your tax situation after the loss of a spouse - in plain language - so you can feel more confident, ask better questions, and avoid costly surprises. You'll hear them discuss: How your filing status works in the year your spouse passes, and what changes in the years that follow (including qualifying surviving spouse and head of household) Why your adjusted gross income (AGI) is such a powerful number and how it affects Social Security taxation, Medicare premiums, and eligibility for credits and deductions When and why Social Security survivor benefits become partially taxable and how timing major financial decisions can help What cost basis means, how the step-up in basis works at death, and why it can dramatically reduce capital gains taxes on a home or investment account How selling a house or investments in the wrong year can unexpectedly spike your income and how to think strategically about timing The most commonly missed deductions after a spouse's death, including medical expenses, property taxes, mortgage interest, charitable gifts, and capital loss carry-forwards One simple habit - tracking your income deposits —-that can help you regain control and make your tax return far less intimidating Resources Allen Sakon on LinkedIn⁠ | Email Stacy Francis on LinkedIn | X(Twitter) | Email FrancisFinancial.com Reach out to receive a complimentary consultation! Contact Francis Financial at +212-374-9008 or visit Francis Financial today!

In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Nadab “Niddy” Akhtar, Co-Founder of eXcite Capital, on-site at Art Basel 2025 to discuss alternative investments and how eXcite uses real-time, physics-inspired AI to approach market strategy and risk. Watch Full Episode on Youtube⁠. --- Follow Adam on Instagram at ⁠https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/⁠ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: ⁠https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/⁠ Visit our website: ⁠https://missionmatters.com More FREE content from Mission Matters here: ⁠https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the last U.S. herd rebuild can be described as a “jackrabbit” rebuild, this current period is completely the opposite, says Oklahoma State University economist Darrell Peel.The beef industry is on pace for a slow rebuild, and this episode of The Angus Conversation dives into the “why.”Cattle feeder Steve Sunderman and stocker-operator Gene Copenhaver join Peel to discuss tight supplies, margin pressures and how producers are adapting. From heavier finishing weights to rising capital requirements for the next generation, the guests explore what's shaping today's dynamics and long-term outlook. The guests share why they're “cautiously optimistic” and yet emphasize the importance of risk management.HOSTS: Miranda Reiman and Mark McCullyGUESTS:Derrell Peel is an ag econ professor at Oklahoma State University, holding the Charles Breedlove Professorship of Agribusiness in the Department of Agricultural Economics. He has served as the extension livestock marketing specialist since 1989, focusing on livestock market situation and outlook and marketing/risk management education for producers.His work covers all areas of livestock production economics and marketing for beef cattle including meat supply chain and international cattle and beef trade with an expertise in the Mexican cattle and beef industry.Gene Copenhaver is a fifth-generation cattleman whose family dates to the 1850s in Washington County, Va. Copenhaver currently manages his family's stocker operation in southwest Virginia with his son, Will. He was an agriculture loan officer for 38 years and served his clients who were primarily cattle producers in five East Coast states.Copenhaver is currently serving as National Cattlemen's Beef Association president.He has been married to his wife, Jodi, for more than 35 years, and they have three grown children, Brad, Will and Jaymee, and one granddaughter.Steve Sunderman is a sixth-generation farmer rancher who works alongside his parents near Norfolk, Neb. Sunderman Family Farms is a farming, cow-calf and cattle feeding operation. Steve has served the board of the Nebraska Cattlemen Association and is currently vice chair of the taxation committee as well as past chair of the marketing & commerce committee and past member of their executive committee. He is also a past chair and vice chair of the National Cattlemen Beef Association's live cattle marketing committee.Steve is a co-founder and president of Sunderman Investments, an investment firm focused on rural downtown development and value-added ag investments.SPONSOR:Angus Media: Are you ready to find your next influential Angus sire? Angus Journal subscribers will receive a free copy of the Angus Bull Book: Spring 2026 Angus Sire Directory, mailed right alongside their March edition. Visit www.AngusJournal.net to subscribe to the Angus Journal today.Angus Media: A sale book isn't just a sale book. You have options. Big or small, private treaty or live auction, Angus Media's Pasture to Publish online portal is here to serve you. Visit www.AngusMedia.org to learn more.  Don't miss news in the Angus breed. Visit www.AngusJournal.net and subscribe to the AJ Daily e-newsletter and our monthly magazine, the Angus Journal.

In this Mission Matters episode, ⁠Adam Torres⁠ interviews ⁠Nadab “Niddy” Akhtar⁠, Co-Founder of eXcite Capital, on-site at Art Basel 2025 to discuss alternative investments and how eXcite uses real-time, physics-inspired AI to approach market strategy and risk. Watch Full Episode on Youtube⁠⁠⁠. --- Follow Adam on Instagram at⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/⁠⁠ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: ⁠⁠https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/⁠⁠ Visit our website: ⁠⁠https://missionmatters.com⁠ More FREE content from Mission Matters here:⁠ ⁠https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Die Welt wird neu sortiert! Ein viraler LinkedIn-Post des KI-Unternehmers Matt Shumer schlägt Alarm: Stehen wir vor einem massiven Umbruch in der Wissensarbeit und sind die Menschen weitgehend unvorbereitet, ähnlich dem Beginn der Corona-Pandemie? Die beiden Wirtschaftsjournalisten Dietmar Deffner und Holger Zschäpitz tauchen tief in das Thema KI-Disruption ein. Sie debattieren, ob wir uns wirklich Sorgen um unsere Jobs machen müssen, oder ob das Ganze doch nur eine clevere Verkaufsmasche für KI-Premium-Abos ist. Erfahrt, warum Zschäpitz glaubt, dass eine Portion "Paranoia" an der Börse gerade nicht schadet, und warum Deffner trotzdem optimistisch ins "Jahr des Feuerpferdes" blickt. Außerdem zeigen die beiden, warum unter der Oberfläche eine Brutalo-Rotation läuft, wieso ein Welt-ETF das Chaos erstaunlich gut wegsteckt – und warum Dividenden-Aristokraten gerade wie eine Trutzburg wirken, während Big Tech vom „Asset-light“-Liebling zum „Capital-heavy“-Problemfall wird. Und am Ende gibt es die Wette, die alles auf den Punkt bringt: SAP gegen Nvidia. DEFFNER & ZSCHÄPITZ sind wie das wahre Leben. Wie Optimist und Pessimist. Im wöchentlichen WELT-Podcast diskutieren und streiten die Journalisten Dietmar Deffner und Holger Zschäpitz über die wichtigen Wirtschaftsthemen des Alltags. Schreiben Sie uns an: wirtschaftspodcast@welt.de Impressum: https://www.welt.de/services/article7893735/Impressum.html Datenschutzerklärung: https://www.welt.de/services/article157550705/Datenschutzerklaerung-WELT-DIGITAL.html

In this episode, host Mickey Desai speaks with Frances Roen, CEO and Lead Strategist of Fundraising Sol, about best practices for preparing and executing a successful nonprofit capital campaign. They discuss the importance of pre-planning, assessing organizational capacity and donor pipelines, aligning committees, and leveraging technology and data. Frances emphasizes the need for nonprofits to take a thoughtful, deliberate approach rather than rushing into a campaign, and highlights how Fundraising Sol guides small-to-medium sized nonprofits through the campaign process. This episode provides valuable insights for nonprofit leaders considering a capital campaign. We welcome support of the Nonprofit SnapCast via Patreon. We welcome your questions and feedback via The Nonprofit SnapCast website. Learn more about Nonprofit Snapshot's consulting services.

A majority of young adults believe that they will not be as well off as their parents. In other words, they are falling behind. And the economic data bears it out. The average age of first time homebuyers is 40. But in the 1980s it was 30. What can the average young man or woman do to build wealth ?

In this special live recording from the Expo Stage at Potato Expo 2026, host Lane Nordlund sits down with Kam Quarles, CEO of the National Potato Council (NPC), and Randy Russell, President and CEO of The Russell Group. One year into the current administration, the discussion tackles the current policy landscape and its impact on NPC's mission of "Standing Up for Potatoes on Capitol Hill."The conversation explores how the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) movement and the DOGE commission have shifted the food policy landscape far faster than typical federal cycles. Looking toward the 2026 midterm elections, the panel analyzes the narrow legislative window for passing a new five-year Farm Bill, as the 2018 bill remains under a one-year extension through September 2026. The group also addresses the ongoing economic crisis in farm country, highlighting the NPC's role in fighting for additional economic relief for specialty crop producers to offset rising input costs and market disruptions.

Developing housing is already a complex equation and tapping EB-5 capital adds a whole other layer of strategy. In this episode of BuzzHouse, Don Bernards and Garrick Gibson are joined by their Baker Tilly colleagues Warren Oakes and Jillian O'Brien, two professionals with deep experience in EB-5 project structuring, compliance, and advisory services.They explain what EB-5 is, how it applies to multifamily housing, and the steps developers need to take if they're considering this type of capital. The conversation also covers legislative changes, including a potential new bill focused on supporting affordable and multifamily housing through EB-5 set-asides. If you're in the housing space and curious about alternative financing, this episode gives you the clarity you need to evaluate whether EB-5 is a good fit.Follow UsTwitter @BakerTillyUSFacebook @BakerTillyUSInstagram @bakertillyusPresented by Baker Tillywww.bakertilly.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Polk County recently rejected a planned truck refueling stop near a key wildlife corridor crossing over Interstate 4. It's a pretty big deal for animal and environmental advocates.Call: 813-755-6562Message: FloridaMatters@wusf.orgWebsite: https://www.wusf.orgSign up for our daily newsletter: https://www.wusf.org/wakeupcall-newsletterFollow us on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WUSFInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wusfpublicmedia/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsN1ZItTKcJ4AGsBIni35gg

Hear Vincent and Joel discuss the cutting edge of business development in South Carolina in front of a new class of business leadership in our State's capital with Guest, president of SCOUT MOTORS USA, Scott Keogh. Hear about Scott's background, family, and the business of cars. Listen to recent updates on the debate over South Carolina data centers and their potential drain on state resources, SCOUT motors future in South Carolina, national political updates, statewide political races, and so much more!Support the showKeep up to Date with BITBR: Twitter.com/BITBRpodcastFacebook.com/BITBRpodcasthttps://bourboninthebackroom.buzzsprout.com

ACOFAE Podcast Presents: Mockingjay Part 1 - The movie: "Everything old can be new again...like democracy." Remember when watching this movie was a form of escapism? Remember when the concept of the Hunger Games was horrifying and parents were up in arms? Remember all that? Good. Watch it again. ACOFAE is continuing the watch of The Hunger Games series with the third movie, Mockingjay: Part 1. Filled with a cast that is beyond talented, Katniss is struggling with her new life in District 13, after she was rescued from the Games. Peeta is a hostage of the Capital, and is not doing well and Katniss has to rally the people for revolution. With propos. That she isn't very good at. What follows is Katniss' journey of working through the scheming and the politics of 13, dealing with Snow and his cruelty, and figuring out her place in this new district. Hoorah? "Not one to waste it in rehearsal."

In this conversation, Dr. Amir Baluch shares his unique journey from a medical career to becoming a successful fund manager in the real estate sector. He discusses the thriving DFW real estate market, his early investments, and the strategies he employs in acquisitions and development. Amir emphasizes the importance of understanding market trends, particularly in the context of inflation, and outlines his current projects and future plans for growth in the industry.   Professional Real Estate Investors - How we can help you: Investor Fuel Mastermind:  Learn more about the Investor Fuel Mastermind, including 100% deal financing, massive discounts from vendors and sponsors you're already using, our world class community of over 150 members, and SO much more here: http://www.investorfuel.com/apply   Investor Machine Marketing Partnership:  Are you looking for consistent, high quality lead generation? Investor Machine is America's #1 lead generation service professional investors. Investor Machine provides true 'white glove' support to help you build the perfect marketing plan, then we'll execute it for you…talking and working together on an ongoing basis to help you hit YOUR goals! Learn more here: http://www.investormachine.com   Coaching with Mike Hambright:  Interested in 1 on 1 coaching with Mike Hambright? Mike coaches entrepreneurs looking to level up, build coaching or service based businesses (Mike runs multiple 7 and 8 figure a year businesses), building a coaching program and more. Learn more here: https://investorfuel.com/coachingwithmike   Attend a Vacation/Mastermind Retreat with Mike Hambright: Interested in joining a "mini-mastermind" with Mike and his private clients on an upcoming "Retreat", either at locations like Cabo San Lucas, Napa, Park City ski trip, Yellowstone, or even at Mike's East Texas "Big H Ranch"? Learn more here: http://www.investorfuel.com/retreat   Property Insurance: Join the largest and most investor friendly property insurance provider in 2 minutes. Free to join, and insure all your flips and rentals within minutes! There is NO easier insurance provider on the planet (turn insurance on or off in 1 minute without talking to anyone!), and there's no 15-30% agent mark up through this platform!  Register here: https://myinvestorinsurance.com/   New Real Estate Investors - How we can work together: Investor Fuel Club (Coaching and Deal Partner Community): Looking to kickstart your real estate investing career? Join our one of a kind Coaching Community, Investor Fuel Club, where you'll get trained by some of the best real estate investors in America, and partner with them on deals! You don't need $ for deals…we'll partner with you and hold your hand along the way! Learn More here: http://www.investorfuel.com/club   —--------------------

Brussels is full of lobbyists. Over decades, big companies have been using their financial might not only to influence EU policies but even to shape how EU institutions are designed and what their key goals are. Host Licia Cianetti talks to Kenneth Haar, who for almost two decades has been conducting research on corporate lobbying in the EU for Corporate Europe Observatory. Kenneth explains how corporate lobbying works, what lobbyists want, and how a sketchily defined “competitiveness” agenda is driving a far-reaching deregulation drive by the European Commission, which endangers hard fought for environmental, social, health, and labour protections.  Guest: Kenneth Haar is a researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). His freely downloadable book, A Europe of Capital, details how corporate lobbyists got to the core of the European project. Corporate Europe Observatory is an advocacy and investigative research group. Their many reports, articles, and infographics on corporate lobbying in the EU are available on the CEO website. You can download their alternative tourist guide to Bussels here: “Lobby Planet – Brussels”. CEO's podcast EU Watchdog Radio is also highly recommended! Presenter: Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Faith Driven Investor Podcast - Episode 216Join hosts Richard Cunningham and Luke Roush as they sit down with Steve Cook, Executive Managing Director of LFM Capital, for a deep dive into the state of US manufacturing and the reshoring revolution transforming American industry. From the deck of an aircraft carrier to the shop floor to private equity boardrooms, Steve brings a unique perspective on what it takes to build manufacturing companies that strengthen both portfolios and national security.Key Investment Topics:The economics of reshoring: Why major manufacturers are bringing supply chains back to the USLFM Capital's operator-led approach to buyout private equity in manufacturingHow tariffs, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical tensions are reshaping investment opportunitiesWhy aerospace, defense, and B2B manufacturing offer compelling risk-adjusted returnsThe role of leadership and operational excellence in driving EBITDA margins and enterprise valueInterest rates, deal flow, and the creative structuring required in today's PE marketPowerful Quotes:"We won World War One and Two predominantly because we had a strong industrial base that could step up and pivot when the country needed it. We're woefully unprepared for World War Three." - Steve Cook"It costs more to hire an English-speaking manager in China than it does in the US today. Labor cost equilibrium is happening faster than anyone expected." - Steve Cook"The absolute worst form of ownership I've ever seen is 50/50. Someone has to make the final decision - that's true in a company and true in a marriage." - Steve CookEpisode Description:What does it take to rebuild American manufacturing in an era of global uncertainty? Steve Cook knows firsthand. As a former Navy fighter pilot who flew combat missions during Desert Shield, then an operations leader at Dell managing 2,200 manufacturing employees, Steve brings unparalleled shop floor DNA to private equity investing. Now leading LFM Capital - a buyout firm exclusively focused on US manufacturing - he's witnessing the early stages of a reshoring revolution that could reshape both the American economy and investment portfolios.This episode cuts through the headlines to reveal what's really happening on the ground with US manufacturing. Steve explains why companies are finally bringing production back home, which industries offer the most compelling opportunities, and how LFM's operator-first approach generates returns by elevating leadership and operational excellence rather than financial engineering. From the impact of Liberation Day tariffs to the quiet convergence of global labor costs, from AI's limited role on today's shop floor to the creative deal structures emerging in a higher interest rate environment, this conversation delivers actionable insights for investors seeking exposure to the manufacturing renaissance.Steve also vulnerably shares lessons from Genesis on leadership, partnership, and the biblical principles that shape both his marriage and LFM's investment philosophy - including why 50/50 ownership structures consistently fail and what that reveals about decision-making authority in both business and family.Guest Background:Steve Cook is Executive Managing Director of LFM Capital, a Nashville-based private equity firm investing exclusively in US manufacturing companies. A graduate of the US Naval Academy and MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing program, Steve flew F/A-18s off aircraft carriers for seven years before transitioning to operations leadership roles at Dell and venture-backed technology companies. At LFM, he leads a team of operators and engineers who partner with manufacturing CEOs to build enterprise value through operational excellence, not financial engineering. Steve and his wife Shannon live in Nashville and are active members of Long Hollow Church.

Kick back with your favorite podcast duo!  It's Halftime!! The NFL's biggest game of the year has come and gone. From the game itself to the "controversial" Halftime Show, the guys weigh in on Super Bowl 60. WAKE UP! "What timeline are we in?" has become a frequent theme on the show. With more information coming out surrounding the notorious "Epstein Files", the lines between conspiracy and reality hit an all-time high. Peace Be With You. The Monks, who started their "Walk for Peace" back in October, finally reached the Nation's Capital. What was their message to the Nation? Like Share Comment Subscribe and Review!

This episode, we talk about two monumental projects that were started in this reign.  One was the historiographical project that likely led to the creation of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.  And then there was the start of the first permanent capital city:  the Fujiwara Capital. Listen to the episode and find more on our website:  https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-143   Rough Transcript   Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua and this is Episode 143: Temmu's Monumental Projects     Ohoama sat astride his horse and looked out at the land in front of him.   He could still see the image of the rice fields, now long fallow, spreading out on the plain.  To the north, east, and west, he could see the mountains that would frame his vision.  As his ministers started to rattle off information about the next steps of the plan, Ohoama began to smile.  He thought of the reports his embassies to the Great Tang had brought back, about the great walled cities of the continent.  In his mind's eye, Ohoama envisioned something similar, rising up on the plain in front of him. There would be an earth and stone wall, surrounding the great city.  The gates would be grand, much like the temples, but on an even greater scale.  Houses would be packed in tight, each within their own walled compounds.  In the center painted red and white, with green accents, would be a palace to rival any other structure in the archipelago.  The people would stream in, and the city would be bustling with traffic. This was a new center, from which the power of Yamato would be projected across the islands and even to the continent.   Greetings everyone, and welcome back.  This episode we are still focused on the reign of Ohoama, aka Temmu Tennou, between the years 672 and 686. Last episode we talked about the Four Great Temples—or the Four National Temples.  Much of this episode was focused on the rise and spread of Buddhism as we see in the building of these national temples, but also on the changes that occurred as the relationship between Buddhism and the State evolved.  This was part of Ohoama's work to build up the State into something beyond what it had been in the past—or perhaps into something comparable to what they believed it to have been in the past.  After all, based on the size of the tomb mounds in the kofun period, it does seem that there was a peak of prosperity in the 5th century, around the time of Wakatakeru, aka Yuryaku Tennou, and then a decline, to the point that the lineage from Wohodo, aka Keitai Tennou, seemed to have come in during a time when they were rebuilding Yamato power and authority. This episode we are going to talk about two projects that Ohoama kicked off during his reign.  He wouldn't see the completion of either one, since both took multiple decades to complete, but both focused on linking the past and the future.  The first we'll talk about is a new attempt to gather historical documents and records—the last time that was done was in the time of Kashikiya Hime, over 50 years ago.  That was during the height of Soga power.  Since then a lot had changed, and presumably there were even more stories and records that had been written down.  Plus the tide had changed.  So they needed to update—and maybe even correct—the historical record. But beyond that, there was a greater goal: Ohoama and his court also needed to make sure that the past was something that they wanted to go back to, among other things. The other thing we are going to discuss is the start of a project to build a brand new capital city.  And when we talk a bout city, we really mean a city.  This was a massive undertaking, likely unlike anything that we've seen so far.  Sure, there had been monumental building projects, but this was something that was going to take a lot more work - how much more monumental could you get than a new city?  And it would create a physical environment that would be the embodiment of the new centralization of power and authority, and the new state that Ohoama was building, with his administration—and Yamato—at the center.   Let's start with the big ones.  First and foremost, we have the entry from the 17th day of the 3rd month of the 681.  Ohoama gave a decree from the Daigokuden to commit to writing a Chronicle of the sovereigns and various matters of high antiquity.  Bentley translates this as saying that they were to record and confirm the Teiki, which Aston translated as the Chronicle of the Sovereigns, and various accounts of ancient times.  This task was given out to a slew of individuals, including the Royal Princes Kawashima and Osakabe; the Princes Hirose, Takeda, Kuwada, and Mino; as well as Kamitsukenu no Kimi no Michichi, Imbe no Muraji no Kobito, Adzumi no Muraji no Inashiki, Naniwa no Muraji no Ohogata, Nakatomi no Muraji no Ohoshima, and Heguri no Omi no Kobito.  Ohoshima and Kobito were specifically chosen as the scribes for this effort.  We aren't told what work was started at this time.  Aston, in his translation of the Nihon Shoki, assumes that this is the start of the Kojiki.  Bentley notes that this is the first in a variety of records about gathering the various records, including gathering records from the various families, and eventually even records from the various provinces.  And I think we can see why.  Legitimizing a new state and a new way of doing things often means ensuring that you have control of the narrative.  Today, that often means doing what you can to control media and the stories that are in the national consciousness.  In Ohoama's day, I'd argue that narrative was more about the various written sources, and how they were presented.  After all, many of the rituals and evidence that we are looking at would rely on the past to understand the present.  The various family records would not only tell of how those families came to be, but would have important information about what else was going on, and how that was presented could determine whether something was going to be seen as auspicious, or otherwise.  Even without getting rid of those records, it would be important to have the official, State narrative conform to the Truth that the state was attempting to implement. Ultimately, there is no way to know, exactly, how everything happened.  If the Nihon Shoki had a preface, it has been lost.  The Kojiki, for its part, does have a preface, and it points to an origin in the reign of Ohoama—known as the sovereign of Kiyomihara.  In there we are told that the sovereign had a complaint—that the Teiki and Honji, that is the chronicles of the sovereigns and the various other stories and legends, that had been handed down by various houses had come to differ from the truth.  They said they had many falsehoods, which likely meant that they just didn't match the Truth that the State was trying to push.  Thus  they wanted to create a so-called "true" version to pass down. This task was given to 28 year old Hieda no Are.  It says they were intelligent and had an incredible memory.  They studied all of the sources, and the work continued beyond the reign of Ohoama.  Later, in 711 CE, during the reign of Abe, aka Genmei Tennou, Oho no Yasumaro was given the task of writing down everything that Hieda no Are had learned.  The astute amongst you may have noticed that this mentions none of the individuals mentioned in the Nihon Shoki.  Nor does the Nihon Shoki mention anything about Hieda no Are.  So was this a separate effort, or all part of the same thing?  Was Are using the materials collected by  the project? As you may recall, we left the Kojiki behind some time ago, since it formally ends with the reign of Kashikiya hime, aka Suiko Tennou, but realistically it ended with Wohodo, aka Keitai Tennou—after that point there are just lists of the various heirs.  As such, there is some speculation that this was originally built off of earlier histories, perhaps arranged during the Soga era. The general explanation for all of this is that Hieda no Are memorized the poems and stories, and then Yasumaro wrote them down.  Furthermore, though the language in the Kojiki does not express a particular gender, in the Edo period there was a theory that Hieda no Are was a woman, which is still a popular theory. Compare all of that to the Nihon Shoki.  Where the Kojiki was often light on details and ends with Suiko Tennou, the Nihon Shoki often includes different sources, specifically mentions some of them by name, and continues up through the year 697.  Furthermore, textual analysis of the Nihon Shoki suggests that it was a team effort, with multiple Chroniclers, and likely multiple teams of Chroniclers.   I have to admit, that sounds a lot more like the kind of thing that Ohoama was kicking off. We have an entry in the Shoku Nihongi, the work that follows the Nihon Shoki, that suggests 720 for the finished compilation of the Nihon Shoki.  So did it take from 681 to 720 to put together?  That is a really long project, with what were probably several generations of individuals working on it. Or should this be read in a broader sense?  Was this a historiographical project, as Bentley calls it, but one that did not, immediately, know the form it would take?  It isn't the first such project—we have histories of the royal lineage and other stories that were compiled previously—much of that attributed to Shotoku Taishi, but likely part of an earlier attempt by the court.  In fact, given that the Kojiki and Sendai Hongi both functionally end around the time of Kashikiya hime, that is probably because the official histories covered those periods.  Obviously, though, a lot had happened, and some of what was written might not fit the current narrative.  And so we see a project to gather and compile various sources.  While this project likely culminated in the projects of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, I doubt that either work was necessarily part of the original vision.  Rather, it looks like the original vision was to collect what they could and then figure things out. It would have been after they started pulling the accounts together, reading them, and noticing the discrepancies that they would have needed to then edit them in such a way that they could tell a cohesive story.  That there are two separate compilations is definitely interesting.  I do suspect that Oho no Yasumaro was working from the efforts of Hieda no Are, either writing down something that had been largely captured in memory or perhaps finishing a project that Are had never completed.  The Nihon Shoki feels like it was a different set of teams, working together, but likely drawing from many of the same sources. And as to why we don't have the earlier sources?  I once heard it said that for books to be forgotten they didn't need to be banned—they just needed to fall out of circulation and no longer be copied anymore.  As new, presumably more detailed, works arose, it makes sense that older sources would not also be copied, as that information was presumably in the updated texts, and any information that wasn't brought over had been deemed counterfactual.  Even the Nihon Shoki risked falling into oblivion; the smaller and more digestible Kojiki was often more sought after.  The Kojiki generally presents a single story, and often uses characters phonetically, demonstrating how to read names and places.  And it just has a more story-like narrative to it.  The Nihon Shoki, comparatively, is dense, written in an old form of kanbun, often relying more on kanbun than on phonetic interpretations.  It was modeled on continental works, but as such it was never going to be as easy to read.  And so for a long time the Kojiki seems to have held pride of place for all but the most ardent scholars of history. Either way, I think that it is still fair to say that the record of 681 was key to the fact that we have this history, today, even if there was no way for Ohoama, at the time, to know just what form it would take. Another ambitious project that got started under Ohoama was the development of a new and permanent capital city. Up to this point we've talked about the various capitals of Yamato, but really it was more that we were talking about the palace compounds where the sovereign lived.  From the Makimuku Palace, where either Mimaki Iribiko or possibly even Himiko herself once held sway, to the latest palace, that of Kiyomihara, the sovereigns of Yamato were known by their palaces.  This is, in part, because for the longest time each successive sovereign would build a new palace after the previous sovereign passed away.  There are various reasons why this may have been the case, often connected to insular concepts of spiritual pollution brought on by the death of an individual, but also the practical consideration that the buildings, from what we can tell, were largely made of untreated wood.  That made them easier to erect, but also made them vulnerable to the elements, over time, and is probably one of the reasons that certain shrines, like the Shrine at Ise, similarly reconstitute themselves every 20 years or so. Furthermore, we talk about palaces, but we don't really talk about cities.  There were certainly large settlements—even going back to the Wei chronicles we see the mention of some 70 thousand households in the area of Yamateg.  It is likely that the Nara basin was filled with cultivated fields and many households.  Princes and noble households had their own compounds—remember that both Soga no Umako and Prince Umayado had compounds large enough that they could build temples on the compounds and have enough left over for their own palatial residences, as well.  However, these compounds were usually distributed in various areas, where those individuals presumably held some level of local control. It is unclear to me how exactly the early court functioned as far as housing individuals, and how often the court was "in session", as it were, with the noble houses.  Presumably they had local accommodations and weren't constantly traveling back and forth to the palace all the time.  We know that some houses sent individuals, men and women, to be palace attendants, even though they lived some distance away.  This was also likely a constraint on the Yamato court's influence in the early days. We do see the sovereign traveling, and various "temporary" palaces being provided.  I highly doubt that these were all built on the spot, and were likely conversions of existing residences, and similar lodging may have been available for elites when they traveled, though perhaps without such pomp and circumstance. What we don't really see in all of this, are anything resembling cities.  Now, the term "city" doesn't exactly have a single definition, but as I'm using it, I would note that we don't see large, permanent settlements of significant size that demonstrate the kind of larger civil planning that we would expect of such a settlement.  We certainly don't have cities in the way of the large settlements along the Yangzi and Yellow rivers. We talked some time back about the evolution of capital city layouts on the continent.  We mentioned that the early theoretical plan for a capital city was based on a square plan, itself divided into 9 square districts, with the central district constituting the palace.  This design works great on paper, but not so much in practice, especially with other considerations, such as the north-south orientation of most royal buildings.  And then there are geographic considerations.  In a place like Luoyang, this square concept was interrupted by the river and local topography.  Meanwhile, in Chang'an, they were able to attain a much more regular rectangular appearance.  Here, the court and the palace were placed in the center of the northernmost wall.  As such, most of the city was laid out to the south of the palace. In each case, however, these were large, planned cities with a grid of streets that defined the neighborhoods.  On each block were various private compounds, as well as the defined markets, temples, et cetera. The first possible attempt at anything like this may have been with the Toyosaki palace, in Naniwa.  There is some consideration that, given the size of the palace, there may have been streets and avenues that were built alongside it, with the intention of having a similar city layout.  If so, it isn't at all clear that it was ever implemented, and any evidence may have been destroyed by later construction on the site.  Then we have the Ohotsu palace, but that doesn't seem to be at the same scale as the Toyosaki palace—though it is possible that, again, we are missing some key evidence.  Nonetheless, the records don't really give us anything to suggest that these were large cities rather than just palaces. There is also the timeline.  While both the Toyosaki palace and the Ohotsu palace took years to build, they did not take the time and amount of manpower that would be needed to create a true capital city.  We can judge this based on what it took to build the new capital at Nihiki. This project gets kicked off in the 11th month of 676.  We are told that there was an intent to make the capital at Nihiki, so all of the rice-fields and gardens within the precincts, public and private property alike, were left fallow and became totally overgrown. This likely took some time.  The next time we see Nihiki is in the 3rd month of 682, when Prince Mino, a minister of the Household Department, and others, went there to examine the grounds.  At that point they apparently made the final decision to build the capital there.  Ohoama came out to visit later that same month. However, a year later, in the 12th month of 683, we are told that there was a decree for there to be multiple capitals and palaces in multiple sites, and they were going to make the Capital at Naniwa one of those places.  And so public functionaries were to go figure out places for houses.  So it wasn't just that they wanted to build one new, grand capital.  It sounds like they were planning to build two or three, so not just the one at Nihiki.  This is also where I have to wonder if the Toyosaki Palace was still being used as an administrative center, at the very least.  Or was it repurposed, as we saw that the Asuka palaces had been when the court moved to Ohotsu? This is further emphasized a few months later, when Prince Hirose and Ohotomo Yasumaro, at the head of a group of clerks, officials, artisans, and yin yang diviners were sent around the Home Provinces to try and divine sites suitable for a capital.  In addition, Prince Mino, Uneme no Oni no Tsukura, and others were sent to Shinano to see about setting up a capital there as well.  Perhaps this was inspired by the relationship between the two Tang capitals of Chang'an and Luoyang.  Or perhaps it was so that if one didn't work out another one might. Regardless, Nihiki seemed to be the primary target for this project, and in the third lunar month of 684 Ohoama visited the now barren grounds and decided on a place for the new palace.  A month later, Prince Mino and others returned with a map of Shinano, but there is no indication of where they might want to build another capital. After that, we don't hear anything more of Shinano or of a site in the Home Provinces.  We do hear one more thing about Naniwa, which we mentioned a couple of episodes back, and that is that in 686 there was a fire that burned down the palace at Naniwa, after which they seem to have abandoned that as a palace site.  And so we are left with the area of Nihiki. This project would take until the very end of 694 before it was ready.  In total, we are looking at a total of about 18 years—almost two decades, to build a new capital.  Some of this may have been the time spent researching other sites, but there also would have been significant time taken to clear and level.  This wasn't just fields—based on what we know, they were even taking down old kofun; we are later told about how they had to bury the bodies that were uncovered.  There was also probably a pause of some kind during the mourning period when Ohoama passed away.  And on top of it, this really was a big project.  It wasn't just building the palace, it was the roads, the infrastructure, and then all of the other construction—the city gates, the various private compounds, and more.  One can only imagine how much was being invested, especially if they were also looking at other sites and preparing them at the same time.  I suspect that they eventually abandoned the other sites when they realized just how big a project it really was that they were undertaking. Today we know that capital as Fujiwara-kyo, based on the name of the royal palace that was built there, and remarkably, we know where it was.  Excavations have revealed the site of the palace, and have given us an idea of the extent of the city:  It was designed as a square, roughly 5.3 kilometers, or 10 ri, on each side.  The square itself was interrupted by various terrain features, including the three holy mountains.  Based on archaeological evidence, the street grid was the first thing they laid out, and from what we can tell they were using the ideal Confucian layout as first dictated in the Zhouli, or Rites of Zhou.  This meant a square grid, with the palace in the center. Indeed, the palace was centered, due south of Mt. Miminashi, and you can still go and see the palace site, today.  When they went to build the palace, they actually had to effectively erase, or bury, the roads they had laid out.  They did the same thing for Yakushi-ji, or Yakushi-temple, when they built it as part of the city; one of the reasons we know it had to have been built after the roads were laid out.  We will definitely talk about this more when we get to that point of the Chronicles, but for now, know that the Fujiwara palace itself, based on excavations of the site, was massive.  The city itself would surpass both Heijo-kyo, at Nara, and Heian-kyo, in modern Kyoto.  And the palace was like the Toyosaki Naniwa palace on steroids.  It included all of the formal features of the Toyosaki Palace for running the government, but then enclosed that all in a larger compound with various buildings surrounding the court itself.  Overall, the entire site is massive.  This was meant as a capital to last for the ages. And yet, we have evidence that it was never completed.  For one thing, there is no evidence that a wall was ever erected around it—perhaps there was just no need, as relations with the mainland had calmed down, greatly.  But there is also evidence that parts of the palace, even, were not finished at the time that they abandoned it.  Fujiwara-kyo would only be occupied for about 16 years before a new capital was built—Heijo-kyo, in Nara.  There are various reasons as to why they abandoned what was clearly meant to be the first permanent capital city, and even with the move to a new city in Nara it would be clear that it was going to take the court a bit of time before they were ready to permanently settle down—at least a century or so. Based on all the evidence we have, and assuming this was the site of the eventual capital, Nihiki was the area of modern Kashihara just north of Asuka, between—and around—the mountains of Unebi, Miminashi, and Kagu.  If these mountains are familiar, they popped up several times much earlier in the Chronicles--Mostly in the Age of the Gods and in the reign of the mythical Iware-biko, aka Jimmu Tennou.  Yet these three mountains help to set out the boundaries of the capital city that was being built at this time. There is definitely some consideration that they were emphasized in the early parts  of the Chronicles—the mythical sections, which were bolstering the story of Amaterasu and the Heavenly Grandchild, setting up the founding myths for the dynasty.  Even though the Chronicles  were not completed until well after the court had moved out, the Fujiwara capital is the climax of the Nihon Shoki, which ends in 697, three years into life at the new palace.  And so we can assume that much of the early, critical editing of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki were done with the idea that this would be the new capital, and so it was woven into the histories, and had it continued as the capital, the very landscape would have recalled the stories of the divine origins of the Royal family and the state of Yamato itself.  This was the stage on which Ohoama's state was built.  He, and his successors, didn't just change the future path of the Yamato government.  They rearranged the physical and temporal environment, creating a world that centered them and their government.  I suspect that Ohoama didn't originally consider that these wouldn't be finished during his reign.  That said, he came to power in his 40s, only slightly younger than his brother, who had just died.  He would live to be 56 years old—a respectable age for male sovereigns, around that time.  From a quick glance, Naka no Oe was about 45 or 46 years old, while Karu lived to about 57 or 58.  Tamura only made it to 48.  The female sovereigns seem to have lasted longer, with Ohoama's mother surviving until she was 66 or 67 years old, and Kashikiya Hime made it to the ripe old age of 74.  That said, it is quite likely that he thought he would make it longer.  After all, look at all the merit he was accruing!  Still, he passed away before he could see these projects fully accomplished.  That would have to be left for the next reign—and even that wasn't enough.  The Fujiwara Capital would only be occupied for a short time before being abandoned about two reigns later, and the histories as we know them wouldn't be complete for three more reigns.  So given all of this, let's take another quick look at Ohoama himself and where he stands at this pivotal moment of Yamato history.When we look at how he is portrayed, Ohoama is generally lionized for the work he is said to have accomplished.  I would argue that he is the last of three major figures to whom are attributed most of the changes that resulted in the sinification of the Yamato government.  The first is prince Umayado, aka Shotoku Taishi, who is said to have written the 17 article constitution, the first rank system, and the introduction of Buddhism.  To be fair, these things—which may not have been exactly as recorded in the Chronicles—were likely products of the court as a whole.  Many people attribute more to Kashikiya Hime, aka Suiko Tennou, as well as Soga no Umako.  Of course, Soga no Umako wasn't a sovereign, or even a member of the royal family, and Kashikiya Hime, aka Suiko Tennou, seems to have likewise been discounted, at least later, possibly due to the fact that she is thought to have come to power more as a compromise candidate than anything else—she was the wife of a previous sovereign and niece to Soga no Umako.  Many modern scholars seem to focus more on the agency of Kashikiya Hime and suggest that she had more say than people tend to give her credit for.  That said, Shotoku Taishi seems to have been the legendary figure that was just real enough to ascribe success to.  That he died before he could assume the throne just meant that he didn't have too many problematic decisions of his own to apparently work around. The next major figure seems to be Naka no Oe, aka Tenji Tennou.  Naka no Oe kicks off the period of Great Change, the Taika era, and is credited with a lot of the changes—though I can't help but notice that the formal sovereign, Naka no Oe's uncle, Karu, seems to have stuck with the new vision of the Toyosaki Palace and the administrative state while Naka no Oe and his mother moved back to the traditional capital.  And when Naka no Oe moved the capital to Ohotsu, he once again built a palace more closely aligned to what we see in Asuka than the one in Naniwa, which brings some questions about how the new court was operating.  But many of his reforms clearly were implemented, leveraging the new concepts of continental rulership to solidify the court's hegemony over the rest of the archipelago. Ohoama, as represented in the Chronicles, appears to be the culmination of these three.  He is building on top of what his brother had implemented through the last three reigns.  Some of what he did was consolidate what Naka no Oe had done, but there were also new creations, for which Ohoama is credited, even if most of the work was done outside of Ohoama's reign, but they were attributed to Ohoama, nonetheless.  Much of this was started later in Ohoama's reign, and even today there seem to be some questions about who did what.  Nonetheless, we can at least see how the Chroniclers were putting the story together. There are a lot of scholars that point to the fact that the bulk of the work of these projects would actually be laid out in the following reigns, and who suggest that individuals like the influential Uno no Sarara, who held the control of the government in Ohoama's final days, may have had a good deal more impact on how things turned out, ultimately.  In fact, they might even have been more properly termed her projects—there are some that wonder if some of the attributions to Ohoama were meant to bolster the authority of later decrees, but I don't really see a need for that, and it seems that there is enough evidence to suggest that these projects were begun in this period. All of this makes it somewhat ironic that by the time the narrative was consolidated and published to the court, things were in a much different place—literally.  The Fujiwara capital had been abandoned.  The court, temples, and the aristocracy had picked up stakes and moved north.  Fujiwara no Fuhito had come on the scene, and now his family was really taking off.  This was not the same world that the Chronicles had been designed around. And yet, that is what was produced.  Perhaps there is a reason that they ended where they did. From that point on, though, there were plenty of other projects to record what was happening.  Attempts to control the narrative would need to do a lot more.  We see things like the Sendai Kuji Hongi, with its alternative, and perhaps even subversive, focus on the Mononobe family.  And then later works like the Kogoshui, recording for all time the grievances of the Imbe against their rivals—for all the good that it would do.  With more people learning to write, it was no longer up to the State what did or did not get written down. But that has taken us well beyond the scope of this reign—and this episode, which we should probably be bringing to a close.  There are still some things here and there that I want to discuss about this reign—so the next episode may be more of a miscellany of various records that we haven't otherwise covered, so far.  Until then if you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website,  SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  

In this episode of the Culture Architects podcast, David Friedman interviews Andy Wiener, CEO of RockStep Capital, who shares his journey from running a family retail business to establishing a successful real estate investment company. Central to RockStep Capital's operations is a strong emphasis on company culture, encapsulated in the 'RockStep Way,' a set of 26 behaviors that guide employee actions and decision-making. Andy discusses the evolution of his vision for the company, the importance of building a high-performance team, and the challenges of maintaining a strong culture as the company grows. He emphasizes the significance of intentionality in defining behaviors and the role of leadership in fostering a positive work environment. The conversation also touches on the integration of Rocksteps with business operations and the lessons learned along the way, highlighting the importance of passion and commitment in driving company culture.

Brussels is full of lobbyists. Over decades, big companies have been using their financial might not only to influence EU policies but even to shape how EU institutions are designed and what their key goals are. Host Licia Cianetti talks to Kenneth Haar, who for almost two decades has been conducting research on corporate lobbying in the EU for Corporate Europe Observatory. Kenneth explains how corporate lobbying works, what lobbyists want, and how a sketchily defined “competitiveness” agenda is driving a far-reaching deregulation drive by the European Commission, which endangers hard fought for environmental, social, health, and labour protections.  Guest: Kenneth Haar is a researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). His freely downloadable book, A Europe of Capital, details how corporate lobbyists got to the core of the European project. Corporate Europe Observatory is an advocacy and investigative research group. Their many reports, articles, and infographics on corporate lobbying in the EU are available on the CEO website. You can download their alternative tourist guide to Bussels here: “Lobby Planet – Brussels”. CEO's podcast EU Watchdog Radio is also highly recommended! Presenter: Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science