Pale Blue Nexus

CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
00:26 Who Gabe is and what Subfrost does
01:56 Finding traction in a bear market
02:20 The China road trip and an unexpected user base
04:32 Alkanes' share of Bitcoin block space, in Gabe's numbers
05:30 How trustless can Bitcoin smart contracts really be?
06:06 Progressive decentralization: nine signers, then doxxed, then permissionless
08:59 Current TVL
09:03 The L2 misconception and the UTXO model
10:44 Spam, BIP-110, and where Gabe thinks censorship starts
14:25 The TAM argument: ETFs, perps, and moving Bitcoin on chain
18:07 Institutional Bitcoin: what it opens up and what it risks
24:44 Will younger holders ever self-custody?
28:25 Where did Bitcoin's volatility go?
33:27 Why build on Bitcoin instead of another chain
37:05 July 2: the attempted drain of frBTC
41:13 The failsafe, the halted unwraps, and the cleanup
43:50 The free audit, and the one they paid for
44:53 Stablecoins, KYC, and the third route
47:53 One year out: indexers, apps, and dxBTC
51:44 Where to find Gabe

CHAPTERS
00:00 The tooling gap between a working demo and production

02:15 Token prices are rising. Why that is the wrong thing to panic about

06:57 What constrains supply: data centers, power, cooling, hardware

08:30 Where generative AI prototypes actually go to die

10:58 Why something that looks 80 percent done is closer to 20 percent

14:16 Silent regressions and testing a non-deterministic system

15:37 What Prove AI is incubating and the three personas behind it

20:26 Guardrails for agents doing finance and legal work

23:02 Context bloat, wasted tokens, and who is supposed to fix it

24:56 The coordination tax in multi-agent systems

27:47 Does AI engineering need proofs the way software engineering did

30:36 Why compliance talk is premature without observability

32:15 Where the human in the loop still matters

34:42 Trusting agents with real money

36:57 The food inspection analogy for cross-vendor accountability

38:50 Building the logging system for AI

39:36 Where to find Prove AI

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and how to pronounce Lugli

02:43 Who is Victor Lugli

06:17 Rhetoric, Rome, and the roots of influence

08:38 From psychology to cognitive neuroscience

11:03 Studying consciousness, building neuromarketing

13:28 The pattern behind successful CEOs

19:09 The trust recession

20:23 Why AI produces averages, not intelligence

25:53 Everyone's pitch sounds the same now

34:29 Speed, acquisitions, and going global

38:22 The next ten years: brain machine interfaces

47:55 The manipulation problem

52:53 The golden brain

53:47 Vision 2030, biotech, and what's next for Lugli Group

0:00 Welcome and intro

1:00 Origin story: a 2002 AI research spinoff that became Markup AI
3:27 Why Matt says "content is the next code"

4:16 Real client results: productivity, quality, and the previously unimaginable

6:13 Cloud infrastructure and how Markup AI works across multiple LLMs

7:29 How Markup AI proves impact with standards and risk scoring

9:32 The agent to agent economy and machine readable brand

11:12 A quick detour on the metaverse and multiverse content

11:48 Matt's life outside the CEO seat

12:32 Teaching media literacy in the age of AI

13:57 Gartner's guardian agents and why AI has to check AI

15:02 Deterministic trust scores explained

15:51 Who checks the checker: verifying Markup AI's own agents

16:17 Selling safety, confidence, and revenue through search visibility

17:10 The shift from traditional search to AI powered discovery

18:24 Where paid search fits in an AI first world

19:55 Predicting search one to two years out

21:37 Tackling the AI slop problem

22:55 AI influencers worth following

24:10 What a great 2026 looks like for Markup AI

24:48 Where to find Matt and Markup AI

Chapters:
00:00 Meet Vadim, founder and CEO of Diffco

01:13 The 10x engineer myth and why the metric is an illusion

03:18 Cutting client costs by 4x, and the legacy codebase reality check

05:18 What he'd build today: the most unsexy, regulated industries

09:04 The three kinds of projects worth building

12:56 Wearing the advisor and investor hats

13:34 What he invests in: outsiders who challenge the status quo

16:42 The brutal truth about the founder journey

17:36 Careful founders don't win: energy over age

21:39 From coding assistants to full agentic development

24:59 We need architects, not coders

27:20 Approaching 100% AI-written code on new projects

29:16 The coming pricing crisis in software development

31:55 Where AI still falls short

34:30 Why better models don't equal better output

39:11 Two bold predictions for the next 12 to 18 months

42:13 Wrap up

Chapters:
00:00 Meet Vitaly Golomb

01:32 Why job losses are inevitable this time

04:41 How close are autonomous trucks?

06:10 Manufacturing, China, and lights-out factories

07:30 The five robotics verticals his fund invests in

11:10 If capital doesn't need labor, who buys anything?

15:22 China's laws on replacing workers with robots

17:45 UBI, or why "negative income tax" might actually pass

20:27 Fixing US healthcare, one Medicare year at a time

22:40 US vs Canada healthcare

26:23 AI washing: which layoffs are real

30:00 The Displacement Machine and the grievance economy

36:38 America's unfair advantage: immigration

40:09 What he invests in and why

44:13 Why he's bearish on humanoid robots

47:48 Final thoughts

Chapters
00:00 Meet Mary Grove

00:22 Immigrant parents, an operating room nurse, and a clinic

02:25 From the IPO desk to building a global startup program

02:52 Why 75% of venture dollars still land in three cities

04:22 The capital efficiency case for building outside the coasts

05:40 Food tech, digital health, vertical SaaS, and why those three

07:31 Not trying to build the next Silicon Valley

08:31 Inside the Innovation Circle: 19 enterprise partners, 2,500 deals a year

11:21 Q-rounds and the deal a hospital partner handed back

13:57 Are we in an AI bubble?

16:27 Dot-com, 2008, and why post-crisis vintages perform

19:01 Encarta, Netscape, and the last time it felt this hyped

21:58 Human in the loop: where AI belongs in healthcare

22:42 Is AI bigger than the internet?

25:13 Building faster than the guardrails

27:27 Nostalgia, collectibles, and analog friction

29:32 85 companies in, and what she's most excited about

34:45 Women's health as the largest underserved market

36:45 Open office hours and how to reach the team

My guest this week built a headset that turns your own brainwaves into a video game, and the point of that game is to teach your brain to drop into a flow state on demand, even under pressure.

Steve Gullans spent 18 years as a scientist at Harvard Medical School, ran a venture fund, took a company public and rang the NASDAQ bell, then came out of retirement to bring this technology to market. His company, Thynk, is starting in public schools, where he says kids playing about an hour a week show calmer behavior and measurable gains, and it is moving next into elite sports.

We get into why a big gaming company has not built this, what the data reveals about how distracted we have all become, what "neurodivergent" actually means, his take on peptides and GLP-1s, and the one piece of advice he gives every founder about the CEO's real job.

Steve Gullans is the CEO of Thynk. He was previously a professor at Harvard Medical School, co-founded a venture fund with Juan Enriquez, and has been close to around 60 companies as a founder, investor, and operator.

This conversation is for information and general interest. It is not medical advice.

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Every index fund quietly does something strange. When a company's founder retires, sells, or passes away, the index buys more of that company, not less. Haren Bhakta thinks that is exactly backwards. On this episode of Pale Blue Nexus, the CEO and founder of Inside Ownership Index explains why he would rather own the leaders of a business than the logo, and why he went through roughly 20,000 proxy filings by hand to build the data that proves it.

We get into the moment at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting that sparked the whole idea, the difference between a "zoo lion" CEO who gets fed whether or not the hunt succeeds and a "wild lion" owner-operator who feels the pain of every mistake, and a study of stocks that returned 100 times their money over 25 years, nearly all of which shared one trait before the run ever started. We also cover why the most dominant company in history faded once its owner stepped away from the board, and where disruption tends to come from once leadership no longer has real skin in the game.

Guest: Haren Bhakta, CFA, CEO and founder of Inside Ownership Index. The ETF trades under the ticker OWN.

Subscribe to Pale Blue Nexus so you never miss an episode, and drop a comment with the company you think owner alignment explains best.

Learn more about the guest: insideownership.com (ticker: OWN)

This conversation is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.

Eliza Blank built The Sill into one of the most recognizable houseplant brands in the country. Now she's CEO of The Farmlink Project, a national nonprofit moving 150 million pounds of surplus produce a year from farms to families facing food insecurity. In this conversation, she breaks down how a grassroots COVID-era effort by college students became one of the most efficient food recovery operations in North America, why relationships (not trucks or warehouses) are the real currency of food recovery, and what's actually going wrong for American farmers right now.

Sponsored by Huckabuy & Aloomii