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In this episode, Madelyn O'Farrell interviews Eesha Pathak, Senior Director of Product Management at Crusoe, about her unconventional career from software engineering and branding to leading enterprise AI at Google and now building AI-first infrastructure. They discuss Crusoe's vertically integrated, energy-first approach to cloud and data centers, capturing abundant energy (like stranded gas and renewables) and turning “electrons into intelligence” via GPUs and a custom cloud stack. Eesha explains how Crusoe's gigawatt-scale campuses and modular Spark edge deployments complement each other to deliver both scale and low-latency inference, dives into the Managed AI platform with its model marketplace, self-serve and tailored deployments, fine-tuning, and upcoming reinforcement learning, and highlights why judgment and holistic thinking are critical in product and engineering. She also unpacks Crusoe's close partnership with NVIDIA, its role in enabling physical AI and robotics with low-latency compute, a flexible data and partnership strategy, and her long-term vision of Crusoe becoming the most helpful company for people building AI, so customers can focus on their products instead of wrestling with infrastructure. Highlights from their conversation include: Eesha's Unconventional Career Path from Bosch to Google to Crusoe (0:29) Why Energy Is the Real Bottleneck for AI Infrastructure (3:30) What Energy-First Means and Bringing Compute to Abundant Power (5:04) Spark Modular Data Centers and Edge Zones Strategy (6:22) How Gigawatt Campuses and Edge Zones Work Together (8:26) Importance of Judgment in Product and Engineering Decisions (12:49) NVIDIA Partnership and Day Zero Nemotron Model Launches (15:25) Physical AI, Robotics, and Low-Latency Edge Inference (17:21) Crusoe's Data Strategy and Partnership Approach (21:52) Vision for Crusoe as Most Helpful Company for AI Builders (22:47) Closing Thoughts and Episode Wrap-Up (24:09) Dynamo Ventures is a venture firm backing founders upgrading the physical economy. As intelligence moves into critical infrastructure and technology collides with physics, industry is entering a new era of transformation - the industrial renaissance. Born from the dirt and grit of supply chains and shaped by operations, not spreadsheets, Dynamo focuses on the complex realities of building in the real world. We invest in companies transforming infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and the systems that power global commerce. Dynamo works closely with founders who combine ambition with a bias to action, bringing a builder mindset to venture capital through deep operational insight, systematic pressure-testing and hands-on partnership. Our purpose is simple: to back the relentless shaping the industrial renaissance. Learn more at www.dynamo.vc. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Yasir Arafat is the co-founder and CTO of Aalo Atomics, a company developing factory-manufactured modular nuclear power plants designed for AI data centers. Before founding Aalo, Yasir led the MARVEL microreactor program at Idaho National Laboratory. In this episode of Inevitable, Yasir explains how Aalo became one of four U.S. nuclear startups to achieve criticality by the July 4, 2026 deadline. He breaks down what criticality means, why the milestone matters, and how the team went from a small startup to sustaining a nuclear fission chain reaction in less than a year. The conversation explores why Yasir believes nuclear's biggest challenges are speed and economics rather than safety or reliability, and how Aalo is trying to address both through factory-based manufacturing. Yasir also shares how the company built its own reactor building in 36 days, tested its full-scale reactor systems, developed scalable fuel assembly manufacturing, and partnered with Idaho National Laboratory to learn how to operate a real reactor. Finally, Yasir outlines Aalo's path from its zero-power Critical Test Reactor to Aalo-X, a full-powered reactor designed to generate electricity and power a co-located AI data center, and ultimately to the company's commercial Aalo Pod. The discussion also covers DOE demonstration pathways, future NRC licensing, the resurgence of nuclear innovation, and why Yasir believes multiple reactor technologies and companies will be needed to scale nuclear energy. Note: Aalo Atomics is an MCJ portfolio company. Episode recorded on August 6, 2026 (Published on August 18, 2026). In this episode, we cover: (0:00) An overview of Aalo Atomics (2:00) What criticality means in a nuclear reactor (3:38) Why the July 4 deadline was set and why it mattered (7:07) The final 24 hours before Aalo reached criticality (9:24) How accurately Aalo's reactor matched its physics models (11:43) From the MARVEL microreactor to founding Aalo Atomics (13:56) Why Aalo is focused on nuclear speed and economics (17:05) Why Aalo built a zero-power critical test reactor first (19:01) Building a nuclear reactor building in 36 days (19:21) What Aalo tested beyond the reactor itself (20:53) Building fuel assemblies for the next 100 reactors (23:43) Why organizational readiness matters as much as reactor technology (24:05) Running the CTR and Aalo-X projects in parallel (24:56) Excavating through unexpectedly difficult basalt rock (26:03) The progression from CTR to Aalo-X to the Aalo Pod (29:29) Partnering with turbine suppliers and Crusoe (31:27) The timeline for powering a co-located AI data center (32:09) How DOE authorization supports first-of-a-kind reactor demonstrations (34:01) Moving from DOE demonstrations toward NRC commercial licensing (42:03) Why Aalo is betting on the next generation of sodium-cooled reactors Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant
Axios reported that Crusoe is in talks about a potential IPO as AI data center demand strains power supplies. Crusoe, founded by CEO Chase Lochmiller and president Cully Cavness, builds modular data centers powered by stranded energy at oilfields. The company raised a $350 million Series C in 2022 and launched Crusoe Cloud to offer Nvidia GPU compute. EPA methane regulations finalized in December 2023 increase incentives for flare mitigation partnerships that can supply Crusoe with power inputs. Competitors such as CoreWeave, Equinix, Digital Realty, Applied Digital, and Iris Energy are expanding capacity through debt, construction, or pivots to AI hosting. Investors would assess site counts, megawatts deployed, utilization, GPU procurement, capex per megawatt, and power sourcing economics if Crusoe files an S-1.Learn more on this news by visiting us at: https://greyjournal.net/news/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination. Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal. Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild? 1:12 Wes: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous. 1:23 Erin: Oh, perfectly harmless. 1:24 Wes: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you? 1:38 Erin: I have not. And I actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish. 1:52 Wes: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see. 1:56 Erin: I don't know. 1:57 Wes: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild? 2:03 Erin: Really? Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to, but I. Maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see. Am just. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees, 1996 World Series sweatshirt. 2:42 Wes: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it? 2:45 Erin: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a mousse on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I. I bought a moose sweatshirt in, I think Grand Teton, and I was like, I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah, and things would happen. Everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw baby moose. I'd get all upsided and I would. I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me. 3:32 Wes: So you don't want to see like a magic white heart or something like that? 3:38 Erin: No, no, I just want to see him. Even the garden variety moose? No, no. Just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it. 3:49 Wes: Because they are a goofy, right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking? Are they both? 3:55 Erin: I think they're both. And I think that kind of qual quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size, and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow, as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand. 4:22 Wes: Interesting. 4:24 Erin: Yeah. They're not majestic. 4:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal. 4:41 Erin: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my grandfather. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense, because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's that she's grown up in and that she's part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on. 5:17 Wes: Okay. So maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right. 5:26 Erin: Yeah. 5:27 Wes: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading? 5:35 Erin: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and the collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower middle, upper five islands. Five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the passengers lie back, snores some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned. Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half grown, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time. She looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel the sweet sensation of joy? Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit McAdam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline. 11:05 Wes: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. It's the word read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background? 11:22 Erin: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then. And then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about More. But, yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hoffman, who wrote quite a bit about her. And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sistina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England. But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified. 12:53 Wes: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it. 12:55 Erin: Yeah, that's right. She started this in, I think, 1946. 13:01 Wes: And then she finished it when this 13:04 Erin: was published in Geography 3. So she finished it in the 70s. 13:07 Wes: Okay. 13:08 Erin: Geography 3 came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, geography three is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that. 13:24 Wes: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there. 13:29 Erin: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they Get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem. Yeah. Low rate of productivity is great to. 14:08 Wes: You know, I can relate to that. 14:11 Erin: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live. Live Large and die with a slim Collected is kind of a. 14:19 Wes: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro. 14:28 Erin: That's right. 14:29 Wes: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it this is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony. 14:38 Erin: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me. 14:45 Wes: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while. 14:47 Erin: Absolutely, absolutely. 14:49 Wes: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she. She'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip. And the. There really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven else. 15:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage. 15:30 Wes: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right. Her. Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized. 15:41 Erin: That's right, yeah. 15:41 Wes: She aged at. When she was 5. 15:43 Erin: That's right. 15:44 Wes: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead. 15:48 Erin: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from the bite on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar. 16:23 Wes: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general? 16:28 Erin: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes as her. A scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefoot on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals. And they took her to. Back with him to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema. And really, like, I think almost died of both at one time or other, very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved, seeing her hand and her little. In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up. But this is a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say, too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Mecedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years. She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography three, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian pumps. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed. Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these. These beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich. 19:43 Wes: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. What are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, begins with the tides, but. 20:12 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and, you know, just the necessities and a place we learn that that is. That maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it. 21:16 Wes: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward, it's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and brought along with it towards her destination. 22:08 Erin: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there. 22:31 Wes: Well, I was going to say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my finger on it exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now? And what's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image. 23:12 Erin: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant, considering that she's talking about a tide. 23:25 Wes: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But. 23:40 Erin: And boundaries, too, right. You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border. 24:18 Wes: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But, yeah, I had the same thought to you. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as. As the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there. 24:58 Erin: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big, suddenly reduced in size to the handheld, but coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, you know, sort of springing out of the fishing industry. 25:42 Wes: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide. 25:52 Erin: That's great. 25:52 Wes: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum, and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus. 26:37 Erin: Yeah. The bus flashes pink. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content. Right. Of the road itself. So we get that combination of, like, something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area. 27:07 Wes: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Green, who I've been reading. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses, like. So from the red clay, you can make, you know, homes from as well, and common in Sierra Leone. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up. All right. There must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah. 27:41 Erin: So that's the mineral, the. 27:44 Wes: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering. 27:56 Erin: Right. 27:57 Wes: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the. 28:12 Erin: Yes, it's coming. 28:13 Wes: The redness of the soil. 28:14 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling. 28:41 Wes: Such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading. Well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more. More vivid, definitely. 29:26 Erin: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape, makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image. And yeah, you talked about momentum, too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with. And Akali supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak, Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I eye of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dogs. So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the capital I. 30:49 Wes: We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting a her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop? 31:32 Erin: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass River. Right. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's content. 31:49 Wes: Content goes. 31:50 Erin: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups. The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peasants clinging. One of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from certainly from a moving bus. 32:43 Wes: Yeah, the point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important which is at the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very Beautiful. 33:12 Erin: Yeah. They compound and then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boot and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment, of 10 o'. Clock. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens bomb, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so they're probably. No. No real connection there. 34:07 Wes: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving, right. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it mean, means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and it's evening is approaching and a kind of mini winter, Right. Something. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves. As evening commences, it's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening. That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see, okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the light reflecting off the enamel bus, or not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark. Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah, the shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime, Right? 35:39 Erin: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To Autumn, you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence. You get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind. Right. Because there's. There's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of, you know, like the evening. Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is. Yeah. Rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is, you know, it's got to be like August, maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development. 36:40 Wes: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter. It gets colder and we see the. 36:46 Erin: Definitely. 36:47 Wes: We see the effects of it. But, yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season for. 36:53 Erin: Right. Yeah. And that point. Or that point in the transition from summer to autumn where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, the evening temperature is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get. 37:09 Wes: Shall we take a. Shall we? 37:12 Erin: Oh, yes. 37:13 Wes: Let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two. 37:17 Erin: She'll have to wait. 37:18 Wes: Let's not let her on the bus yet. 37:20 Erin: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinal rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you. 37:29 Wes: Thank you.
Adam Brown is back!General relativity is said to be the most beautiful idea the human mind has ever produced. Most of us will never get to fully appreciate its elegance by taking the 20-lecture graduate course Adam taught on it at Stanford. But in this episode, Adam distills the key idea at its heart so clearly and compellingly that even I could keep up lol.At the core of general relativity, Einstein is trying to figure out the principle behind a particular coincidence: that the mass that resists acceleration and the mass that gravity pulls on just happen to be exactly the same. Adam then leads us through the path of insight which Einstein called his “happiest thought.”Then Adam lectures on black holes. First, by showing how even under special relativity you could create a perpetual motion machine if black holes weren't truly black. And then, by explaining why the observations of an infalling observer and a distant bystander to the black hole would be so radically differentAdam leads Blueshift, the team at Google DeepMind cracking science and reasoning, which gave us the opportunity to discuss at the very end how close we are to AIs that could rediscover general relativity from scratch. Stay till the close for some philosophy of science.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Jane Street has traders from all sorts of different backgrounds. For example, I recently got to speak with Jed Thompson, a trader who started his career in particle physics. Jed told me how the habits he built as a physicist (like never running a calculation without first having a good guess at the answer) helped him build good trading intuition. So no matter what field you're working in right now, your experience may be more applicable than you think. Check out open positions at janestreet.com/dwarkesh* Crusoe gave me early access to their new serverless fine-tuning product, so I decided to try fine-tuning a Dwarkesh-style question generator. Crusoe made this really easy: I just turned my interview transcripts into training data and then kicked off a run – I never had to touch infra or tweak hyperparameters. After training was done, I ran a blind eval with my team: they preferred the fine-tuned model's proposed questions over my own suggestions about 30% of the time. Serverless fine-tuning goes live next week. Learn more at crusoe.ai/dwarkesh* Cursor's iOS app lets me kick off real work no matter where I am. For example, recently I was at dinner with friends when I had an idea about how to investigate the past few years of progress in sample efficiency. I pulled out the Cursor app, dumped my thoughts into a voice note, and 15 minutes later, Cursor had cloned the relevant repo, done the necessary analysis, and written up its findings. And now I'm expanding that work into a full write-up. Without the Cursor app, the idea would've floated away. Check out the app now at cursor.com/dwarkeshTimestamps(00:00:00) – The coincidence that led Einstein to general relativity(00:16:42) – Gravity is a consequence of curved spacetime, not a force(00:31:46) – Why black holes prevent unlimited energy extraction(00:47:12) – Black holes are the ultimate power plants(01:13:50) – What falling into a black hole would actually feel like(01:18:51) – The three ways we know black holes are real(01:24:21) – The first time we saw gravity bend light(01:29:33) – How far can AI get without experimental evidence? Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
The global AI landscape is shifting fast as Chinese tech giants disrupt hardware norms and infrastructure demands trigger real-world community backlash. In this episode of the Tech Field Day News Rundown, Tom Hollingsworth and Alastair Cooke dive into DeepSeek's ambitious move to develop its own AI silicon to bypass U.S. export caps, coupled with a surprising trend of U.S. companies turning to lower-cost Chinese AI models. Meanwhile, infrastructure growth hits a rocky patch as Microsoft faces a class-action lawsuit from Wisconsin residents over deafening data center cooling systems, even as Redmond expands its enterprise reach via a native Commvault data protection partnership on Azure. Finally, the duo analyzes Anthropic's critical privacy policy overhaul for Claude's agentic workflows, Crusoe's new custom tuning tools on NVIDIA H100/H200s, and IBM's slick new rack-mounted Z17 and LinuxONE 5 mainframes designed to slide seamlessly into modern enterprise data centers.This and more on the Tech Field Day News Rundown with Tom Hollingsworth and Alastair Cooke. Time Stamps: 0:00 - Cold Open 0:29 - Welcome to the Tech Field Day News Rundown1:41 - DeepSeek Is Building Its Own AI Chip to Challenge Industry Leaders4:25 - Commvault and Microsoft Expand Azure Partnership to Strengthen Cloud Data Protection6:52 - Microsoft Sued Over Noise From Wisconsin AI Data Center10:21 - Anthropic Updates Claude Privacy Rules as AI Becomes More Powerful14:11 - Crusoe Expands AI Platform with Easier Model Fine-Tuning and Deployment16:52 - IBM Expands Mainframe Lineup with Smaller Systems and Built-In Security20:26 - Rising AI Costs Push U.S. Companies Toward Chinese AI Models29:32 - The Weeks Ahead 31:29 - Thanks for WatchingFollow our hosts Tom Hollingsworth, Alastair Cooke, and Stephen Foskett. Follow Tech Field Day on LinkedIn, on X/Twitter, on Bluesky, and on Mastodon.
Connect with Early Riders — https://www.earlyriders.com/contactConnect with Onramp — https://onrampbitcoin.com/contact-us/Presented collaboratively by Early Riders & Onramp Media…Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering capital markets, dealmaking, early-stage venture, bitcoin applications and protocol development.This week Michael, Liam, and Brian cover the Trump crypto roundup: over $1B in disclosed crypto earnings, American Bitcoin's 500 BTC add, the launch of Trump Accounts, and the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve back on the table. They break down Open Standard, the 140-company OpenUSD stablecoin consortium taking on Tether, and Cloudflare's x402 integration for internet micropayments. They run through record Bitcoin ETF outflows, Sberbank and German banks turning on crypto trading, MiCA going live, and Robinhood Chain's mainnet launch. They close on Crusoe's $30B valuation talks and OpenAI's proposed 5% stake to the Trump administration.Chapters00:00 - Celebrating Freedom and Independence02:50 - Trump's Crypto Ventures and Controversies05:57 - The Trump Family's Financial Moves09:08 - The Launch of Trump Accounts12:03 - The Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Discussion14:50 - Open Standard and the Future of Stablecoins40:34 - The Future of Internet Monetization42:25 - AI's Impact on Information Value45:24 - Navigating the Avalanche of Information48:04 - Market Dynamics of Bitcoin ETFs50:20 - Global Trends in Crypto Regulation53:38 - Institutional Adoption of Digital Assets55:18 - The Rise of Traditional Finance in Crypto58:32 - The Regulatory Landscape for Crypto in Europe01:01:47 - Robinhood's New Financial Ecosystem01:06:01 - Emerging Trends in AI and Crypto Investments01:12:41 - The Intersection of Energy and AI01:16:04 - OpenAI's Strategic Moves in WashingtonIf you found this valuable, please subscribe to Early Riders Insights for access to the best content in the ecosystem weekly: https://www.earlyriders.com/researchKeep up with Michael:https://x.com/MTangumaKeep up with Liam:https://x.com/Lnelson_21Keep up with Brian:https://x.com/BackslashBTC
Had Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time.Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence.In 1513 the Medici retook control of Florence and, wrongly suspecting Machiavelli of participating in a coup attempt, fired, tortured, and exiled him.Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents.Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career's lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici.But at least the Medici were in a position to use his insights to defend Florence. Machiavelli the patriot did not want any other hands to touch these books, because those hands, armed further with these lessons, might pose an existential danger to Florence.The closest modern analogy, at least as Machiavelli would have seen it, would be Szilard's letter warning FDR about the possibility of a nuclear fission bomb.What were those insights? And how were they inspired by Machiavelli's dangerous diplomatic missions all across Europe, and his extensive reading of antiquity? Watch this episode with Ada Palmer to find out!By the way, Ada is launching a new podcast which I'm very excited about. The first season will be about Machiavelli - a perfect way to dive deeper into the topics we discussed in this episode. Subscribe at Beforecast's website to be notified of the first episode, subscribe on YouTube, follow her on Patreon, and if you want even more Ada, check out her FixTheNews Podcast episode, and check out her books and more.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Cursor recently saved one of my podcast recordings. When a video file from a shoot came out corrupted, I pointed Cursor at it: it recovered the footage on its own, tracking down the right reference file from the file's metadata and realigning the out-of-sync audio. My whole team now uses Cursor for everyday tasks, not just coding. Get started at cursor.com/dwarkesh* Jane Street's hiring process has been going viral on Twitter lately. The memes are pretty funny, but I wanted to see what their interviews were actually like. So I had Ricson, one of Jane Street's ML researchers, walk me through a retired puzzle: he gave me an image dataset where 50% of the files had been corrupted – I had to figure out how to recover them. If you're interested in these sorts of puzzles, you can find Jane Street's open roles at janestreet.com/dwarkesh* Crusoe is turning the AI datacenter buildout into an industrial process. At their massive Colorado factory, they assemble Spark units, modular datacenters with power, cooling, and fire suppression built in. They also manufacture specific components in-house to skip the longest lead times. Crusoe has experience running these Spark units on a range of energy sources, including solar and used EV batteries, ensuring they don't get bottlenecked by grid availability. Learn more at crusoe.ai/dwarkeshTimestamps(00:00:00) – How Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival(00:15:08) – Machiavelli's analytical innovations(00:23:58) – Why popes became warlords(00:36:13) – Why the common people demanded nepotism(00:47:57) – Cesare Borgia brought terror to rulers and justice to the people(00:57:55) – Art as a proxy for war(01:06:41) – Florence, a city famous in hell(01:15:57) – The Prince was a job application to Machiavelli's torturers(01:41:39) – During the Renaissance, original ideas had to be couched in antiquity(01:50:44) – Why copyright began with the Inquisition(02:02:12) – Machiavelli wasn't Machiavellian Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
SpaceX's IPO is three times oversubscribed at $250 billion, and Hut 8 has closed a $4.25 billion, BBB-rated note for its Beacon Point AI data center. Welcome back to The Blockspace Podcast! Reuters has reported that SpaceX's IPO round could come in at $250 billion, a 3x oversubscription from the company's planned $75 billion. Plus, Cormint CEO Jamie McAvity joins us to give an optimistic outlook on bitcoin mining with hashrate stagnant – even as hashprice flirts with all-time lows. For other news, we cover Keel's $458 million convertible note; Hut 8's $4.25 billion senior secured note for its Beacon Point data center, the second investment-grade bond for project-level financing for the burgeoning AI firm; Crusoe hitting pause on a proposed 10 GW data center in Wyoming; and OpenAI's plans for its own 10 GW, $500 billion project in Ohio. Check out our latest report, “What's a Megawatt Worth?” where we quantify the trillion dollar opportunity for bitcoin miners venturing into the AI sector. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates for all of our shows and content.
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 491. https://youtu.be/lfjpoKCWBDA I've known Paul Cwik, Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Mount Olive and fellow of the Mises Institute since I started attending the Austrian Scholars Conference in 1995. He is an Austrian and libertarian of sorts but had some qualms with my anti-IP writing so presented a paper "Is There Room for Intellectual Property Rights in Austrian Economics?" at the Austrian Scholars Conference in 2008, which I attended and commented on. After 18 years we finally decided to get around to talking about this. I had planned on an hour but we ended up talking for 3. It turns out we were old friends but not that close; we didn't know much about each other. So the first 30-50 minutes or so is more preliminary discussion. To his credit, he read a good deal of the huge deluge of material I sent to read up on and asked many very good questions. He did not engage in intentional equivocation that is characteristic of many on the pro-IP side, and he was reasonable in conceding many of my points and was willing to ponder my push back. I was hoping to get him to see the light, since I have in person seen many people change their minds on IP after a long discussion but have never had it happen while recording. We did not resolve the issue, partly because we just didn't have enough time to keep going, but I think we made some progress. Maybe we will have a Part 2 later. Who knows. For now, some relevant links pertaining to some of the topics discussed. I will organize this better later. (Not to be confused with Bryan Cwik, who also has opinions on IP: “Good Ideas is Pretty Scarce”; Bryan Cwik, "Property Rights in Non‐rival Goods" (2, 3, 4); "Labor as the Basis for Intellectual Property Rights" (2; 3); Gamrot, Labor as the Basis for Intellectual Property Rights: Against Cwik.) IP Proponents Do Not Even Know The Difference Between Patent, Copyright, Trademark … Types of Intellectual Property It is impossible to own ideas Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists See the Appendix to What Libertarianism Is: section “Concept and Definition of “Property”” The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property Gamrot, Labor as the Basis for Intellectual Property Rights: Against Cwik The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists Objectivists: “All Property is Intellectual Property” A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources” New Working Paper: Machan on IP “Aggression” versus “Harm” in Libertarianism Kinsella v. Schulman on Logorights and IP The Nature, Properties, and Characteristics of Goods (Igloo Coolers case) Fraud, Restitution, and Retaliation: The Libertarian Approach Libertarian Answer Man: Bitcoin and Fraud KOL274 | Nobody Owns Bitcoin (PFS 2019) On Property Rights in Superabundant Bananas and Property Rights as Normative Support for Possession Libertarian Answer Man: Self-ownership for slaves and Crusoe; and Yiannopoulos on Accurate Analysis and the term “Property”; Mises distinguishing between juristic and economic categories of “ownership” There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property (and trademark) KOL207 | Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Are Not About Plagiarism, Theft, Fraud, or Contract KOL020 | “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society: Lecture 3: Applications I: Legal Systems, Contract, Fraud” (Mises Academy, 2011) Copying vs. Plagiarism: A Recent Illustration—Grau vs. Hernandez on Milei Re the practice of attribution and credit: see Stephan Kinsella, “Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe: An Indispensable Framework,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press and Property and Freedom Society, 2026), in the section “Excursus: The Role of Ideas in Human Action” “Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off“ Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes Stop calling patent and copyright “property”; stop calling copying “theft” and “piracy” IP Proponents Do Not Even Know The Difference Between Patent, Copyright, Trademark … Fraud: A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability, Part III.E “The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract,” Part IV.C Labor and Leisure Rothbard on the Main Fallacy of our Time: Marx's Labor Theory of Value KOL037 | Locke's Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory “Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor” Cordato and Kirzner on Intellectual Property Labor, Value, Metaphors, Locke, Intellectual Property Concise Tweet on the Problem with IP Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward: Part IV.D: "Overreliance on “labor” metaphors also leads to confusion about IP. Locke correctly argued that the first person to “mix his labor with” an unowned resource owns it, since he thereby establishes an objective link to the resource which gives him a better claim to it than latecomers.[55] However, Locke based his argument on the confused and unnecessary idea that a person “owns” his labor and “therefore” owns resources that he mixes it with. But labor is not owned—it is an action, something a person performs with his body, which he does own—and this assumption is not needed for the Lockean labor-mixture argument to work.[56] This mistaken notion leads some people to favor IP because they figure that if you own a scarce resource because you mix your labor with it, you also own useful ideas that are produced with your labor. The related Smith-Ricardo-Marx labor theory of value, which underlies Marxism and socialism, is also sometimes used to support IP, as when people argue that if you work or labor, you “deserve” some kind of reward or profit. All this focus on labor must be rejected as overly metaphorical and confused, and, frankly, Marxian.[57]" On Libertarian Legal Theory, Self-Ownership and Drug Laws: p. 632 Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?, p. 687 Creationism: Libertarian and Lockean Creationism: Creation As a Source of Wealth, not Property Right Libertarian Creationism KOL012 | “The Intellectual Property Quagmire, or, The Perils of Libertarian Creationism,” Austrian Scholars Conference 2008 KOL037 | Locke's Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory Part III.C.2 C. Contract and Fraud Arguments for IP Fraud and Plagiarism “Copying, Patent Infringement, Copyright Infringement are not “Theft”, Stealing, Piracy, Plagiarism, Knocking Off, Ripping Off“ IP by Contract I discuss problems with the contractual argument for IP in: Kinsella (2008, pp. 51–55) — Against Intellectual Property Kinsella, April 8, 2025. “KOL458 | Patent and Copyright versus Innovation, Competition, and Property Rights (APEE 2025).” Kinsella on Liberty Podcast. Link Kinsella, Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society, Part III.C Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward, n.46 June 13, 2021. “Richard O. Hammer: Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts.” C4SIF Blog. https://c4sif.org/2021/06/richard-o-hammer-intellectual-property-rights-viewed-as-contracts/ 2023t, Stephan Kinsella on the Logic of Libertarianism and Why Intellectual Property Doesn't Exist, text at n.52 Jan. 8, 2025. “David Gordon on IP.” C4SIF Blog. https://c4sif.org/2025/01/david-gordon-on-ip/ See also Wendy McElroy's perceptive comments on this issue in Kinsella (March 19, 2013). “McElroy: ‘On the Subject of Intellectual Property' (1981).” C4SIF Blog. Link Bouckaert (1990, pp. 795 & 804–805). Bouckaert, Boudewijn (1990). “What is Property?” Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 13, no. 3: 775–816 (attached) Related Links Hoppe on Intellectual Property The Universal Principles of Liberty A Selection of my Best Articles and Speeches on IP Key Works The Problem with Intellectual Property (2025) “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism”, Mises Daily (Nov. 17, 2009). Concise case against IP. An Overview of Libertarian Property Rights and the Case Against IP (from KOL341) How To Think About Property “The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright” Other Recommended KOL483 | The Economics and Ethics of Intellectual Property, Loyola University—New Orleans (a very good recent overview) KOL 037 | Locke's Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory Shownotes/Topical Summary (Grok) Stephan Kinsella with Paul Cwik • 2 hours 56 minutes In this nearly 3-hour conversation, Stephan Kinsella and economist Paul Cwik explore their personal histories, shared libertarian and Austrian foundations, and engage in a detailed, respectful debate on intellectual property — particularly copyright. Kinsella lays out his principled case against IP while Cwik defends copyright (but rejects patents). Timestamps & Detailed Summary 0:02 – Introduction and Casual Catch-Up Kinsella and Cwik greet each other and set the stage. Cwik explains he has wanted to discuss IP with Kinsella for years because their views differ. He notes he has persuaded people in person on IP and hopes to document the conversation. They acknowledge this is not a typical Kinsella podcast. 1:38 – How Long Have They Known Each Other? They reminisce about Mises Institute events. Kinsella's first was in 1990; Cwik started attending in 1995. They recall the Austrian Scholars Conferences and the tight-knit Austrian community at Auburn in the 1990s. ...
In this episode, Chris sits down with John McQueeney, State Representative for House District 97 in Tarrant County, Texas and member of the State Affairs Committee covering power grid and electric policy. In the last six weeks alone, John's committee has run three interim data center hearings. He is also drafting the Data Center Responsibility Act for the January 2027 session - the bill that will set the framework for how Texas handles the data center build-out for a generation. Texas has 440 gigawatts of applications in the queue against roughly 110 gigawatts of current peak capacity. Someone has to sort out what's real, what's speculative, and who pays for the grid when it all comes online. John is one of the people doing that work. They discuss: Why the data center industry is losing a PR battle it should be winning The tax story hyperscalers haven't been telling How the large load approval process works in Texas, end to end - from TSP submission to ERCOT study to Approved to Energize What's real vs. speculative in the 440 GW pipeline Behind-the-meter data centers as grid stabilizers What the Data Center Responsibility Act will cover The railroad analogy: why communities that miss this build-out will fall behind for decades Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(02:27) Why Data Centers Are a "12 Out of 10" for Texas(08:17) A Day Without a Data Center(09:34) Inside Stargate: Lancium, Crusoe, Oracle & OpenAI(14:34) When One Data Center Funds 30% of a City's Budget(17:03) The Vicious Restudy Cycle & the Batch Zero Fix(28:55) 440 GW of Applications Chasing 105 GW of Capacity(35:53) The 75 MW Threshold & Going Behind the Meter(48:36) Drafting the Data Center Responsibility Act(54:19) North Texas's Hidden Risk in Batch Zero(01:08:35) Who Actually Pays for the Grid Buildout?(01:14:32) Data Centers Are a National Security Issue(01:18:12) Data Centers in Space & the Long Arc ----- Presented by Airshare: Trusted across the country for fractional ownership, jet cards, charter, and aircraft management, Airshare gives you a smarter way to fly private - over 25 years of experience, operating their own fleet, with the top safety ratings in the industry. Drive up to the FBO, walk on, and go. Go to flyairshare.com to learn more. ----- Sponsored by Collateral Partners: Collateral Partners builds institutional-grade investor materials for private credit, private equity, real estate, and family office firms - the kind of marketing collateral that helps you close capital. Learn more at collateral.com/fort. ----- Chris on Social Media: X: https://x.com/fortworthchris Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepowerspodcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispowersjr/ Visit our website: https://www.powerspod.com/Leave a review on Apple: https://bit.ly/45crFD0Leave a review on Spotify: https://bit.ly/3Krl9jO
New blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.Reiner is CEO of MatX, a new chip startup (full disclosure - I'm an angel investor). He was previously at Google, where he worked on software efficiency, compilers, and TPU architecture.Watch this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard. Read the transcript.Sponsors* Crusoe was one of only five GPU clouds that made the gold tier in SemiAnalysis' most recent ClusterMAX report. Gold-tier providers like Crusoe delivered 5-15% lower TCO than silver-tier clouds, even with identical GPU pricing. This is because optimizations like early fault detection and rapid node replacement don't necessarily show up in the sticker price, but still matter a ton in the real world. Learn more at crusoe.ai/dwarkesh* Cursor is where I do most of my work—from reading research papers to visualizing technical concepts to coding up internal tools for the podcast. Most recently, I used it to build two different review interfaces for my essay contest, one that anonymizes submissions for scoring and another that lets me see applicants' essays next to their resumes and websites. Whatever you're working on, you should try doing it in Cursor. Get started at cursor.com/dwarkesh* Jane Street let me ask Ron Minsky and Dan Pontecorvo, two senior Jane Streeters, a bunch of questions about how they use AI. We discussed everything from the types of models they're training to how they think about the future of trading to why they're more bullish than ever on hiring technical talent. You can watch the full conversation and learn more about their open positions at janestreet.com/dwarkeshTimestamps00:00:00 – Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates00:16:31 – Muxes and the cost of data movement00:26:10 – How systolic arrays work00:39:11 – Clock cycles and pipeline registers00:51:51 – FPGAs vs ASICs01:03:25 – Cache vs scratchpad01:07:27 – Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores01:12:00 – Brains vs chips01:15:33 – A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Luister het eerste hoofdstuk in de Abel Club en het gehele luisterboek in je favoriete luisterboeken app!Drievoudig Kinderjury-winnaar Kevin Hassing verrast zijn lezers op een nieuwe avontuurlijke serie. ''Ruby Crusoe – Het vertrek'' is het eerste deel en gaat over de twaalfjarige Ruby, dochter van de beroemde schipbreukeling Robinson Crusoe.Terwijl haar broers huiveren bij de overlevingsverhalen van hun vader, verlangt Ruby naar één ding: ook overleven op een eiland. Dus springt ze stiekem aan boord van een schip, om weken later op een onbewoond eiland te stranden. Algauw ontdekt ze dat overleven zwaar en eenzaam is. Net wanneer ze de moed dreigt te verliezen, doet ze een angstaanjagende ontdekking…-Duik in een wereld van luisterverhalen, audioseries, podcasts en luisterboeken voor kinderen. Meer kinderverhalen? Bekijk de afspeellijst Abel ClubVolg ons ook op Instagram @abel_luisterverhalen#rubycrusoe #kevinhassing #kinderboek #kinderverhalen #luisterboek
David Reich is back.He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution.By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up.Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago).That's when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body fat to intelligence were most in flux.Over the last 10,000 years, selection pushed the genetic predictor of cognitive performance up by roughly a full standard deviation — most of it between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago.After we finished recording, David sketched out on a whiteboard his new heretical model about who the Neanderthals really were. Luckily, I took out my iPhone and managed to record it.He thinks the standard story (that Neanderthals are some separate archaic lineage we interbred with a little) just doesn't fit the evidence. Instead, he proposes that Neanderthals are essentially genetically-swamped modern humans.A small population somewhere around the Caucasus invented Middle Stone Age technology roughly 300,000 years ago and expanded outward. The ones that moved into Europe interbred with local archaic humans, got genetically swamped, and became Neanderthals. The same expansion went into Africa, met much more diverged archaic Africans, and that mixture became us.This means Neanderthals and modern humans share the same cultural ancestry — the only difference is which archaic humans they mixed with afterward.David is a brilliant and rigorous scholar. It was a real delight to learn from him again.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Cursor was super useful as I prepped for this episode. Whenever I had a question, I'd have Cursor kick off a few different models simultaneously and then compare their responses. I found that this led to better results than I could get out of any individual LLM. If you've only used Cursor for coding, you should try using it for research. Check it out at cursor.com/dwarkesh* Jane Street uses an internal currency called “hive bucks” to allocate compute through a real-time auction – and anyone can change anyone else's bids or even kill their jobs! Everyone just trusts each other to act in the firm's best interest, which is what lets the system work in the first place. If this weird and high-trust culture sounds like your kind of thing, Jane Street's hiring at janestreet.com/dwarkesh* Crusoe's ML infra team built fastokens, an open-source tokenizer that delivers a ~9x speedup over Hugging Face and up to 40% faster time-to-first token – on real production workloads! Crusoe achieved these results by parallelizing things and using some clever engineering to handle duplicates without cross-thread coordination. Learn more at crusoe.ai/dwarkeshTimestamps(00:00:00) – Ancient DNA suggests strong selection over last 10,000 years(00:15:45) – Natural selection intensified during the Bronze Age(00:35:02) – Why didn't evolution max out intelligence?(00:57:21) – Evolution is limited by time, not population size(01:09:02) – Why no farming before the Ice Age?(01:17:13) – The Neanderthal puzzle David can't stop thinking about(01:54:10) – The methodology behind this breakthrough Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
This Week In Startups is made possible by:Render - render.com/twistVanta - vanta.com/twistNorthwest Registered Agent - northwestregisteredagent.com/twistHave you wanted to invest in venture capital alongside your 401k contributions, but struggled to find a way to place a bet? Search no more, for the AngelList team has created USVC, a new fund that will accept investments of as little as $500 from folks who lack accreditation. USVC's Ankur Napgal swung by the show to chat about investment strategies, access, fees, and just how illiquid the venture-like vehicle will prove to be.Jason and Alex were then joined by Jon Durbin, core contributor at Chutes, and Yash Goenka, co-founder and CEO of Humwork. Chutes is the most valuable Bittensor subnet, focused on aggregating GPUs to offer trustless AI compute. Humwork wants to help bring a human into your agentic workflow to unstick your agent when it runs into a hitch. The show closes with a news lightning round — enjoy!Timestamps:0:00 Intro + Plaud AI sponsor read (Jason demos the NotePin S)2:06 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!3:50 Episode overview: USVC, Chutes, Humwork7:41 USVC structure: $500 min, no accreditation, quarterly redemptions10:28 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist11:39 Fee structure breakdown: 1% mgmt fee, ~2.5% net expense ratio15:41 USVC portfolio: xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Crusoe, Vercel16:17 Strategy: 1/3 emerging managers, 1/3 growth, 1/3 secondaries19:00 $1B cap and path to expanding the fund20:33 Vanta - Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 reports fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at https://www.vanta.com/twist28:00 What is sovereign compute? Permissionless GPU networks explained30:10 Render - Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers.44:53 Usage history: 160B tokens/day peak, free-to-paid transition46:41 GPU pricing: from $0.77/hr to $3.50/hr as shortage bites49:13 DeepSeek censorship demo: Taiwan test on DeepSeek chat57:27 Permissionless supply curves: Uber/Airbnb analogy for induced demand59:20 Yash Goenka, co-founder of Humwork (YC S26)1:00:49 Lightning Round: Ryan Cohen wants to buy eBay — Jason's hot take1:12:36 Lightning Round: Cerebras IPO update ($27–36B valuation range)1:14:05 Lightning Round: Spirit Airlines / JetBlue / M&A regulation debate1:19:10 OFF-DUTY: Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord1:32:57 Alex's OFF-DUTY: Captain of IndustrySubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com
I asked Jensen about TPU competition, Nvidia's lock on the ever more bottlenecked supply chain needed to make advanced chips, whether we should be selling AI chips to China, why Nvidia doesn't just become a hyperscaler, how it makes its investments, and much more. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Crusoe's cloud runs on state-of-the-art Blackwell GPUs, with Vera Rubin deployment scheduled for later this year. But hardware is only part of the story—for inference, Crusoe's MemoryAlloy tech implements a cluster-wide KV cache, delivering up to 10x faster TTFT and 5x better throughput than vLLM. Learn more at crusoe.ai/dwarkesh* Cursor helped me build an AI co-researcher over the course of a weekend. Now I have an AI agent that I can collaborate with in Google Docs via inline comment threads! And while other agentic coding tools feel like a total black-box, Cursor let me stay on top of the full implementation. You can try my co-researcher out at github.com/dwarkeshsp/ai_coworker, or get started on your own Cursor project today at cursor.com/dwarkesh* Jane Street spent ~20,000 GPU hours training backdoors into 3 different language models, then challenged my audience to find the triggers. They received some clever solutions—like comparing the base and fine-tuned versions and extrapolating any differences to reveal the hidden backdoor—but no one was able to solve all 3. So if open problems like this excite you, Jane Street is hiring. Learn more at janestreet.com/dwarkeshTimestamps(00:00:00) – Is Nvidia's biggest moat its grip on scarce supply chains?(00:16:25) – Will TPUs break Nvidia's hold on AI compute?(00:41:06) – Why doesn't Nvidia become a hyperscaler?(00:57:36) – Should we be selling AI chips to China?(01:35:06) – Why doesn't Nvidia make multiple different chip architectures? Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Erwan Menard - SVP Product Management @Crusoe talks about… SHOW: 1008SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Reasoning Show #1008 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: SPONSORS:VENTION - Ready for expert developers who actually deliver?Visit ventionteams.comSHOW NOTES:Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us a bit about your background, and what you focus on now at Crusoe. Topic 2 - There has obviously been a lot of coverage of AI data center buildouts all over the world for the last few years. Tell us about Crusoe, and your approach to providing “neocloud” services. Topic 3 - What are the biggest challenges facing Crusoe today and in the immediate future - is it technology, energy, financing for expansions, etc.?Topic 4 - Crusoe started as a bitcoin-focused company and has evolved to more of a GenAI-focus. What types of architectural changes did you have to make for this new type of workload? And how do those impact the quality of the services your customers expect from Crusoe?Topic 5 - Is your focus more on environments to enable model training and customization, or more focus on inference for customer-facing applications? Topic 6 - A lot has changed in AI in the last couple years. What has changed the most in the last couple years, and what are you expecting to change the most over the next couple years? Topic 7 - Sovereign AI and Private AI have become much bigger topics over the last 12-18 months, and we'd expect that to grow. What unique things is Crusoe doing to adapt to these changing requirements from customers?Send a textFEEDBACK? Email: show @ reasoning dot show Bluesky: @reasoningshow.bsky.social Twitter/X: @ReasoningShow Instagram: @reasoningshow TikTok: @reasoningshow
O programa Meio-Dia em Brasília desta sexta-feira, 20, fala sobre a nova decisão do ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) Alexandre de Moraes de ouvir em depoimento o presidente da União Nacional dos Auditores Fiscais (Unafisco) após ele fazer uma série de críticas à conduta do magistrado.Além disso, o jornal também fala sobre as consequências políticas do desfile da Acadêmicos de Niterói e sobre a petição apresentada pelo PL contra o governo Lula por crime eleitoral.Meio-Dia em Brasília traz as principais notícias e análises da política nacional direto de Brasília. Com apresentação de José Inácio Pilar e Wilson Lima, o programa aborda os temas mais quentes do cenário político e econômico do Brasil. Com um olhar atento sobre política, notícias e economia, mantém o público bem informado. Transmissão ao vivo de segunda a sexta-feira às 12h. Apoie o jornalismo independente. Assine O Antagonista e Crusoé com 10% via Pix ou Google Pay: https://assine.oantagonista.com.br/ Siga O Antagonista no X: https://x.com/o_antagonista Acompanhe O Antagonista no canal do WhatsApp. Boletins diários, conteúdos exclusivos em vídeo e muito mais. https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Va2SurQHLHQbI5yJN344 Leia mais em www.oantagonista.com.br | www.crusoe.com.br
The Information's Sri Muppidi talks with TITV Host Akash Pasricha about OpenAI finalizing its massive $100 billion funding round and what the new Series C structure means for a 2026 IPO. We also talk with Ann Gehan about Hungryroot's potential public offering and the resurgence of high-quality consumer IPOs, Avery Marquez about the "race to go public" between AI titans, and we get into AMD's strategic financial backstop for Crusoe with Miles Kruppa. Finally, we discuss the "SaaS is dead, long live SaaS" shift with Dallas Dolen from PwC.Articles discussed on this episode: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-finalizing-first-commitments-100-billion-mega-roundhttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/hungryroot-posts-55-revenue-growth-eyes-potential-2026-ipohttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/amd-backstop-300-million-crusoe-loan-following-nvidia-playbookSubscribe: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theinformation The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/subscribe_hSign up for the AI Agenda newsletter: https://www.theinformation.com/features/ai-agendaTITV airs weekdays on YouTube, X and LinkedIn at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Or check us out wherever you get your podcasts.Follow us:X: https://x.com/theinformationIG: https://www.instagram.com/theinformation/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@titv.theinformationLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theinformation/
In this episode of Founded & Funded, Ben Gilbert, co-host of the Acquired podcast, sits down with Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe-AI, the company building what it calls AI factories, including its massive campus in Abilene, Texas, which are designed to power this new era of intelligence. In this conversation, Ben and Chase explore the physical reality behind today's AI revolution. Why modern AI workloads demand entirely new infrastructure. How energy has become the primary bottleneck to scaling intelligence. What it takes to compress multi-year building timelines into months. And how Crusoe's energy-first philosophy, from capturing flared methane to siting facilities near abundant wind power, shaped its path to building one of the world's largest AI computing campuses. This is a must-watch for anyone building in AI or rethinking infrastructure for the next era of intelligence. Full Transcript: https://www.madrona.com/the-infrastructure-of-intelligence-inside-crusoes-ai-factory-in-texas Chapters: (00:00) - Introduction (02:46) - Scale and Power Requirements (03:55) - Job Creation and Construction Progress (05:11) - Creative Solutions and Manufacturing Capabilities (06:25) - Modular Design and Infrastructure Optimization (07:42) - Data Center Construction and Assembly Process (09:07) - Technical Infrastructure and Cooling System (10:33) - Power Sourcing and Renewable Energy (11:56) - Wind Energy Utilization and AI Infrastructure (13:16) - AI Workload Flexibility and Energy Considerations (14:38) - Entrepreneurial Journey and Company Evolution (16:11) - Background in AI and Transition to Data Centers (17:40) - Early Business Model and Bitcoin Mining (19:14) - Infrastructure Evolution and Future Outlook (21:17) - Cloud Platform Services
“The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his life, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.” After the death of his wife, Robinson Crusoe is overcome by the old wanderlust, and sets out with his faithful companion Friday to see his island once again. Thus begins a journey which will last ten years and nine months, in which Crusoe travels over the world, along the way facing dangers and discoveries in Madagascar, China, and Siberia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
“The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his life, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.” After the death of his wife, Robinson Crusoe is overcome by the old wanderlust, and sets out with his faithful companion Friday to see his island once again. Thus begins a journey which will last ten years and nine months, in which Crusoe travels over the world, along the way facing dangers and discoveries in Madagascar, China, and Siberia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
“The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his life, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.” After the death of his wife, Robinson Crusoe is overcome by the old wanderlust, and sets out with his faithful companion Friday to see his island once again. Thus begins a journey which will last ten years and nine months, in which Crusoe travels over the world, along the way facing dangers and discoveries in Madagascar, China, and Siberia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
“The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his life, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.” After the death of his wife, Robinson Crusoe is overcome by the old wanderlust, and sets out with his faithful companion Friday to see his island once again. Thus begins a journey which will last ten years and nine months, in which Crusoe travels over the world, along the way facing dangers and discoveries in Madagascar, China, and Siberia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
“The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his life, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.” After the death of his wife, Robinson Crusoe is overcome by the old wanderlust, and sets out with his faithful companion Friday to see his island once again. Thus begins a journey which will last ten years and nine months, in which Crusoe travels over the world, along the way facing dangers and discoveries in Madagascar, China, and Siberia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
“The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his life, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.” After the death of his wife, Robinson Crusoe is overcome by the old wanderlust, and sets out with his faithful companion Friday to see his island once again. Thus begins a journey which will last ten years and nine months, in which Crusoe travels over the world, along the way facing dangers and discoveries in Madagascar, China, and Siberia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
“The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of his life, And of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.” After the death of his wife, Robinson Crusoe is overcome by the old wanderlust, and sets out with his faithful companion Friday to see his island once again. Thus begins a journey which will last ten years and nine months, in which Crusoe travels over the world, along the way facing dangers and discoveries in Madagascar, China, and Siberia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Episode 144Happy New Year! This is one of my favorite episodes of the year — for the fourth time, Nathan Benaich and I did our yearly roundup of AI news and advancements, including selections from this year's State of AI Report.If you've stuck around and continue to listen, I'm really thankful you're here. I love hearing from you.You can find Nathan and Air Street Press here on Substack and on Twitter, LinkedIn, and his personal site. Check out his writing at press.airstreet.com.Find me on Twitter (or LinkedIn if you want…) for updates on new episodes, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.Outline* (00:00) Intro* (00:44) Air Street Capital and Nathan world* Nathan's path from cancer research and bioinformatics to AI investing* The “evergreen thesis” of AI from niche to ubiquitous* Portfolio highlights: Eleven Labs, Synthesia, Crusoe* (03:44) Geographic flexibility: Europe vs. the US* Why SF isn't always the best place for original decisions* Industry diversity in New York vs. San Francisco* The Munich Security Conference and Europe's defense pivot* Playing macro games from a European vantage point* (07:55) VC investment styles and the “solo GP” approach* Taste as the determinant of investments* SF as a momentum game with small information asymmetry* Portfolio diversity: defense (Delian), embodied AI (Syriact), protein engineering* Finding entrepreneurs who “can't do anything else”* (10:44) State of AI progress in 2025* Momentous progress in writing, research, computer use, image, and video* We're in the “instruction manual” phase* The scale of investment: private markets, public markets, and nation states* (13:21) Range of outcomes and what “going bad” looks like* Today's systems are genuinely useful—worst case is a valuation problem* Financialization of AI buildouts and GPUs* (14:55) DeepSeek and China closing the capability gap* Seven-month lag analysis (Epoch AI)* Benchmark skepticism and consumer preferences (”Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi”)* Hedonic adaptation: humans reset expectations extremely quickly* Bifurcation of model companies toward specific product bets* (18:29) Export controls and the “evolutionary pressure” argument* Selective pressure breeds innovation* Chinese companies rushing to public markets (Minimax, ZAI)* (21:30) Reasoning models and test-time compute* Chain of thought faithfulness questions* Monitorability tax: does observability reduce quality?* User confusion about when models should “think”* AI for science: literature agents, hypothesis generation* (23:53) Chain of thought interpretability and safety* Anthropomorphization concerns* Alignment faking and self-preservation behaviors* Cybersecurity as a bigger risk than existential risk* Models as payloads injected into critical systems* (27:26) Commercial traction and AI adoption data* Ramp data: 44% of US businesses paying for AI (up from 5% in early 2023)* Average contract values up to $530K from $39K* State of AI survey: 92% report productivity gains* The “slow takeoff” consensus and human inertia* Use cases: meeting notes, content generation, brainstorming, coding, financial analysis* (32:53) The industrial era of AI* Stargate and XAI data centers* Energy infrastructure: gas turbines and grid investment* Labs need to own models, data, compute, and power* Poolside's approach to owning infrastructure* (35:40) Venture capital in the age of massive GPU capex* The GP lives in the present, the entrepreneur in the future, the LP in the past* Generality vs. specialism narratives* “Two or 20”: management fees vs. carried interest* Scaling funds to match entrepreneur ambitions* (40:10) NVIDIA challengers and returns analysis* Chinese challengers: 6x return vs. 26x on NVIDIA* US challengers: 2x return vs. 12x on NVIDIA* Grok acquired for $20B; Samba Nova markdown to $1.6B* “The tide is lifting all boats”—demand exceeds supply* (44:06) The hardware lottery and architecture convergence* Transformer dominance and custom ASICs making a comeback* NVIDIA still 90–95% of published AI research* (45:49) AI regulation: Trump agenda and the EU AI Act* Domain-specific regulators vs. blanket AI policy* State-level experimentation creates stochasticity* EU AI Act: “born before GPT-4, takes effect in a world shaped by GPT-7”* Only three EU member states compliant by late 2025* (50:14) Sovereign AI: what it really means* True sovereignty requires energy, compute, data, talent, chip design, and manufacturing* The US is sovereign; the UK by itself is not* Form alliances or become world-class at one level of the stack* ASML and the Netherlands as an example* (52:33) Open weight safety and containment* Three paths: model-based safeguards, scaffolding/ecosystem, procedural/governance* “Pandora's box is open”—containment on distribution, not weights* Leak risk: the most vulnerable link is often human* Developer–policymaker communication and regulator upskilling* (55:43) China's AI safety approach* Matt Sheehan's work on Chinese AI regulation* Safety summits and China's participation* New Chinese policies: minor modes, mental health intervention, data governance* UK's rebrand from “safety” to “security” institutes* (58:34) Prior predictions and patterns* Hits on regulatory/political areas; misses on semiconductor consolidation, AI video games* (59:43) 2026 Predictions* A Chinese lab overtaking US on frontier (likely ZAI or DeepSeek, on scientific reasoning)* Data center NIMBYism influencing midterm politics* (01:01:01) ClosingLinks and ResourcesNathan / Air Street Capital* Air Street Capital* State of AI Report 2025* Air Street Press — essays, analysis, and the Guide to AI newsletter* Nathan on Substack* Nathan on Twitter/X* Nathan on LinkedInFrom Air Street Press (mentioned in episode)* Is the EU AI Act Actually Useful? — by Max Cutler and Nathan Benaich* China Has No Place at the UK AI Safety Summit (2023) — by Alex Chalmers and Nathan BenaichResearch & Analysis* Epoch AI: Chinese AI Models Lag US by 7 Months — the analysis referenced on the US-China capability gap* Sara Hooker: The Hardware Lottery — the essay on how hardware determines which research ideas succeed* Matt Sheehan: China's AI Regulations and How They Get Made — Carnegie EndowmentCompanies Mentioned* Eleven Labs — AI voice synthesis (Air Street portfolio)* Synthesia — AI video generation (Air Street portfolio)* Crusoe — clean compute infrastructure (Air Street portfolio)* Poolside — AI for code (Air Street portfolio)* DeepSeek — Chinese AI lab* Minimax — Chinese AI company* ASML — semiconductor equipmentOther Resources* Search Engine Podcast: Data Centers (Part 1 & 2) — PJ Vogt's two-part series on XAI data centers and the AI financing boom* RAAIS Foundation — Nathan's AI research and education charity Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe
Philip Johnston is co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, a company building data centers in space to solve AI's power crisis. Starcloud has already launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit and is partnering with cloud providers like Crusoe to scale orbital computing infrastructure.As AI demand accelerates, data centers are running into a new bottleneck: access to reliable, affordable power. Grid congestion, interconnection delays, and cooling requirements are slowing the deployment of new AI data centers, even as compute demand continues to surge. Traditional data centers face 5-10 year lead times for new power projects due to permitting, interconnection queues, and grid capacity constraints.In this episode, Philip explains why Starcloud is building data centers in orbit, where continuous solar power is available and heat can be rejected directly into the vacuum of space. He walks through Starcloud's first on-orbit GPU deployment, the realities of cooling and radiation in space, and how orbital data centers could relieve pressure on terrestrial power systems as AI infrastructure scales.Episode recorded on Dec 11, 2025 (Published on Jan 13, 2026)In this episode, we cover: [04:59] What Starcloud's orbital data centers look like (and how they differ from terrestrial facilities)[06:37] How SpaceX Starship's reusable launch vehicles change space economics[10:45] The $500/kg breakeven point for space-based solar vs. Earth [14:15] Why space solar panels produce 8x more energy than ground-based arrays [21:19] Thermal management: Cooling NVIDIA GPUs in a vacuum using radiators [25:57] Edge computing in orbit: Real-time inference on satellite imagery [29:22] The Crusoe partnership: Selling power-as-a-service in space [31:21] Starcloud's business model: Power, cooling, and connectivity [34:18] Addressing critics: What could prevent orbital data centers from workingKey Takeaways:Starcloud launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit in November 2024 Space solar produces 8x more energy per square meter than terrestrial solar Breakeven launch cost for orbital data centers: $500/kg Current customers: DOD and commercial Earth observation satellites needing real-time inference Target: 10 gigawatts of orbital computing capacity by early 2030s Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant
Instagram is giving you some control over your algorithm. Is Instacart using algorithmic pricing? SpaceX thinks it will be worth $1.5 trillion. Has DeepSeek been smuggling chips? And what if your startup's side-hustle can plug into the AI CAPEX bonanza? Instagram Will Start Letting You Pick What Shows Up in Your Reels (Wired) Same Product, Same Store, but on Instacart, Prices Might Differ (NYTimes) SpaceX to Pursue 2026 IPO Raising Far Above $30 Billion (Bloomberg) DeepSeek is Using Banned Nvidia Chips in Race to Build Next Model (The Information) Boom Supersonic raises $300M to build natural gas turbines for Crusoe data centers (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Crusoe will pay Boom $1.25 billion for more than a gigawatt of generating capacity with deliveries of the turbines starting in 2027. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Dr. Jeffrey Herbener explains why “Crusoe economics” isn't a caricature but the indispensable starting point for economics and liberty—built from action, property, and exchange.Sponsored by Steven Berger.Recorded at the Mises Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, on October 18, 2025.
Send us a textInvest in pre-IPO stocks with AG Dillon & Co. Contact aaron.dillon@agdillon.com to learn more. Financial advisors only.00:00 - Intro00:07 - Tether $10B+ Profit Fuels $20B Buyback Ambition01:05 - Ripple $500M Raise at $40B Valuation Boosts Global Payment Push01:53 - Decagon Eyes $4-5B Valuation on 100x ARR Multiple02:38 - Crusoe Tender Implies $13B Valuation (+30%)03:20 - Google-Wiz $32B Deal (+39%) Clears DOJ04:09 - Armis $435M Pre-IPO Round at $6.1B (+36%)04:52 - Harvey Raises $150M at $8B Valuation (+multi-round 2025 surge)05:34 - OpenAI Revenue Soars … $574.9B Secondary Valuation (+15%)06:35 - OpenAI 1M Business Customers + 800M Weekly Users07:25 - OpenAI-AWS $38B Cloud Deal Reshapes Infra Market07:55 - Lambda + Microsoft Multibillion AI Infra Deal (+90.1%)08:56 - Gemini Prediction Markets Expand Crypto Derivatives Frontier09:57 - Perplexity v. Amazon Tests AI Agent Commerce Rules10:54 - Anthropic $70B revenue + wins Cognizant Deal12:19 - Epic Games-Google Settlement Redefines App-Store Economics13:15 - SpaceX Starlink 8M Users >> $446.3B Secondary Valuation (+11.6%)
Is AI infrastructure the next great buildout — or the next bubble waiting to burst?In this episode, Jake Corley (@jacobcorley) and Justin Ballard (@JLB_Oso) break down what might be the largest capital migration in modern history — the trillion-dollar rush to build data centers, generation, and power infrastructure for AI.From Fermi America's $13B IPO to Crusoe's $10B valuation, from China's 40-GW dams to America's permitting gridlock — this one connects the dots between energy, compute, and capital.We explore: ⚡ The $250B+ pouring into AI infrastructure this year ⚡ How off-grid power and natural gas are reshaping the landscape ⚡ Whether the boom is sustainable — or headed for a shakeout ⚡ Why China's generation advantage could reshape the AI arms race ⚡ The fusion of AI, Power, and Bitcoin — and what it means for the next decadeIt's AI x Power x Bitcoin — and the lines are blurring fast.
Chase Lochmiller is the CEO and co-founder of Crusoe. If you're a regular listener, Crusoe isn't new to the pod. This summer, Cody sat down with Chase's Co-founder and COO, Cully Cavness, during our live event in Austin.This latest episode was recorded live at the inaugural MCJ Summit in San Francisco at the beautiful Autodesk Gallery. Cody and Chase dive into how Crusoe is building data centers at the intersection of AI and energy. Chase traces his path from MIT soccer captain and mountaineer to climate-focused entrepreneur, and how those experiences shaped Crusoe's core values of preparation, curiosity, and speed.He shares the story behind the company's 1.2-gigawatt Abilene, TX project, its energy-first approach to powering AI infrastructure, and his vision for an era of abundant energy and intelligence. The discussion also explores the future of AI labor, grid integration, and what digital abundance could mean for society at large.Special thanks to our MCJ Summit attendees and our kind sponsors: Autodesk Foundation, Borusan, Cedar Grove, CSC Leasing, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Obayashi, Palantir, and Safire Partners.Episode recorded on Oct 15, 2025 (Published on Oct 29, 2025)In this episode, we cover: [01:14] Chase's early love of math, science, and soccer [02:42] Realizing academia moved too slow for his energy [04:32] How his entrepreneurial father shaped his path [05:05] Climbing Everest and the origins of “Think Like a Mountaineer” [09:32] Defining Crusoe as a clean AI infrastructure company [10:47] Building vertically integrated “AI factories” [16:24] Inside the 1.2 GW Abilene project for OpenAI and Oracle [20:52] Crusoe's energy-first approach to compute build-outs [25:36] Using AI demand to accelerate next-gen energy solutions [30:24] When AI becomes a power orchestrator [33:31] Digital labor and AI's impact on GDP and society [38:41] How Chase hopes Crusoe is remembered in 30 years Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant
Leslie Picker, Carl Quintanilla, and Michael Santoli kicked off the hour with new consumer data and the latest on the trade front out of Washington - before breaking down this morning's cooler-than-expected inflation report with Goldman's Chief U.S. Economist, and Bespoke's Paul Hickey. Plus: get the read out from Ford earnings with former CEO Mark Fields - and a deep-dive on JPMorgan's latest move into the crypto space. Also in focus: a check in on the AI complex... AI data center start-up Crusoe just raising new money at a $10B+ valuation - with backers including Nvidia and Salesforce. Crusoe's CEO joined the team at Post 9 to talk the news, and whether this massive domestic investment in data centers will really pay off. Squawk on the Street Disclaimer Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller talks with TITV Host Akash Pasricha about Crusoe's $1.3 billion funding and the company's ambition to take cloud computing into outer space. We also talk with The Information Reporters Stephanie Palazzolo, Kalley Huang, and Erin Woo about why OpenAI employees are calling the company's culture shift "Facebookification." Next, TITV Host Akash Pasricha talks with The Information's Rocket Drew about SoftBank's renewed robotics ambitions and the acquisition talks with Agility Robotics, as well as David Bell, CEO of Remedy Robotics, about how robots are revolutionizing medicine. Lastly, we get into the future of wearables with Premise's Co-Founder Vanessa Larco.Articles discussed on this episode:https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-readies-facebook-erahttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/softbank-hunts-humanoid-robot-startupsTITV airs on YouTube, X and LinkedIn at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Or check us out wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe to: - The Information on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theinformation4080/?sub_confirmation=1- The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/subscribe_hSign up for the AI Agenda newsletter: https://www.theinformation.com/features/ai-agenda
Send us a text00:00 - Intro00:07 - Kalshi Fields $10B+ Valuation Offers Post-$5B Raise01:12 - Crusoe $1.38B Raise at $10B+ Valuation Fuels AI Infra Expansion02:31 - Redwood Materials $350M Series E at $6B Valuation Boosts Battery Recycling04:04 - OpenEvidence $200M Series C at $6B Valuation Drives Medical AI Adoption05:35 - Cohere $7B Tender Offer Amid $150M ARR Enterprise LLM Growth06:40 - Synthesia $4B GV-Led Round Talks Post-Adobe $3B Acquisition Bid08:05 - Suno $100M+ Raise at $2B+ Valuation in AI Music Surge09:04 - Anduril Acquires AIRS to Bolster Multi-Domain Infrared Sensing10:13 - Revolut Mexico Banking Launch Amid $4B Revenue Expansion11:18 - X Launches Inactive Handle Marketplace for Premium Monetization12:10 - Anthropic Tens of Billions Google TPU Deal Expands Compute Footprint13:08 - OpenAI $15B Wisconsin Data Center Partnership with Oracle14:17 - OpenAI Acquires Sky AI Mac Interface Team in Consumer Push
Hui Wen Chan, Senior Director of Sustainability at Crusoe, describes how the rapid rise of AI is reshaping energy demand and Crusoe's efforts to design more sustainable data centers. She explains how Crusoe leverages stranded energy sources, repurposed electric vehicle batteries, on-site renewables, and innovative energy-efficient cooling technologies to design and build gigawatt-scale AI data center infrastructure that reduces water and carbon footprints. She also shares why Crusoe emphasizes modularity and location-based energy sourcing, and how its customers—ranging from AI startups to tech hyper-scalers—are integrating climate into their computing strategy. Hui reflects on her path from microfinance and Citi's ESG team to climate tech and offers practical advice for others pursuing careers at the intersection of AI and sustainability. This episode is a part of our HBS alumni series, which also features Eric Adamson who works on agricultural robotics at Oishii, and Danielle Colson who works at Mantel, a carbon capture technology start-up. Visit our website (climaterising.org) to explore the entire series!
As the co-founder of MusicGorilla, Alexia Erlichman has built a powerhouse platform that connects independent musicians with top industry opportunities in film, TV, advertising, and gaming. A graduate of NYU, Alexia began her career in production with Miramax Films, Tribeca Productions, and Robert Rodriguez before launching MusicGorilla with her husband, Lawrence. With over a decade of entertainment experience, she now champions artist empowerment, helping musicians get their work discovered, licensed, and celebrated—all while running the company from the Northeast with their spirited rescue dog, Crusoe.In this episode, Alexia Erlichman joins Michael Walker to explore how independent artists can harness technology, community, and creative collaboration to thrive in the evolving music industry.Key Takeaways:How AI and digital tools are reshaping music creation—and why they'll never replace human creativity.The power of collaboration and community in building a sustainable music career.Practical strategies for artists to get their songs heard, licensed, and monetized in today's industry.---→ Learn more about Alexia and her work at: musicgorilla.com.Book an Artist Breakthrough Session with the Modern Musician team: https://apply.modernmusician.me/podcast
Danielle Rapson, HBS alum and Co-founder and COO of Mantel, joins Climate Rising to explain how her company is developing a novel molten-based carbon capture system for hard-to-abate industrial sectors. Danielle shares the story of how Mantel spun out of an MIT lab, what sets its technology apart from existing amine-based carbon capture, and why the economics of steam reuse are critical to its efficiency. She also discusses how Mantel's early projects in pulp and paper and oil refining are shaping its path to commercialization, and what policy and regulatory incentives—like 45Q and Canada's carbon tax—mean for scaling carbon removal solutions. This episode is part of our alumni series, which also features Eric Adamson, Robotics Executive at Oishii and co-founder of Tortuga AgTech, and Hui Wen Chan of Crusoe, which uses stranded energy to power AI data centers. Explore the full series at climaterising.org. Resources Mentioned • Mantel – Developing molten material-based carbon capture for industrial emissions • Breakthrough Energy Fellows – A program supporting early-stage climate tech innovators • The Engine – VC firm backing tough tech startups out of MIT • MCJ – "My Climate Journey," a podcast and investor network on climate tech • Kruger– Canadian pulp and paper partner for Mantel's first demonstration project • 45Q Tax Credit (U.S. IRS) – U.S. tax credit for carbon capture and sequestration • Canada's Carbon Tax Policy – A national carbon pricing mechanism incentivizing low-carbon tech Host and Guest Host: Mike Toffel, Professor, Harvard Business School (LinkedIn) Guest: Danielle Rapson, Co-founder & COO, Mantel (LinkedIn)
Literature's most famous castaway, Robinson Crusoe, was washed up on a desert island - where he would remain for 28 years - on 30th September, 1659. By selecting this date, author Daniel Defoe ensured that his fictional protagonist's fate pre-dated the real-life estrangement of Royal Navy man Alexander Selkirk, who was stranded some 46 years later: 14 years prior to Defoe writing his novel. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain how his story pioneered not only the English novel, but also the movie trailer; ask whether Crusoe's narrative voice sounds like an authentic young man of the period, or betrays the fact that Defoe was nearly sixty when he created him; and dig around in the writer's early career (including, but not limited to, creating perfume from civets)... Further Reading: • Daniel Defoe profile (The British Library): https://www.bl.uk/people/daniel-defoe • ‘Debunking the Myth of the ‘Real' Robinson Crusoe' (National Geographic, 2016): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/robinson-crusoe-alexander-selkirk-history • The Shipwreck scene from ‘Robinson Crusoe' (1927): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCaYAD1ZGuM This episode first aired in 2021Love the show? Support us! Join
Eric Adamson, Robotics Executive at Oishii and co-founder of Tortuga AgTech, joins Climate Rising to share how automation and AI are transforming fruit farming. Eric explains how his team designed a strawberry-harvesting robot capable of operating in outdoor tunnels and vertical farms, bringing operational efficiency, labor savings, and climate resilience to high-value crops. He discusses why harvest is the hardest—and most impactful—problem in agriculture to automate, what it took to move from lab demo to field-scale deployment, and how they integrated custom robotics and 17 on-device AI models to achieve 97% picking accuracy. Eric also shares his climate thesis on why controlled environments reduce emissions, waste, and chemical use, and how UV-powered robots and environmental buffering help adapt to floods, fungi, and labor volatility. This episode is part of our alumni series, which also features Danielle Colson of Mantel, a carbon-capture climate-tech start-up, and Hui Wen Chan of Crusoe, which uses stranded energy to power AI data centers. Explore the full series at climaterising.org
Send us a text00:00 - Intro00:54 - Databricks Targets $100b in New Round01:53 - Canva Launches Tender at $42b Valuation02:49 - Crusoe Eyes $1b Raise at $10b Valuation03:27 - Anthropic Doubles Raise to $10b at $170b04:15 - Eight Sleep Raises $100m at $1.5b04:47 - Manus Hits $90m ARR in 6 Months05:17 - Anduril Sponsors Ohio State Athletics06:18 - Stripe / MetaMask Launch mUSD Stablecoin
WBSRocks: Business Growth with ERP and Digital Transformation
Send us a textRecent developments across the enterprise technology landscape highlight a strong push toward AI-driven efficiency, enhanced integration, and strategic partnerships. Resulticks' launch of Genie, an AI-powered marketing agent, promises to reduce workloads by 40% while boosting real-time audience engagement. Simpplr is expanding its platform extensibility with custom apps that enable seamless enterprise integrations, while iFabric Corp adopts BlueCherry® ERP to drive smarter supply chain and operational growth. Talkdesk's After Hours feature improves customer and agent satisfaction by extending support beyond standard business times. Additionally, ARIS has partnered with ProcessMaker to introduce a new task mining solution, Cleo and Programmers.io announced a fresh partnership, and Crusoe unveiled new managed services. Strategic alliances also continue to shape the market, with Phenom teaming up with Deloitte, Progress releasing over 50 free UI components, and QAD announcing a new CEO to lead its next phase of growth.In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry analysts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to analyze current enterprise software stories. We covered many grounds including the direction and roadmaps of each enterprise software vendors. Finally, we analyzed future trends and how they might shape the enterprise software industry.Background Soundtrack: Away From You – Mauro SommFor more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs. rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.
(0:00) James Litinsky, MP Materials (13:32) Lisa Su, AMD (29:45) Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe (43:26) Jensen Huang, Nvidia Thanks to our partners for making this happen: NYSE : https://www.nyse.com Visa: https://usa.visa.com Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect
Cully Cavness is the co-founder, president, and COO of Crusoe, an energy-first AI infrastructure company. In this live episode recorded in Austin, Texas, Cully shares how Crusoe evolved from capturing flared gas for Bitcoin mining to becoming a leading developer of hyperscale data centers. He discusses the company's pivotal role in Project Stargate—a $500B AI infrastructure effort led by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle—and how Crusoe is building a 1.2 gigawatt data center campus in Abilene, Texas. Cully reflects on the decision to divest its original Bitcoin business, the company's vertical integration strategy, and how energy abundance will shape the future of AI. In this episode, we cover: [00:24] An overview of Crusoe [01:08] Its role in Project Stargate and Abilene data center[03:41] Shift from outbound to inbound interest[06:17] Company pivots and existential startup bets[09:09] Sale of Bitcoin mining business to NYDIG[11:40] Flared gas capture and climate impact overview[14:57] From digital flare mitigation to stranded wind use[17:27] Cully's personal energy background and worldview[22:14] Why AI could drive climate and fusion breakthroughs[25:47] Details of the 1.2 GW Abilene campus for Oracle[36:42] 3,500 skilled trades supporting data center build[44:42] Natural gas as a bridge fuel + CCS investmentsEpisode recorded on June 10, 2025 (Published on June 17, 2025) Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant
Somebody loves us all. Rosalynde Vas Dias discusses three poems by Elizabeth Bishop: “Sestina” (1956), “Filling Station” (1956), and “Crusoe in England” (1971). John McCoy with Rosalynde Vas Dias and Marina McCoy.
All your Bitcoin mining news from this week, in 30 minutes or less! Including CoreWeave's downgraded IPO, Crusoe selling assets to NYDIG plus Riot bidding for Rhodium's mining assets!You're listening to The Mining Pod. Subscribe to the newsletter, trusted by over 10,000 Bitcoiners: https://newsletter.blockspacemedia.comWant to mine Bitcoin? Check out the Blockspace Media store today!Welcome to The Mining Pod! This week, we dive into Bitcoin's difficulty adjustments with hash rate approaching 850 EH/s while miners face compressed hash prices at $48.63. We analyze Core Weave's IPO reduction from $4B to $1.5B amid market skepticism. Plus, breaking news on Crusoe's mining operations exit to NYDIG, Riot's $185M offer for Rhodium's Rockdale assets, and the hilarious irony of anti-ordinals Ocean Mining processing Taproot Wizards transactions. Join us for expert analysis on the evolving mining and AI compute landscapes.# Notes:- Difficulty adjustment estimated at 5.6%- Hash prices at $48.63 per hash per day- Network hash rate approaching 850 EH/s- Core Weave IPO reduced to $1.5B from $4B- Riot offering $185M for Rhodium assets- Crusoe selling all mining operations to NYDIGTimestamps:00:00 Start02:16 Hashrate Forecast04:56 What's up with CoreWeave?06:31 Kramer video17:38 Crusoe Sells Assets to NYDIG21:52 Riot and Rockdale25:37 Cry Corner: CATS, Wizards vs Ocean