Podcasts about Merge

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Best podcasts about Merge

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Latest podcast episodes about Merge

Secretly Society
Secretly Weekly - Episode 6

Secretly Society

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2026 44:58


Episode 6 of Secretly Weekly - a bi-weekly podcast show highlighting the most recent tracks released in the Secretly ecosystem. Everything from Secretly Group, All Flowers Group, Merge and Numero Group. A radio show delivered to your podcast feed, once every two weeks; hosted by WFHB's Music Director, Abby Noroozi.   Track listing 1. Black Marble - Jim Carol New Year 2. Nirosta Steel - English Party 3. The Cave Singers - Distant Sures 4. Will Charette - Dear Prudence 5. Max Subar - Anything Could Be 6. Here We Go Magic - Make Up Your Mind 7. Yoko Ono - Walking on Thin Ice 8. KL Hamilton - I'm Trying 9. Aaron Frazer - If I Got It (Your Love Brought It) 10. MRCY - Lorelei   Credit music by Richard Swift.

The Peel
The Hidden Layer Every AI Agent Runs On | Tony Holdstock-Brown, Inngest

The Peel

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2026 88:55


Tony Holdstock-Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Inngest, the durable execution platform that quietly powers your favorite AI agents.We get into why agents work in a demo and die in production, building their own cloud to get 20x lower cost, growing 35x after AWS and Cloudflare copied them, growing a dev tools company without a personal brand or Twitter account, why he thinks evals today are like “asking the criminal if they committed the crime”, and the thing they built to score 100% of your production agents without paying for LLM as a judge.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, Merge, and Monaco for supporting this episode.Numeral: Sales tax on autopilot https://www.numeral.comFlex: Premium banking, 60-day credit, 0% APR https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every model, one API https://www.merge.dev/turnerMonaco: The revenue engine for startups https://www.monaco.com/Timestamps:(0:00) The hidden infra layer every AI agent runs on(1:46) Building complex chains of logic(3:31) Why agent SDK's don't go far enough(4:49) Healthcare was the original event-driven nightmare(6:32) Storing traces on your infrastructure enables self-improving loops(14:26) Why Inngest was already in the right place for AI(15:49) Score agents off product events, not LLM's(17:31) The OpenAI copy-paste signal(21:24) Swap in LLMs and cut costs 20x(23:44) How customers pulled the product forward(25:41) Orchestration belongs outside the sandbox(29:48) Building a neocloud to cut costs 20x(32:09) Most neoclouds just resell AWS(32:54) All AI infrastructure is converging(34:49) Why Claude can't just build your backend(36:44) How to build a software factory(39:12) Agents are a lottery you get addicted to(42:44) Loops must exist until AGI hits(45:38) If models keep getting better, why orchestrate?(48:28) When incumbents steal your features(52:30) Why you can't vibe code infrastructure(55:54) Why Tony has no personal brand(59:38) Dev tools GTM without Twitter(1:03:20) Lessons from the founder of DuckDuckGo(1:10:39) Truth as a company value(1:13:08) Taking too long adapting to AI(1:15:10) Startups are 100% R&D(1:17:19) Ali from Databricks(1:19:03) Writing his own code, Voice-to-text with local models(1:23:53) Evals are batshit insaneReferencedInngest: https://www.inngest.com/Principles by Ray Dalio: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501124021?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackTraction - How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591848369?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackFollow TonyTwitter: https://x.com/itstonyhbLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonyhb/Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Disruptive CEO Nation
Ep 339 The Future of Tailored AI Models with Zhen Lu, Co-Founder and CEO of Runpod; San Francisco, CA, USA

Disruptive CEO Nation

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2026 29:08


Small teams with smart AI can solve problems no one imagined before. In this episode, I spoke with Zhen Lu, CEO of Runpod, about the rapidly evolving AI landscape and the future of software development. Zhen Lu shared how Runpod is empowering engineers to train AI models tailored to specific business needs, improve efficiency, and reduce waste. We also discussed his founder journey, the power of co-founder alignment, global innovation outside traditional tech hubs, and the importance of human accountability in AI-driven organizations. Here are the highlights: ● Runpod builds AI developer infrastructure. The platform supports tailored AI workloads, enabling businesses to efficiently train models specific to their needs. ● AI is changing how software is built. Engineers are challenged to rethink software design, not just accelerate existing processes, creating new opportunities for innovation. ● Efficiency and sustainability matter. Fine-tuning smaller, focused models reduces resource waste, energy consumption, and operational costs compared to massive off-the-shelf models. ● Co-founder alignment drives success. Implicit trust, complementary skills, and low ego between Zhen and his co-founder have accelerated decision-making and execution. ●     Global networks and bootstrapping foster innovation. Scarcity encourages creativity, and building strong relationships outside Silicon Valley has enabled Runpod to grow and support AI developers worldwide.   About the guest: Zhen Lu and co-founder Pardeep Singh started by running crypto mining rigs out of their New Jersey basements. When Ethereum's "The Merge" threatened to make that obsolete, they pivoted,  converting the rigs into AI servers. As corporate developers at Comcast building ML projects, they saw firsthand that the GPU developer experience was, in Zhen's words, "just hot garbage." That insight became Runpod.   Launched in early 2022, Runpod offers fast, developer-friendly GPU infrastructure: clean APIs, CLI tools, serverless options, and easy configuration. Rather than the traditional VC route, they debuted on Reddit with "Hey Reddit, give us your worst" — and got "please take my money" in return. They went on to earn validation from Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond and a seed round led by Dell Technologies Capital, hitting $120M ARR, 10 billion serverless requests, and serves ~900,000 developers across 31 global regions.   Connect with Zhen Lu: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeen/ Website: https://www.runpod.io/ Connect with Allison: Feedspot has named Disruptive CEO Nation as one of the Top 25 CEO Podcasts on the web. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonsummerschicago/ Website: https://www.disruptiveceonation.com/    #CEO #leadership #startup #founder #business #businesspodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

two & a half gamers

Gossip Harbor is now the fourth-highest-grossing game on the planet — behind only Royal Match, Honor of Kings, and Whiteout Survival. The merge category the crew has been covering for years is bigger and more stable than ever, and Century Games just showed exactly how you stack another winner on top of your portfolio.We break down Hotel Legacy by Century Games (of Tasty Travels fame), using it as a lens on the whole merge category. They recap the state of merge (Gossip Harbor at ~$95M/month and still climbing, Tasty Travels, Travel Town, Flambe, Seaside Escape), walk Hotel Legacy's board and its standard-but-polished feature set (three LiveOps systems, bubble offers, generators, the min-max storing loop), and dig into the genuinely puzzling part: the winning My Perfect Hotel / Last Asylum creative concept that's driving installs isn't actually in the game yet. The lesson: you stack merge games by shipping essentially the same game with a new theme, then testing creatives at scale until you find what to build next.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━⏱️ TIMESTAMPS00:00 The state of merge — Gossip Harbor is #4 globally05:00 The revenue picture — $95M/month and climbing06:46 Hotel Legacy enters at #15 — 50K/day, all tier-one09:00 The "six merge games" player behavior theory10:06 Walking the board — LiveOps, bubble offers, min-maxing17:00 The mystery — the winning creative isn't in the game17:42 The creatives — My Perfect Hotel, Last Asylum, 500 in 30 days27:16 How to stack a merge game on your portfolioThis episode is brought to you by Kinoa — the AI operating system for mobile game operations: flows, live segments, in-app messages, push notifications, and A/B testing in one place, run by the operators who own the numbers. Carry1st saw +43% ARPDAU; PlayStudios saw +31% revenue on Tetris Block Party. Learn more at Kinoa.http://www.kinoa.ai?utm_source=MatejPodcast&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=Matej+Podcast&utm_id=100--------------------------------------PVX Partners offers non-dilutive funding for game developers.Go to: https://pvxpartners.com/They can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once you have the metrics to back it.- Scale fast- Keep your shares- Drawdown only as needed- Have PvX take downside risk alongside you+ Work with a team entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors---------------------------------------For an ever-growing number of game developers, this means that now is the perfect time to invest in monetizing direct-to-consumer at scale.Our sponsor FastSpring:Has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 yearsThey power top mobile publishers around the worldLaunch a new webstore, replace an existing D2C vendor, or add a redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg.---------------------------------------This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA---------------------------------------Matej LancaricUser Acquisition & Creatives Consultant⁠https://lancaric.meFelix BrabergAd monetization consultant⁠https://www.felixbraberg.comJakub RemiarGame design consultant⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar---------------------------------------Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Merge Community Church Podcast
Merge Summer Camp 2026 Final Session - Audio

Merge Community Church Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2026 24:55


Messages from Merge Community Church in Azle, Tx.

The Peel
Rebuilding a $600M Company From Scratch | Peter Rahal, David

The Peel

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2026 88:06


Peter Rahal is the Founder and CEO of David. Before David, he built RXBAR in his parents' basement with $10k and sold it to Kellogg for $600M.We get into why he basically rebuilt the same company again, how buying his own ingredient supplier made a food business venture-backable, why RXBAR's paleo positioning was a trap, the EPG fat technology behind David, how GLP-1's have changed diet trends forever, selling cans of fish as a marketing weapon, the lawsuit that got him 120M impressions in a week, and why he studies fashion houses instead of food companies.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode.Numeral: Sales tax on autopilot https://www.numeral.comFlex: Premium banking, 60-day credit, 0% APR https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every model, one API https://www.merge.dev/turnerTimestamps:(0:00) David: Tools to increase muscle, decrease fat(2:24) Making nutrition evidence-based, not ideological(4:27) $300M revenue in year two(5:19) Why he rebuilt the same company again(7:12) Do what you're already good at(9:57) In food, the only edge is brand(12:13) The RXBAR playbook and $600M exit(14:20) RXBAR's original positioning was too fragile(15:25) Designing David from first principles(18:22) Why people don't eat protein bars(19:33) Building a multi-brand company that lasts(25:44) How EPG made David venture-backable(29:44) The Medici name and structure(31:38) Food entrepreneurs are Luddites(33:37) Why Big Food can't innovate(38:21) Beverage is a better business than food(40:34) Deciding which products to launch(43:21) GLP-1's ended diet trends forever(48:09) Looking good is the new status symbol(51:30) Sleep first, exercise second, nutrition third(54:35) Brand is just a unique human being(59:05) Humor travels(1:01:09) Marketing is finding mispriced attention(1:06:35) When to bail on a marketing trend(1:09:05) What makes a good meme(1:10:00) Why David sold cans of fish(1:13:30) How to navigate a lawsuit(1:17:02) 120M impressions from a lawsuit(1:18:52) Lessons from Bezos and Brad Jacobs(1:23:30) Why the best brands are fashion and beauty(1:25:00) Women set cultureReferencedDavid: https://davidprotein.com/EPG / Epogee: https://epogee.com/Whoop: https://www.whoop.com/Oura: https://ouraring.com/Fort: https://fort.cx/David Rumors TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@davidprotein/video/7616855415875210510Founders Podcast: https://www.founderspodcast.com/How to Make a Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs: https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Few-Billion-Dollars/dp/B0CHTQP25TFollow PeterTwitter: https://x.com/PeterRahalLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-rahal-037bba43Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

La chronique de Benaouda Abdeddaïm
Annalisa Cappellini : Israël, un rival émerge face à Benyamin Netanyahou - 10/07

La chronique de Benaouda Abdeddaïm

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2026 3:37


Ce vendredi 10 juillet, le nouveau visage de l'opposition en Israël incarné par Gadi Eisenkot et la menace sérieuse qu'il pose à la réélection de Benyamin Netanyahou ont été abordés par Annalisa Cappellini dans sa chronique, dans l'émission Good Morning Business, présentée par Laure Closier, sur BFM Business. Retrouvez l'émission du lundi au vendredi et réécoutez la en podcast.

Race Chaser with Alaska & Willam
AS11 E10 “Tell Me Something Good”

Race Chaser with Alaska & Willam

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 8, 2026 70:54


Ya'll wanted a Merge eh? Willam is joined by guest co-host Laganja Estranja this week as the Semi Finals of the Tournament of All Stars kicks off. Ru challenges the queens to give good story on the main stage before showing off their Red Carpet Couture for the judges. Willam and Laganja discuss the value of a soundboard, why some topics don't translate, and Michelle's bald head. Oh and also…How Did You Get Here? Nobody's Supposed to Be Here!Listen to Race Chaser Ad-Free on MOM PlusFollow us on IG at @racechaserpod and click the link in bio for a list of organizations you can donate to in support of Black Lives MatterFOLLOW ALASKAhttps://twitter.com/Alaska5000https://www.instagram.com/theonlyalaska5000https://www.facebook.com/AlaskaThunderhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9vnKqhNky1BcWqXbDs0NAQFOLLOW WILLAMhttps://twitter.com/willamhttps://www.instagram.com/willamhttps://www.facebook.com/willamhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrO9hj5VqGJufBlVJy-8D1gRACE CHASER IS A FOREVER DOG AND MOGULS OF MEDIA (MOM) PODCASTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast
Ep 813: AI Cost Control 101: Why Your Chatbot Bill Is Becoming a Board-Level Problem (Start Here Series Vol 31)

Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2026 33:57 Transcription Available


Fain & Simplu Podcast
PARIUL DE 50 MILIOANE € AL LUI SELLY: ”VA MERGE SAU NU, TOT VA FI ISTORIE!” I Fain & Simplu 312

Fain & Simplu Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2026 123:14


Este Nibiru al doilea Beach Please? Selly vorbește la Mihai Morar despre cel mai mare pariu al litoralului nostru. Unul dintre primii creatori de conținut online din România – Andrei Șelaru – Selly, cum îl cunoaște lumea, marchează azi 10 ani de la apariția sa online. De la canalul de YouTube al puștiului care intra la liceu, la omul care a construit o nouă stațiune pe litoralul românesc! Selly vorbește astăzi despre Nibiru, dar și despre prima sa experiență în Costinești: Beach Please. O ideea care a plecat de la ‚3 seri de concerte pe plajă' și a ajuns cel mai mare festival de hiphop din Europa! Mihai Morar îl aduce pe omul care a fost acuzat că promovează drogurile și masculinitatea toxică la un festival unde nu vrei să ajungă copiii tăi. Care e realitatea și ce răspunde Selly?Află la Fain si Simplu, cu Mihai Morar.

The Tucker Carlson Show
BREAKING: Congress Moves to Commit Treason and Allow Israel to Forever Enslave America's Military

The Tucker Carlson Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2026 74:32


This month, unless Donald Trump stops it, our treasonous Congress is likely to merge the US military with Israel's genocidal armed forces. Dennis Kucinich on the end of American sovereignty. (00:00) The Attempt to Merge the US Military With the IDF (06:08) The Subversion of Congress (26:00) Who Is Pushing This Bill? (44:33) How Can America Remain Independent? (50:00) Will Democrats Vote Against This Bill? Dennis Kucinich was Mayor of Cleveland, an eight-term U.S. Congressman, Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008, and currently authors The Kucinich Report on Substack: https://kucinichreport.substack.com/ Paid partnerships: American Financing: NMLS 182334, http://nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Brooklyn Bedding: Get 30% off sitewide with promo code TUCKER at https://brooklynbedding.com Black Rifle Coffee: Use promo code "Tucker" for 30% off at https://blackriflecoffee.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Analytic Dreamz: Notorious Mass Effect
"GOSSIP HARBOR - MOBILE SALES & REVIEW ROUND-UP"

Analytic Dreamz: Notorious Mass Effect

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2026 19:18


Linktree: ⁠https://linktr.ee/Analytic⁠Join The Normandy For Ad-Free NME, Additional Bonus Audio And Visual Content For All Things Nme+! Join Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://ow.ly/msoH50WCu0K⁠In this segment of Notorious Mass Effect, analytic dreamz delivers a concise breakdown of Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story, one of the highest-grossing merge games of all time from Microfun Limited.Launched in July 2022, Gossip Harbor blends addictive Merge-2 mechanics, soap-opera storytelling, and restaurant restoration on Brimwave Island. Follow single mother Quinn Castillo as she rebuilds her father's restaurant amid romance, betrayal, family drama, mystery, and crime-style twists featuring characters like Colton Everett, Olivia Castillo, and more. New chapters drop weekly alongside heavy live-service events, energy systems, customizable decor, and constant limited-time challenges.By 2026, the game surpassed Merge Mansion and Travel Town with over 50 million downloads and staggering revenue—peaking at $62 million monthly and generating hundreds of millions overall, led by the US and strong Asian markets. analytic dreamz explores Microfun's aggressive live-ops strategy, female-focused audience (79% women), hybrid monetization, and major criticisms including predatory energy walls, misleading ads, and technical issues.Discover how Gossip Harbor redefined mobile merge success through narrative hooks and relentless events in this in-depth analysis. Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Secretly Society
Secretly Weekly - Episode 5

Secretly Society

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 3, 2026 35:50


Episode 5 of Secretly Weekly - a bi-weekly podcast show highlighting the most recent tracks released in the Secretly ecosystem. Everything from Secretly Group, All Flowers Group, Merge and Numero Group. A radio show delivered to your podcast feed, once every two weeks; hosted by WFHB's Music Director, Abby Noroozi. Track listing Phoebe Bridgers - Lost Boys Lusine - Pendulum Bullion - Francis Ford  Early Day Miners - Placer Found Superchunk - I Don't Want You Anyway Dinosaur Jr. - Several Got Away  Scowl - Not Hell Not Heaven David Vandervelde - Nothin' No Jens Lekman - Still In Love With You Credit music provided by Richard Swift.

The Peel
Inside Goldman's $22B Bet on Venture Capital | Hans Swildens, Industry Ventures

The Peel

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 3, 2026 105:13


Hans Swildens started Industry Ventures in 2000, and this is his first podcast since selling it to Goldman Sachs in 2026.Hans has been buying venture secondaries longer than almost anyone, and the combined business is one of the largest VC portfolios in the world: 525 firms, 1,600 funds, and over $22B in capital commitments.We get into why he sold to Goldman, the barbell market quietly killing middle-stage venture, how VC's are manufacturing their own exits, why most seed funds without a real angle have 5 years left, the LP base that's a completely different species every fund cycle, how he started Industry by acquiring funds at 99% discounts during the Dot Com Collapse, the day he passed on a multi-billion-dollar data center, and why the secondary market may eventually be multiples the size of the primary market.Thank you to Zach Coelius, Will Quist, Emily Zheng, and Andrea McGee for help brainstorming topics for the conversation.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode.Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.comFlex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APR https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every model. One API. Total control. Check out Merge's Agent Handler. merge.dev/turnerTimestamps:(0:00) Inside Goldman's $22B venture bet(7:57) 1,600 funds over 525 firms(11:11) Why scale lets you “see the cube”(14:17) Most humbling lesson in 26 years(16:19) Three types of Seed funds(18:47) LP's evolve every fund cycle(22:00) VC is a sales game(24:38) A strong CRM is non-negotiable(29:06) Buying secondaries during the Dot Com Collapse(31:33) Triangulating opinions across GP's, founders, and LP's(37:22) Seed without differentiation doesn't work(42:16) Biggest mistakes by first-time GP's(44:31) Buying Enron's VC portfolio at a 99% discount(50:15) Entrepreneurial finance is underappreciated(52:15) Why asset managers are acquiring venture firms(58:47) Why it's hard to start venture programs(1:03:20) Secondaries: $250M to $150B market in 25 years(1:08:06) Continuation funds & debt structured secondaries(1:12:02) “Secondaries might be multiples bigger than primaries”(1:19:52) How to structure secondary transactions(1:26:00) What happens after SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic IPO's(1:30:35) How Seed survives the asset manager era(1:35:16) How to manufacture liquidity(1:41:41) How AI is impacting secondary marketsReferencedIndustry Ventures: https://www.industryventures.com/How Big Is The Secondary Market for Venture Capital?: https://www.industryventures.com/insight/2023-2025e-how-big-is-the-secondary-market-for-venture-capital/Exploring the Growth of Venture Secondaries: https://www.chronograph.pe/exploring-the-growth-of-venture-secondaries/Pitchbook's US Secondaries Market Watch: https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/2025-annual-us-vc-secondary-market-watchFollow HansTwitter: https://x.com/HansSwildensLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansswildensFollow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Rob Has a Podcast | Survivor / Big Brother / Amazing Race - RHAP

Aubry Bracco Postseason Interview Survivor 50's epic journey comes full circle as Rob Cesternino sits down with newly crowned winner Aubry Bracco for a post-finale deep dive into the game’s most pivotal moments and personal growth. In this special post-game interview, Rob and Aubry rewind the clock on a season defined by second chances, high-stakes narrative battles, and her own transformation from the edge of defeat to Sole Survivor. Aubry shares the emotional impact of returning for Survivor 50 after her heartbreak in previous seasons, revealing how therapy and personal work shaped her new approach to both the game and life. She breaks down the stress of being a betting favorite, grappling with narrative warfare from savvy players like Genevieve, and the strategic value of keeping her relationships “in the pocket.” The conversation spotlights her careful idol play—the moment she compared it to a “Scarlet Letter”—and the crucial post-merge tribal where she changed her trajectory by finally burning that idol in front of the tribe. Aubry discusses the infamous “power broker” day, her thoughtful social reads on players like Joe, Coach, and Cirie, and how silent observation became her superpower in the chaotic new era of Survivor. Highlights from Rob and Aubry's conversation include: – Aubry's candid reflections on losing Koh Rong and how that loss prepared her for a winning game – Navigating tribal politics after a rocky start and the moment she learned her bag was searched – Surviving narrative warfare led by Genevieve and leveraging intuition at key turning points – The strategic idol play that changed her threat level and allowed her to fade into the background – Behind-the-scenes insights on alliance-building, pregame rumors, and managing Survivor's emotional toll As Aubry reflects on planting seeds with the jury, making intentional Final Tribal choices, and learning to let go of old anxieties, Rob and Aubry ask: Did Survivor 50 reward holding back and letting others burn bright? How did mastering restraint and emotional perspective break a decade-long curse? Don't miss this winner's interview for an inside look at Survivor 50's most complex game—and how Aubry finally got her victory. Chapters: 0:00 Aubry Bracco crowned Survivor 50 winner 1:45 Overcoming anxiety after Survivor 38 5:52 Therapy transforms Aubry's Survivor mindset 10:55 Navigating slow start and tribe distrust 14:34 Bag search blindsides Aubry early 18:49 Idol paranoia and tribal divides 20:25 Surviving narrative warfare in Survivor 50 23:18 Mastering others' stories to advance 27:35 Blood Moon twist shifts Aubry's position 29:39 Merge chaos and the Scarlet Idol 30:04 Playing the idol resets Aubry's game 32:56 Rick Devens' fake idol and chaos 39:01 Power Broker day changes everything 41:31 Flipping Ozzy and building trust 51:11 Final Tribal Council sparring strategy 55:25 Reading the jury and winning votes 57:48 Grateful for the Survivor 50 experience To order Rob’s book, The Tribe and I Have Spoken, visit www.robhasabook.com Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Survivor: 46 - Recaps from Rob has a Podcast | RHAP
Aubry Bracco Postseason Interview

Survivor: 46 - Recaps from Rob has a Podcast | RHAP

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2026 60:52


Aubry Bracco Postseason Interview Survivor 50's epic journey comes full circle as Rob Cesternino sits down with newly crowned winner Aubry Bracco for a post-finale deep dive into the game’s most pivotal moments and personal growth. In this special post-game interview, Rob and Aubry rewind the clock on a season defined by second chances, high-stakes narrative battles, and her own transformation from the edge of defeat to Sole Survivor. Aubry shares the emotional impact of returning for Survivor 50 after her heartbreak in previous seasons, revealing how therapy and personal work shaped her new approach to both the game and life. She breaks down the stress of being a betting favorite, grappling with narrative warfare from savvy players like Genevieve, and the strategic value of keeping her relationships “in the pocket.” The conversation spotlights her careful idol play—the moment she compared it to a “Scarlet Letter”—and the crucial post-merge tribal where she changed her trajectory by finally burning that idol in front of the tribe. Aubry discusses the infamous “power broker” day, her thoughtful social reads on players like Joe, Coach, and Cirie, and how silent observation became her superpower in the chaotic new era of Survivor. Highlights from Rob and Aubry's conversation include: – Aubry's candid reflections on losing Koh Rong and how that loss prepared her for a winning game – Navigating tribal politics after a rocky start and the moment she learned her bag was searched – Surviving narrative warfare led by Genevieve and leveraging intuition at key turning points – The strategic idol play that changed her threat level and allowed her to fade into the background – Behind-the-scenes insights on alliance-building, pregame rumors, and managing Survivor's emotional toll As Aubry reflects on planting seeds with the jury, making intentional Final Tribal choices, and learning to let go of old anxieties, Rob and Aubry ask: Did Survivor 50 reward holding back and letting others burn bright? How did mastering restraint and emotional perspective break a decade-long curse? Don't miss this winner's interview for an inside look at Survivor 50's most complex game—and how Aubry finally got her victory. Chapters: 0:00 Aubry Bracco crowned Survivor 50 winner 1:45 Overcoming anxiety after Survivor 38 5:52 Therapy transforms Aubry's Survivor mindset 10:55 Navigating slow start and tribe distrust 14:34 Bag search blindsides Aubry early 18:49 Idol paranoia and tribal divides 20:25 Surviving narrative warfare in Survivor 50 23:18 Mastering others' stories to advance 27:35 Blood Moon twist shifts Aubry's position 29:39 Merge chaos and the Scarlet Idol 30:04 Playing the idol resets Aubry's game 32:56 Rick Devens' fake idol and chaos 39:01 Power Broker day changes everything 41:31 Flipping Ozzy and building trust 51:11 Final Tribal Council sparring strategy 55:25 Reading the jury and winning votes 57:48 Grateful for the Survivor 50 experience To order Rob’s book, The Tribe and I Have Spoken, visit www.robhasabook.com Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Big Technology Podcast
OpenAI President Greg Brockman: Our Plan To Merge Chat And Agents

Big Technology Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 1, 2026 48:58


Greg Brockman is the president and co-founder of OpenAI. Brockman joins Big Technology Podcast live from the Big Technology AI Summit to discuss OpenAI's trajectory, the state of the frontier, and why he believes compute will ultimately decide the AI race. Tune in to hear Brockman make the case that there will never be enough compute to satisfy demand, why he thinks the interface itself will eventually melt away into a persistent agent that acts on your behalf, and how he expects pricing to evolve as today's premium intelligence becomes tomorrow's commodity. We also cover the competitive dynamic with Microsoft and the "models are a commodity" argument, the path to a personal AGI, voice as an interface, and why Brockman is most excited about AI's potential in health. Hit play for a wide-ranging conversation about where OpenAI and the frontier go next. Watch the full documentary here: Watch the full documentary here: https://www.gravitee.io/ai-agent-documentary Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reči o živote, vesmíre a vôbec
O kreativite, umení, hierarchiách, AI a tvorbe Krotiteľov Entropie s NoGoodKid

Reči o živote, vesmíre a vôbec

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2026 151:20 Transcription Available


Ako sa prepnúť do cypherpunk režimu? Poznáme prípady ITčkarov, ale v tomto rozhovore s NoGoodKid sa dozviete, ako sa to dá aj v úplne inej oblasti. NoGoodKid je Nostr-natívny tvorca, umelec, producent a dizajnér. Spolupracovali sme na viacerých projektoch, vrátane knihy Krotitelia Entropie. Ale dozviete sa aj o tom aké to bolo odísť z hierarchií, akú rolu v tom zohrávala identita, Nostr, prečo štruktúra, v ktorej tvoríme ovplyvňuje výsledok. Odkazy: Portfólio NoGoodKid a jeho Nostr Krotitelia Entropie – kniha a multimediálny projekt, na ktorom sme spolupracovali Nostr posty Krotiteľov Entropie Soundtrack Nocoiner Syndróm – paper reagujúci na haluze centrálnych bankárov a moralizovanie o Bitcoine Cypherpunkový časopis Dark Forest #0 – There were never any real rules. Možnosť objednať papierový výtlačok u mňa na eshope. Kniha Wasted Blood od Josha Datka (a jeho projekt Bitpunk.fm) The Merge od The Ohm – dokumentárne sci-fi Roadstr – decentralizovaný road reporting (Waze-like) Proti ľudskému braku a Ako byť primárny – blogy o kreativite a AI Album Sleepfields od Abuse (momentálne The Autumnist) Humanizer prompt Podcast Ako uloviť memetického ducha… (o použití AI pri kreatíve) X účet LinkedIn Lunatics

The Sydney Hollis Show
In the End, All Apps Merge into One - Ep 294

The Sydney Hollis Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 26, 2026 55:27


PLUS: New Names. Pajamas? A Rock & Roller Breathes.

The Peel
The Past, Present, and Future of Pre-Seed | Charles Hudson, Precursor

The Peel

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2026 102:07


Charles Hudson started Precursor Ventures in 2015, and helped create pre-seed as a category.Ten years and hundreds of Day 0 checks later, few investors have backed as many first-time founders, making him the perfect person to talk through the state of the category today.We talk about why this is the hardest moment for pre-seed/seed investing he can remember, why sitting out of bubbles can be more dangerous than joining, how he hands his junior team real money to make their own bets, and urgency and “the last $250k effect”.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode.Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.comFlex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every modal. One API. Total control. Check out Merge's Agent Handler. merge.dev/turnerTimestamps:(0:00) Is Pre-Seed dead?(4:15) Do round names matter anymore?(12:27) Multi-stage signaling risk doesn't exist(16:42) Smart LP's love multi-stage funds(22:03) Is the traditional Seed model broken?(26:31) Velocity of capital deployment drives all incentives(30:30) How to compete with megafunds at early stage(34:24) Megafunds have Seed funds in a vice-grip(38:34) “The best Series A's are all expensive"(39:33) Are we doing 2021 all over again?(41:53) It's safer to participate in bubbles than sit out(47:35) Price you pay is everything(50:22) The system incentivizes an addiction to consensus(55:22) High valuation + high CapEx grows AUM(59:56) How Precursor actually invests today(1:01:32) Precursor's Principal investor program(1:05:56) Deciding when to selling your winners(1:10:53) Raising as a pre-consensus founder(1:12:39) What Charles looks for in founders(1:17:20) What it's actually like to start a fund(1:20:56) Misconceptions of first-time fund managers(1:26:22) 300+ LP meetings to raise Precursor Fund 1(1:29:24) The single tweak to his pitch that raised the fund(1:31:54) Precursor's evolution over time(1:34:57) The second desert of venture capital(1:37:34) The last $250k effectReferencedPrecursor: https://precursorvc.com/a16z's State of Markets report https://x.com/TurnerNovak/status/2015830796393742599?s=20Follow CharlesTwitter: https://x.com/chudsonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chudsonCharles Substack: https://chudson.substack.com/Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Survivor: Turning Back Time
One World EP7: The Beauty in the Merge

Survivor: Turning Back Time

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2026 97:26


Jared and Steven swear it isn't poop.Link to Yodeling in Meadow Hill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdXeB_8OT6g&list=RDNdXeB_8OT6g&start_radio=1

KBTHABANDHEAD PODCAST
Why is everyone talking about Georgia Mass Band "The Merge" Performance - Podcast

KBTHABANDHEAD PODCAST

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2026 38:51


KBThaBandhead, is back at it again with a new episode recapping the 2026 Georgia Mass Band "Merge" Performance. This year marks 10 years of GAMB's existence in the Summer Band space, and the future is brighter than ever. In this podcast, he gives his honest reaction and opinion on song selections, execution, and overall performance Make sure you SUBSCRIBE for more Podcasts!   Website: https://www.bskillzentertainment.com/ Watch my REACTIONS on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/kbthabandhead Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kbthabandhead/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kbthabandhead?lang=en Merch: https://kbthabandhead.myspreadshop.com/

Suddenly Steven
I Did It! File Merge Master

Suddenly Steven

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2026 66:21


Hah! I'm laughing at myself. I clicked the wrong button and messed up the recording. Instead of deleting everything I kept going. I did a quick search and found a free easy to use file merging service. I'm operating with a simple Chromebook. Anyway, enjoy the randomness. Also, I didn't   

Secretly Society
Secretly Weekly - Episode 4

Secretly Society

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2026 37:58


Episode 4 of Secretly Weekly - a bi-weekly podcast show highlighting the most recent tracks released in the Secretly ecosystem. Everything from Secretly Group, All Flowers Group, Merge and Numero Group. A radio show delivered to your podcast feed, once every two weeks; hosted by WFHB's Music Director, Abby Noroozi.     Track listing 1. Baby Rose - Let Me Go 2. Elujay - Wushua 3. Danielle Ponder - Power 4. Bon Iver - Heavenly Father 5. HTRK - Eat Yr Heart 6. Jordan Patterson - Cinderella 7. Fruit Bats - Perhaps We're a Storm 8. Way Dynamic - Miffed It 9. Wednesday - Reality TV Argument Bleeds 10. Mitski - Your Best American Girl   Credit music by Richard Swift.

The Peel
Inside Elbow Grease, NYC's Hands-On Accelerator | Dan Teran, Gutter Capital

The Peel

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2026 108:24


Dan Teran is the co-founder Gutter Capital, a concentrated seed fund in NYC, and Elbow Grease, the accelerator that puts 15 startups in one building and helps build their teams for them.Gutter just announced a $75M Fund III and opened applications for the second Elbow Grease batch (apply below by July 31st)We get into starting an accelerator when there's already a hundred of them, why Gutter prefers very concentrated portfolios, what it was actually like selling Managed by Q to WeWork, why raising a fund turned out to be harder than selling a company, why he thinks startups should form a board and use OKR's from day one, and the time he went big-wave surfing with Adam Neumann and Laird Hamilton.Thank you to James Gettinger, Satya Patel, Abhinav Kapur, and JT White for help brainstorming topics for the conversation.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode.Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.comFlex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every modal. One API. Total control. Check out Merge's Agent Handler. merge.dev/turnerTimestamps:(0:00) Elbow Grease: NYC's new accelerator(7:39) Building a small, hands-on, in-person experience(13:39) Recruiting 100 people into portfolio companies(16:25) Portfolio concentration makes investors more helpful(24:58) Why raising Fund 1 was so hard(28:08) Advice for new fund managers(30:30) “Hiring today is as competitive as ever”(32:23) Selling Managed By Q to WeWork(35:23) “Never raise too much money”(39:43) Almost buying his company back from WeWork in Feb 2020(43:50) Starting Gutter Capital in the depths of COVID(49:34) Funding angel investing with gambling proceeds(52:39) Behind the name “Gutter Capital”(54:49) “Raising a fund is like getting punched in the face”(59:03) Writing long LP letters(1:06:45) Investing in real world problems(1:09:48) What a Gutter founder looks like(1:12:46) How Gutter makes new investments(1:18:41) Importance of customer calls at pre-seed(1:21:59) Evolution of NYC tech over last 15 years(1:26:15) Why you should form a board at Seed(1:28:29) How to run a Seed stage board meeting(1:34:04) Sharing carry with portfolio founders(1:35:56) The best founders need lots of help(1:39:30) Big wave surfing with Adam Neumann and Laird HamiltonReferencedApply to Elbow Grease: https://forms.gutter.cc/eg0002-applicationElbow Grease: https://elbowgrease.cc/Gutter Capital: https://www.gutter.cc/WeWork Acquires Managed By Q: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/03/wework-acquires-managed-by-q/Follow DanLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danteran/Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Grumpy Dungeon Masters
Episode 283 – Can AI And Dungeon Master Merge To Make Better Roleplaying Games

Grumpy Dungeon Masters

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 16, 2026 63:26


A deep talk on AI being used by ADHD people for their home games, a new Ravenloft book for Dungeons & Dragons, and the guys meeting up at a swap meet to trade games.

Deconstructor of Fun
Puzzle Monthly #3: Merge vs Match-3, Gossip Harbor's Rise, and the Future of Merge

Deconstructor of Fun

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2026 46:09


Gossip Harbor is beating Candy Crush, Merge Mansion is going to Supercell, and the Merge genre is at an inflection point.In this episode of Puzzle Monthly, we break down the real state of Merge games in 2026, from the history of the genre to why Gossip Harbor succeeded where others failed, and what the next Merge hit might look like.Topics Covered:● The history of Merge — from Tripletown to Merge Dragons to Merge 2● Merge 2 vs Merge 3: how the economies actually differ● Why Gossip Harbor surpassed Candy Crush while Merge Mansion collapsed● The no-fail-state problem and how live ops try to solve it● Board clutter, storage frustration, and persistent board design● Sensor Tower data: Travel Town vs Gossip Harbor vs Merge Mansion● Hard order labeling and whether Match 3 lessons apply to Merge● What the next Merge game should look likeCHAPTERS:01:07 Merge Takes Center Stage02:07 Origins of Merge Games02:38 Merge Two vs Three03:48 Core Loop Explained06:03 Merge Mansion vs Gossip Harbor07:54 Live Ops Without Fail States09:40 Why Merge Feels Boring11:51 Progress and Board Order15:45 Dog Quest and Board Clutter17:45 Persistent Boards and Storage19:24 Monetization Paradox20:11 What's Next for Merge21:28 Soap Opera and Generator Ideas22:12 Persistence Makes UX Hard22:48 Persistent Boards Shift23:32 Making Merge Feel Dynamic24:28 Separate Boards Live Ops25:06 Lucky Catch Event Design26:02 Battle Pass Segmentation26:38 Why Gossip Harbor Won28:17 Merge Engine Under Hood36:24 Next Genre Innovations39:00 Cannibalization By Sequels40:53 Hard Labeling For Orders43:13 Generator Overcharge Ideas44:04 Future Focus Areas44:48 Wrap Up And Farewell

Made for Mondays
Episode 298 - Losing Myself: Ego is Expensive

Made for Mondays

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2026 69:30


Got a question? Let us know!INTRO | GUESTSHost: HeatherGuests: Jamey, Doug, RaChelleWEEKEND CHITCHATQuick catch-up: What did y'all get into this weekend?BIBLE READING CHALLENGEWhat stood out to you from this week's reading?Finished 2 Chronicles, started Ezra, and wrapped up John.SUNDAY DISHThis week in Losing Myself, Jamey took us to Numbers 20, where Moses lets frustration and ego shape a moment that was meant to reveal God's grace. The reminder was both sobering and hopeful: When I insert myself, I distort Jesus. As we lose ourselves, people can see Him more clearly.Q1: The Long RoadThe Israelites spent decades in the wilderness.What's something in your life that took much longer than expected but taught you something valuable along the way?Q2: Formation Over DestinationJamey, you said we often focus on destinations while God focuses on formation.Where have you seen God shaping you in a season that felt slower or harder than you wanted?Follow-up: How do you notice formation instead of only measuring progress?Q3: Representing JesusMoses had a unique role, but in some ways every Christian represents God to others.How do we take that responsibility seriously without acting like we speak for God?Follow-up: Have you ever had a moment where frustration affected how you represented Jesus to someone else?Q4: Conviction Without ContemptJohn Newton warned about the danger of self-righteousness.Why is contempt so tempting when we believe we're right, and what does it look like to hold conviction without losing compassion?Follow-up: How can we tell the difference between courage and ego in our tone?Q5: Distorting JesusThe big idea was:"When I insert myself, I distort Jesus."Where does that land personally—in family conflict, politics, social media, church conversations, or elsewhere?Follow-up: What's one sign that Jesus is becoming clearer and we're becoming less visible?Q6: Three PracticesJamey challenged us to:Pause before reactingLead with graceRemember how much grace we needWhich of those feels like your next faithful step this week?Follow-up: What would change if we started with confession before criticism?EVENTS THIS WEEKMERGEQuick conversation about tonight's Merge gathering.FAITH & FREEDOM MOVIE NIGHTA brief look at this week's documentary event exploring the story and significance of Juneteenth and the hope that fueled the pursuit of freedom.JOIN US SUNDAY!Be sure to share this episode and invite someone to join you this weekend!We'll be at 9:00 & 10:45 AM as we wrap up our Losing Myself series. We'd love to connect with you and your guests. If you can't make it in person, join us on YouTube at 1 PM.Until then, don't forget—we're here for good.Go BE LOVE!Stay Connected Website: https://believerschurch.org/ Bible Reading Plan: https://believerschurch.org/bible-reading-plan/Believers Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/believerschurch.va/ Believers Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/believers_church/Subscribe to The Outlet: https://believerschurch.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=66f00f86238de86688d2480e6&id=729c3f381f

The Peel
The AI-Native GTM Playbook | Sam Blond, Monaco

The Peel

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2026 116:48


Sam Blond is the Co-founder and CEO of Monaco, the revenue engine for startups.Sam is one of the best sales operators in tech. He spent four years as CRO at Brex, where he helped scale it to a ~$12B valuation, ran sales at Zenefits before that, and got his start at EchoSign.If there's a modern GTM playbook, Sam helped write it. Our conversation walks through how AI has rewritten a big chunk of it. But most importantly, we talk about what hasn't changed.We get into the sales work AI is now better at than humans, and why Sam thinks 90% of startups misdiagnose their bottleneck as conversion when it's really demand gen.He explains why he doesn't measure early brand marketing at all and trusts anecdotes over attribution, walks through the full Monaco launch playbook including the Super Bowl box-truck story, and shares a rev-ops insight from Brex, including how they figured out a specific ICP converted at 4x the rate of another.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode.Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.comFlex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every modal. One API. Total control. Check out Merge's Agent Handler. merge.dev/turnerTimestamps:(0:00) Scaling Brex to $12B(1:14) How AI speeds up prospecting and TAM building(5:19) Using AI to get more leverage(9:15) Incubating Monaco at Founders Fund(12:56) Innovator's dilemma in AI(15:57) Why AI companies build full platforms, not wedge products(23:30) Revenue is just a math equation(27:18) Two ways AI increases conversion rates(36:56) AI will never replace spending time with customers(39:46) Don't measure the impact of brand marketing(49:03) Your marketing must be different (and hard)(58:39) Customer discovery calls and working with design partners(1:03:03) The zero to 100 launch(1:11:00) Monaco's launch playbook(1:19:00) Send gifts that are unique and social(1:22:17) Naming your company(1:28:04) Founders should send early outbound(1:32:38) How multi-channel augments AI outbound(1:39:42) Using intent signals and outreach timing to increase conversions(1:43:28) Two common ways founders mess up when scaling revenue(1:50:22) Monaco's Forward Deployed AE'sReferencedTry Monaco: https://www.monaco.com/Careers at Monaco: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/monacoSam's launch post: https://x.com/samdblond/status/2026420015793320129?s=20Follow SamTwitter: https://x.com/samdblondLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-blond-791026b/Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

Dial P for Procurement
Too big to merge? Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern Try Again

Dial P for Procurement

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2026 17:21


Can a mega merger of peers increase competition in their market? Case in point: the proposed rail merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. Both are Class I railroads, among the largest by revenue in North America as defined by the Surface Transportation Board. According to a 2001 Surface Transportation Board rule, their merger must enhance competition - but that's not usually how mergers are designed to work, especially among giants. And this is the first rail merger that has to meet that requirement. After some back-and-forth, the Surface Transportation Board "conditionally" accepted the merger application on May 28th, but they are still looking for more information. No review activities will be conducted until that information is provided. In other words: the Surface Transportation Board has accepted the Union Pacific - Norfolk Southern filing, but they have not accepted the information provided in that filing. We'll have to wait to find out if the application is approved based on its merits. In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner covers the proposed merger from multiple angles: - The expectations for increased rail competition and public benefit - How the railways propose to give their non-transcontinental competitors a fighting chance - Whether the Surface Transportation Board and a coalition of opponents think competition is likely Links: One Railroad to Rule Them All? Inside the Union Pacific–Norfolk Southern Merger: https://artofprocurement.com/blog/supply-one-railroad-to-rule-them-all-inside-the-union-pacific-norfolk-southern-merger  Kelly Barner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-barner-6884443/  Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/art-of-supply-6895142546301960193  Art of Supply on AOP: http://www.artofsupply.com  Subscribe to the Art of Procurement Newsletter: https://resources.artofprocurement.com/art-of-procurement-podcast-subscribe   

Cu inima la vedere
Despre sinceritate, frici și puterea de a merge mai departe | Ada Galeș, Cu

Cu inima la vedere

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2026 50:58


Implică-te în misiunea Hope and Homes for Children accesând ⁠⁠https://hopeandhomes.ro/implica-te/ ⁠⁠Ascultă-ne și dă azi SUBSCRIBE pe:

The MM+M Podcast
Why Merge is putting AI on the org chart, a podcast sponsored by Merge

The MM+M Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2026 33:14


In this conversation, Stephanie Trunzo, CEO, Merge, and Pat McGloin, managing director of health, Merge, talk with MM+M about the future of AI, healthcare marketing and delivering Whole Human experiences. The discussion explores how Merge is embedding AI into its foundation to create more contextual, emotionally intelligent and consumer-centered brand experiences. From the Humanity Suite and AIgency model to the evolving role of empathy, creativity and systems of intelligence, the discussion highlights how Merge is helping health and wellness brands navigate an AI-driven paradigm shift while staying deeply human. Check us out at: mmm-online.com   Follow us:  YouTube: @MMM-online TikTok: @MMMnews Instagram: @MMMnewsonline Twitter/X: @MMMnews LinkedIn: MM+M   To read more of the most timely, balanced and original reporting in medical marketing, subscribe here. Music: “Deep Reflection” by DP and Triple Scoop Music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Secretly Society
Secretly Weekly - Episode 3

Secretly Society

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2026 39:20


Episode 3 of Secretly Weekly - a new bi-weekly podcast show highlighting the most recent tracks released in the Secretly ecosystem. Everything from Secretly Group, All Flowers Group, Merge and Numero Group. A radio show delivered to your podcast feed, once every two weeks; hosted by WFHB's Music Director, Abby Noroozi.   Track listing 1. Eaves Wilder - The Great Plains 2. Bizhiki - Gigawaabamin (Come Through) 3. Chanel Beads - Dust in the Wind 4. Gigi Masin - Golden 5. Sharon Van Etten - Our Love 6. Japanese Breakfast - Orlando in Love 7. Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life 8. Whitney - Golden Days (Alt Video) 9. Greg Mendez - So Mean 10. Bill Fay - Just a Moon Secretly Society Podcast on Secretly Store Secretly Society General Information Secretly Society Podcast Episodes

The Peel
Inside the First Quant-Driven VC Fund | Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Chamaeleon

The Peel

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2026 121:20


Nuno Goncalves Pedro is the Founder and Managing Partner at Chamaeleon. He won't describe it this way, but I'd call Chamaeleon something like "The RenTech of VC."Chamaeleon is built around its proprietary data platform, Mantis, which borrows tools like factor analysis from public-market investors and operates more like a quant hedge fund than a traditional venture firm.We talk through a bunch of data that cuts against the common narrative in venture, including why repeat founders aren't always the safer bet, why sub-$100m funds catch the majority of fund-returning deals, and why 10x might be a better target than 100x.Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode.Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.comFlex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every modal. One API. Total control. Check out Merge's Agent Handler. merge.dev/turnerTimestamps:(1:00) When 1st time founders outperform serial entrepreneurs(8:05) Mantis: factor-driven quant model for VC(18:33) Why most VC's are not data-driven(22:28) Top 1% VC fund performance(27:41) Early customer sentiment stronger success indicator than PMF or Team(34:09) Importance of co-investors on performance(39:42) Sub-$100M funds capture 70% of fund-returning deals each year(43:53) The Neolab AI bubble(52:16) Marketing games that VC's play(55:22) Most investors are not high conviction(56:43) Startups not raising for at least 3 years are 5x less likely to succeed. 10x less likely at 5 years.(1:00:19) Emerging managers have lowest LP interest in the last 15 years(1:11:19) LP capital is much less concentrated than in 2011(1:16:28) The importance of remaining relevant(1:21:01) You must lean into your unique edge as an investor(1:23:18) Pros/Cons of an alumni network venture strategy(1:28:29) Specialist funds outperform generalists (with a catch)(1:35:22) The data says go for 10x, not 100x returns(1:41:41) Should you start or join a VC firm today?(1:48:07) Nuno's collection of 270+ phones(1:53:16) Racing cars (and winning championships)ReferencedChamaeleon: https://www.chamaeleon.vc/Tech Deciphered Podcast https://decipheredshow.com/Say It With Charts: https://www.amazon.com/Say-Charts-Executives-Visual-Communication/dp/007136997XHow To Lie With Charts: https://www.amazon.com/How-Charts-Gerald-Everett-Jones/dp/1419651439Redmagic Phone: https://redmagic.gg/ASUS Rog phone: https://rog.asus.com/phones/rog-phone-model/Follow NunoLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ngpedro/Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

The Information's 411
Microsoft's Homegrown AI Models, Trump's AI Executive Order, OpenAI to Merge Codex & ChatGPT

The Information's 411

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2026 46:30


TITV Host Akash Pasricha talks with Aaron Holmes about Microsoft's new Scout agent, Dev Box hardware, and seven custom AI models designed to undercut OpenAI. KeyBanc's John Vinh joins to discuss Marvell's soaring valuation, Intel's low-power Crescent Island AI GPU, and Microsoft's 2029 quantum chip timeline. Next, Leo Schwartz unpacks President Trump's new AI executive order and its 30-day model-sharing compromise. Finally, Stephanie Palazzolo previews OpenAI's upcoming Codex and ChatGPT merger, and Jyoti Mann covers Meta's employee tracking scaleback following a 1,500-signature staff petition.Articles discussed on this episode: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-openais-decision-combine-codex-chatgpthttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-rolls-back-parts-employee-tracking-tool-staff-backlashhttps://www.theinformation.com/briefings/microsoft-unveils-new-homegrown-ai-openclaw-inspired-agents-businessesSubscribe: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theinformation The Information: https://www.theinformation.com/subscribe_hSign up for the AI Agenda newsletter: https://www.theinformation.com/features/ai-agendaTITV airs weekdays on YouTube, X and LinkedIn at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Or check us out wherever you get your podcasts.Follow us:X: https://x.com/theinformationIG: https://www.instagram.com/theinformation/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@titv.theinformationLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theinformation/Chapters:00:00 - Introduction01:13 - Microsoft Build: 7 New Models & Dev Box Hardware10:48 - Nvidia's Trillion-Dollar Call & Intel's Crescent Island24:46 - Trump Signs Compromise AI Executive Order31:04 - OpenAI Merges Codex & ChatGPT Into Super App40:41 - Meta Staff Backlash Limits Employee Tracking

World Alternative Media
BREAKING: U.S. MILITARY TO MERGE WITH ISRAEL? - New Deal Means Global Government!

World Alternative Media

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2026 43:04


GET HEIRLOOM SEEDS & NON GMO SURVIVAL FOOD HERE: https://heavensharvest.com/wam USE Code WAM to save 25% plus free shipping! USE Code WAM50 for 50% off on select items like the #10 cans & MRE packs! Pledge here! Just a dollar a month can help keep us alive! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2652072&ty=h&u=2652072 EXCLUSIVE replays of hour plus long live shows are available here at $5 a month or more! BUY GOLD HERE: https://firstnationalbullion.com/schedule-consult/ Avoid CBDCs! GET 10% OFF ON SHILAJIT FROM DR. KAUFMAN WHEN YOU USE CODE WAM10 HERE: https://medauthentica.com/discount/WAM10?redirect=/products/authentica-shilajit%3Fsca_ref=10867124.wrNV3jkYSaMg9 HELP SUPPORT US AS WE DOCUMENT HISTORY HERE: https://gogetfunding.com/help-keep-wam-alive/# Josh Sigurdson reports on the crazy new deal being pushed forward through the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) with Israel as part of section 224. This would effectively merge the US military and the IDF into one military unit which is a plan Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing forward for years. In a recent letter from Netanyahu to Congressman Stutzman, he details the plan to merge militaries as the next step in the global agenda. This news breaks as claims spread of President Trump getting in a vicious argument with Netanyahu. This of course is a public relations psyop perpetrated by Israel as the claim has been both confirmed by Trump and Netanyahu in interviews. The disingenuous response by Trump, seen in this video is a major red flag. Meanwhile, Netanyahu's response was that if the US and Israel don't bring down Iran, Iran will nuke the United States. This seemed like a veiled threat by Israel. While the push for militaries to merge carries on, Jared Kushner is also pushing the ceasefire caveat to force everyone into the Abraham Accord and make every country bow to Israel. With recent attacks between the US, Iran, Kuwait and Bahrain, Trump defined the so-called "ceasefire" as "shooting in a more moderate manner." Essentially, he's saying there would be no actual "ceasefire." As Israel First congressmen and senators call for kicking any non-Israel Firsters out of government like Congressman Thomas Massie, many people who were once major Trump supporters are asking themselves, "what is even the point of voting anymore? Israel controls the outcome." Stay tuned for more from WAM! GET YOUR WAV WATCH HERE: https://buy.wavwatch.com/WAM Use Code WAM to save $100 and purchase amazing healing frequency technology! Get Your SUPER-SUPPLIMENTS HERE: https://vni.life/wam Use Code WAM15 & Save 15%! Life changing formulas you can't find anywhere else! Get local, healthy, pasture raised meat delivered to your door here: https://wildpastures.com/promos/save-20-for-life/bonus15?oid=6&affid=321 USE THE LINK & get 20% off for life and $15 off your first box! DITCH YOUR DOCTOR! https://www.livelongerformula.com/wam Get a natural health practitioner and work with Christian Yordanov! Mention WAM and get a FREE masterclass! You will ALSO get a FREE metabolic function assessment! GET YOUR APRICOT SEEDS at the life-saving Richardson Nutritional Center HERE: https://rncstore.com/r?id=bg8qc1 Use code JOSH to save money! PayPal: ancientwonderstelevision@gmail.com FIND OUR CoinTree page here: https://cointr.ee/joshsigurdson PURCHASE MERECHANDISE HERE: https://world-alternative-media.creator-spring.com/ JOIN US on SubscribeStar here: https://www.subscribestar.com/world-alternative-media For subscriber only content! BITCOIN ADDRESS: 18d1WEnYYhBRgZVbeyLr6UfiJhrQygcgNU World Alternative Media 2026

Unapologetic Swingers
Unapologetic Swingers: Epsiode 43 - The Merge Lane: Exploring New Experiences

Unapologetic Swingers

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2026 52:23 Transcription Available


Ariel and the Tramp talk about our unique dynamics and the new experiences we've come across within the lifestyle so far.  Visit us at UnapologeticSwingers.comAlso visit our partners: Shivers.Store and use the discount US at checkout for 10% off your order and our newest sponsor, The Scarlet Ranch! Colorado's premier Lifestyle club

Ron Paul Liberty Report
NDAA Shocker Congress Seeks To Merge US_Israeli Militaries!

Ron Paul Liberty Report

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2026 33:22


NDAA Shocker Congress Seeks To Merge US_Israeli Militaries! by Ron Paul Liberty Report

Punk Lotto Pod: A Punk Rock Podcast
The Guestlist with Hedge

Punk Lotto Pod: A Punk Rock Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2026 63:53


Justin is back with his solo side project The Guestlist, where he has on guests....to make lists. Joining Justin this week is Christopher of the Massachusetts indie/punk band Hedge. Hedge released their excellent new EP, Freeze Frame High Five earlier this year, and is here to discuss his favorite obscure / lesser known albums. Hedge Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hedgebandma/ Hedge Bandcamp: https://hedgebandma.bandcamp.com/album/freeze-frame-high-five Song Clips: Hey Dude by Hedge Pillow by Loomis She Eats Her Esses by Vitreous Humor You're Not An Astronaut by Pond Mickey's Lament by Overwhelming Colorfast Never In by The 101

TD Ameritrade Network
Wednesday's Final Takeaways: Tesla-SpaceX Merge & Tesla in Europe

TD Ameritrade Network

Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2026 4:49


Marley Kayden talks about the potential Tesla-SpaceX merger Elon Musk has hinted at with Musk holding 85% of the voting power at SpaceX. Sam Vadas talks about Tesla in Europe continuing to see momentum with the record 6% YoY last month.======== 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

SBS Kurdish - SBS Kurdî
Neh pêşmerge di êrîşa Îranê de birîndar bûn

SBS Kurdish - SBS Kurdî

Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2026 9:38


Komara Îslamî ya Îranê bi 2 dironan û moşekekê baregeha Çemşar a Spaya Millî ya Kurdistanê, ku dikeve bakur rojavayê Hewlêrê û nêzîkî kampa Dareşekranê, kir armanc. Di encamê de 9 pêşmerge birîndar bûn ku rewşa 4an ji wan giran e û ji bo dermankirinê veguhastin nexweşxaneyê. Zêdetir di naveroka raporta Ehmed Xefûr ji Hewlêrê heye.

Secretly Society
Secretly Weekly - Episode 2

Secretly Society

Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2026 44:39


Episode 2 of Secretly Weekly - a new bi-weekly podcast show highlighting the most recent tracks released in the Secretly ecosystem. Everything from Secretly Group, All Flowers Group, Merge and Numero Group.   A radio show delivered to your podcast feed, once every two weeks; hosted by WFHB's Music Director, Abby Noroozi.   Track listing: 1. Jordan Patterson - Just My Friend 2. Dua Saleh - Firestorm 3. aja monet - working class musicians 4. Kevin Morby - 100,000 5. Drunk - Hand on Deck 6. Jensen McRae - Taboo 7. John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies - Lord of the Underground 8. Closure - servant to silence 9. They Hate Change - Run the Road 10. Studio - Life's A Beach! (Todd Terje Beach House Mix)   Secretly Society Podcast on Secretly Store Secretly Society General Information Secretly Society Podcast Episodes

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast — CodeGen, Agents, Computer Vision, Data Science, AI UX and all things Software 3.0

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal GCP AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. Jake Cooper, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero. Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts.For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor.Today, Railway has raised $124m and is growing very fast. A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week. Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with 70% margins funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.From rebuilding Railway's network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own bare metal data centers, Jake Cooper is trying to build a new cloud for an agent-native world. In this episode, Railway's founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just “Heroku but newer,” what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, and static cloud resources may be heading for a rewrite.We go deep on Railway's infrastructure stack: own-metal data centers, three-month cloud payback periods, cloud bursting, data center debt, Railpack, Nixpacks, Temporal, feature flags, Central Station, content-addressable filesystems, agent-safe production forks, and why the CLI may become more important than the canvas in an agent world. Jake also shares the founder journey behind Railway, how the company survived losing $500K/month, why it now serves millions of users with only 35 people, and why he believes the pull request is dying.We discuss:* How Railway went from a slow six-year grind to adding 100,000 users a week* How Railway thinks about agents as the next dominant software species* Why agents need version control, observability, compute, storage, and orchestration at 1000x scale* The economics of Railway's own-metal data centers and three-month payback* How Railway uses cloud bursting while scaling its own infrastructure* Why data center debt can be a better tool than venture debt for infra startups* Central Station, Railway's internal system for clustering customer feedback and incidents* Why responsible disclosure and over-communication matter for platforms* Why feature flags, progressive rollouts, and shadow traffic are essential for agents* Temporal's strengths, pain points, and why workflows matter for agents* Railpack, Nixpacks, Nix, and lazy-loaded content-addressable filesystems* Why “cattle, not pets” may change if you can clone the pets* Why Railway is building a new cloud from scratch instead of copying hyperscalers* The solo founder path, focus, writing, and how Jake thinks about company buildingRailway:* Website: https://railway.com/* X: https://x.com/RailwayJake Cooper:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejakecooper/* X: https://x.com/JustJakeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction: What Is Railway?00:02:07 Jake's Path to Railway00:06:13 Railway's Six-Year Growth Story00:08:52 Rebuilding the Business After the Free Tier00:11:17 Agents as the Next Software Platform00:13:29 Railway's Infrastructure Philosophy00:15:42 Bare Metal, Cloud Economics, and the Compute Crunch00:17:22 Cloud Bursting and Five-Cloud Networking00:20:20 Data Center Debt and Infra Financing00:23:31 Data Centers in Space00:25:24 What Agents Need From Infrastructure00:28:24 CLIs, Canvas, and Agent-Native UX00:35:15 Central Station, Incidents, and Responsible Disclosure00:40:30 Safe Rollouts, SRE Agents, and Production Forks00:45:00 AI SRE, Specs, Code, and Tests00:48:24 Self-Replicating Infrastructure and the New Serverless00:53:18 Heroku, Temporal, and Workflow Engines01:04:07 Railpack, Nixpacks, and Lazy-Loaded Filesystems01:06:01 Coding Agents, Token Spend, and Roadmap Acceleration01:10:56 The Pull Request Is Dying01:12:28 Feature Flags and the Agent-Era SDLC01:16:15 Cattle, Pets, and Cloning Machines01:19:29 Solo Founder Lessons01:24:12 Focus, GPUs, and Building a New Cloud01:28:20 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.Swyx [00:00:10]: Hey, hey, hey. Today we're in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway.Alessio [00:00:14]: Conductor of Railway.Swyx [00:00:15]: Conductor at Railway. Yeah.Alessio [00:00:16]: Choo-choo.Swyx [00:00:17]: Do you actually have that anywhere, like on your business card?Jake [00:00:20]: We call some of our volunteer moderators conductors. I don't have a business card. We're not that big yet. At some point I will. I got handed a nice business card from the Supermicro folks, and I was like, “Damn, this is pretty official.”Swyx [00:00:30]: Business cards are coming back.Jake [00:00:32]: They're cool. They're hip. The conductor thing is good. We're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. Some people think it's super cringe and say, “You don't need a name for people internally.” Some people want to call each other something. We still don't have a really good one.Jake [00:00:55]: We've got New Railcrews, Trainiacs. Nothing has stuck yet.Swyx [00:01:00]: I like Trainiac. Trainiac sounds good. Railwayians. For those who don't know, what is Railway? Let's give people a crisp definition up front.Jake [00:01:09]: Railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You go to the canvas, or you talk with Claude, and you say, “Deploy a Postgres instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code,” and you're off to the races.Swyx [00:01:22]: You've got a nice animation on the landing page.Jake [00:01:24]: Thank you. None of my work, by the way. They don't let me touch the design stuff anymore.Jake [00:01:25]: We want to make it trivially easy not just to deploy things, but to evolve applications over time. Most tooling right now stacks entropy on top of entropy: Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible scripts, and all these other things. If we can version all of your software and keep track of all the changes, then we can make it trivial to clone environments, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of production data, get copies of any services, make changes, validate them, and collapse them back in without reproducing everything across a staging environment.The Railway Origin Story: From Uber Systems to a New CloudSwyx [00:02:07]: I was looking at your background: Bloomberg, Uber. Nothing immediately stands out as, “This guy is going to found the next great platform as a service.” What prepared you for Railway?Jake [00:02:21]: It was curiosity to keep going deeper. I started out on front-end stuff, working on Wolfram Mathematica and porting it over. Then I briefly moved to Bloomberg, then toward Uber and distributed systems, taking the Jump Bikes systems and moving them to a distributed system built on top of Cadence, the pre-Temporal Temporal.Swyx [00:02:44]: Which, by the way, I'm happy to talk about, pros and cons.Jake [00:02:48]: Totally.Swyx [00:02:51]: But let's do the Railway story.Jake [00:02:52]: It has been a continual step of wanting an experience. Whether it's walking up to a bike, unlocking it, and having it work frictionlessly, or something else, the depth required to make that happen follows from the experience. A lot of the work I do, and a lot of the team does, is in service of that experience. We fundamentally don't care how deep we have to go. We will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to get the experience.Jake [00:03:17]: I don't have a physics PhD. I did an EECS degree. It has always been about figuring out the next step: how do we get there? That's what led to starting Railway for that experience and then moving all the way to bare metal data centers. I was adding patches to the kernel this week to get the experience there because I can see how much better it can be.Swyx [00:03:49]: Other patches to the Linux kernel this week?Jake [00:03:51]: Yeah. Not upstream. Our fork.Swyx [00:03:52]: That's a flex. Railpack? No, this is different. This is the OS on top of Railpack?Jake [00:03:57]: No, this is an actual kernel patch. It's always literally: what do we have to do to get that experience? Then figure it out. Anything is figureoutable.Swyx [00:04:10]: Would you send the patch upstream, or does it not fit other use cases?Jake [00:04:13]: Maybe. We have to work out the experience internally. It has to do with the storage layer we're building for some of the agentic stuff. Maybe it'll be useful upstream, but it's deeply useful for us internally.Open Source, Forks, and Non-Deterministic VersioningSwyx [00:04:29]: You mentioned open source before. How do you think about starting from open source, and then coding agents letting you do a lot more from forks of it?Jake [00:04:38]: GitHub's original sin is that it's almost a series of broken pointers. You have this thing, then you clone it, and now you've lost the whole upstream. How do we make it trivial for people to modify really small pieces of it?Jake [00:04:51]: We think of Git in a discrete sense: I've either made a change and merged upstream, or I haven't. What would it look like if it were percentage-based, a little more non-deterministic, or a stream of changes that users traverse as a percentage rolled out in general and then rolled all the way up?Jake [00:05:13]: We have the open-source kickback program and let you deploy templates because we want to make it trivial for people to version these shards over time. It solves a large problem around authentication, authorization, and security. NPM has a way to define, “Don't take any new packages.” The ideal end state is that you roll out progressively to users with the minimum impact zone and continue rolling up. JPMorgan should probably be the last one on the patch line, for all our sakes, because our money and livelihoods are there.Jake [00:05:53]: It's okay if Johnny Vibe Coder gets a broken patch because there's so much entropy in the system that the rubber has to meet the road at some point. You have to test at varying levels.The Long Grind: First Users, Free Tier, and Making the Business WorkSwyx [00:06:13]: I wanted to pull up this glorious chart, which is your usage or number of daily signups?Jake [00:06:22]: Daily signups, I think.Swyx [00:06:24]: You started six years ago. It was a slow grind, and now you're on a rocket ship. You say, “Don't doubt your fight and don't quit.” Maybe pick out certain points that were key inflections for the company.Jake [00:06:40]: At the start, it's about getting your first 100 users, hell or high water. We had a website and a support link. The support link was the Discord channel. I had notifications on with two monitors: the monitor I was working on and the other monitor with Discord. If anybody came in, I was immediately like, “Hey, how's it going?” It was rare, so getting those first 100 users to come back was the start.Jake [00:07:14]: Then you build a consultancy factory because users want all these things. You have to go back to the board and ask, “What is the actual product offering I want to build on top of this?”Jake [00:07:28]: VCs want charts that always go up and to the right, but in reality you don't necessarily want charts that look like that. For us, there have been periods of expansion where we add features to test use cases, and periods of compaction where we ask, “If the experience we have is good, how do we make it significantly better?” Maybe we strip out features that don't fit our ICP anymore.Jake [00:07:57]: The boom from 2022 to 2023 came from the free tier. Everybody under the sun was using it.Swyx [00:08:09]: A lot of Reddit bots and Discord bots.Jake [00:08:12]: And crypto miners. When you build an open product on the internet where anybody can sign up, the internet is a horrible place with so many things. You go through periods of asking, “How do I reach as many people as possible?” Then, “How do I fit the exact use case for the people who really matter and are really excited about this specific thing?”Jake [00:08:39]: Then there was a two-year period of making the actual business work. During the free-tier era, we were losing about half a million dollars a month.Swyx [00:08:59]: On a $20 million bank account.Jake [00:09:02]: On a $20 million bank account with maybe $50,000 a month in revenue. That's a horrible business. I don't know how anybody invested. But you have to go through it and say, “We have an experience people love, but the business has to work.”Jake [00:09:17]: There are two schools of thought. You can run the horrible business all the way up with bad margins, or you can go back and make it work. We've always wanted a super lean team. We're 35 people right now. It's very small.Swyx [00:09:36]: Supporting three million already?Jake [00:09:38]: Yeah. We're adding 100,000 users a week right now, so it's growing fast. We don't want to add headcount for the sake of headcount or throw bodies at problems. We want to build systems. It's hard to build systems during expansion because you're adding things to the system because people are asking for them or things are breaking.Jake [00:10:00]: We had to cut off the free users for a little while, rebuild the business, and make sure it worked. We want to reach as many people as possible because software is important. It's become difficult to create things in the physical world, so it's important to make it easy for people to build in the virtual world and have access to creation. But there are legs to that journey.Jake [00:10:30]: You can see divots in the charts. If you follow between 2025 and 2026, it's either summer or winter. People go on holiday with family.Swyx [00:10:50]: It affects that much?Jake [00:10:51]: Yeah. It's kind of B2C and kind of B2B. People are shipping constantly, then they stop. Our activation curve now shows more people activating on weekdays because we have more business users, so it smooths out over time.Agents as the New Interface to DeploymentSwyx [00:11:17]: Was there a point where you started prioritizing AI development or agent development?Jake [00:11:24]: We've prioritized agentic as a top-of-funnel thing. Over the last six months, we've deeply prioritized agentic as a mechanism to build and deploy things because we believe the curve is so steep and that is how people will build and deploy software.Jake [00:11:42]: It almost fundamentally doesn't matter whether this is dot-com or not because we're all on the internet anyway. If agents are going to deploy a bunch of things and we hit an inference wall at some point, we'll fix those problems. The dominant species over the next 10 years is that we've moved from assembly to C to C++ to JavaScript to words. You're going to need to close that loop.Swyx [00:12:13]: When you say this is dot-com, did you mean buying the domain, or the general case?Jake [00:12:17]: I mean the dot-com era, when companies had a huge run-up because people understood the internet was important. Then they hit bottlenecks, fundamental laws of physics, math didn't work, and everybody came back down to earth. But it didn't matter because the internet became so impactful. If you operate on a long enough time horizon, you should build these things anyway because you can see where it's going.Jake [00:12:45]: That's where I think a lot of agent stuff is. You get to a point where you're running thousands of agents in parallel. What is the inference cost? What is the compute cost? How do you make that efficient? How do you coordinate all this? We have issues coordinating humans; we don't even have good tooling for that. Now we have to figure out how to get agents to coordinate, safely version changes, and know when to raise their hand for someone to intervene. Otherwise it becomes an interrupt factory.Railway's Infrastructure Thesis: Network, Compute, Storage, and MetalSwyx [00:13:19]: Let's go right into the technical side. What are the core infrastructure or architectural beliefs of Railway that allow you to do what you do?Jake [00:13:29]: The primitives matter a lot for us. We need network, compute, storage, and orchestration around it. You need control over a lot of those things. We've talked a lot about how we don't really use Kubernetes because we want higher-order control to place workloads in very specific places.Jake [00:13:48]: The reason is that you have to be very efficient with agents: memory reuse and all these other things, or you're going to massively blow up your cost structure. Being able to rack and stack your own servers and build your own metal unlocks performance and cost. Experiences where you're running 1,000 agents in parallel are not massively cost prohibitive.Jake [00:14:13]: Token use and compute use are blowing up. Over time, those things have to get a lot more efficient. You can get a lot of margin to make those experiences solid by building your own metal. That's all in service of offering a differentiated experience to as many people as humanly possible.Swyx [00:14:51]: You have a data center in Singapore.Jake [00:14:53]: Yeah. We have two in every other region now. In Singapore, we're adding a second one in Q3.Swyx [00:14:58]: What's it like? I've never built a data center. Do you go to Equinix and say, “I want some slots?”Jake [00:15:05]: Yeah. Equinix. You basically go and say, “I want power and I want a cage.” They say, “Great, here's what it's going to be.” You rent the cage for a period of time, fill it with racks and servers, and hook up internet to it. That's all the pieces.Swyx [00:15:36]: Then you handle everything else.Jake [00:15:37]: You handle everything else.Swyx [00:15:39]: What's the math versus clouds doing it for you?Jake [00:15:43]: If we rented in the cloud, our payback period when we go to metal is about three months.Swyx [00:15:50]: Which is crazy.Jake [00:15:51]: It's nuts. That's four years of depreciated hardware. You're going to see a lot of this compute crunch because hyperscalers are buying up a lot of stuff. We're working directly with OEMs, resellers, and people building these machines: Supermicro, Dell, and others.Jake [00:16:11]: Upstream, there's a bunch of supply pressure. When we raised our last round, between deploying capital for servers and now, the amount of money we've raised is less than the amount of money we have in the bank plus the value of the servers because the servers have appreciated as RAM has gone up. It's nuts how valuable hardware has become.Jake [00:16:50]: If you look at hyperscalers, they deployed around $80 billion of capital expenditures this year, and next year will be more. That's a massive infrastructure build-out. You look at that and think it's crazy that they're spending way more than the Manhattan Project. But if every person is going to run dozens or hundreds of agents in parallel, you have no conceptual idea how much compute is required to make that experience happen, even if you're deeply efficient and sharing resources. And that doesn't even count inference.Swyx [00:17:22]: How do you plan the build-out? The growth chart is so vertical. Are you usually at 100% utilization as soon as racks are live? How far ahead are you planning?Jake [00:17:33]: We still maintain cloud presence for bursting. We work with AWS, GCP, and a few other clouds. We can rent, and then the moment we get space or power, we compact those workloads off the cloud. We started on the clouds, then built a system to migrate to our own metal. There's nothing that says you can't continually do that again, and that's exactly what we do. We never want to be compute constrained.Jake [00:18:09]: At the start of the year, we actually became compute constrained because one upstream provider wasn't able to give us quota at the rate we needed, and the hardware was slower. I spent a weekend rebuilding our entire network overlay so we could straddle five clouds: Oracle, AWS, ourselves, GCP, and one other one. We can do more than that now.Jake [00:18:38]: We got into a spot where we were trying to pack instances tight because we couldn't get enough compute. That led to a few reliability issues, which are now past us. I made a tweet pointing out that it's becoming harder and harder to acquire compute at the rate these models need to acquire compute. We got bit by it.Swyx [00:19:15]: How do you think about pricing knowing you might not have your own metal available at all times? Are you pricing assuming you need extra margin if you end up going into the cloud?Jake [00:19:26]: Because we've built out our metal data centers, our margins on metal are around 70%. We can deeply subsidize the cloud business if we want to scale at a reasonable rate. We have a few levers: metal, which makes the margins; cloud burst; debt to buy servers; and venture capital. It's an interesting operational problem: how much cash do we have, how much should we raise, how quickly can we deploy it, and can we scale revenue as quickly as we scale compute?Jake [00:20:05]: If we continue making it trivially easy for people to build and deploy, then the faster we close that loop and the more operationally excellent we are with capital, the faster the business can scale. It's almost a straight linear deployment rate.Financing Infrastructure: Hardware Debt, VC, and Operational LeverageSwyx [00:20:20]: I think infra startups raising debt is a tool people don't utilize enough or know enough about. What can you tell us about that? Is it secured against your CPUs?Jake [00:20:32]: It's secured against our hardware.Swyx [00:20:37]: What rates do you get? Who are the lenders?Jake [00:20:39]: We pay prime plus a spread, and we can refinance any of the debt as rates go down. The terms are pretty good. The unfortunate thing is that Twitter has no nuance, so people say, “Venture debt bad.” But as with all things, there are specific tools and areas where you can be deliberate instead of using one tool as a hammer. Venture capital is not the hammer for everything. You have to explore and figure out what works.Swyx [00:21:12]: VC is usually the most expensive financing you can get.Jake [00:21:15]: Yeah. I also think people think about VC incorrectly from a capital-raising perspective. Most people think, “How do I raise as much money as possible from whoever is probably the best I can get at that time?” That's close to right, but what we've tried to do is figure out what unfair advantage we can buy with that equity.Jake [00:21:34]: It's the most expensive equity you're going to give away at that point in time, assuming the company keeps getting better. How do you use it to work with someone stellar who complements you? In the seed stage, I had never started a company. Ray Tonsing had good advice, and I could text him all the time. He was really fast. Awesome.Jake [00:22:01]: Then with John and Erica at Unusual, they said, “You roughly know what you're doing building a product. We'll mostly leave you alone and be available for advice.” Amazing. Then we got to Series A and the business was an operational tire fire because we didn't know how to scale a business. Work with Erica, and Jordan is over at Redpoint, so bonus.Jake [00:22:28]: Now we've raised from TQ and FPV as we're moving into enterprises. Every step of the way, we've asked: who can we partner with at this specific time to unlock the next section of the journey? I don't know enterprise sales. As an engineer, I can eyeball what features we might need, and we have wonderful people internally who can help. But you want boardroom dynamics where everyone is aligned and asking, “How do we win this?” instead of bickering about strategy.Data Centers in Space and the Physics of ComputeSwyx [00:23:31]: You had a tweet about data centers in space. Why no data centers in space?Jake [00:23:37]: It's not “no data centers in space.” My hot take is that I think it is solvable. I've just never seen anybody solve it.Swyx [00:23:49]: You said, “How are you going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum?” You're making a physics claim.Jake [00:23:55]: I haven't seen anybody prove how you're going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means nobody has brought it up yet.Swyx [00:24:05]: Astrophage.Jake [00:24:06]: I don't know what that is.Swyx [00:24:07]: The Martian thing. Okay, you're very logical.Jake [00:24:09]: It could work. A lot of people are putting the cart before the horse. They say, “We're going to put data centers in space.” Okay, but how? “We have time to figure it out.” It's like in The Martian where they ask how they're going to intercept something and say, “We'll figure it out.”Swyx [00:24:36]: Making a bet on human invention is weird because you blind trust that it can be solved. But with physics, there are first-principles bounds you can put on it. Maybe not. Maybe you're asking to travel time or break a fundamental thermodynamic law.Jake [00:24:57]: I don't know how VCs do this either. How do you know what's not possible and a grift versus what's possible but sounds completely insane? “We're going to put data centers in space.” Coin flip as to which it is, and I guess you'll know in 10 years. That's one cycle.What Agents Need: Versioning, Observability, and 1,000x ScaleSwyx [00:25:23]: Moving back to agents. The branching, fast spin-up, and orchestration you do feels like pre-work that happened to be exactly what agents want. What do agents want differently than humans?Jake [00:25:37]: They want the ability to version things. It's not that different; it materializes slightly differently. Agents want a way to test changes incrementally. Engineers have feature flags. Is there a reason agents can't use feature flags? I don't think so.Jake [00:25:54]: They want version control. Can we use Git or not Git? That one is up in the air. I think something outside Git will emerge for how we version these things over time. They need observability. You need to query what happened, when it happened, which steps failed, traces, logs, metrics, and all the rest. They need network, compute, and storage. They need to write files, save files, iterate on files, and snapshot file systems.Jake [00:26:25]: A lot of what humans needed is in line with what agents need. Branching and forking are not different; we're just moving 1,000 times quicker. It can look like you need something massively different, but what you need is something massively better than what existed. You need orchestration massively better than Kubernetes. You need networking probably better than Envoy. It goes all the way down the stack.Jake [00:26:55]: If the workload profile doesn't change so much as it gets massively compressed because you need thousands of these things, what assumptions change? etcd is going to melt. You need to replace it with something. You can go all the way down the stack and say, “That part has to change, that part has to change, and that part has to change.”Jake [00:27:19]: The interesting thing about the super-exponential curve is that you have to build systems where you can rip out those parts at any time because a new bottleneck might emerge. You get good at parallel agents, and a different part of the system breaks. So it's similar to what humans needed, but at 1,000x scale.Jake [00:27:55]: How do you do code review in the age of agents?Swyx [00:28:00]: You throw more agents at it.Jake [00:28:01]: You don't. But then who reviews for CVEs and all these other things?Swyx [00:28:07]: More agents.Jake [00:28:08]: And that's how we hit the inference wall. You can continually throw agents at the problem, but I think there's a limit to the number of agents you can throw at a problem.CLI, Agent Handles, and Closing the LoopSwyx [00:28:24]: You already had a CLI before it was cool. How is the shape of what you're exposing changing, if at all?Jake [00:28:28]: CLIs have always been cool. The CLI changes because we think about how to give Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, or any model a handhold.Jake [00:28:50]: A CLI is a single command: deploy, get logs, and so on. Things that were prohibitively annoying to humans are not annoying to agents. They're nice. If I handed you a CLI with 40 arguments and 600 flags, you'd think, “I'm never going to use all of this.” But if you hand it to an agent, it says, “This is excellent. I have so many handles to work with.”Jake [00:29:24]: If you're going to expose things to agents that way, you want as many handles as possible where they can get information, query dynamic information, and close the loop quickly. Most problems right now are about how to close the loop as quickly as possible. Where does the agent get stuck, and how can you remove that?Jake [00:29:49]: Telemetry is important. If you can tell where the agent gets stuck from the CLI and say, “12% of people deviate from the happy path because of this, and now I add this argument and drive it down to 2%,” you massively increase the rate of loop closure.Jake [00:30:03]: That's how we think about not just the CLI, but every point in the dashboard. It's a user journey: I hear about Railway. I get something deployed. I get my first green build or aha moment. I see an endpoint, logs, whatever. Then I iterate. The iteration loop is indefinite. The user wants to deploy a new thing, a Postgres instance, change code, and keep iterating.Jake [00:30:36]: If you focus on the iteration loops and what's blocking them from closing quickly, one thing we say internally is: you never want to be waiting on compute anymore. You always want to be waiting on intelligence. If you're waiting on compute, there's a bottleneck that needs to be destroyed because eventually that bottleneck becomes so large that another workflow emerges to change it.Jake [00:31:04]: We've built a product where you push code, build it, and so on. But I fundamentally believe the push-pull loop is going away. We'll get to a point where you make a small change in production, that change is versioned across your infrastructure, you're working alongside copy-on-write versions of your database and infrastructure, and then you merge it in and it's instantaneously live. That's the holy grail of loops. The push-pull-rebuild thing is a point of friction that we're removing entirely.Canvas as Output: Dashboards, Context Anchors, and HyperstructuresSwyx [00:31:43]: It's incredibly fast. If anyone hasn't tried it, that fast feedback is great. My hot take is that Railway was famous for its canvas, which visualizes your infrastructure and lets you manipulate it visually. But that was for humans. For the next phase of growth, Railway CLI is more important than canvas.Jake [00:32:05]: The canvas is funny because it's a mechanism to show changes over time. You're right that previously we used it a lot as an input. Moving forward, its goal is more like an output. You would go to the canvas, make changes, see them, and watch your infrastructure evolve. Now agents have access to the CLI and can make those changes. So the canvas becomes an output: what information does the human need at this moment to make suitable decisions about control requests? Do I approve this or not?Jake [00:32:57]: It also has to be an anchor for your context, a port in the storm. Think of it like layers in a file system. You start with a project, then drill down into services, then into a function or code, because you want to represent the entire thing not just in your head, but in the canvas. Other people can share that representation, think on the same wavelength, and move quickly.Jake [00:33:33]: A lot of organizations get in trouble as they scale because all the context lives in someone's head. “How does this microservice work?” “I have no idea; go ask this person.” Then you have whole categories of products built around context discovery. A lot of that melts away if you have a solid hierarchy and can infinitely nest services, code, context, and everything else all the way down. That's what lets you build these structures over time.Jake [00:34:18]: It's also what lets us build what I've called hyperstructures: things that are way bigger. You look at the Golden Gate Bridge and ask, “How did we build that?” There's a meme that we lost the technology. To some extent, yes, because the coordination that built those things evolved and changed. We lost some of the art of building structure as we jammed everything into Slack.Swyx [00:34:52]: But you jam everything in Discord.Jake [00:34:53]: Same point. It doesn't matter. It's message passing and interrupts, message passing and interrupts.Swyx [00:35:00]: So you're arguing there should be something better and more structured than Slack?Jake [00:35:04]: Yeah. For sure. I think Slack is awful, and Discord is awful too.Central Station: Context Routing, Support, and Incident ClustersSwyx [00:35:09]: This is the equivalent of my mom test. What have you done that has your solution to this?Jake [00:35:15]: Internally, we've built a tool called Central Station that aggregates all the context from our users. Every piece of feedback, every customer support item, everything gets aggregated into clusters. If an incident is brewing, we can determine how many users are affected and break off a discussion based on that.Jake [00:35:40]: That is more helpful than long-running channels where you're trying to decide which channel to put something in. If you can dynamically aggregate information and dynamically route it to the right person based on context, it works better. We know internally that these four people are close to networking. If we see a networking thing, we can drill it down to those four people. If it's with this part, we can look at the commits. This is no longer a manual process internally.Jake [00:36:13]: If you go to station or help.railway.com, that's why we built it. We wanted to scale with a massive amount of leverage by aggregating feedback.Swyx [00:36:27]: This is built in-house?Jake [00:36:28]: Yep.Swyx [00:36:29]: I remember helping out on this one with Angelo in 2023. You scale a lot with a very small team.Jake [00:36:38]: Yeah. We're about 10 times bigger now.Swyx [00:36:40]: You have your full developer code here? Very cool.Jake [00:36:44]: If you go to railway.com/stats, we expose this as a pub-sub-able thing. It's all real-time metrics. There's a way to get it as JSON somewhere if you care.Jake [00:37:01]: We're big on trying to build everything in public and talk about what we're working on. We've had issues in the past, and we'll say, “Here's how we're fixing these things.” We've gotten compliments and flak for incident reports. We're always trying to make them better and talk with people.Incidents, Disclosure, and Progressive RolloutsSwyx [00:37:20]: You had a big one recently. I liked that it was scoped to 3,000. You presumably used Central Station. Talk through what happened and how you address it internally as a team.Jake [00:37:38]: Internally, this one really sucked. It had to do with an upstream provider that didn't do the behavior it said it documented, which is unfortunate given they wrote the RFC for how the behavior should work. We rolled those things out, and Central Station caught it initially when a couple users said caches weren't invalidating. We turned it off immediately.Jake [00:38:03]: When you roll out to a large user base of three million people, you get a lot of disparate behaviors. We tested in staging and had tests, but we hit an edge case. We've hardened those systems, and now we can make that better. But it was a tough one.Swyx [00:38:39]: I always wonder how private disclosure is supposed to work if people find an issue. Are they supposed to contact you first? When you run a platform, these things will happen. What channels should people pursue to quietly resolve it before it becomes a bigger incident?Jake [00:38:59]: There's responsible disclosure. We err on the side of over-disclosing and letting you know something is wrong versus having your provider gaslight you. We've erred on sharing those things more publicly, even if they impact a small subset of users. That's a decision we've made internally. We have four values. One is honor. The honorable thing is to notify people to the widest degree at which they may have been affected or there was an issue, and then confront it head-on: why did it happen, what can we do better?Swyx [00:39:45]: Not the whole user base. That's because of incremental rollouts and other things?Jake [00:39:50]: Yeah. Progressive rollouts.Swyx [00:39:54]: That should be the norm at all large platforms.Jake [00:39:58]: It should. A variety of companies do this. There's the quote that Meta runs 10,000 different versions of Meta. To our earlier point about agents, they need the same thing. They need shadow traffic and all these other things. We've built so much ceremony around production being sacred that we need to make it trivially easy to test different behaviors in a safe environment. Then you can make mistakes in a safe environment.Safe AI SRE: Customer Agents, Forked Environments, and Production ParityAlessio [00:40:30]: Do you see a world where these things get automatically caught, not necessarily by your agent, but by your customer's agent? The cache invalidation issue seems easy to check if you know to look for it.Jake [00:40:44]: It's hard because to determine it, we almost need to hook into your observability infrastructure. That's why we have the template loop on the platform: so you can roll things out progressively. You can roll out to Johnny Vibe Coder initially, or push a shard that someone consumes at their own leisure. Or you can roll it out over weeks: 0.1% of people, 1% of people, early adopters, then all the way up. That's the non-deterministic version control we talked about earlier.Jake [00:41:30]: I believe that's where most things should go, because most companies end up building staged rollout systems in-house. It's the same thing built again and again at every company. There's a massive opportunity to consolidate developer debt.Alessio [00:41:45]: You should have a free tier. Model providers give free tokens if you let them use the data. You could give free compute if someone is the number-one shard that goes out and lets you plug into their observability.Jake [00:41:55]: We do that. That's why we talked about the impact on 3,000 people. We start with lower-impact people. Larger companies on the platform are last to receive those rollouts so they have a version of the platform that's deeply stable.Alessio [00:42:16]: I have three services, so I'm sure I get the first rollout. You can nuke my thing at any time. There are all these SRE agent companies. Observability people also want agents that fix upstream problems. You have your own agent in the canvas now. How do you see that playing out?Jake [00:42:39]: It's the stacking entropy problem. If you don't have primitives to make iteration in production safe, it becomes difficult. If you're an observability provider saying, “Here's the fix to this error,” assume 80% are good and make sense. But in the last 20% long tail of complex issues, if you let somebody stamp it, you create an opportunity for an incident.Jake [00:43:08]: That's why forked environments are important. People have staging, but it always drifts from production. You need primitives, workflows, and experience built first-party on the platform so you can fork any service at any point in time.Jake [00:43:33]: I think of the canvas as a sheet of transparency paper. The agent is a little guy you push up into the canvas. It should say, “I need to copy that service and that service so I can test these two things.” It gets a read-only copy of production. Anything that's PII gets marked as a transform when we clone the database, create a copy-on-write version, or read from it. Then the agent makes changes and asks, “Does this actually work?” as close to production as possible.Jake [00:44:22]: That's how close you have to be, or you get massive drift. The system becomes unstable. You see this with massive systems built on Docker for local, Kubernetes for production, and a specific thing for something else. That complexity slows developers and becomes unstable at scale, making it hard to iterate. We want to compress that way down and say, “As close to prod as possible is where we want to be.”From AISRE Skeptic to Agent BelieverSwyx [00:45:00]: I was texting Erica for questions, and she says you were originally not a believer in AISRE. Have you come around on it?Jake [00:45:10]: I flipped, but I'm still not a believer in AISRE if you don't have the primitives to make it safe. If you unleash AISRE on production infrastructure without safe primitives for copying volumes and making sure things are fine, it's going to nuke your production database. It's not a matter of if, but when. I'm a big believer in making those loops safe.Jake [00:45:33]: I was a deep AI skeptic until 2023. In 2024, I thought, “Maybe I can roughly make this thing do it.” In 2025, I thought, “Now I can hold this.” Over winter break, everybody came back saying, “It's almost impossible to hold this.”Swyx [00:46:01]: Did you see this on the Claude docs? CloudBot? OpenCloud?Jake [00:46:06]: It's gotten to a point where it's harder to hold it wrong than to hold it right. There's a scene in Avengers where Vision picks up Thor's hammer and says it's terribly well-balanced. It self-balances and works well. I'm a deep believer at this point that this will be the dominant species: assembly, C, C++, JavaScript, words.Swyx [00:46:35]: It feels like a big jump.Jake [00:46:37]: It is. But it's not like you abandon CPU-based discrete logic and move straight to fuzzy logic. You need both. Your skills should call code or applications or some static structure. You can use skills to distill what the procedure should be or how the code should act.Jake [00:47:02]: I'm coming to a thesis: you need three points. You need a clear spec defining the system, the code, and the tests. When you say it out loud, if you've been in engineering long enough, you're like, “Of course. That's an RFC, tests, and code.” But they all matter. Having them together lets them reinforce each other: the spec and tests match, but the code doesn't, so reconcile it. Or the tests and code match but the spec doesn't, so reconcile that. That's the iteration loop.Jake [00:47:41]: That's why you're seeing people talk about software factories, docs, and reconciliation. Some of that is architectural astronomy if you don't implement it, but that loop is where most things will end up.Swyx [00:48:07]: For listeners, we've been talking about this on the pod for three years: the holy trinity of specs and tests. Itamar Friedman from Qodo is the reference if people want to look it up.Self-Modifying Infrastructure and the End of Push-Pull-RebuildSwyx [00:48:18]: One thing I want to mention on the OpenCloud idea is self-modification. I don't know how Railway would support it, but I have my OpenClaw, and I just tell it it has the Railway CLI and can do whatever. In theory, whatever capabilities or new infra it needs, it can call the Railway CLI, provision it, and add it to itself. The agent can modify its own infra.Jake [00:48:45]: It's nuts. I have a loop set up where you put the Railway CLI on top of something that runs on Railway. You're authenticated as whatever the current box is, and you can make any changes to it. Then you call Railway deploy, and it deploys itself.Jake [00:49:04]: It's like: “I need to spin up this instance of this environment. I already exist in this environment. Excellent, I have access to a Postgres instance now.” That's where we want to go with agentic, self-replicating infrastructure. That's your loop: iterate in production. You continue making changes. If it works, merge it upstream. If it doesn't, throw it away.Jake [00:49:37]: How do you make throwaway copies trivial to spin up and super cheap? The era of “I have an AWS instance with four vCPU and 16 gigs of RAM” is going to get destroyed. If you do that for agents, you need a thousand of those machines. It's prohibitively expensive compared with what we've spent a ton of time figuring out: the atomic unit of deploy, whether you call it isolates, sandboxes, or something else. Only pay for what you use, spin up instantaneously, and close the loop as quickly as possible.Jake [00:50:15]: If the system can self-replicate safely and say, “This is my environment, I'm making these changes,” it can come back with, “Does this look good? This is a new state of infrastructure given this prompt. I think I've solved it.” Then you go back and say, “Actually, it looks different.” It does the loop again. Then you say, “Cool. Apply.”Swyx [00:50:38]: That's retroactively obvious, which is the most useful kind. Any other comments on agent deployment on Railway?Jake [00:50:51]: It's getting better every day. I'm on X or Twitter. You can always yell at me about the parts not working as well as they should, because plenty of things should work way better.The New Serverless: Stateful, Long-Running, Pay-for-What-You-Use LinuxSwyx [00:51:04]: At this stage, when people want massively or embarrassingly parallel compute, they usually talk serverless. I feel like there's a new serverless compared to the previous five years of serverless. You're in that new bucket. Do you have comparisons or philosophical differences you want to call out?Jake [00:51:31]: It's somewhere in between. It's the ability to run stateful, long-running workflows or executions.Swyx [00:51:42]: Vercel has Fluid Compute, Cloudflare has some container thing, Google has App Runner and others.Jake [00:51:55]: That's where everything is roughly going, and it's why we've been working on this for six years. We believe users need access to a computer: a box that speaks Linux. They need to deploy what they want. Other systems change the surface area of what you can build. For us, users need a computer and need to deploy anything they truly want. That's why we've focused on the primitives: network, compute, storage. If we give you those and expose them so you can run things indefinitely, that's where we believe it's going.Jake [00:52:43]: Twitter has no nuance, so everyone says “servers” or “serverless.” It's always somewhere in the middle: I want to run it for a long time, but I don't want to provision the resource statically or pay for things I'm not using. That's been our thesis from day one: pay only for what you use, run it indefinitely, and it is full Linux.Swyx [00:53:12]: That's why I like the naming of Fluid. It's fluid. Flexible.Heroku, Focus, and Carrying the Torch Without Becoming the PastSwyx [00:53:18]: Another milestone is the Heroku official deprecation. You're one of the presumptive new Herokus. “New Heroku” has been a category for as long as I've been in developer tooling. It's finally happening. What was that like? Any behind-the-scenes of, “This is the moment”?Jake [00:53:42]: You have people where you're like, “You were running stuff on here? You, as this company?” It's crazy that names you would know are running on it and now coming to us saying, “We want to move a lot of this off.”Swyx [00:54:00]: Any behind-the-scenes on why Salesforce let Heroku stagnate?Jake [00:54:05]: I can only guess. It's hard when it's not your business. Salesforce's business is to build a great CRM. That's their focus. Then you acquire a compute business as an offshoot. A lot of early Meta people talk about focus. Boz has a write-up about how in the early days of Meta they had no money, so they were forced to focus. Then they turned on the money tree and had no reason not to split their focus.Jake [00:54:52]: But that dilutes your product. You get offshoots where you ask, “Is this the focus of the business?” If it's not core, it languishes. A lot of companies get in trouble when they split focus because they're fighting a multi-front war, not just externally but internally for alignment. Where are we going? What are we doing? What is our purpose?Jake [00:55:24]: If you're Salesforce-built and mission-driven, you want to work on Salesforce. Heroku is off to the side. It's not core to the business. Getting resources, budget, focus, and alignment internally becomes hard. It was a matter of time.Swyx [00:56:06]: Kudos for them to call it out instead of leaving it unknown.Jake [00:56:12]: Their release was a little odd. They called it out, but they didn't say they were shutting it down. Behind the scenes, I think they issued messages to people saying they should close accounts and that they were going to deprecate and remove things over time.Jake [00:56:30]: It's crazy because some of my first deployment experiences were on Heroku. You start with dragging things into an FTP server, then you try to get a deploy working, and then it's Heroku. It was the on-ramp for us. But the wheel turns. New things emerge. We're happy to carry the torch for a lot of that. But we don't want to be the new Heroku. We want to be the way people build and deploy software, and ultimately the way people monetize software over time.Swyx [00:57:19]: It's still a big crown to be the new Heroku. There are 50 companies that fought for that.Jake [00:57:23]: Everybody is holding some portion of it. We're happy to support people and companies. The platform works differently. The game loop is similar, but we've been dogmatic about where these things are going: primitives, agents, fan-out. Some things fit; some workflows need to change. We have an approximation of Heroku pipelines with the environment system. It's exciting. We've got a ton of people we can support, and it's growing a lot.Temporal, Workflow Engines, and State MachinesSwyx [00:58:12]: I have one more technical question about Temporal. I've sold my shares. You're a power user and one of our earliest customers. I met you through Temporal. You built on Temporal. You have complaints. This may be the most neutral and informed conversation anyone will hear about Temporal without someone working at the company.Jake [00:58:39]: That's fair. I've used Temporal for almost 10 years because of Cadence at Uber.Swyx [00:58:52]: Give people a sense of what Cadence was at Uber.Jake [00:58:57]: Cadence was the precursor to Temporal. It powers trip actions, rides, when you rent a Jump bike or scooter or car. You're running workflows for a period of time and saying, “This ride will run indefinitely until it finishes.” You attach information: you paused in this zone, so add this charge to the bill. When you end the trip, the workflow is done. That experience was powered by Cadence at the time.Swyx [00:59:34]: I used to say it's like programming the entire user journey top-down as one function.Jake [00:59:39]: It's a powerful idea and important. It's also important for the next phase of the agentic journey. You want an agent to do a specific task, be complete or incomplete on that task, and move on to the next thing. You need a way to manage workflows dynamically.Jake [00:59:59]: Temporal was always great in theory, and great when you got it working the way you wanted in production. But it required you to model the entire journey in your head. If you didn't, you could cause issues where replaying the state of the workflow causes non-determinism.Swyx [01:00:25]: Because it works on deterministic workflow history.Jake [01:00:28]: Exactly. I describe it as a jet engine. If you know how to operate it and run it, it's great. But you can't hand it to people trying to build complicated things if they don't have the whole state in their head.Jake [01:00:48]: We run our whole deployment pipeline on top of it. That's a reasonably complicated workflow: pre-commit hooks, signaling, queuing, and all the rest. We ran into the same thing at Uber. As you express a large workflow, it gets more complicated, with more states in the state machine that you have to map back to the workflow.Swyx [01:01:15]: It's a lot of ifs.Jake [01:01:16]: Exactly. At Uber, we built a system for doing the state machine and testing it. We've started to build some of those things here because it's grown heavily. It's not quite love-hate. When it works well, it works super well. But if someone who doesn't have full context puts something into the system that invalidates state or causes non-determinism, or spins off a ton of activities, you have to keep track of underlying SRE knobs like activity slots. Those should scale with memory, vCPU, and so on. It becomes a bear to scale.Swyx [01:02:10]: You need a capable sysadmin running things behind the scenes. If you moved off, what would you do?Jake [01:02:19]: We'd build our own workflow engine. We have a few internally that we've worked on.Swyx [01:02:27]: This is one of those classes of things you typically wouldn't vibe code, but I'm wondering if you can.Jake [01:02:33]: I still don't think you should vibe code it. You still want to run decent tests to make sure it works.Swyx [01:02:39]: Timo didn't invent that from scratch either. There are libraries you can run. On top of that, it's just a state machine that you have to map out. Ultimately, you define the instructions you want and run them through a state machine.Jake [01:03:00]: It's very doable. Workflow stuff is interesting. Restate is doing neat stuff here.Swyx [01:03:10]: You're tied into JavaScript. Are you a JavaScript maxi?Jake [01:03:13]: Internally, we have TypeScript, Rust, and Go. We don't add more languages. Actually, we have a little C because we write BPF code and hooks. But those are the languages.Swyx [01:03:28]: Is this for sidecars?Jake [01:03:32]: No. It's for the networking stack, volumes, and things like that. We use TypeScript a lot because it powers the dashboard, but we're moving a lot of workflow stuff off the dashboard stack and into the infrastructure stack.Railpack, Nixpacks, and Content-Addressable FilesystemsSwyx [01:04:00]: Cool. Any other technical infrastructure stuff? Railpacks?Jake [01:04:07]: We built an engine for determining dependencies based on source code. It's called Railpack. We built the first version, Nixpacks, on top of Nix, and then we moved.Swyx [01:04:17]: People have been trying to get me to adopt Nix and NixOS for four years. Is it ever going to be a thing?Jake [01:04:23]: I don't know. We're excited about it, but it has pain points. Think of it as a stack of versioned binaries at specific slices in time. If you want version X and version Y, you bloat the package space, which blows up image size and makes real-world workloads difficult.Swyx [01:04:53]: But you content-address it and cache it. In theory, there are optimizations.Jake [01:05:00]: In theory, yes. But with a large enough user base and disparate enough machines, you run into a problem Meta described in the XFAAS paper, their internal serverless system. It becomes difficult at scale unless you break out specific runtimes.Jake [01:05:24]: We didn't want to do that because we wanted to truly allow you to deploy anything. That was our initial thing with Nix. But we've moved toward interesting work around content-addressable file systems that can lazy-load anything from any point and page it into memory.Swyx [01:05:48]: Amazing.Jake [01:05:49]: The future is very bright. It's crazy, and it's going to be nuts.Coding Agent Spend, Roadmaps, and Token ROISwyx [01:05:54]: Founder journey stuff?Alessio [01:05:56]: Your cloud usage: you tweeted you're going to spend $300K this month?Jake [01:06:01]: I think we got to $200K.Alessio [01:06:02]: Coding agents?Jake [01:06:03]: Yeah.Swyx [01:06:04]: Across the company?Alessio [01:06:05]: You only have 35 people, so I'm sure they're not all spending $10K a month. What's the distribution?Jake [01:06:10]: I think I'm at about $25K. We have power users all the way down. We came back from winter break, and I basically said, “If you're writing code by hand, you're doing this wrong.” The tools are good enough now that you can move extremely quickly. There are issues and pain points, but you should be reviewing the code you are writing instead of writing it by hand.Jake [01:06:40]: Architectural patterns matter more now than ever, but you shouldn't spend your time generating code you would write. If you know how to write it, ask the agent to write it and reconcile it until it looks like you would have written it yourself.Jake [01:06:58]: People misconstrue my propensity to push people toward agents as connected to our growth and some reliability bumps. They're not necessarily related. The tools are good enough to move extremely quickly and build things way larger than you could before.Jake [01:07:19]: To the earlier point about cooling data centers in space: I don't know. But with software, you can ask, “How would I build block storage from scratch? How would I do these things?” I have ideas because I have history and have read papers. Let me work them out and build massive test benches with thousands of tests, because those are now free to author. If you're not using AI systems to speed-run your roadmap and reconcile your existing system onto the future, you're missing a large point of what's happening.Alessio [01:08:12]: What's the path to spending $3 million a month? Is it bound by ideas and things customers can absorb?Jake [01:08:19]: For most companies, it's bound by deployment at this point. That's why we've seen a massive boom in users and companies, from Fortune 50s down, asking how to get developers to move faster. You'll probably hit your CFO before any technical limits because they'll look at the eye-watering amount of money spent on tokens. Inference costs have to come down, but we're inference constrained now. There will be price discovery around what makes sense for an org to adopt.Jake [01:09:06]: I think you'll end up with the F1 driver concept. If someone is really adept at these things, it makes sense to put them in a $3 million car. If they're not, it probably doesn't make sense. You'll take a few people and say, “You can drive the F1 car. We need to go in this direction. Figure out if it works and prototype it.”Jake [01:09:33]: We've done some of that and vastly accelerated our roadmap. We thought we'd ship something in a few years; now we can probably ship it in a few months because we validated it and don't have to build it incrementally. We can skip steps and move toward our vision.Alessio [01:09:58]: A lot of people are realizing the roadmap doesn't always have a business impact, so they say tokens are too expensive. But if your roadmap were built to make more money by the time you built it, you'd have token pricing for it, the same way you do with sales. You'd spend a billion dollars on sales if you knew you would get $2 billion of revenue.Jake [01:10:19]: Exactly. A naive way to measure this is the percentage of tokens that end up in production. If you can measure impact because those tokens end up in production, that's awesome. But the burden of proof will rise. Internally, we have a growing number of pull requests that haven't merged. The question becomes: how do you get this into production? It's about how quickly you can build and deploy software, which is exciting because that's our whole thing.The SDLC Shift: Prompt Requests, Feature Flags, and Safe RolloutsSwyx [01:10:56]: The SDLC is changing. One thesis is that the pull request is dying. It's going to be the prompt request. Beyond that, code review is also kind of dying if you have all the other systems in place. What else is changing about the SDLC?Jake [01:11:19]: The AISRE and the tools to make it happen. AISRE is pie-in-the-sky aspirational. What does it take to get an AISRE? What tools do you need to build?Swyx [01:11:32]: You should expose your tooling to customers at some point. The Central Station command center.Jake [01:11:39]: We have it for template maintainers. Template maintainers can deploy and maintain templates, and they get feedback. We're going to expose those things incrementally.Swyx [01:11:51]: Clustering around incidents. Everyone has a version of that, but I don't think anyone has solved it.Jake [01:11:56]: I won't say we've solved it internally, but it's gotten so good that we can see incidents forming pretty quickly. At some point, those will be things either someone else builds or we build. We've always built things purpose-built for us. If it makes sense to make it useful for users, monetize it, or turn that loop into a profit center instead of a cost center, we want to do that.Jake [01:12:28]: Pull request is definitely dying.Swyx [01:12:29]: Do you do first-party feature flagging and incremental rollout stuff?Jake [01:12:34]: We have a feature-flagging engine we built internally and will eventually roll out.Swyx [01:12:38]: I don't see it as a user. How come you didn't give us what you have?Jake [01:12:43]: We have to beta test it. We care a lot about the quality of the things. There's plenty we've used internally that doesn't make it all the way through the journey because it fails. It works for one service but not multiple services. We'd have to build it for multiple services and know that if we released it, we'd rebuild it again and again. Some things are worth that, but many inform the roadmap.Jake [01:13:18]: We don't want to dilute the experience by saying, “This works, but only for this service,” unless it's a core initiative. Over the next few months, we'll roll out things that work for a single service, then multiple services, then multiple services across the environment. You have to be deliberate. Otherwise you create broken disparate experiences and support load because people ask how to use the feature.Jake [01:13:52]: It's the earlier expansion and compaction pattern. You expand the company to get features, then compact and smooth them out so the experience is stellar. You told me in the hallway, “It's gotten so much better.” Internally we're saying, “This part really sucks. We need to make it significantly better.”Swyx [01:14:11]: I can attest to that over the last three years watching you build Railway. For listeners, feature flagging is a huge part of Uber culture. So much so that they have too many feature flags and another thing to remove feature flags. Facebook has Gatekeeper. Agents are going to need this. It's fundamental to incremental rollouts. OpenAI acquired Statsig. GPT-5 is routing and flagging through different models.Jake [01:14:56]: It's super important. If the software development lifecycle is going to change because we're doing things 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times more concurrently, what becomes important at scale?Jake [01:15:16]: Before I started Railway, I built a feature-flagging product and tried to sell it. It was an easier version of LaunchDarkly. I ran into a problem: anyone small enough to adopt your technology doesn't care about feature flags, and anyone large enough to need feature flags needs so much scale that you have to build out all the infrastructure. I scrapped it.Jake [01:15:42]: But what is old is new again. Companies are trying to move quickly, but you can't YOLO a vibe-coded thing straight into production. You need to say, “Here's my blast radius, my impact, and I want to shadow it for these users.” Feature flags. You're going to need the tools larger companies built to maintain their structures. Everything gets compressed by 1,000x so everybody can build those structures quickly.Jake [01:16:07]: That's exactly where we are: compressing the software development lifecycle, then expanding it and adding more new things.Cattle, Pets, and Clonable InfrastructureSwyx [01:16:15]: Another term that comes to mind for newer developers is “cattle, not pets.” People treat production like a pet. It has a name. You baby it and keep it alive. With cattle, you can mass farm, roll out, portion parts out, and kill them.Jake [01:16:37]: I think that might change. You can move toward having pets as long as you have a cloning machine for your pets.Swyx [01:16:52]: Yeah.Jake [01:16:52]: If you can snapshot every single thing at every frame, it doesn't matter if something gets obliterated because you have a snapshot of it. The things we've built right now are designed to block changes from the hermetically sealed DevOps line. You have to write a Dockerfile because you nee

The Metacast
Naavik Digest: The Eastern Playbook for Dominating Western Audiences

The Metacast

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2026 20:40


This episode covers the Naavik Digest newsletter published on Sunday, May 17th. This week, we conduct a focused case study within the highly competitive Merge-2 subgenre of the casual mobile F2P market, where certain Eastern developers are now consistently out-monetizing their Western counterparts while competing for the same audience pools. You can read the newsletter (with even more sections and visual detail) here: https://www.naavik.co/digest/the-eastern-playbook-for-dominating-western-audiencesWant to explore working with Naavik? Shoot us a note: https://naavik.co/contact-us/ Let us know what you think by sending us a note at podcast@naavik.co.Watch our episodes: YouTube ChannelFor more episodes and details: Podcast WebsiteFree newsletter: Naavik DigestFollow us: Twitter | LinkedIn | WebsiteSound design by Gavin Mc Cabe.

The Relevance Of Now
A Practical Path To Merge Your Higher And Lower Self

The Relevance Of Now

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2026 13:28 Transcription Available


You can spend years trying to fix your life from the mind and still feel like something essential is missing. We go straight to the root: the possibility that you are a unique facet of creator consciousness, and that remembering it is how you welcome your power back into your body, your choices, and your daily life. Michael Connell and William Linville unpack what “higher levels” means in real terms, from supportive guidance realms to the deeper “higher self” that wants to fully embody through your physical form. We talk about the heart as the center point of your unique creator facet and share a simple, felt practice for moving attention into the heart, sensing your presence, and allowing that presence to expand through the body. Along the way we explore what it can feel like when your inner frequency shifts, when intuition becomes clearer, and when support feels closer than you expected. Click subscribe, join us next time, and namaste.

merge lower self practical path michael connell
TED Talks Daily
Why humans should merge with AI | D Scott Phoenix

TED Talks Daily

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2026 14:19


Deep tech entrepreneur D. Scott Phoenix spent years building AI — now, he believes we're on the cusp of a profound merger between humans and machines. Reframing the AI debate through the lens of evolutionary biology, he shifts the question from whether we should fear or embrace AI to whether we understand what's at stake if we get it wrong. Hear his provocative case for why we need to "eat the AI." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership
368: Before You Merge: Five Factors Every Nonprofit Leader Must Weigh (Staci Barfield)

Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2026 55:44


368: Before You Merge: Five Factors Every Nonprofit Leader Must Weigh (Staci Barfield)Episode SummaryFor too many nonprofit leaders, the word “merger” lands like a verdict, a sign something has gone wrong. Staci Barfield, Senior Director of Consulting Excellence at Armstrong McGuire in Cary, NC, argues the opposite: a merger belongs early on a leader's strategic menu, not at the end. Drawing on her work facilitating the Arise Collective and MATCH (Mothers and Their Children) merger, Staci walks Patton through the full continuum of collaboration and unpacks the five factors every leader should weigh: mission alignment and strategic rationale, organizational and cultural fit, governance and leadership readiness, financial health and due diligence, and capacity to manage change while continuing to serve. She makes the case that funders are increasingly convening these conversations and that the strategic exercise itself has value even when it doesn't end in a merger. Listeners walk away with a practical framework for assessing any form of collaboration, and a sharper read on when a merger isn't a retreat but a way to magnify mission.About StaciStaci Barfield is Senior Director of Consulting Excellence at Armstrong McGuire, where she leads the methodologies, tools, and resources that equip the firm's advisor team to deliver consistent, high-impact client work. She came to the philanthropic sector after a long corporate career in information technology and business process improvement at Gap, Inc., Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Sprint, AT&T, and Springs Industries. The pivot was catalyzed when a Hurricane Katrina deployment with the American Red Cross showed her that her business skill set translated directly to mission-driven work. From there she went on to serve as Vice President of Development for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Eastern NC Chapter, Executive Director of National Students of AMF, and CEO of Children's Flight of Hope, before joining Armstrong McGuire. Across all of it, Staci has been driven by the same instinct: maximizing an organization's opportunities for success through both strategic and operational initiatives.ResourcesConnect with Staci on LinkedInCase study referenced in the episode: Arise Collective + MATCH (Mothers and Their Children)Shared services model referenced in the episode: Ascend Nonprofit Solutions (Charlotte, NC)Companion episode: #350 with Andre Anthony: What Every Nonprofit Leader Needs to Know About MergersStaci's book recommendation: I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times by Mónica GuzmánFollow Your Path to Nonprofit Leadership and please leave a review!Learn more about Staci's work and leadership resources at Armstrong McGuire (ArmstrongMcGuire.com)

Reality TV RHAP-ups: Reality TV Podcasts
Survivor AU: Redemption Mark Warnock Deep Dive

Reality TV RHAP-ups: Reality TV Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2026 183:49


Survivor AU: Redemption Mark Warnock Deep Dive Today, Mike Bloom dives deep with contestant, Mark Warnock, about his time on Australian Survivor: Redemption. Mark Warnock brings all the behind-the-scenes drama, starting with the shock of being the last-minute returnee, leading to one of the wildest Tribal Councils and strategy scrambles of the season. Whether it's wearing a bold “Caleb, you are not beating the allegations” shirt or orchestrating live tribals, Mark pulls back the curtain on the chaos of Redemption Beach and what it's really like to run the show—until the show runs you. Mark shares how he was contacted at the very last moment to join the “Redemption” season, returned to Samoa with a cutthroat mindset, and navigated shifting alliances, idol finds, and orchestrated blindsides. He breaks down his approaches in connecting early with competitors like Faith and Brooke, forming “head office” alliances, and executing daring live votes—including pulling people out of the voting lines to flip the result in front of the tribe. Hear candid behind-the-scenes takes on the infamous Kat vote switch, the fallout from early game power moves, and the rivalry with Johnson, as well as what it's like being targeted as “the boss” by new players. Key moments and gameplay: Mark reveals the wild scramble to join the season, how family and work played into his late decision, and what inspired him to play harder the second time. A breakdown of the live tribal that flipped the first vote from Johnson to Kat, with Mark explaining the risks, social reads, and fallout back at camp. How “head office” dynamics with Faith and Keeley controlled strategy, but also sowed the seeds for explosive betrayals at swap and beyond. Hilarious moments from camp life, including alliance-building over band tattoos and shelter-building grudges, as well as a “Cornship Cartel” underwater alliance. Deep look into tribal council strategy: creating fake idols, pivoting targets live, and the struggle to balance being both shield and target. What will happen when playing a “boss” game puts all eyes—and votes—on you? Can you truly trust your number one ally, and is it ever smart to show your idol at Tribal? Tune in to catch every twist, tribe flip, and dramatic confessional as Redemption leaves nothing off the table. Listen now for exclusive insights into idol reads, game-changing alliance flips, and the biggest blindsides of Australian Survivor: Redemption! Chapters: 0:00 Redemption Season Invitation for Mark 6:53 Mark and Wife Decide Return 13:10 Adopting Aggressive Game Approach 18:00 Brooke and Mark's Key Alliance 21:50 Building the Ruby Soho Trio 26:46 Johnson Targeted, Then Cat's Blindside 35:49 Handling Tribal Fallout with Confidence 42:01 Don Joins Mark's Cornship Cartel 49:59 Tez Falters, Mark Moves On 54:46 Tribe Swap Alters Alliances 58:52 Don's Blindside by Keeley 1:05:04 Head Office Power Struggles 1:11:27 Lindell or Rich? Deciding Loyalties 1:17:23 Tez's Insubordination Seals Fate 1:23:24 Live Tribal Reveals Mark's Threat 1:29:30 Faith's Brutal Honesty Sparks Shift 1:34:13 The Faith Blindside Operation 1:40:57 Merge and Reuniting with Brooke 1:46:29 Lottie Voted Out at Merge 1:51:47 Caleb Betrays Mark's Trust 1:53:53 Fake Idol, Real Idol Play 1:59:47 Caleb's Vote Blindsides Mark 2:32:57 Jury Villa: Shocking Arrivals 2:41:52 Final Tribal: Jury Interrogation 2:54:31 Mark Reflects on His Journey Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Global Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor Global podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Rob Has a Podcast | Survivor / Big Brother / Amazing Race - RHAP
Breaking Down the Survivor 50 Post-Merge

Rob Has a Podcast | Survivor / Big Brother / Amazing Race - RHAP

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2026 19:49


Breaking Down the Survivor 50 Post-Merge Today, Rob Cesternino is breaking down the fallout from one of the wildest moments yet: the historic three-person elimination right at the merge. In this special recap episode, Rob explores how the “Blood Moon” shake-up completely changes the game for the 14 players left competing for the title of Sole Survivor. What does it mean to have the biggest merge vote ever, and who's really holding the power as new alliances start to take shape? Rob lays out the key groups forming around camp—including the “Honor and Loyalty 5,” featuring Coach, Joe, Jonathan, Stephenie, and Chrissy—and the tight trio of Cirie, Ozzy, and Rizo, who have a pile of idols and advantages. He unpacks why Rick and Christian's dynamic duo status could put a target on their backs and how Aubry, now a true free agent, might tip the balance between these shifting sides. The “rats before the war” speech, the idol complications from the Billie Eilish Boomerang twist, and where Tiffany and Dee stand after Kamilla's blindside are all up for debate. – The risky alliances forming after the triple Tribal Council – Cirie, Ozzy, and Rizo's idol stash and what makes them dangerous – The fallout for Jonathan as a target after betraying the “new era” players – Aubry's unique position as a swing vote who could flip the game – How the “rats before the war” warning may shape the next big move With the next Tribal Council looming, Rob examines whether the “new era” bloc will stay united or start voting out their biggest threats from within. Could old wounds or wild twists derail the majority, or will Coach's crew pull off another surprise? Get all the behind-the-scenes insight and alliance breakdowns—tune in for Rob's Survivor 50 analysis, from secret idol plays to the next possible blindside! To pre-order Rob's book, The Tribe and I Have Spoken, visit www.robhasabook.com Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!