Podcasts about Infrastructure

The following article of the Infrastructure industry is: 'Environmental Authorization Is Only the Beginning of Compliance' by Blanca del Carmen Martínez Mendoza, Partner, Mendoza Vera Abogados. 

The following article of the Infrastructure industry is: 'The Hidden Energy Cost of Peak Demand' by Alejandro Fajer, CEO & Co-Founder, Quartux Mexico. 

The artificial intelligence buildout is creating a massive wave of blue-collar jobs tied to data center construction, but growing community opposition could threaten the pace of expansion. Investors betting on AI infrastructure need to understand the human and political factors that could slow the boom.Today's Stocks & Topics: The TJX Companies, Inc. (TJX), Market Wrap, Century Aluminum Company (CENX), New AGI Floor for Itemizers, Centrus Energy Corp. (LEU), Is the Data Center Backlash a Real Investment Risk for AI Infrastructure?, Portfolio Positions, Carvana Co. (CVNA), Opera Limited (OPRA), Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX), Mergers.Our Sponsors:* Check out Anthropic and use my code claud.ai/invest for a great deal: https://www.anthropic.com* Check out Quince and use my code INVEST for a great deal: https://www.quince.com* Check out Scribe and use my code scribe.how/invest for a great deal: https://scribe.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

What happens when a real estate investor decides traditional multifamily no longer offers the opportunities it once did? In this episode of the Major League Real Estate Podcast, Nate and Tom sit down with Chris Salerno, founder and CEO of QC Capital Group, to discuss why he moved beyond multifamily into express car washes, oil changes, flex industrial real estate, healthcare, and other alternative investments. Chris shares how he looks for investments tied to the “infrastructure of daily life” and why cash flow and tax benefits play such a big role in his strategy. Request a free discovery meeting: go.therealestatecpa.com/mlre Join the Hall CPA Team: www.therealestatecpa.com/careers/ Get the Ultimate Guide for Real Estate Syndications: go.therealestatecpa.com/mlreultimateguide Submit your questions to: go.therealestatecpa.com/question The Major League Real Estate podcast is for general information purposes only and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal, investing, financial, or accounting advice. Information on the podcast may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. No reader, user, or listener of this podcast should act or refrain from acting on the basis of information on this podcast without first seeking legal and tax advice from counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. Only your individual attorney and tax advisor can provide assurances that the information contained herein – and your interpretation of it – is applicable or appropriate to your particular situation. Use of, and access to, this podcast or any of the links or resources contained or mentioned within the podcast show and show notes do not create a relationship between the reader, user, or listener and podcast hosts, contributors, or guests. Any mention of third-party vendors, products, or services does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation. You should conduct your own due diligence before engaging with any vendor.

Alaa Abdulridha is from souther Iraq, but now lives in Austin, TX. Post wars in Iraq, the country had poor infrastructure, which got him interested in building and creating things to better and secure his life. He left the country to study, and ended up in Germany as a security engineer. Outside of tech, he enjoys playing RPG video games. In particular, he likes to play World of Warcraft, and enjoys the open world, and character development from scratch. Alaa's current company was built to scrape google search engines, in order to get around a blocker for a prior project. In the past, he used to participate in bug bounty hunting during University, and wrote about his exploits. His now founder's came across his articles, and invited him to joint the company. This is Alaa's creation story at SerpAPI. Linkshttps://serpapi.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/alaa0x2/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors:* Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai* Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.aiAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Geopolitical shifts are reshaping infrastructure decisions as companies navigate growing demand for AI and data centers, energy constraints, global supply chain dependencies, and climate-related pressures. We discuss how these interconnected forces are creating strategic vulnerabilities and critical dependencies—and how companies can build resilience while identifying opportunities in an evolving global environment.Key topics and timestamps1:45 — Geopolitics and infrastructure strategy 6:29 — AI, data centers, and global dependencies 11:12 — Power grid challenges and energy demand 17:59 — Identifying strategic vulnerabilities 22:47 — Balancing sustainability and energy security 29:16 — A framework for board-level risk oversight34:04 — Turning geopolitical risk into opportunityFor more details on geopolitics and infrastructure, check out these other publications:Climate Week 2026 recap: Key takeaways from the conversations happening on the groundManaging geopolitical risk in a more turbulent world — 7 things to considerFollow this podcast on your favorite podcast app and subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay in the loop for the latest thought leadership on sustainability standards. About our guestCraig Stronberg is the Senior Director of PwC Intelligence. He works for PwC leaders, enabling decision confidence about how geopolitics impacts business strategy and investment. He leads the geopolitical capability for PwC Intelligence, spearheading a team of analysts that provide global intelligence to key stakeholders. In addition, he is the primary geopolitical risk advisor to PwC leadership and the PwC board of directors.About our hostHeather Horn is the PwC National Office Sustainability and Thought Leader, responsible for developing our communications strategy and conveying firm positions on accounting, financial reporting, and sustainability matters. In addition, she is part of PwC's global sustainability leadership team, developing interpretive guidance and consulting with companies as they transition from voluntary to mandatory sustainability reporting. She is also the engaging host of PwC's accounting and reporting weekly podcast and quarterly webcast series.TranscriptsTranscripts available upon request for individuals who may need a disability-related accommodation. Please send requests to us_podcast@pwc.com.Did you enjoy this episode? Text us your thoughts and be sure to include the episode name.

Dennis Mitchell, CIO & CEO of Starlight Capital, shares his outlook on Infrastructure Stocks.

Minister of Transport and Government House Leader Steve MacKinnon discusses Bill C-39, legislation aimed at reforming Canada's major project permitting and regulatory system. He explains why he believes the bill will accelerate project approvals, improve labour negotiations, and strengthen supply chains. MacKinnon outlines the government's goals of economic growth and trade diversification, addresses lessons from past regulatory failures, and defends the Liberal Party's centrist approach to balancing more progressive interests while advancing pro-growth policies.The Hub is Canada's fastest growing independent digital news outlet.Subscribe to The Hub's podcast feed to get all our best content:https://tinyurl.com/3a7zpd7e (Apple)https://tinyurl.com/y8akmfn7 (Spotify)Watch a video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheHubCanadaFollow The Hub on X: https://x.com/thehubcanada?lang=enCREDITS:Daphne Liang - Producer and EditorSean Speer - Host Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following article of the Infrastructure industry is: “Do We Really Live in Mexico City?” by Federico de Arteaga, Head of Project, Ibero-American Network of Smart Tourist Destinations. (AA2690)

a16z's David George, Sarah Wang, Alex Immerman, and Santiago Rodriguez unpack 25 key charts from the latest State of Markets presentation, from the scale of the AI infrastructure buildout to what adoption looks like inside companies today.They examine why rising markets have so far been supported by earnings rather than multiple expansion, why hyperscaler CapEx is approaching $1 trillion annually, and why demand for compute continues to outrun supply. They also look at the downstream effects of that spending across chips, power, construction, and physical infrastructure. State of MarketsThen they move up the stack: OpenAI and Anthropic's revenue growth, the gap between AI deployment and measurable enterprise impact, the rise of agents, falling inference costs, and what all of this means for SaaS. They close with where the team is spending time next, including consumer agents, robotics, autonomy, AI and biology, personal health, defense, and the continued diffusion of AI across the enterprise. State of MarketsResources:Follow David George on X: https://x.com/DavidGeorge83Follow Sarah Wang on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwangFollow Alex Immerman on X: https://x.com/aleximm Follow Santiago Rodriguez on X: https://x.com/santiago__rdz Read David's piece ‘There are only two paths left for software': https://a16z.com/there-are-only-two-paths-left-for-software/ Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Infrastructure needs are growing as aging transportation networks, energy-security investments and the digital transformation of the global economy increase demand for funding. At the same time, constraints on traditional sources of capital are creating a broader opportunity set for private infrastructure investors across sectors, geographies and positions in the capital structure. In this inaugural episode of All the Capital, host Keshav Rajagopalan is joined by Josh Shipley and Federico Chiaramonte to discuss: why infrastructure continues to attract investor interest; how investors are expressing conviction across the infrastructure market; and which deal terms and sector trends may matter as capital is deployed. Recorded on August 27, 2026.

Kim St. Onge and Marc Cox host Kim on a Whim, sponsored by Missouri Brush Control. The hosts examine the September 29, 2026 launch of the federal America.gov digital portal, an artificial intelligence initiative designed to streamline access to federal agencies, passport application guidance, and federal job searches via USAJOBS. The segment reviews Associated Press reporting on chatbot responses generated by the platform regarding federal records, historical constitutional amendments, and administrative data sources. The hosts conclude with a discussion on artificial intelligence terminology, energy grid demand, and public policy debates surrounding regional data center infrastructure development. LISTEN TO 97.1 FM TALK LIVE IN ST LOUIS OR STREAM WORLDWIDE AT 971TALK.COM Hashtags: #971FMTalk #StLouis #STLNews #KimonAWhim #AmericaGov #DataCenters

Marc Cox and Kim St. Onge examine regional infrastructure financing proposals, evaluating St. Louis County budget management options regarding municipal road maintenance transfers. The hosts discuss revenue generation initiatives by St. Charles County officials at the Family Arena, analyzing public facility naming rights, arena operational costs, and county government capital projects. The segment details legal developments involving former Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) maintenance worker Michael Brown, who rejected a $100,000 state settlement offer following a November 2021 fatal Telegraph Road crash over Interstate 255. The broadcast closes reporting on defense manufacturing updates, detailing the U.S. Navy's September 29, 2026 selection of Boeing St. Louis to build the sixth-generation F/A-XX carrier-based fighter aircraft. LISTEN TO 97.1 FM TALK LIVE IN ST LOUIS OR STREAM WORLDWIDE AT 971TALK.COM Hashtags: #971FMTalk #StLouis #STLNews #StLouisCounty #BoeingSTL #MoDOT

SpaceX (SPCX) has seen plenty of success for its version 3 satellite launches, says ProcureAM CEO Andrew Chanin. The company's future space prospects, paired with real-time revenue generation from Starlink, offers what he calls a "tremendous opportunity" for its profit path. Andrew addresses the ways SpaceX is raising the landing pad for revenue expectations by lowering fundamental costs. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day. Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/ About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about

In this episode of French Insider, former Sheppard associate and previous host Sarah Ben-Moussa returns to the podcast to speak with host Inès Briand about her move from practicing law in the U.S. to building a legal career in France. They discuss what drew Sarah to make the leap, the practical realities of navigating the French visa process, the key differences between the U.S. and French legal systems, and how she's adapted both professionally and personally to life in Paris.   What we discuss in this episode: Sarah's path from M&A associate to an energy-focused corporate lawyer at Sheppard What led her to leave New York and pursue a legal career in France Navigating the French visa process, including the Passeport Talent route and why applying from abroad can be faster The difference between a juriste and an avocat, and how that distinction shapes career choices in France Key contrasts between U.S. and French corporate legal practice, from deal pace to work-life balance The hardest parts of relocating, including apartment hunting, adjusting to daily life and rebuilding a support system from scratch How U.S. legal training and the English language give American lawyers an edge on cross-border work Advice for other American lawyers considering a move to France or another civil law jurisdiction   About Sarah Ben-Moussa Sarah Ben-Moussa is legal counsel at one of the world's leading renewable energy companies, based in Paris. Her work centers on the development, financing and operation of wind, solar and battery storage projects across multiple jurisdictions—from structuring acquisitions and negotiating project contracts (SPAs, PPAs, EPCs, grid connection agreements) to advising on regulatory compliance, corporate structuring and lender negotiations that keep large-scale energy infrastructure deals moving toward the finish line. Before moving to France, Sarah was an associate in Sheppard's Corporate practice group and a member of the firm's Energy, Infrastructure and Project Finance team in the New York office. She was also a member of the firm's French Desk, and previously hosted the French Insider podcast herself. Before Sheppard, she spent a year and a half living and working in France, focusing on corporate transactions and commercial contracts in Europe and internationally. Sarah is also committed to pro bono work, focusing on cases involving children seeking asylum or other immigration-related relief. About Inès Briand Inès Briand is an associate in Sheppard's Corporate practice group and French Desk team in the firm's Brussels office, where her practice primarily focuses on domestic and cross-border mergers and acquisition transactions (with special emphasis on operations involving French companies). She also has significant experience in general corporate matters and compliance for foreign companies settled in the United States. As a member of the firm's French Desk, Inès has advised companies and private equity funds in both the United States and Europe on mergers and acquisitions, commercial contracts and general corporate matters, including the expansion of French companies in the United States.   Contact Information Sarah Ben-Moussa Inès Briand   Thank you for listening! Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to the show to receive every new episode delivered straight to your podcast player every week.  If you enjoyed this episode, please help us get the word out about this podcast. Rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts, Deezer, Amazon Music or Spotify. It helps other listeners find this show. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as legal advice specific to your circumstances. If you need help with any legal matter, be sure to consult with an attorney regarding your specific needs.

What does it take to lead one of the world's most dynamic regional economies? In this episode of Develop This!, Dennis Fraise sits down with Stephen Cheung, CEO of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC), to discuss his unconventional journey from social work to leading one of the nation's largest economic development organizations. Stephen shares how his diverse career shaped his leadership style and explains why listening, collaboration, and long-term thinking are essential to building resilient communities. He also discusses how Los Angeles has leveraged its diversity, innovation, and global connections to remain one of the world's leading economic hubs. The conversation explores LA's competitive advantages, including its strength in international trade, aerospace, entertainment, life sciences, and emerging industries. Stephen also highlights the importance of infrastructure, foreign direct investment, and regional partnerships in supporting long-term economic growth. Another major focus is resilience. From natural disasters to economic disruptions, Stephen explains how communities can prepare for uncertainty while continuing to attract investment and create opportunities. He also shares how Los Angeles is preparing for the 2028 Olympic Games and other global events that will shape the region's future. Throughout the episode, Stephen reflects on the importance of relationship-building, global collaboration, and embracing new technologies like AI to stay competitive in a rapidly changing economy. A key takeaway? Strong regional economies are built through collaboration, resilience, and leaders who can unite diverse stakeholders around a shared vision. Key Takeaways Diverse industry clusters strengthen long-term economic resilience International trade and global partnerships remain critical to regional growth Infrastructure and collaboration drive sustainable economic development Preparing for major global events creates lasting economic opportunities AI and emerging technologies are reshaping economic development strategies Effective leadership begins with listening and building strong relationships Key Topics Covered Stephen Cheung's journey into economic development Los Angeles' diverse economy and industry clusters International trade and foreign direct investment Regional resilience and disaster recovery Preparing for the 2028 Olympic Games Leadership, collaboration, and future economic trends Sound Bites "Stephen Cheung's career path was not linear." "LA hosts multiple major sporting events and teams." "AI is a key trend for economic developers."

As Prime Minister Mark Carney longs for a stronger Canada, his lust for fast-tracking projects signals a threat to meaningful conversation and consultation from Indigenous groups. Earlier this month at his Investment Summit in Toronto, hundreds of protestors across the country gathered in opposition to his pitch for a trillion dollars in exchange for what they feel like is their say in projects. Same goes for the Ontario government's plans for infrastructure surrounding the Ring of Fire, specifically Bill 5.Host Caryn Ceolin speaks to Chadwick Cowie, political science professor at the University of Toronto to discuss the Carney government's relationship with First Nations, Inuit and Métis groups, and why pushing their voices to the fringes is more dangerous than not. We love feedback at The Big Story, as well as suggestions for future episodes. You can find us:Through email at hello@thebigstorypodcast.ca Or @thebigstory.bsky.social on Bluesky Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Where do poetry and democracy intersect?In part two of our conversation with Dayton poet laureate, educator, activist, culture keeper, and Kettering Foundation Democracy and the Arts resident artist Sierra Leone, we follow the threads of memory and imagination from a gallery of story quilts in Hamilton, Ohio, to the Legacy Sites of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.Along the way, Sierra reads American Libation III: Weaving an Amendment for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, her response to Carolyn Crump's quilt Lovely One. She takes us inside The Belonging Project, where the stories of more than 100 Dayton residents are being harvested and turned into theater. And she shares a new poem born of a week with fellow Democracy Defenders led by Kimberlé Crenshaw in partnership with, a poem about how ideas persist and how thorns of memory grow from the womb of subjugation.If you've ever wondered what poetry has to do with the work of self-government, or how a life of civic leadership actually begins, this one's for you.In this episode we explore:Poetry asks. Democracy asks too. A poem doesn't go looking for answers. It leaves something behind for others to grapple with, and each generation has to decide what democracy will be.The petals that fall to the ground. Every society chooses which stories rise to the surface. Poets pick up the parts that fall and put some wind under them.Belonging becomes theater. Verbatim stories from returning citizens, bankers, fathers, teachers, and teens become a stage for the hard conversations communities need to have.Notable MentionsPeopleSierra Leone: Dayton's first Poet Laureate, playwright, educator, and Kettering Foundation artist-in-residence.Willis "Bing" Davis: Dayton artist and educator, founder of EbonNia Gallery, honored in Sierra's American Libation: Homage to an Elder (part one).Ketanji Brown Jackson: Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 2022, the first Black woman to serve on the Court.Carolyn Crump: Houston-based quilt and multimedia artist whose quilt Ketanji Brown Jackson: Lovely One inspired Sierra's poem.Dr. Carolyn L. Mazloomi: Quilt artist, historian, curator, NEA National Heritage Fellow, and founder of the Women of Color Quilters Network.John Coltrane: Jazz saxophonist and composer. Sierra's poem closes on "a love supreme."Angela Siner: University of Toledo faculty member in Africana Studies and Sierra's mentor, who told her, "Choose your approach."Joni Doherty: Senior Program Officer for Democracy and the Arts at the Kettering Foundation. She invited Sierra to accompany her to Montgomery as a guest of the Foundation.Bryan Stevenson: Public-interest lawyer, author of Just Mercy, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.Kimberlé Crenshaw: Legal scholar who was instrumental in developing the concepts of critical race theory and "intersectionality" and co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum.Augusto Boal: Brazilian theater artist and activist, creator of the Theatre of the Oppressed.Paul Laurence Dunbar: Dayton-born poet and novelist, one of the first Black American writers to gain national renown.Lucille Clifton: National Book Award–winning poet known for spare, luminous poems of family and resilience.Terrance Hayes: National Book Award–winning poet and MacArthur Fellow, author of Watch Your Language.Jericho Brown: Pulitzer Prize–winning poet (The Tradition) and co-editor of How We Do It.Nikki Giovanni: Poet, essayist, and leading voice of the Black Arts Movement (1943–2024).Sonia Sanchez: Poet, activist, Black Arts Movement pioneer, and Philadelphia's first poet laureate.Maya Angelou: Poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.Robert Hayden: Poet and the first African American Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.Gwendolyn Brooks: The first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize and a lifelong chronicler of Chicago's Bronzeville.Organizations & InstitutionsCenter for the Study of Art and Community: Producer of Art is Change, building art-and-community partnerships since 1992.Charles F. Kettering Foundation: Democracy and the Arts: Foundation program exploring how the arts strengthen democratic life, and partner on the Art in Action series.Fitton Center for Creative Arts: Community arts center in Hamilton, Ohio, which organized the Soul of Black Folks: 250 Years of Creativity, Innovation and Leadership exhibition. The Fitton partnered with the Kettering Foundation to develop the Voices of Black Folks program.Women of Color Quilters Network: International network of Black quilt artists founded by Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi.The Human Race Theatre Company: Dayton professional theater and one of the partners on The Belonging Project.AmeriCorps Seniors: National service program for volunteers 55 and older, among the groups heard in The Belonging Project listening sessions.University of Dayton: Imagining Community Symposium: October 2026 symposium on civic hope and belonging, where The Belonging Project will be presented.Equal Justice Initiative: Montgomery-based human rights organization founded by Bryan Stevenson.African American Policy Forum: Think tank co-founded and led by Kimberlé Crenshaw. They host the annual Democracy Defenders Summit, which in 2026 involved a partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative.U.S. Sentencing Commission: Federal agency that sets sentencing guidelines. Justice Jackson served as its vice chair.University of Toledo: Where Sierra studied and met her mentor, Angela...

Stephen Grootes speaks to Lullu Krugel, Chief Economist and Africa Sustainability Leader at PwC South Africa, about how improving infrastructure is changing the constraints on South Africa’s economic growth. PwC forecasts GDP growth of just 1.1% in 2026 and 1.3% in 2027, with the economy still facing weak momentum despite progress in electricity reliability. The Money Show is a podcast hosted by well-known journalist and radio presenter, Stephen Grootes. He explores the latest economic trends, business developments, investment opportunities, and personal finance strategies. Each episode features engaging conversations with top newsmakers, industry experts, financial advisors, entrepreneurs, and politicians, offering you thought-provoking insights to navigate the ever-changing financial landscape.    Thank you for listening to a podcast from The Money Show Listen live Primedia+ weekdays from 18:00 and 20:00 (SA Time) to The Money Show with Stephen Grootes broadcast on 702 https://buff.ly/gk3y0Kj and CapeTalk https://buff.ly/NnFM3Nk For more from the show, go to https://buff.ly/7QpH0jY or find all the catch-up podcasts here https://buff.ly/PlhvUVe Subscribe to The Money Show Daily Newsletter and the Weekly Business Wrap here https://buff.ly/v5mfetc The Money Show is brought to you by Absa     Follow us on social media   702 on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalkRadio702 702 on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@talkradio702 702 on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/talkradio702/ 702 on X: https://x.com/CapeTalk 702 on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@radio702   CapeTalk on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CapeTalk CapeTalk on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@capetalk CapeTalk on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ CapeTalk on X: https://x.com/Radio702 CapeTalk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CapeTalk567 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ep 329 Peacewarts: Morphological Peace 101 - Defending the Human Commons Against the Robot Corridor (Class 10) We examine how designing community centers, public squares, and car-free living spaces protects human connection from automated logistics and establishes trust as physical infrastructure. Using Utrecht's public plazas, Venice's historic campi, and Freiburg's Vauban district as historical anchors, we explore how defending our public spaces from automated corridors restores the civic commons. Homework: Look up the urban design of Utrecht's public squares or Freiburg's Vauban district and summarize how car-free frameworks protect community connection. Write down one question about any of this episode's topics. If you don't have a question, write 'no question.' Optional: Reflect on a public square or shared space in your community. Journal about how defending it from automated or vehicular encroachment changes your sense of local trust. Books: If you would like to read more on this subject, some book suggestions are Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl, Happy City by Charles Montgomery, and Street Fight by Janette Sadik-Khan. Learning Topics: Human Commons; Robot Corridor; Trust as Infrastructure; Utrecht Public Squares; Car-Free Neighborhoods; Community Centers. Join the Community / Get the Books: https://www.AvisKalfsbeek.com Podcast Music: Javier Peke Rodriguez "I am late, madame Curie" https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW

Philip Kent, CEO of Gravis Capital and Lead Manager of GCP Infrastructure Investments (LSE: GCP), joins UK Investor Magazine to discuss the state of the infrastructure investment trust sector and how GCP is designed to achieve capital preservation and reliable, inflation-linked income from UK infrastructure projects.Infrastructure trusts have spent much of the past few years trading at wide discounts to NAV. Philip explains why, how Gravis-managed portfolios react to interest rate moves, and how the team balances income against capital protection in a weak economy.The conversation also covers the outlook for infrastructure dividends over the next five years, opportunities in net zero and the energy transition, and where capital is flowing across the UK today. Philip addresses the health of GCP's debt book directly, including whether any project borrowers are falling behind on interest payments.From the perspective of investors who may use an ISA or SIPP, Philip outlines the portfolio mix, the advantages listed vehicles offer over private funds, and the most common misconceptions about infrastructure investing. He closes with how Gravis is approaching AI and what role infrastructure should play alongside equities and bonds in a diversified portfolio.Topics covered:Why infrastructure trusts trade at discounts to NAVInterest rate sensitivityIncome vs capital protectionDividend sustainability over five yearsNet zero and energy transition opportunitiesWhere UK infrastructure capital is goingDebt quality and borrower performanceGCP's portfolio mix for ISA and SIPP holdersListed vs private infrastructure fundsGravis Capital's approach to AIRetail misconceptions about infrastructureInfrastructure in a diversified portfolio Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1952 THE DEFENDERS BY PHILIP K. DICKArtificial Intelligence Infrastructure And RegulationGUEST: Jim McTague Jim McTague explores the political and economic friction surrounding artificial intelligence expansion, particularly the development of massive data centers. Reporting from Pennsylvania, McTague notes how local municipalities are establishing zoning regulations and utility constraints to prevent corporate developers from imposing facilities without community input. Alongside cohost Thaddeus McCotter, McTague discusses White House backing for a golden age of artificial intelligence, comparing proposed regulatory approaches to financial market oversight. While tech leaders call for industry guardrails, McTague emphasizes that light touch, goal oriented regulatory models are superior to heavy handed rules, warning that political backlash over energy grid strain impacts elections. File 6

All links and images can be found on CISO Series This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark, the producer of CISO Series, and Geoff Belknap. Joining us is our sponsored guest Ryan Lloyd, chief product officer, GuardSquare. In this episode: Determinism was never the point Every MCP server is an uncontracted vendor Mobile security, the version everyone's tired of hearing Architectural vanity A huge thanks to our sponsor, Guardsquare Guardsquare delivers mobile app security without compromise, providing advanced protections for both Android and iOS apps. From app security testing to code hardening to real-time visibility into the threat landscape, Guardsquare solutions provide enhanced mobile application security from early in the development process through publication. Learn more about how to protect your app at Guardsquare.com.

Charlie Nitschelm is the co-founder and CEO of Uplift, a company building affordable, rapidly deployable temporary housing. Uplift's first product is a 90-square-foot, off-grid home designed for one to two people that can be transported fully assembled, placed with a standard forklift, and self-level without a foundation or skilled labor for deployment.In this episode of Inevitable, Nitschelm explains how his experience at SpaceX and Starlink, followed by an intensive period of studying homelessness, poverty, and other social challenges, led him to think about housing as a problem that could benefit from a fundamentally different architecture. The conversation explores how Uplift is designed to work immediately after deployment, including its approach to power, water, sanitation, connectivity, and remote monitoring. Nitschelm also discusses the company's manufacturing ambitions and its potential applications in workforce housing, disaster response, global shipping, ADUs, and affordable housing developments.Episode recorded on September 15, 2026 (Published on September 29, 2026)In this episode, we cover: (0:00) An overview of Uplift(1:38) Charlie's path from SpaceX and Starlink to Uplift(3:57) Learning about homelessness, poverty, and other social challenges(8:22) Why housing needs a fundamentally different architecture(12:00) Why eliminating skilled labor is central to Uplift's design(16:49) Forklift deployment and off-grid utilities(23:33) Starlink, solar power, and building a connected fleet(25:03) Applying car manufacturing principles to housing(28:07) Workforce housing and infrastructure projects(32:16) Why disaster housing can take months to deploy(34:12) Global shipping, ADUs, and affordable housing applications(37:04) “Speed to sleeping” and the economics of temporary housing(39:58) Uplift's manufacturing ramp and the path to HUD approval 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

In this episode, Greg Castle, U.S. Power & Grid Commercial Leader, Schneider Electric, and James Vun Cannon, Healthcare Segment Manager for Strategic Accounts and U.S. Digital Power, Schneider Electric, discuss rising power demand from AI, grid constraints and why health systems need to align IT, facilities, clinical and finance teams around long-term infrastructure and energy planning.Learn more: https://www.se.com/us/en/work/solutions/healthcare/This episode is sponsored by Schneider Electric.

For episode 777 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Kenneth Shek, CEO at Moca Network and Managing Director at Animoca Brands.Kenneth leads the Moca Network, Animoca Brands' identity ecosystem, building decentralized identity infrastructure across a network spanning more than 500 portfolio companies and 700M+ addressable users, and can discuss AI agents and digital identity, the future of online trust, agentic commerce, and why identity will become a foundational layer of the AI-powered internet.

Spy Ninjas President Shelly Soriano breaks down how the YouTube-native serialized franchise scaled to 47 million subscribers and expanded beyond digital video into live entertainment, licensing, and retail.She reveals why keeping production values intentionally accessible maintains viewer trust, how a $25 million investment fuels their expansion, and why traditional entertainment talent must adapt to platform-native storytelling.Key Highlights

Data center builds are facing challenges, not only from energy supply and supply chains, but also from increasing community pushback. Analysts Tony Lenoir and Matthew Richesin join host Eric Hanselman to preview a webinar that they'll be presenting that explores wide ranging actions that being raised against data center construction and the concerns that are driving them. The traditional industry practice of "Design, announce, defend", where the build is presumed onto the community, is being reworked to include community engagement at the initial stages of a project. There are a number of regulatory strictures that are in place and more pending as a political dynamic around data centers grows in a fractious campaign season.  All of these aspects are intertwined with societal concerns about technology and AI's impacts. As has happened with earlier technology innovations, where the ramifications of new developments aren't fully understood, there will be many who are concerned about the implications of rapid, unchecked adoption. Data centers have become emblematic of this change and a lightning rod for discussion. Join the webinar to get the full story!   More S&P Global Content: Join the webinar: AI Infrastructure webinar 2026 Trends in Data Center Services & Infrastructure New data center legislation roundup, April 2026 The sustainability risks threatening AI's resilience narrative For S&P Global subscribers: US data center growth: Impact on communities 101 An evolving data center industry calls for creative modifications to early-stage negotiations Balancing data center growth and regulation: Florida's legislative conundrum Host/Author: Eric Hanselman Guests: Tony Lenoir and Matthew Richesin Producer/Editor: Dylan Scheible 

Private markets have historically been dominated by pensions, endowments and other large institutional investors. But as access expands, individual investors are increasingly encountering private equity, private credit and other investments outside the traditional public markets. This week, Jeremiah Bates and Alex Lundgren are joined by Christian McCormick, CFA, Head of Client Portfolio Management at Meketa Capital, for a three-hour deep dive into how private markets actually work. Christian explains the differences between public and private investments, why companies are staying private longer, and how private equity firms invest in and work with businesses. They also break down venture capital, growth equity and buyouts, along with the due diligence involved in evaluating private investments. Then, the conversation turns to the investor's side of the equation: liquidity, long holding periods, drawdown funds, evergreen and interval funds, portfolio allocation and the tradeoffs that come with investing in assets that can't simply be sold with the click of a button. Finally, Christian takes a closer look at private infrastructure, including power generation, transportation, pipelines, digital infrastructure and data centers. They discuss why infrastructure has attracted more investor attention, how these projects can generate income and returns, and where inflation protection and diversification can fit into the picture.   Listen, Watch, & Connect! https://www.therealmoneypros.com Christian McCormick & Meketa Capital https://meketacapital.com/profile-mccormick ————————————————————— Ataraxis PEO https://ataraxispeo.com Tree City Advisors of Apollon: https://www.treecityadvisors.com Apollon Wealth Management: https://apollonwealthmanagement.com/ —————————————————————

Live from WindEnergy Hamburg! Alfredo Perez from Hitachi Energy shares insights on the global and European offshore wind grid challenges, the importance of grid infrastructure, and the future of renewable energy integration.Key Topics- European offshore wind grid development- Hitachi Energy's technological innovations- Global regional differences in renewable energy- Challenges in permitting and community engagement- Storage and transmission solutions for renewable energy- Security and resilience in energy infrastructureGWEC's Offshore Wind Podcast is hosted by Stewart Mullin, GWEC's Chief Industry Officer, and Rebecca Williams, GWEC's Deputy CEO, who leads on all GWEC's Offshore Wind work.The podcast, or 'show' as Stewart still likes to call it, features leading voices from across the sector, whether that is large OEMs, key supply chain manufacturers or political leaders driving policy, to talk about how we can all work together to deliver on offshore wind's enormous potential.Follow Stewart on LinkedIn hereFollow Rebecca on LinkedIn here and Instagram hereFollow GWEC on LinkedIn here and Instagram here

Every cross border payment gets checked twice. Once by the sending bank, once by the receiving bank. Nobody questions why. This week I speak with Richard Beverley, CEO and Founder of Block Infrastructure, and he makes the case (and solution) that screening it once, not twice, is the fix the industry has been avoiding.Block Infrastructure runs two products built on the same idea: share verified data instead of duplicating it. It streamlines KYC and KYB verification so institutions don't recheck what's already been confirmed. Its transaction screening product pre screens payments for sanctions and compliance risk using zero knowledge screening, so no bank has to expose its own customer data to do it. We get into why AI turns ambiguous compliance "maybes" into fast, binary decisions, how a five person team plus an army of AI agents now replaces what used to take a full engineering department, why chasing niche markets beats going straight at the big banks, and the founder lesson that nobody will ever treat you as their priority, plus Richard's honest read on Founders burnout.What you'll learnWhy screening a payment once instead of twice cuts compliance cost and closes the FX gap that makes cross border payments expensiveHow screening lets banks catch sanctioned payments without exposing their own customer dataHow AI turns ambiguous compliance maybes into fast, binary yes or no decisionsWhy founding teams now pair a handful of senior engineers with AI agents instead of scaling headcount, cutting costs six to sevenfoldWhy not adopting AI now is the fastest way to fall permanently behindWhy chasing niche, fast moving markets before big banks is the smarter go-to-market sequenceWhy resilience, not a great idea, is what actually gets a fintech founder through the sales cycleTimestamps 00:29 — Why financial services is "built wrong" 04:16 — Why chasing big banks first will burn your capital 06:24 — The hidden cost: compliance gets checked twice 09:23 — $2.9 billion lost last year in compliance holds 14:24 — Why correspondent banks are disappearing 20:37 — How Block Infrastructure screens for sanctions 28:12 — Adopt AI now, or "reinvent the wheel" 35:15 — The biggest founder mistake: nobody is your priority 40:04 — Five engineers and an army of AI agents 45:51 — The honest answer on founder burnout in the AI era

Bernhard Lorentz hat den Thinktank Agora Energiewende und die Stiftung Klimaneutralität mit ins Leben gerufen. Beim globalen Beratungskonzern Deloitte ist er verantwortlich für Global Climate and Infrastructure – und er setzt auf künstliche Intelligenz als zentrales Werkzeug für die Dekarbonisierung. Über diese »grüne KI« hat er ein Buch geschrieben. Aber steht KI in der aktuellen Debatte nicht für alles Mögliche, nur nicht für Nachhaltigkeit und eine gerechtere Zukunft? Darüber unterhalten wir uns mit Lorentz im Krisenpodcast. In jeder Folge von »Auch das noch? – Der freundliche Krisenpodcast« sprechen ZEIT-Politikredakteurin Petra Pinzler und Wissenschaftsredakteur Stefan Schmitt über eine Krise der Gegenwart: Es geht um die Klimakrise, das Artensterben, die Energiekrise und Kriege. Jedes Mal hilft eine Expertin oder ein Experte, zu verstehen, wie alles zusammenhängt. Nicht um zu verzweifeln, sondern weil Verstehen der erste Schritt zur Lösung ist. Und um Lösungen geht es natürlich auch.   Die Links zur Folge:  - Grüne KI. Wie die Wirtschaft das Klima retten und den Wohlstand mehren kann heißt das Buch von Bernhard Lorentz (Campus, 2026): https://campus.de/business-management/fuehrung-management/gruene-ki/CAM52286 - Powering artificial intelligence heißt die Studie des Beratungsunternehmens Deloitte vom November 2024, die im Podcast angesprochen wird: www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/climate/powering-ai.html - Und aus dem Folgejahr stammt die Deloitte-Studie AI for energy systems: https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/climate/ai-for-energy-systems.html - Das ist der Artikel von Juliane Schäuble über die Proteste der Anwohner eines gigantischen Rechenzentrum-Projekts im US-Bundesstaat Utah aus der ZEIT 35/2026: https://www.zeit.de/2026/35/ki-rechenzentrum-utah-bau-infrastruktur-protest - Und im Autorenprofil von Nicolas Killian finden Sie alle Texte des KI-Korrespondenten der ZEIT im Silicon Valley: https://www.zeit.de/autoren/K/Nicolas_Killian/index [ANZEIGE] Mehr über die Angebote unserer Werbepartnerinnen und -partner finden Sie HIER. [ANZEIGE] Mehr hören? Dann testen Sie unser Podcast-Abo mit Zugriff auf alle Doku-Podcasts, Bonusfolgen und unser Podcast-Archiv. Jetzt 4 Wochen kostenlos testen. Und falls Sie uns nicht nur hören, sondern auch lesen möchten, testen Sie jetzt 4 Wochen kostenlos DIE ZEIT. Hier geht's zum Angebot.

Stop Tracking Vanity Metrics: How Schedule Adherence, Rework Reduction, and Rapid Communication Drive Real Business Value In this episode of Ask Drone U Enterprise, Paul and Rob dive into one of the most critical questions facing construction drone program managers: How do you accurately measure the success and ROI of a drone program in construction? Most organizations fall into the trap of relying on activity metrics — tracking total flight hours, number of certified pilots, gigabytes/terabytes of processed data, or missions flown. While these metrics show program activity, they fail to demonstrate actual business value to executives. 5-Day Free Course: Thriving Drone Real Estate Business Transform your drone operations into a thriving real estate-focused business. Learn client management, pricing for profit, and creating high-value deliverables. Grow My Drone Business Get your questions answered: https://thedroneu.com/. If you enjoy the show, the #1 thing you can do to help us out is to subscribe to it on iTunes. Can we ask you to do that for us real quick? While you're there, leave us a 5-star review, if you're inclined to do so. Thanks! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-drone-u/id967352832. Click here for access to Skywatch for all your drone insurance purposes ! Become a Drone U Member. Access to over 30 courses, great resources, and our incredible community. Follow Us Site – https://thedroneu.com/ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/droneu Instagram –  https://instagram.com/thedroneu/ Twitter –  https://twitter.com/thedroneu YouTube –  https://www.youtube.com/c/droneu Timestamps: [00:30] — Construction vs. Government & Utility Drone Operations [01:05] — Tangent: Heavy-Lift & Logistics Drones in Infrastructure & Utilities [02:40] — Sponsor Message: Enterprise Drone Training with Drone U [03:20] — The Core Premise: Activity Metrics vs. Real Business Outcomes [04:15] — Why "Vanity Metrics" (Flight Hours, Data Volume) Fail Executives [05:10] — Metric 1: Protecting Project Timelines & Preventing Liquidated Damages [06:45] — Metric 2: Reducing Change Orders & Catching Structural Errors Early [08:15] — Real-World Case Studies: Elevator Shaft Misalignments & Dusty Robotics [09:50] — Metric 3: Subcontractor Accountability & BIM Model Verification [11:30] — Metric 4: Field-to-Office Speed & Eliminating Inspection Travel [13:10] — The Future of Construction Analytics & Long-Term Predictive Data [15:00] — Sales Skills & Construction Knowledge for Drone Program Success

Marc Cox and Kim St. Onge host the St. Louis Morning Brief, opening with reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's September 25, 2026 ruling staying an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals order, upholding Missouri's 6-2 congressional district map layout for the November 2026 general election. The segment reviews local reporting from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch regarding an immigration awareness march in Overland organized alongside the Archdiocese of St. Louis during the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. Additional regional brief stories cover infrastructure vandalism investigations involving damaged fire hydrants across North St. Louis, controlled demolition plans by the Missouri Department of Transportation for the historic Chester Bridge connecting Perryville, Missouri to Chester, Illinois, and well wishes for community members recovering from motor vehicle accidents. For official election information, voter registration resources, and district lookup tools, visit the Missouri Secretary of State Elections Division. LISTEN TO 97.1 FM TALK LIVE IN ST LOUIS OR STREAM WORLDWIDE AT 971TALK.COM Hashtags: #971FMTalk #StLouis #STLNews #Redistricting #ArchdioceseSTL #ChesterBridge

In this special in-person episode of Hivemind, Kevin joins Yan, Jose, Jason, and Ceteris to debate whether crypto is still the frontier or whether the biggest opportunities have shifted elsewhere.The team breaks down crypto's move from experimentation to adoption, the rise of tokenization, and why onchain options could be the next major opportunity. They also explore AI's investment cycle, the risks around data center expansion and frontier lab revenues, and the sectors they're deliberately avoiding.TIMESTAMPS00:00 Intro & Market Surprises06:00 Tokenization, Zcash & Crypto's Winners20:51 Onchain Options: The Next Big Opportunity?32:52 Is Crypto Still the Frontier?46:40 AI Labs, Infrastructure & Bubble Risks1:08:00 What We're Avoiding1:20:34 Biggest Risks & What Comes Next

What balance of academic and in-practice education will turn out the best future infrastructure leaders? That's what the team behind the Infrastructure Institute are discovering as they prepare to launch the inaugural Canadian Infrastructure Leadership Academy at the University of Toronto. Matti Siemiatycki is leading the charge, and he returns to the podcast to speak further about the inspiration and effort behind the program.In his conversation with Ricardo, Evgenia, and Shormila, Matti—a U of T professor of urban planning and Director of the Infrastructure Institute—discusses what's missing in modern infrastructure delivery and what the Academy could mean for the future of an industry so vital to Canada's continued growth. Matti reflects on years spent as the “coroner of infrastructure,” studying why major projects fail. Over time, he spotted recurring patterns: while individual project management issues matter, many failures point to broader gaps in leadership, organizational capacity, and the human side of delivery.Inspired by other professional offerings, like the Major Projects Leadership Academy in the UK, the Canadian program is designed for professionals with 10 to 15 years of experience who are ready to move into larger delivery roles. The program will combine academic insight with practical industry expertise, covering the commercial and business skills, as well as the conflict management, required to lead complex projects. Keep listening to learn what it will take for the academy to create project management change, in practice, nationally. Matti also discusses why this is the perfect moment to explore and launch a program that focuses on behavioural and relationship best practices and seeks to change the culture of infrastructure delivery as a whole, through an academically rigorous, practically sound approach to creating major projects that succeed.Key takeaways:Why major project leadership requires more than technical expertise or on-the-job experience alone;How studying project failures reveals recurring gaps in leadership, organizational capacity, and delivery culture;What lessons successful projects like the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station can offer;What needs to happen around the Leadership Academy for it to help shift Canadian project delivery culture;Why future leaders need to learn from a combination of academics and industry experts.Quote“I'm becoming much more convinced that the individuals make a huge difference” - Matti SiemiatyckiThe conversation doesn't stop here—connect and converse with our community via LinkedIn:Follow Navigating Major Programmes: https://www.linkedin.com/company/navigating-major-programmes/Read Riccardo's latest at www.riccardocosentino.comFollow Riccardo Cosentino: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cosentinoriccardo/Follow Shormila Chatterjee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shormilac/Follow Evgenia Jilina: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ejilina/ Connect with Matti Siemiatycki: https://www.geography.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/matti-siemiatycki   Learn more about the Leadership Academy: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infrastructure-institute/people/ Listen to NMP, episode 19, “The Human Pursuit of Infrastructure Delivery”: https://navigatingmajorprogrammes.transistor.fm/s2/19 Listen to NMP, episode 59, “Infrastructure Planning Meets Social Purpose”: https://navigatingmajorprogrammes.transistor.fm/s3/59 Listen to NMP, episode 66, “The Leadership Gap: Building Better Leaders for the Future of Canadian Infrastructure”: https://navigatingmajorprogrammes.transistor.fm/s3/66 Read “Anatomy of a unicorn: How systemic program management delivered a nuclear power plant on time and on budget”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629625005067 

This episode explores the future of Heathrow, the UK's hub airport and a vital engine for national economic growth. The discussion was recorded live at the recent TwinTalks breakfast hosted by the Bentley Systems Infrastructure Policy Advancement team and features Helen Elsby, Chief Development Officer at Heathrow, the person responsible for turning the airport's complex multi-billion-pound ambitions into physical and commercial realities. Helen is joined in the discussion by two key members of her supply chain: Nigel Cole, Managing Director of Infrastructure at Mace Construct and Harriet Wheeldon, director at Mott MacDonald.With passenger volumes continuing to reach record highs, Heathrow continues to progress plans for expansion to combat capacity constraints and keep passengers and cargo moving in, out and across the country smoothly.The scale of ambition is staggering: a £1.3 billion commitment in 2026 to conclude the current H7 investment cycle, more than £5 billion planned for the forthcoming H8 period (2027–2031), and the greenlighting of planning work for a potential further multibillion pound investment in expansion. As the discussion hears, Heathrow plans to build faster, smarter, and more efficiently to deliver maximum value for passengers, airlines, and the UK economy.Funding these ambitions entirely through private capital requires relentless operational and supply chain efficiency. From Modern Methods of Construction and the use of digital technology to collaboration across a nationwide supply chain, Heathrow must stretch every asset to unlock a 12% capacity boost, transform passenger experience, and drive net-zero goals.Much to get on with at Heathrow – so much to discuss.ResourcesDraft Heathrow Expansion National Policy StatementHeathrow's H7 2026 plansHeathrow's H8 plansHeathrow expansion plansInterview with Heathrow COO Javier EchaveInfrastructure Policy Advancement

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on the rapidly escalating war in Ukraine as Russia expands its attacks on civilian and economic infrastructure, including a Kyiv-region warehouse used by a logistics partner of American company McDonald's, amid a broader campaign hitting businesses, logistics hubs, data centers and other infrastructure across Ukraine. Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum with Dr. Steve Hassan: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show The Ken Harbaugh Show: https://meidasnews.com/tag/the-ken-harbaugh-show Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the South Carolina Lede for September 26, 2026: we're getting back to some roots for a moment; we're talking infrastructure, we're talking economics, we're talking a little bit of politics; and more!

The sixth and final episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores how geopolitical power is encountered, reproduced, and contested through everyday urban life. Moving beyond an understanding of geopolitics centred exclusively on states, borders, and diplomatic strategy, our guests examine how global conflicts and political imaginaries enter homes, streets, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and digital spaces. The conversation considers how ordinary practices, ranging from commuting, shopping, and consuming media to caring, protesting, and negotiating identity, connect intimate urban life to wider geopolitical formations. The episode highlights how geopolitical distinctions are materialised through mundane infrastructures and encounters. Housing markets, migration bureaucracies, policing, schools, monuments, religious spaces, social media platforms, and commodity networks shape who can move, settle, belong, and appear in the city. Geopolitics is therefore not only imposed from above but also lived affectively through fear, aspiration, suspicion, solidarity, memory, and attachment. Cities emerge as spaces in which distant wars, borders, colonial histories, and nationalist projects become proximate, entering everyday relations and producing uneven forms of visibility, vulnerability, and belonging. At the same time, the conversation attends to the capacity of everyday practices to unsettle dominant geopolitical scripts. Migrant networks, neighbourhood solidarities, commemorative practices, cultural production, and ordinary acts of care can rework the categories and divisions through which geopolitical power operates. This episode invites listeners to understand the everyday not as a scale beneath geopolitics, but as one of the principal sites through which geopolitical worlds are assembled, inhabited, contested, and transformed.

Is the open model GLM-5.2 really Opus 4.8 level?

Evan Schlossman is a principal at Neostellar, where he focuses on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, particularly the infrastructure powering AI systems, including compute platforms, data infrastructure, and enabling technologies. Before joining Neostellar, Evan worked in business intelligence at the Lifetime Value Company and as a consultant at Deloitte. With an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and a background in economics from Cornell, Evan brings a unique perspective on the intersection of technology, finance, startups, and investing. On this episode we talk about: How Evan discovered his interest in technology, business, and investing from an early age Why young people should experiment with different careers, internships, and side projects before deciding what they want to do Evan's transition from pre-med to consulting, startups, and eventually venture capital The rise of “boring” Main Street businesses like laundromats, car washes, roofing, and HVAC companies as potential entrepreneurial opportunities How AI can modernize the back-office operations of traditional businesses and increase their leverage Why Neostellar focuses on the infrastructure powering AI rather than simply betting on the next consumer-facing AI application The investment thesis behind AI infrastructure, including compute, data, memory, and storage Evan's perspective on evaluating businesses based on cash flow, opportunity cost, career stage, and personal goals Top 3 Takeaways Experiment before committing to a career path. You don't need to know at 18 what you want to do for the rest of your life. Internships, side projects, freelance work, and conversations with people in different industries can help you discover what actually interests you. Look beyond the obvious AI companies. Rather than trying to predict which consumer-facing AI application will win, consider the foundational infrastructure that all of these technologies need, such as compute, data, memory, and storage. Don't overlook the value of your own time. When evaluating a business opportunity, especially a small service-based business, consider the opportunity cost of your time and what it would cost to hire someone else to operate the business. Your real economic return isn't simply the business's cash flow. Notable Quotes "It's a matter of talking to people, keeping your options open, right? Trying to identify what's out there, what do you like doing, what sort of fits that intersection of interests and what you're good at." "Don't, you know, undervalue your time, right? Because if you are running this business and that's your day-to-day job, there's an opportunity cost for your time." "No matter what products end up winning in two, three years... what are the foundational components that they are going to need to be a part of?" Connect with Evan Schlossman: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanschlossman/ Other: Neostellar — portfolio, team, white papers, quarterly earnings calls, and company information A Word from Our Sponsors: - The most successful business owners don't do it all themselves — they delegate. Upwork lets you build a team of highly skilled specialists for every function your business needs, so you can focus on what you do best and let experts handle the rest. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free! - Scribe captures workflows as work happens and automatically generates step-by-step guides with screenshots and instructions, so no one has to sit down and write documentation from scratch. Learn more at scribe.how/tmm and mention Travis Makes Money for your first month of Scribe Capture free on select plans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The space economy is becoming more connected to everyday economic activity, from satellite communications and navigation to weather forecasting, defense and data. Falling launch costs, advances in satellite technology and rising demand for AI infrastructure are broadening the conversation around what space could enable.In this episode of The Bid, host Oscar Pulido speaks with Reid Menge, portfolio manager in BlackRock's Fundamental Equity Group, about how the space economy is developing and the forces behind its growing relevance. They explore lower launch costs, satellite capabilities, national security priorities, AI infrastructure and the potential evolution of data centers.The discussion also looks beyond rockets and satellites to the broader infrastructure and capital markets ecosystem supporting space activity. Reid explains why cost and capability remain critical variables, how government spending can intersect with private-sector innovation, and why technical execution remains an important source of uncertainty as the industry develops.Episode chapters00:00 Introduction to Space Economy02:02 Space in Daily Life02:37 Space Investing Goes Mainstream04:40 Cost Capability Demand09:22 AI Meets Orbit11:18 Space Data Centers Explained14:39 National Security Imperative16:20 Where Opportunities Emerge18:29 Risks and Reality Check20:32 Next Decade Outlook22:28 Wrap Up and DisclosuresKey Insights from this episode:· How falling launch costs could expand the range of economically viable space activities.· Why smaller, lower-cost satellites are changing communications and Earth observation.· How AI is increasing the potential value of data collected from space.· Where national security priorities intersect with commercial space infrastructure.· Why semiconductors, communications equipment and specialty materials form part of the space ecosystem.· How execution risk and technological complexity could influence the industry's development.

Sept. 25, 2026- Politico New York energy reporter Marie French discusses the state of New York's transmission infrastructure and how regulators are building for the future.

From the earliest days of open-weight models to becoming the neutral routing layer for more than 10 million developers, OpenRouter is one of the clearest bets that the future of AI will be multi-model. In this episode, OpenRouter co-founder & CEO Alex Atallah, with AMP's Anjney Midha returning with swyx to unpack how OpenRouter emerged from the first wave of Llama, Alpaca, Mistral, and Midjourney, why model diversity mattered before it was consensus, and how a company dismissed as “just a wrapper” became critical infrastructure for the AI ecosystem.We go deep on the product and distribution lessons behind OpenRouter: why model labs can spend billions training a checkpoint and still struggle to get it into developers' hands, how Mistral helped prove the value of a competitive inference marketplace, why OpenRouter chose focus over expanding into fine-tuning, memory, and other adjacent products, and how its rankings became a real-time map of how AI usage was changing. Alex also explains OpenRouter's early experiments with model fusion, why they deleted the first version and brought it back years later, and how the platform grew to more than 10 trillion tokens per day.Finally, Anjney explains why Stripe and OpenRouter fit together, why token fraud may become one of the defining security problems of the AI economy, and why the next wave of fraud won't just come from humans but from autonomous agents attacking increasingly valuable token flows.We discuss:* Why OpenRouter bet early that no single AI model would win everything* Alpaca, Llama, and open models becoming impossible to ignore* Why Discord's early AI deployments exposed the limitations of closed models* Why model labs can spend billions on training and still fail at distribution* How OpenRouter became a neutral distribution layer for model developers* Why VCs dismissed OpenRouter as “just a marketplace” or “just a wrapper”* The Mistral price war and the first real proof of an inference marketplace* How Midjourney scaled through Discord and what it taught the AI ecosystem* Why crypto infrastructure became a dress rehearsal for generative AI* OpenRouter vs. LM Arena and why their missions are fundamentally different* Why focus became one of OpenRouter's biggest strategic advantages* Anthropic's early focus on AI pair programming and coding* The OpenRouter products that were prototyped but never launched* MOM, OpenRouter's early Mixture of Models experiment* Why model fusion failed in 2024 — and why it works much better now* How OpenRouter's leaderboard became a live map of the AI industry* OpenClaw, auto-routing, and agents reshaping AI usage* How OpenRouter reached 10+ trillion tokens per day* Why inference gateways are increasingly becoming targets for fraud* Why Stripe's fraud infrastructure is strategically important to OpenRouter* The coming rise of agentic fraud and attacks on the token economy* What changes and what stays the same as OpenRouter joins StripeAlex Atallah* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexatallah/* X: https://x.com/alexatallah* Website: https://alexatallah.comAnjney Midha* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjney/* X: https://x.com/AnjneyMidha* AMP: https://www.amppublic.com/Timestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:02:12 Alpaca, Llama, and the Multi-Model Bet00:06:04 Discord, Open Models, and OpenRouter's Origins00:14:28 Why “One Model Wins” Was the Wrong Bet00:17:27 Why Model Labs Struggle With Distribution00:23:04 “Just a Wrapper”: Why VCs Misunderstood OpenRouter00:27:58 Bootstrapping OpenRouter Through Community00:36:16 Crypto, Midjourney, and the Early Generative AI Ecosystem00:43:38 Mistral and the Birth of the Inference Marketplace00:47:10 OpenRouter vs. LM Arena00:52:08 Focus, Anthropic, and Roads Not Taken00:59:34 Mixture of Models and Model Fusion01:02:44 Sonnet, OpenClaw, and OpenRouter's Explosive Growth01:09:03 Why Stripe Acquired OpenRouter01:12:45 Fraud and the Emerging Token Economy01:17:47 The Coming Wave of Agentic Fraud01:19:07 What's Next for OpenRouter at StripeTranscriptIntroduction: OpenRouter, Marketplaces, and Pub-Sub as a Product PrincipleSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay, we are here in Anja's house, which is where all big startups in San Francisco start.Anjney Midha [00:00:08]: Howdy.Swyx [00:00:08]: And, congrats on Cursor, Mistral. I don'- God knows what else. You got so much stuff going on.Anjney Midha [00:00:17]: There's, there's a lot going on. Well, OpenRouter is probably the - has been the most, I would say, like, one I'm excited about recently.Swyx [00:00:24]: Yeah. And we have Alex, first time on the pod, but,Anjney Midha [00:00:27]: Thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:27]: You've been in the IE a few times. I appreciate every time you've shown up, for the community. Congrats. I just, like, what a journey. When I was looking back at your past posts, one of the earliest principles that I saw you write as a product person is sub as a product principle. And I wanted - you to maybe explain how you think about what should exist in the world.Anjney Midha [00:00:49]: Yeah. The sub piece, which was early 2023, I didn't think about it until we talked like 10 minutes ago, is about how there is like a way of thinking about products as an intersection between subscribing to data and publishing data. And marketplaces are an easy example of this. You have suppliers that are publishing some product to a SKU. And the SKU is like a sub topic that a consumer is subscribing to and just going to, like, consume whenever they want. And humans consume in a very, like, discreet, ad hoc way. It's not very scalable. all their attention is on the topic when they're buying the thing, and their attention is nowhere else when that happens. agents and consumers of inference don't act like that. They're consuming continuously, and they're changing the SKUs that they consume from all the time. So OpenRouter is like a blend between a normal API experience and a marketplace where we create model slug. We have the auto router. We have all kinds of, like, product SKUs that you can subscribe to. And then you can, like, continuously add, like, derive value and make decisions based on those consumers.Alpaca, Llama, and the Multi-Model BetSwyx [00:02:11]: Yeah. This is something that was more consensus now, but not consensus when you guys started, which was that there is such a demand for swapping models and changing things out and, that people would not use the native SDKs. I guess, for each of you, what was your realization moment that this would be it? I, - You've, you've given a talk at EIE about Alpaca as,Anjney Midha [00:02:33]: Yeah.Swyx [00:02:33]: One of your inspiring moments.Anjney Midha [00:02:35]: Alpaca, I can, like, rehash the Alpaca moment for a sec. Like, the very beginning, at the end of 2022, OpenAI was the only game in town. There was, like, OpenAI, Cohere,Swyx [00:02:47]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:02:48]: And then a smattering of, like, early attempts at open weight models.Swyx [00:02:54]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:02:54]: When Llama came out in January of 2023, it was like, “Wow, really exciting. This is really big.” It outperforms 3 on, one or two benchmarks. but you can't chat with it. It wasn't like - It wasn't an engaging model, but it seemed like someone just needed to fix a couple things and do some RLHF on it to get it all the way there. And Alpaca was the first model that I saw that did that. It only took $600 to do. A team at Stanford generated a bunch of synthetic data, tuned Llama, and made Alpaca, billion parameter model. Or was - Maybe it was thirteen billion parameters. And it was so good. Like, I was just, like, on an airplane using it. I, - in many cases, I, like, you could not discern a ChatGPT versus an Alpaca result. And I figured if it was this easy to make a model, one, we have a whole new way of monetizing data for the first time. you can just, like, take really valuable data and turn it into a service in $600. and that cost will probably go down over time.Swyx [00:04:03]: When you - So sorry. when you say monetizing your data as, what eventually will become an MCP endpoint or as a training data for a model?Anjney Midha [00:04:12]: Yeah, training data for a model.Swyx [00:04:13]: Awesome.Anjney Midha [00:04:13]: Like, an abstract way of saying like, “Hey, I have this data.”Swyx [00:04:15]: Compress it into a model.Anjney Midha [00:04:16]: Like, it makes sense for me in my product, but, like, I could repackage it in the form of a model and sell it. And so it's just a whole new business model for the economy. It also, of course, provides, like, a way of following what Frontier Labs are doing, but in a way that, like, a single developer or a small team of developers can roll on their own. And so - Whenever you have an example of that, like a breakout app that's doing really well, and then some framework for imitating it with - in your own flavor, you have an immediate ecosystem of, like an immediate ecosystem, like, should arise because there's just a huge gap between the, like, decisions that the single company is making and all of the variations in those decisions that, like, a wider ecosystem can create themselves. And so then, you need a marketplace to, like, discover all of those, services and all of those products. There wasn't any place on the internet that, like, was like a home base for LLMs in terms of seeing how much they were being used and seeing who was using them and why.Swyx [00:05:29]: The closest would be Hugging Face.Anjney Midha [00:05:30]: Hugging Face was the closest at the time, yeah.Swyx [00:05:31]: They just started Hugging, like, a few years ago before that.Anjney Midha [00:05:34]: Yeah, and Hugging Face also didn't have the closed-source models.Swyx [00:05:37]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:05:38]: And they didn'- you couldn't use the models at the time. and there wasn't data about who was using them. There were, like, a bunch of differences between OpenRouter and Hugging Face, and those differences felt really critical to me, especially when I was just trying to learn about LLMs and, like, why people are choosing, like, Different little ones that are emerging over time.Discord, Open Models, and the Origins of OpenRouterSwyx [00:06:03]: Got it. And then, Ansh, no stranger to wanting more model diversity, at the time, you're a couple of years into your Anthropic journey, which we covered in the previous podcast as well. What was your introduction to Alex?Alex Atallah [00:06:16]: Well, the introduction was, I think, thirteen years before that.Swyx [00:06:20]: Oh.Alex Atallah [00:06:20]: But the OpenRouter handshake happened right over there, if you remember.Anjney Midha [00:06:23]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:24]: Which - So Alex and I, met, I believe as sophomores now, if I remember at the Stanford Review,Anjney Midha [00:06:32]: That's rightAlex Atallah [00:06:32]: Meeting for the first time.Anjney Midha [00:06:33]: I think so, yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:35]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:06:35]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:35]: So Stanford Review was the libertarian newspaper on campus at Stanford that Peter Thiel started back in the day. And, whatever-- for whatever reason, I, Alex and I both showed up to one of the meetings, and I remember, the editor-chief was a mutual friend of ours. Lisa was really a really great editor-chief, where, part of an editor-chief's job is to assign responsibilities to people and make sure the work gets done. and I, I may be misremembering the details, but I remember wanting to. It was surprising to me that at the time there was no dedicated technology section in the newspaper.Alex Atallah [00:07:11]: YouSwyx [00:07:13]: Because it's political, right?Alex Atallah [00:07:14]: It is primarilySwyx [00:07:14]: Like, it's talkingAlex Atallah [00:07:15]: It originally started as like aAnjney Midha [00:07:16]: Yes.Swyx [00:07:17]: Yeah, states and all those things.Alex Atallah [00:07:17]: Correct.Swyx [00:07:18]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:07:18]: But it, - To take us back in time, you may remember this, but, there was this technology, legislation that was being debated called, the Net Neutrality Act. And net neutrality is, like, inherently this political concept, right? It's, it's about the regulation of - internet broadband access. And so there was a community of us who were technologists, but also debating the politics of the technology. And I thought the Review would be a great place - to, like, write about that. And I was working on, I think, a net neutrality article, and I remember proposing, “Well, maybe we should start a technology section.” And Alex was one of the only people who said, “Yes, that would be cool.” And said. I forget whether we ended up writing stuff together, but - that's when we first met,Alex Atallah [00:08:03]: Was 2011 or twelve. I forget which year it was. It was one of those.Anjney Midha [00:08:09]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:08:09]: It was at Old Union, if I remember correctly.Alex Atallah [00:08:11]: That's where we used to meet. But, along the way, Alex and I have had a chance to, To hang out often. And probably the time when we had the most professional overlap was when I was running the platform at Discord, and it had become this explosive platform for cryptoSwyx [00:08:32]: YeahAlex Atallah [00:08:32]: And NFTs in the middle of the pandemic.Swyx [00:08:35]: Which also, by the way, you were in charge of safety and security as well, right?Alex Atallah [00:08:38]: I was the head of platform, which meant all of the crypto - the DAO and NFT launch security debugging fell onSwyx [00:08:45]: And their phishing and.Alex Atallah [00:08:47]: The phishing, the social engineering attacks, the katana DDoS that we were getting hit by. but it's around the time I first started teaching security at scale at Stanford, CS 153. And Alex was on the, - at OpenSea at the time, and I was trying to figure out how we could defend against all these attacks that we were. Like, and at peak, I forget, if you remember how much NFT volume was running throughSwyx [00:09:10]: DiscordAlex Atallah [00:09:10]: Discord, but it was, like, a meaningful amount of, like, it was, like, several billion dollars in NFT volume of GMV, so to speak, were running through the platform, and it was all coming from OpenSea. It was these, like, buy, sell,Swyx [00:09:20]: TheAlex Atallah [00:09:21]: ServersSwyx [00:09:21]: The D in DAO is Discord.Alex Atallah [00:09:25]: Yes. And so that's when I think we had hung out professionally. But a year after that, OpenAI gave Discord early access to GPT. Sorry, three. No, it was five. Yeah, five, which is the RL version of three. And that's around the time we made a Discord bot with, OpenAI for internal deployment, and that's when I realized we would need. Like, since I was part of the deployment team.Anjney Midha [00:09:50]: What was the use case?Alex Atallah [00:09:51]: There were two that were. And there's, there's a post now called “Discord is Your Place for AI with Friends” that somebody sent me recently that I wrote, and published in twenty-three. But There were two use cases. One was Clyde, which was the - like, a party friend inside of Discord that could help you set up your Discord server and talk to you about onboarding and get your friends to hang out more. and then there was content moderation. And one of the realizations we had with content moderation was - it would refuse to moderate. Like, it would just refuse our prompts because the The training was. We were very early in the training era, and it would just. Our prompts would trigger it, its, like, guardrails. And we told OpenAI, “Hey, guys, we need access to the weights because if we're gonna be doing content moderation at scale, we had 250 million monthly active users, we need more reliability that the model will do what we need it to.” And they said, “Well, sorry, guys, that's not how this works. We're a closed-source company.” And so that was my first realization that we needed open models, and the enterprises would need more control over capabilities, and then ultimately would need some control plane or management system to orchestrate these open models. But there weren't no good - there were no good open alternatives until maybeAlex Atallah [00:11:10]: Six months later when Llama came out. And six months after that, I led the series A into Mistral, which was started by Guillaume and the Llama team. And - That, - Around that time is when I remember hearing about Alex launching OpenRouter and going, “These worlds are gonna collide, and I don't know when it'll make sense to team up.” But Alex was so early and could see. I think he was totally right about this ecosystem starting with Llama that then needed, like, a, an easy layer to manage for, especially for. I was approaching it from the enterprise perspective because I had been that, like, the. As the VP of platform at Discord, it was my job to ensure that when we deployed models to, like, 250 million users, they did what we wanted them to. And that was very hard, because if you outsourced it to the labs and they controlled the guardrails and their guardrails are their safety policies. Forbid the model from responding to your prompts. That was quite catastrophic.Swyx [00:12:05]: Yeah. But what, a moderation is the thing that they want to support. And obviously, beyond that, they would - OpenAI would work with you, presumably to give you a moderation endpoint, which they offer for free.Alex Atallah [00:12:16]: It was an interesting use case, that - So they did give us a moderation endpoint. However, as you guys know, every Discord server is like a mini deployment of itself. And so the use case was instead of having human moderators that have to interpret the norms of the community, you just give the, - Often, like every, subreddit, Discord servers, public ones have their own rules that the user, the users create.Swyx [00:12:41]: Oh, yeah. We run the LinkedIn Discord in. Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:12:43]: And then humans used to read those norms and then enforce it every day manually, like observing each message in these communities. And these communities have like millions of users. So we had a 5,000+ person team globally in the, on the Discord content moderation team. These are outsourced contractors who had a really tough job. And so the idea was instead, if you could give the norms of that server To the LLM, then the LLM would do custom moderation for that server. It's almost like a, like context moderation for that server. And many of those servers' norms just violated OpenAI's rules. And so - It was like we had our own custom eval. So each server had its own custom eval. But Discord-- at the time, OpenAI's evals, we were all soAlex Atallah [00:13:28]: Primitive in our thinking about how to deploy these LLMs that often the training prompts were super handed. It said, “Oh, anything about Harry Potter, anything that has trademarked content, don'- refuse.” And if it was a fan - Harry Potter fan community, this is a real use case, that had content moderation, the LLM would just refuse.Swyx [00:13:48]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:13:49]: And that was just not precise enough.Anjney Midha [00:13:52]: Another one that we heard was like if someone was trying to write like a detective story, and there's one chapter with a lot of violence, like maybe someoneAlex Atallah [00:14:01]: RightAnjney Midha [00:14:01]: Like kills someone, the LLMs would just refuse to, like, help with that part of the story.Alex Atallah [00:14:07]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:14:07]: And then - like, we used to be like, okay, this is not like structurally inherent to LLMs. There must be, like, some choice out there so that I can, like, switch to another model, when I'm getting, like, a refusal or a bad result from the main one that I have. And that, like, tension also drove me for a marketplace.Why “One Model Wins” Was the Wrong BetSwyx [00:14:28]: Yeah. I think that is well accepted now. What was it like back then when you were raising or, starting this? did people get it? what was the, some of the struggles? I like getting stories out of him about how other VCs don't get it. So like anything you wanna, talk about, now - Let's, let's call it, that the early journey of OpenRouter is done, right? You can obviously talk about some of the early days stuff.Anjney Midha [00:14:54]: Well, I was gonna say that, like, the biggest objection we got is big model win, which is - all of theSwyx [00:15:03]: Scaling laws.Anjney Midha [00:15:04]: Huh?Swyx [00:15:04]: Scaling laws.Anjney Midha [00:15:05]: Yeah, scaling laws, and natural network effects are just gonna accrue to one company, which will be - It'll be a Google-style monopoly, just like how Google won the search market, by a large margin, and you'll just be fighting for scraps at the end. That was probably the biggest objection we got. it is interesting that Google won the search engine race with such a huge margin. I think, like, had there been more interesting benchmarks or had, like, search engines been, - had people, like, seen them a little bit more like LLMs where they're services that you can build companies on top of, that might not have been the case. but LLMs don't merely have a user interface. They're also, like, ways of building entirely new businesses. And, a Google-level monopoly would be like the Dutch East India Company times, quadrillion in magnitude because the whole economy ends up, like, depending on the one monopoly as well. So it didn't seem like would be a really crazy outcome if that happened. And it's also less likely because the economics of, like, creating good competitors are much, like, much more decentralizable.Alex Atallah [00:16:25]: Everything Alex said is true, And I came at it from a completely different perspective, whichSwyx [00:16:31]: Yes, this is why we're here.Alex Atallah [00:16:32]: The scaling laws were never - In my mind, were always a feature, not a bug for why OpenRouter would be very valuable. Because, I was one of the first investors in Anthropic, and it was obvious to me that other researchers in our friends - I went to grad school for machine learning, and I just had a lot of friends in the ML community who it was very obvious to us that the bitter lesson holds. And so I was like, “Oh, fantastic. Now we have at least two proof points that compute scaling works.” It was OpenAI and Anthropic. and by the time I think we decided to team up on OpenRouter, I had already invested in Mistral and Black Forest Labs and Luma. So there was multiple model companies and teams that I was, working with.Why Model Labs Struggle With DistributionSwyx [00:17:14]: But you did other modalities, whereas this is literallyAlex Atallah [00:17:16]: Across different modalities, yesSwyx [00:17:17]: Text.Alex Atallah [00:17:18]: Exactly. And it was so obvious to me that an ecosystem of different kinds of models were being created, and that this whole narrative of, like, Only one company will dominate like Google was, well, like maybe true, but one, I don't believe that. But two, there was so much extraordinary innovation happening across several different research teams. But the shared problem I was noticing across all of them was often, the research teams were fantastic at figuring out how to reason about new capabilities. They think in terms of capabilities, but never - like, are not developer mindset-oriented. Like, what happens after the training is done and the checkpoint comes out? Like, you'd be shocked how, like, similar the early training teams at OpenAI, sorry, Anthropic, BFL, Mistral, were in their, like, default approach to. Taking their research out of the, lab and scaling their impact, which is often, oh, the checkpoint is done, put it out as an API, done, and then there'd be crickets. in the case of Claude, the first Claude checkpoint was done a year before they released it internally. And then ChatGPT came out, and we decided, okay, yes, it's a good idea to release a Claude version externally.Alex Atallah [00:18:34]: And they had no plan, like no plan for how to get developers to try it out. And so if you go to the Claude one blog post, you'll notice there are, like, three developer examples for users of the API, and one is a Discord bot, and the second is Vivian, my wife's startup called Juny Learning, ‘- And then there was, like, Notion, because these were all friends of, like, the Anthropic Because that's how - like, last minute the planning was around, hey, once the model's done training, how do you get it out to the world? There was no distribution platform that understood what developers needed, all the key management, provisioning, like, simple, like, endpoint management, versioning control. Like, all these things that the scientists and researchers go, “ that's plumbing. I don't really think about it.”Swyx [00:19:15]: Implementation detail.Alex Atallah [00:19:16]: Right. And instead, Alex came at it from that perspective. And so, it was so obvious to me that, like, every single lab I was funding would spend - like, literally sometimes billions of dollars into training, and then a checkpoint would be done, and there'd be crickets, like, during early access because they're like, “Oh, that's right.”Alex Atallah [00:19:35]: It's hard to use a checkpoint to make anything. You need a whole bunch of plumbing around it to make it usable by a developer. And so by the - I think - it was so obvious to me that a distribution platform like OpenRouter was critical to have in the ecosystem if we wanted there to be competition to Google. Like, unless-- ‘cause with Google, DeepMind is done training a new checkpoint, and then they push a button, and it gets blasted out across all their surfaces from Google Docs to,Swyx [00:20:01]: Everywhere, even if I don't want it.Alex Atallah [00:20:02]: Everywhere. You wanna know about, like, on Android, like, overnight, they can deploy a new checkpoint to, like, a billion devices, right? And that invisible infra advantage, distribution advantage, most people don't realize, but until OpenRouter showed up, - you had to think about all of that yourself as a model lab. And it was very daunting. at Anthropic, I think it took, well, more than twelve months to get to our first 10 million in revenue. And in contrast with Black Forest Labs, I remember the early days, you guys had a conversation with the BFL team, and, it was so simple for OpenRouter to say, “Oh, no problem. Like, the day you launch, we can send 1 million developers to you.” that was crazy. That was like a step function change in, like, an hour.Swyx [00:20:46]: Is that a real number, a million?Alex Atallah [00:20:47]: I,Swyx [00:20:48]: Okay. All right.Alex Atallah [00:20:48]: I think today it's, like, 4 million. How many developers are on OpenRouter today?Anjney Midha [00:20:52]: Over ten,Alex Atallah [00:20:54]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:20:54]: Over 10 million, but, like, it's, it's hard to, youAlex Atallah [00:20:59]: I, yeah, I don't know how to. Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:21:00]: We do a lot of, like, account duping work, but, noAlex Atallah [00:21:04]: If you could get 1,000 developers, just to put in context If you get 1,000 developers who try the model on day one after you release it and just, like, do inference and give you feedback, that's a thousandAnjney Midha [00:21:15]: That's hugeAlex Atallah [00:21:16]: More developers than they knew how to get to on their own.Swyx [00:21:19]: Well, BFL had a reputation, but yes.Alex Atallah [00:21:21]: They had one in Stable Diffusion.Swyx [00:21:22]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:21:23]: And with Mistral, I don't know if you guys remember, but the first checkpoint they released was, like, torrents. It was, like, torrent weights.Swyx [00:21:31]: Yeah, they just put up a magnet link.Alex Atallah [00:21:33]: Yeah, there was no API.Anjney Midha [00:21:34]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:21:34]: Because they didn'- they weren't infra people.Alex Atallah [00:21:37]: ? Like, it's like, okay, download these weights, and you guys go figure out how to host it.Swyx [00:21:39]: Well, he has a story on his side, yeah.Anjney Midha [00:21:41]: Yeah, in addition to the, like, building a really good developer experience around it, the marketing that we do on, like, for different models is totally different and perceived totally differentlyAlex Atallah [00:21:54]: RightAnjney Midha [00:21:54]: From the marketing that a model lab does for itself.Alex Atallah [00:21:56]: Yes, 1,000%.Anjney Midha [00:21:57]: Right? We are like a, neutral layer looking at this market like it's a big dark room with all the corners completely obscure to users, and users are walking into the room and, like, feeling aroundAlex Atallah [00:22:09]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:22:09]: And trying to figure out what objects to grab off the tables and, like, build into, their companies. And it's just an insane way of working. Like, models are not products where you can just enumerate all their features onto a web page. They're all black boxes, including the open weight ones. So you need to, like, shine lights on all corners of this room, so that people can see what makes this model good, and you need the company shining that light to be a neutral third party, which is what we specialize in. So the, like. It'- In addition to developer experience, there's also, like, a very important, like, marketing and product packaging componentAlex Atallah [00:22:50]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:22:50]: And a way of, like, routing and discovering models becomes, like, critical to your market as a provider or a model lab or a server tool and more in the future.“Just a Wrapper”: Why VCs Misunderstood OpenRouterAlex Atallah [00:23:03]: And this value, to your earlier point about how many VCs, like, just don't. One of my biggest frustrations is that venture capitalists, many of them, like, just don't have any operating experience in the field. so unlike a traditional investor who's just maybe come up through the ranks as, like, a associate working on financial modeling or maybe hasn't been a real operator in the field for, like, more than ten years, which is a big part of the industry now, I had just arrived at a16z, like, a year after running the platform. And so I knew what the challenges were of, like, building a real - great developer experience and like, being able to create a working piece of software with a model. And there were a few, I won't name names, but there were investors who were looking at OpenRouter, and, felt at the time, like, when I would compare notes with people, that it was just, I quote unquote, “just a marketplace.”Swyx [00:23:59]: Yeah, just a thin layer, just aAlex Atallah [00:24:00]: CorrectSwyx [00:24:00]: JustAlex Atallah [00:24:01]: A wrapper or whatever on other people's APIs. And I was like, “You have no idea how strategic the value that OpenRouter has created by being able to orchestrate even three.” APIs in production. The amount of both engineering work and community design that goes into getting that live and running in production at the scale the OpenRouter team had started just doesn't happen by default. And that was one of the things that stood out to me about Alex from the earliest days. Like, he just understood, like, - from a systems perspective, like, how do you get these flywheels going? Like, that stood out to me with OpenSea when we were working together on the NFT integration at Discord. Like, Alex had a level of community-- like, systems thinking on how you get these flywheels going that most scientists and machine learning people just don'tAlex Atallah [00:24:48]: Think of. Like, we often think in terms of training.Swyx [00:24:52]: It's a linear stage.Alex Atallah [00:24:53]: It's this linear pipeline.Swyx [00:24:53]: There's no loop yet.Alex Atallah [00:24:54]: Yeah. It wasn't until much later that the modern context feedback loop cycle really got standardized in the industry. But at the time, if you remember, machine learning was like. Like, mostly we did a lot of ML, like, when I was in grad school on a laptop. So you just, like, download a dataset, ran some ablations, and you looked at the loss curves, and you're like, “Great, I made AI.” And the idea that you have to, like, deploy those capabilities, collect feedback trajectories, then, like, put those into a continuous loop, like, came much later. And it was very counterintuitive to the - like, the traditional AI mindset. I do remember doing the investment phase for, OpenRouter, I just didn't try and educate a bunch of other VCs on why it was not just a marketplace. I was like, “ what? I'm just gonna invest.”Anjney Midha [00:25:41]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:25:41]: And I'm going to, like, take the opportunity to partner with Alex, and if - no other VCs get it, that's totally fine. ‘Cause at the time, - it was not obvious, I think, to several of the investors that, like, OpenRouter was not more than just a wrapper around APIs. And - that infuriated me. And I was like, “ what? I don't have time to debate you. I'm - we're gonna, we're gonna invest.” And then I think, like, a month later, Matt Murphy marked it up by 10x. Like, - I think. I forget what the exact money was and so on, but, to his credit, Menlo Ventures realized, “Okay, there's much more strategic value here as well.” Maybe you didn't hear all these conversations behind the scenes But that frustrated me a lot. there's a lot of this, like, opining about wrappers. and if you're like, “Oh, an app is just a wrapper on a model,” then, like. And, OpenRouter is, like, this wrapper on top of other APIs, and this is the most stupid, reductive framework.Alex Atallah [00:26:31]: And so it's clearly somebody who has no experience deploying product at scale.Swyx [00:26:34]: It's the thing you dismiss other things with. Like, you're a - everyone's a wrapper on everything, right? Like, and there's, there's some Some wrappers have value.Alex Atallah [00:26:40]: Investors are wrappers and LPs, right?Alex Atallah [00:26:42]: Like venture capitalists. So, yeah, it's all wrappers down, all down to bare metal, I guess, and like energy.Swyx [00:26:46]: Yeah, there - When I started the whole AI engineer, I guess, the coining, in 2023, like, that was, like, the number one pushback is that this is no value. You should just train models.Anjney Midha [00:26:56]: Right.Swyx [00:26:57]: And, yeah, obviously this is, like. you guys are one of the testaments to the fact that you can build very valuable wrappers, but also very valuable model companies.Alex Atallah [00:27:06]: It's so, hard to be. Like, the day a model launches, the fact that you have an OpenRouter, endpoint for that model frequently at the top of Hacker News on day one, people don't realize the amount of work that goes into accomplishing that. And OpenRouter used. Like, that would happen over and over again, and I remember going, “People have no idea how hard that is.”Alex Atallah [00:27:30]: That's not.Swyx [00:27:31]: Yeah, we've covered some of the inference engineering that goes behind,Alex Atallah [00:27:34]: YesSwyx [00:27:34]: Some of - with Base Ten and all those. Well, today you have, all those, like, cool code name things that people guess what Oxy Alpha is and all those things. But, like, I guess one of the things that you're teasing is, how do you get that initial flywheel going, right? Because today you have your scale and your reputation, all these things, so obviously you - you're driving immense distribution. But when you were early on, when it's mostlyBootstrapping OpenRouter Through CommunityAlex Atallah [00:27:55]: The bootstrap, yeah.Swyx [00:27:56]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:27:56]: What was the bootstrap like?Anjney Midha [00:27:58]: To bring it back to early Discord days, I think we, like, initially connected with. This is an OpenSea story, technically. But, and we initially connected when you were at Discord, and we talked about, like, - the Axie Infinity server.Alex Atallah [00:28:13]: Oh, yes. Yes.Anjney Midha [00:28:14]: This server was, like, the biggest server at theAlex Atallah [00:28:17]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:28:17]: At Discord.Alex Atallah [00:28:18]: That's right.Anjney Midha [00:28:19]: And you were like, constantly bumping up theAlex Atallah [00:28:22]: The limits on the server. Oh, my GodAnjney Midha [00:28:24]: Of how many people could be in the server.Swyx [00:28:24]: For those who don't know, like, 10% of Philippines was Axie.Alex Atallah [00:28:29]: Was on that server. That's a big hit.Swyx [00:28:31]: It was, like, a meaningful contributor to the GDP of the country.Alex Atallah [00:28:33]: It was an NFT, like, crypto game, but itSwyx [00:28:35]: It was like a Pokémon breeding thing.Anjney Midha [00:28:36]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:28:36]: Yeah. Similar. Yeah. There was battling, there was breeding, and then there was, like, a marketplace for trading.Swyx [00:28:43]: Earn as well.Alex Atallah [00:28:45]: Yeah, earn. And, like, the graphics were really cute and fun, and you like, you get emotional about your Axie that you make. So to, like, start a community like that, which we had to do many times at OpenSea with every early project, for us to create a marketplace for it, we need to make sure that the, like, the community wants it.Anjney Midha [00:29:09]: Right.Alex Atallah [00:29:09]: And it's like building something that people want and going and telling them about it. Like, you can do that on a one basis, but there's way higher leverage to do that in a community where everyone can talk to you at the same time. So we spent a lot of time, like, building things that the community really wanted. We did the same thing for OpenRouter. And, like, the Axie community was one of, like, a zillion communities we did that with. And Anj, like, saw us doing it and. ‘Cause you could just see people sharing OpenSea links constantly in that Discord. Like, users sharing links is a really clear indicator that, like, something important is going on. So we spent, a lot of time, like, first figuring out what the gap is in the technology that people care about. Like, what was the actual problem that needs to be solved? in early LLM days, it was, OpenAI refusing to finish the prompt or,Anjney Midha [00:30:09]: YeahAlex Atallah [00:30:10]: To, like, complete the task. It was also.Anjney Midha [00:30:13]: Inability to customize models. and so there are communities that, like are just completely blocked on that issue, and those are the communities that are most useful to learn about and dive into and explore.Alex Atallah [00:30:28]: Something that really struck me at that time, - as I was just hearing your talk, I remember noting - you may not remember this, but we - we had these, like working, Zoom calls that we were doing a sprint around for, like this OpenSea integration with Discord. and, we'd, we'd - it was myself, my engineering team. I think you were there. And I remember, Alex, in the middle of one of those calls, just like there was like silence. we were all like, “Oh, yeah, this totally makes sense. Let's do this.” And then there's - every, like everybody aligned. And Alex was like, “No, this makes no sense to me.” And everyone's - I remember going, “What? Like, it works. Like, you click on a link and this, then it bounces you out to, like, OpenSea.” And he was like, “It's not a good user experience. Yeah, we should not do this.” And I remember going, he was the only one person out of all of us to raise his hand and go, yes, it made sense from a technical implementation perspective. Like, we were bouncing the user out into the, into OpenSea. And so it kinda checked the box of the product manager's requirements on both sides. But Alex went one step further and was like, “ what would be better, guys? If we just embedded the experience right here inside of Discord so the link opened up as an embedded iframe, and you can just check out right there.”Alex Atallah [00:31:47]: And not one person on the call, and there's like seven of us who had met, like, week after week.Swyx [00:31:52]: And it's the guy who doesn't work for Discord.Alex Atallah [00:31:53]: And it's the guy who doesn't work for Discord.Swyx [00:31:55]: Like, technically, you benefit if they bounce.Alex Atallah [00:31:57]: Exactly. And that was, like, adversarial. To keep the user inside of Discord would be adversarial to OpenSea. And yet Alex put that user experience first. And I was like, “That's special.”Swyx [00:32:08]: Wow.Alex Atallah [00:32:08]: Because it's very hard to have somebody who's technical like Alex and understands the developer flow, but also understands the best user experience and wants to prioritize that. And that's two sides of the flywheel that if you can get spinning, like is often hard to stop. And you just reminded me, like that one was one of those moments where I go, I - I realized I gotta be better at user experience because I should have been the one who came up with that, and I didn't. And I learned from you. And, I think that went into one of our case studies for the PM training program at Discord.Swyx [00:32:34]: Whoa.Alex Atallah [00:32:36]: I don't know if it there is Because ofSwyx [00:32:38]: You need an Alex is the conclusion.Alex Atallah [00:32:40]: Yeah. You need an Alex. And this is why I'm not, nobody should be surprised why Stripe decided like they had to buy OpenRouter because it's a really rare combination of people who understand the machine learning community, the developer experience, and the user experience. And putting all that together has resulted in this extraordinary scale that very few other marketplaces have been able to achieveWindow AI, BYOM, and Finding the Right Form FactorSwyx [00:33:02]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:33:02]: Over the last, five years.Swyx [00:33:04]: Yeah. Well, we should talk about the other reasons for acquisitions, whichAlex Atallah [00:33:07]: Yes, we should.Swyx [00:33:07]: You've written about. I wanna proceed somewhat chronologically as well. So - there is a point that, one of the questions that, Dave from H of Zero sent in was, when did it - really started to work? And you brought up Mixtral. I don't know if you wanna bring up that story.Alex Atallah [00:33:22]: Oh, yeah.Swyx [00:33:23]: Which obviously you overlap with, so.Anjney Midha [00:33:26]: Yeah, the MoE was. I don't know when. there's no like one moment where I was like, “Oh, this is, officially starting to work.” It wasSwyx [00:33:36]: The moment where you had a Chrome extension, like, really super early on.Anjney Midha [00:33:39]: Oh, yeah. But, well, - yeah. So before OpenRouter, I wanted to, like, explore a bring-your-own-model experiment. And,Swyx [00:33:47]: Which anyone familiar with crypto is like, yeah, Phantom and all these things.Anjney Midha [00:33:50]: Yeah. So it felt like doing a MetaMask analogy for AI would be a fun way of exploring that. And at the time, there were no AI apps. There were probably as many AI apps that were, like, hitting AI - like, hitting an LLM via an API call as there were, like, games just doing it in JavaScript. like there was a, there was a moment in time where it could have been the case that web apps call LLMs through the browser, like through some desktopAlex Atallah [00:34:27]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:34:27]: Managed app that is controlled by the user. and of course, there are like, I think, many reasons that did not happen. But back when the days were that primordial, I built a Chrome extension called Window AISwyx [00:34:43]: With Plasmo.Anjney Midha [00:34:44]: With Plasmo.Swyx [00:34:45]: I had come across early on, and I was like, “Who's gonna use this?” You did.Anjney Midha [00:34:49]: Plasmo had a couple, like, I think Phantom was using it. there were some other, like real companies using it.Alex Atallah [00:34:56]: It was like a shim.Swyx [00:34:57]: React for Chrome extension. It compiles to allAnjney Midha [00:35:00]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:35:00]: I see.Anjney Midha [00:35:00]: Like Next.js for Chrome extensions.Swyx [00:35:01]: Next.js, Next.js.Alex Atallah [00:35:02]: Okay.Anjney Midha [00:35:03]: And yeah, built Window AI on top of it. The creator of Plasmo, like started contributing code to Window AI, in GitHub, and that turned out to be Louis VicchiAlex Atallah [00:35:15]: Oh, you'Anjney Midha [00:35:15]: Who is the founder of OpenRouter.Alex Atallah [00:35:17]: That's right. You have told me this is how you met Louis. Yes.Anjney Midha [00:35:19]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:35:19]: Okay.Anjney Midha [00:35:20]: So, that allowed users to like configure which model they wanted to use for a web page in their browser, and then, like the app would just call out to that model when it needed to do things. not the right form factor for LLMs, but, it's like fun experiment. You learn a lot, and like I open sourced it. And the main learning is like, okay, this has to be an API, and it has to look a little bit - like, there has to be more of a developer experience here and more of a discovery experience as well. Like, I don't know where to use these models, and a little Chrome extension is not gonna help me discover. It's not enough real estate. I need more space. I need visuals. I need graphs. I need, examples. I need images. I need to, like, I need to be able to, like explore both as a human and as an agent.Crypto, Midjourney, and the Early Generative AI EcosystemAlex Atallah [00:36:10]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:36:10]: So that's how OpenRouter came to be.Alex Atallah [00:36:13]: A meta point that.Alex Atallah [00:36:16]: I think is underappreciated, but Alex is reminding me, is that we were quite lucky that we were so. we were, like, adjacent to the crypto community in those days. Because in hindsight, crypto ended up being like a dress rehearsal for generative models, right? If you think about the Axie experience, Alex is totally right, there were not that many AI apps at the time. And while I was dealing-- my job was to be the head of platform at Discord, which meant to be a general purpose place for communities and friends to create-- for developers to create apps and bots and, other services that could be deployed across Discord. And while 80% of the attention at the time was being spent on crypto, because that's where all the NFT volume was, there was, like, twenty percent of my time I was spending with a friend, who would get hotbot with me and ask me for. We would play Magic: The Gathering on weekends, and he was working on a little Discord bot that could take a text input and turn it into an image, and it was called Midjourney. YouSwyx [00:37:15]: Is that David?Alex Atallah [00:37:15]: It was David Holz.Alex Atallah [00:37:16]: He was a good friend. And David and I have both been failed ARVR founders, in the before that. And, I remember this. Midjourney was one of the fastest-growing communities we had after Axie Infinity started to peter off. And many of the, like, the abstractions and the infrastructure decisions we made to scale Axie happened just in time because they. Axie did this and then fell off a cliff. And then as Midjourney was taking off, we, like, explicitly decided to help David make the server, the Midjourney server, as the primary place for interaction with the model, because it was very hard for people to understand how to use the model if they couldn't see other people using it and copy them. And so the single-player Midjourney web app on its own, like midjourney.com, had, like, terrible retention because people would show up, they'd see this empty field. It's like E 2, and they would type in, like, cat or dog. And it was, like, paralyzing for them to have this blank canvas that they had to fill because they'd never used an AI model before. But instead, in a Discord server, you could see other people using it and riff off of their prompt, and the engagement was off the charts. And so scaling, Midjourney from zero to, like, 10 million monthly actives was a much smoother approach Axie Infinity. And so,Swyx [00:38:29]: Don't forget the best of four pictures, and you choose one.Alex Atallah [00:38:31]: The best, yeah, and then the other, weSwyx [00:38:32]: Which is the feedback loop.Alex Atallah [00:38:33]: The RLHF feedback loop, which, by the way, separately, like, Tom Brown, David and I used to play Magic: The Gathering on weekends. And so, like, it was one group of friends would hang out, and we'd. Like, these concepts were all being discussed all the time. But, there was.Alex Atallah [00:38:47]: I think there were few of us who bridged both the crypto worlds and the AI worlds. And compared to crypto, where it was - the question was always, what's the use case, for this technology? There was never any need to ask that for AI because it's, like, the use case was so visceral. It was like, I can create now anything at - I can imagine. I can write novels, I can code. And the infrastructure that those of us who believed in the distributed systems, like, value of crypto, like the censorship resistance part, found this use case that was explosive. And I think between Midjourney, the, Claude was a Discord bot launch, that we were using internally as an LLM. ElevenLabs had a TTS model that we had on Discord as well. Like, Discord became this petri dish for, like, early apps to innovate. And I don't think it's a coincidence that they found a home there before OpenRouter gave the world, like, a public home store or, like, a, storefront. Discord was this, like, almost petri dish storefront that - had, like, piggybacked on the infra we'd built for crypto communities. And then I think Alex was one of the first people to realize, wait a minute, like, these apps need their own home, on the internet. And then OpenRouter, to me, was a continuation of that community's needs. And of course, there was the crazy distribution that you enabled for a lot of these developers.Why OpenRouter Couldn't Just Live Inside DiscordSwyx [00:40:07]: So then my question is, how come you were. My perception is OpenRouter is not that Discord-centric, right? You have a Discord.Anjney Midha [00:40:14]: Yeah.Swyx [00:40:14]: And you use it to engage your community, but it's not like Midjourney where, like, no, that is like the primary way people experience OpenRouter.Anjney Midha [00:40:21]: Yeah, Midjourney, like, it really helps to see visually really quickly how people are using the model and how to prompt it.Swyx [00:40:29]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:40:29]: And I think that is partly why the server was so critical. It's like it is the user experience. It adds a ton.Swyx [00:40:36]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:40:37]: And you can go the whole mile with just, like, prompting via Midjourney, like, the, via the Midjourney Discord server, getting your images and then sharing them and having fun. For OpenRouter, for LLMs, like, you need a lot of user experience around LLMs to make them, like, really usable.Swyx [00:40:54]: Charge point.Anjney Midha [00:40:55]: And yeah.Anjney Midha [00:40:57]: The, like, seeing the examples of other people is also not as useful because it's a lot of stuff to read. It takes a long time.Swyx [00:41:03]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:41:04]: You need, like, based integration. Not possible to do in a Discord server. You need, Or technic- it's possible. I shouldn't say that. It's just not a great developer experience. you need, like, - you need governance for. At the point where you got based integration, now you need governance for managing the LLMs that have access to it, the data policies, which teams. All that stuff needs a lot more than a Discord server can provide. So it's justSwyx [00:41:30]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:41:30]: It's not the right.Alex Atallah [00:41:32]: Well, in addition, you're not wrong, but also there's the very important distinction that, Midjourney was an end user application.Swyx [00:41:40]: Right.Alex Atallah [00:41:40]: And, that's why Discord, which has 250 million monthly end consumers, made, it made sense for Discord to be a host for that application experience. What I knew was gonna happen soon after Midjourney found explosive product-market fit, because we. I think when Midjourney launched, from launch to $100 million revenue run rate, it was less than eight months. And shortly thereafter, Stable Diffusion launched. And, all of us used to hang out in the Discord server. There, I think it was the,Swyx [00:42:13]: The Stability Discord?Alex Atallah [00:42:14]: It was theSwyx [00:42:16]: Yeah, LAION.Alex Atallah [00:42:16]: Yeah, the LAION Discord server.Swyx [00:42:17]: The image community that spawned Stable Diffusion.Alex Atallah [00:42:19]: The image community. Yeah. And so when Stable Diffusion came out, I realized- Oh, now other people can build their own Midjourney.Alex Atallah [00:42:27]: Because until then, Midjourney did not have an API, so they were a stack company, right? They were training their own models, and they were deploying them as an application. But if you wanted to build your own Midjourney, there was no API of that quality. and I think E two was still quite primitive. Like, Midjourney had great quality. And then when Stable Diffusion came out, suddenly there was this new person who - there was - this new capability in the world, which is a developer could create their own Midjourney. And that, I think, created the need for something like OpenRouter, because then you need an API to. If you - if you had the creativity of David Holz and you had Stable Diffusion as the model and you wanted to put these things together, how could you do that without having to figure out how to host the weights? And what OpenRouter, - the shape of OpenRouter enabled is that. Right? When you have open model alternatives to closed applications, OpenRouter's value in the world becomes extraordinary because now any developer can just show up and use theStable Diffusion and the Need for a Model API LayerSwyx [00:43:20]: You just love model diversity.Anjney Midha [00:43:21]: Did you just say the shape of OpenRouter?Alex Atallah [00:43:23]: Oh, no.Anjney Midha [00:43:25]: Were you in cloud? What is this the real Han?Alex Atallah [00:43:26]: I've been, I've been - I'm, I'm misaligned now. I've been overtrained. I've been using Cloud way too much, haven't I?Swyx [00:43:34]: Claude-ish is what people would say.Alex Atallah [00:43:35]: Claude-ish. Oh, God, I gotta untrain myself.Swyx [00:43:38]: Okay. - And I just wanna cap off the Mistral side. my TLDR is there was a Mistral price war, is what they called it, right? Like, round about NeurIPS is twenty-three or twenty-four.Mistral and the Birth of the Inference MarketplaceAnjney Midha [00:43:47]: Yes. DecemberSwyx [00:43:48]: They launched, the Mistral 8x7B, and like the price went down like 80%.Anjney Midha [00:43:54]: Yeah.Swyx [00:43:54]: To me, that's very positive because it's like the first, like, real competition to host Mistral. Is there more?Anjney Midha [00:44:01]: Yeah, that was. I'm, like, trying to remember it, all the things that happened. It. Like, we saw that model come out and immediately saw people say that it was the best model in the world.Alex Atallah [00:44:15]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:44:15]: Like, this was, to my knowledge, the first time an open weights model was called that in real seriousness.Swyx [00:44:22]: It's hype, right? Is it?Anjney Midha [00:44:25]: It was hype. It was hype. It was also, like, hype from AI influencers at the time. And there were many examples where it was, like, outperforming four. So people really wanted to try it out and see, is this gonna be true for me too? And if so, at what price? And, the, like, inference landscape was really messy.Alex Atallah [00:44:49]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:44:50]: We cleaned it up. - it allowed, like, providers to compete on price, so we could give you just the best price in one spot. And so it was, I think, the first clear example of, like, a provider marketplace working in a way that adds value to end developers.Alex Atallah [00:45:08]: Sean, you may not remember this, but I think we met for the first time a few days after Mistral came out at NeurIPSAnjney Midha [00:45:15]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:45:15]: At a luncheon.Swyx [00:45:16]: Yeah. That's where I also met BFL as well. Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:45:18]: And Guillaume was there.Swyx [00:45:19]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:45:19]: I was at NeurIPS at that time.Alex Atallah [00:45:20]: You were there too. And, we had just announced the Mistral investment, and I remember Guillaume was over there, and I remember turning to Guillaume and asking him, Like, “Is it is all the. Like, how are you feeling after the launch of Mistral and seven B?” And, him in his typical French fashion was like, “ it's a, it's an okay model. It's not that good.” And I was like. It was so, in contrast. But I remember him also saying that part of the reason he felt a lot of people Thought that it was better than four was because of the speed. - it was an MoE model that they had, like, absolutely figured out how to make super efficient. It was on the Pareto frontier. And this is an important thing about LLMs, right? Sometimes when they're faster, you think they're smarter, even though, like, if you did, N of, these common, like, evals that are - you do seven tries, and I don't remember. I think we should go back and figure out what the data says, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out, oh, on an N of seven attempts, four was smarter on evals, but the perception of on, like, or correctness would be smarter or more accurate. But, people, like, from a human preference perspective felt that it was faster because it - or smarter because it's so fast.Swyx [00:46:36]: Yeah. And most queries do not take that levelAlex Atallah [00:46:39]: Don't take that. That's true.Swyx [00:46:40]: Right? So this is the start of humans as routerAlex Atallah [00:46:42]: Yes.Swyx [00:46:42]: Which then eventually becomes OpenRouter as router of like theAlex Atallah [00:46:45]: Oh, that's interesting way to think about it. Yeah.Swyx [00:46:47]: Like, because humans are the routing mechanism. Like, I will ask the fast model first, and then if, like, oh, not good enough, I'm gonna upgrade manually.Alex Atallah [00:46:52]: Yes.Swyx [00:46:53]: But then he's gonna auto it.Alex Atallah [00:46:54]: I didn't, I hadn't thought of it that way, but that makes sense.Swyx [00:46:57]: Which then there's, there's a lot more techniques, like fusion. Fusion is the thing that we should talk about. Before I move on to those things, I just want to close off the early years. one thing that I observe, which you are also an investor in Arena.OpenRouter vs. LM ArenaAlex Atallah [00:47:10]: Right.Swyx [00:47:10]: And we talked about Midjourney having that feedback loop of, A, B, C, D, and choosing that very. being very important. And you understand the flywheel. So how come you didn't build Arena, and how come Arena didn't build OpenRouter?Anjney Midha [00:47:23]: Well, Arena started before OpenRouter, right?Swyx [00:47:27]: They had the school projectAnjney Midha [00:47:29]: Yeah, LMSwyx [00:47:29]: And then it became a company.Anjney Midha [00:47:31]: LM Arena, yeah.Swyx [00:47:32]: So, but, and I know you had some Arena experiences, like the up comparison type things.Anjney Midha [00:47:37]: Yeah.Swyx [00:47:37]: But you never really went as hard as Arena did.Swyx [00:47:40]: And,Anjney Midha [00:47:40]: In doing up experiences?Swyx [00:47:42]: Yes. And LM Arena did have a router project based on LM Arena ELOs, which they never commercialized.Anjney Midha [00:47:48]: It's hard to do a company that does both because one company is taking data and selling it, and the other company really can't by default. So, I think there is, like, a branding reason that there are two companies here. like, when you set up OpenRouter, there's no training, there are no prompts, right, aside from what your provider policy set. Like, OpenRou- like, OpenRouter can't see your prompts or completions. If you want to see that as an org, you have to opt into it and enable it. And so we're, like, pretty conservative and careful about data policy and security. And privacy. And LM Arena is like, their business model is like oriented around the labs and,Swyx [00:48:34]: Because they give it for free, right? You don't give it for free to give it for free.Anjney Midha [00:48:37]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:48:38]: But we do give some. We like have free endpoints too, but like those free endpoints, we, I think we're not collecting any prompts. We're not like monetizing the data unless you, opt into it for some reason.Alex Atallah [00:48:48]: This comparison. you're not the first person to ask me this, and Alex knows this, but I was the interim, like the founder, like first CEO of Arena for the first five months when, and we were helping Anastasios and Waylin spin out of Berkeley. And, I did invest in that before, OpenRouter, but it was very strange to me the comparisons that outside, folks would make between the two projects because the missions were completely different. The founding entity for Arena, we called it the AI Reliability Institute because it was there as an eval service. Like the data, so to speak, that they were originally, offering the labs was how do you make the evaluation of models more reliable than like the state of the art at the time, which was like really just finger in the wind.Alex Atallah [00:49:38]: That's what Anastasios and Waylin's PhD work was as scientists at Berkeley, was on statistical methodologies for correcting, eval estimates, based on like intrinsic biases and how you collected the data.Swyx [00:49:54]: Yes.Alex Atallah [00:49:54]: AndSwyx [00:49:54]: Style control.Alex Atallah [00:49:55]: Style control and stuff like that. And which is very much like a, hey, how. If you're a scientist and you're trying to. the highest expectation customer for Arena was always like a training and, like a researcher at a lab. Whereas the highest expectation customer from my perspective that Alex like really understood and was the mission was to serve was like a developer, right? Who then takes the result of the research and then produces an application that's deployed to the world. It was a completely different problem and person that these two teams were focused on. And so from the outside in. I don't know if you remember this, but I have a distinct memory of a few weeks before we did the term sheet, together for OpenRouter, I'd given you a call because we were trying to get a pooled data set together from OpenRouter and from Arena to, create like an open source repository of prompts. these projects were so different in their goals that it was totally normal to me to be like, “Oh, yeah, let's call Alex and see if he'd want to team up on pooling data,” because they're so different. We need. We don't have that data at all. We. Like, we didn't have API prompts. We didn't, we didn't have like what developers want to do with the models, which is very different from what researchers inside a model lab want to do before releasing the model.Swyx [00:51:15]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:51:15]: Does that make sense? And so to this day, I think you see that this difference, even though at a 30,000-foot level you could. I guess you could conclude that Arena and OpenRouter are adjacent, but, the roadmaps, the missions and so on at the time at least were like in very different directions.Swyx [00:51:36]: That ideal customer, I get. I totally get that.Alex Atallah [00:51:39]: Yes.Swyx [00:51:39]: As a founder, I want to own everything, right?Alex Atallah [00:51:41]: That's possible.Swyx [00:51:42]: Like this is clearly an adjacency that I'm like gonna explore that.Anjney Midha [00:51:45]: Own everything meaning like you don't know what to do yet, so you wanna like make sure you catch PMFocus, Anthropic, and Roads Not TakenAlex Atallah [00:51:51]: No, I think what heAnjney Midha [00:51:52]: As quickly as possible.Alex Atallah [00:51:53]: You want to own the entire infrastructure space, and so you expand to whatever demand you can capture.Swyx [00:51:58]: You want to have a play in each end.Alex Atallah [00:51:59]: Yeah, I think that's, that's hard, in reality, because serving multiple customers is difficult.Swyx [00:52:05]: Clearly, this is the one focus, right?Alex Atallah [00:52:08]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:52:08]: Yeah. I still think even in the age of AI, like focus is,Alex Atallah [00:52:12]: Is criticalAnjney Midha [00:52:13]: Underrated and critical, not just because you end up with a better product by focusing your humans on it, but also because the world knows what your focus is.Alex Atallah [00:52:22]: One thousand percent.Anjney Midha [00:52:23]: The world can map like, “Oh, I have this issue. Which brand out there is going to help me with that issue? This is the brand that's known for that focus.”Alex Atallah [00:52:31]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:52:32]: So like if I want real attention on this issue, like this really matters to me, I should go with the brand that cares the most about it.Alex Atallah [00:52:39]: To underscore Alex's point about how important focus is, in the early days of Anthropic, it was not easy to. Like people think that the early days of Anthropic were like super easy because they were on their 3 guys who left, but it was very

Marc Cox and Kim St. Onge open the segment acknowledging the St. Louis Backstoppers Guns and Hoses Queen of Hearts raffle drawing.Noah Kenney, founder and principal consultant at Digital 520, joins the show to analyze Congressional hearings and public statements by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman regarding artificial intelligence guardrails. Kenney evaluates global technology development competitions, cybersecurity considerations, influence operations on digital platforms, and human oversight standards in high-risk sectors such as healthcare and financial services. The discussion examines energy grid infrastructure and water usage considerations associated with data center expansion across the United States. Kenney reviews local municipal planning, community impact frameworks, and resource allocation requirements for technology infrastructure projects.For official voter registration guidelines, sample ballots, and election information, consult the Missouri Secretary of State Elections Division.LISTEN TO 97.1 FM TALK LIVE IN ST LOUIS OR STREAM WORLDWIDE AT 971TALK.COMHashtags:#971FMTalk #StLouis #STLNews #NoahKenney #AIGovernance #Digital520

By Doug Green “You're really selling expertise, judgment and an understanding of the customer's goals.” In this Technology Reseller News podcast, Devon Rutherford, Sales Solution Manager at Leaseweb, discusses why MSPs should rethink infrastructure sales around customer workloads rather than around a preferred vendor or platform. Leaseweb is an infrastructure-as-a-service provider offering colocation, private and public cloud, dedicated servers, security services and other infrastructure solutions. Rutherford says the MSP market has changed because customers can now buy cloud and infrastructure services directly from a wide range of providers. That means the real value of the MSP increasingly lies in expertise. “The customer can go buy the infrastructure,” Rutherford says. “What they need from the MSP is help understanding where the workload should actually live.” That may mean avoiding the temptation to place every workload onto the platform that offers the best margin or partner incentive. Different workloads have different requirements. An AI inference workload may need to be close to the end user. A stable application may run more economically on bare metal. Other workloads may need public cloud elasticity, object storage, CDN services or specialized compliance controls. That naturally leads toward hybrid infrastructure. Rutherford says the MSP's role is increasingly to understand the business objective, regulatory requirements, performance needs and economics of each workload and then assemble the appropriate infrastructure. That consultative approach can also create recurring revenue. Instead of treating infrastructure placement as a one-time project, MSPs can establish regular reviews with customers to determine whether workloads are still in the right environment as requirements change. “Infrastructure is highly commoditized,” Rutherford says. “Consultative expertise isn't.” For MSPs planning for the year ahead, his recommendation is to follow the workload rather than the vendor. That can strengthen customer trust while positioning the MSP as the ongoing adviser responsible for making the different pieces of a hybrid environment work together. Leaseweb supports that approach with infrastructure options across bare metal, cloud, storage and colocation, along with engineers who can work directly with partners and customers on architecture decisions. Visit Leaseweb.com to learn more.  

**Get Ready for a Wild Ride on This Episode!** This episode is a real treat, folks! We've got a mix of everything from politics to pop culture, and even some fascinating conversations about grid reliability and roadkill. Ross and Jeana are joined by a variety of guests. Buckle up and get ready to dive into some thought-provoking discussions and entertaining stories. But it's not all serious business - Ross also shares some fun stories and anecdotes, including a hilarious exchange about roadkill and a fascinating conversation with a renowned artist about his work and inspirations. So, if you're ready to be entertained, educated, and maybe even a little bit surprised, tune in to this episode and find out what's in store. With a wide range of topics and engaging conversations, this episode is sure to be a hit.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Payments doesn't usually fail because of one big mistake. It fails quietly through a thousand small frictions: too many processing relationships, too many portals, mismatched branding, clunky onboarding, and residual reporting that turns into a monthly spreadsheet marathon. Greg Myers sits down with Ben Griefer, President and COO of Maverick, to talk about what breaks first when an ISO, agent organization, or ISV tries to scale and why “just add another provider” is the fastest way to lose focus.We get into how Maverick approaches the market as a reseller focused, privately owned payments infrastructure provider, including what it takes to deliver a unified, white label experience across sponsor banks, risk ownership, gateway capabilities, and ACH processing. Ben shares why partner empathy matters when you've lived the sales side, and how a single operating system for merchant onboarding, reporting, chargeback management, residuals, and support tickets can reduce operational noise so partners can actually grow.Then we zoom out to the bigger trends shaping the future of payments: embedded payments in vertical SaaS, ISVs looking to monetize payments as SaaS pricing tightens, and why ISOs and ISVs may be more complementary than people assume. We also dig into AI in payments with a clear stance: use AI to boost productivity and protect SLAs, but keep human expertise where relationships, support, and judgment calls make the difference. If you care about payment APIs, white label payments, embedded finance, and what modern partners expect, this conversation delivers the playbook.

AI infrastructure used to be the part developers were supposed to forget about. What happens when the infrastructure itself starts determining what AI can doCorey Noles sits down with Chen Goldberg, Executive Vice President, Product & Engineering at CoreWeave, to unpack the systems underneath the next wave of AI. Using CoreWeave's newly announced multi-rack NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 deployment as a jumping-off point, Chen explains why modern AI infrastructure is no longer just a question of how many GPUs you can get. Compute, networking, storage, cooling, observability, security, and orchestration all have to behave like one enormous machine.The conversation moves from long-running AI agents and latency to Kubernetes, security guardrails, physical AI, energy constraints, and the changing role of software engineers. Chen also explains why CoreWeave sees AI as a transformational rather than incremental shift — and why making this infrastructure accessible matters if the benefits are going to reach more than a small group of companies and researchers.For more practical AI news, tools, and analysis, subscribe to The Neuron at https://theneuron.ai.Sponsored by Outshift:“Scaling Out Superintelligence”  Vijoy Pandey, January 2026. The technical whitepaper detailing the Internet of Cognition architecture, three-layer stack, and cognition state protocols. https://outshift.cisco.com/internet-of-cognition/whitepaper?utm_campaign=fy27q1_outshift_ww_paid_ioc-neuron-wp_podcast&utm_channel=podcast&utm_source=podcastInternet of Cognition Interactive Demo Clickable walkthrough showing per-agent activity, intent, context, and collective reasoning across a multi-agent SRE system.https://outshift.cisco.com/internet-of-cognition/explore?utm_campaign=fy27q1_outshift_ww_paid_ioc-neuron-explore_podcast&utm_channel=podcast&utm_source=podcast