The Exchanges

Q No, it's a very, it's a very positive part of the ecosystem. So, so tell us a little bit about Vercel. What does Vercel do? Who are your customers?

A For sure. So we create web infrastructure. That means we give you the tools and platforms for you to develop, preview and scale and initiative on the web. So we have customers like underarmor.com. Uh, which, uh, they sell sneakers or we have customers like Washington post. What we've solved, which is a hard engineering problem is how can you create applications that can scale to like billions and billions of, of traffic, but also be extremely dynamic in nature. So you can personalize, customize, uh, and deliver them really, really, really fast. So the, the, uh, wisdom that gets shared in the industry a lot is for each hundred milliseconds. That you slow down an e-commerce experience, you have a one percent drop off in conversion. And we've all experienced this when you're like on Instagram and you go to a product, you, you need to buy it and, and everything has to click.

AI assessment note: “we create web infrastructure... So we have customers like underarmor.com”

Q So how do you think about, and there must be a tough line between being a community first company and fully monetizing the opportunity, right? And you obviously don't want to do things that grow the community. Long-term, but you want us to make money. Like, like how do you make those trade-offs or what trade-offs are there?

A For sure. I'm very, very passionate about this idea of education. So one, one principle that we have is we have to have developers learn our methods and techniques and basically have no barrier to entry there. So we give away a lot of resources for free because we know that the engineer that's working on a side project to evaluate the technology We'll bring it to a large enterprise the next Monday. And this has actually happened in ways that are quite fascinating to me. So I like to tell a story of therealreal.com, really big enterprise public company, uh, on, on the e-commerce side. The CTO was testing out our platform on a weekend with his personal email address on our platform. If I had added a lot more friction to that process and like, oh, there's no free account. Like you can't deploy more than end times.

AI assessment note: “we give away a lot of resources for free because we know that the engineer”

Q You built a company early on, right? In helping with clinical trials, or you did a lot of work on that?

A Yes, we did. Uh, so it was in 2006, 2007 at a wonderful co-founder Uh, Chris Isert, who, uh, also from our fraternity at Stanford, and, and, and what we realized was that, you know, the average cost of technology involved in clinical trials was something like, at that time, about half a million dollars, but you could do it for 50,000. I think the problem was that, that really, uh, entrepreneurs and disruptors hadn't really shown up on the scene. They were still using a lot of old technology, old processes, and honestly, although we Ended up moving on from that company, 15 years later, a lot of those opportunities still exist. It shouldn't cost half a billion, a billion dollars to run, uh, every clinical trial.

AI assessment note: “Yes, we did. Uh, so it was in 2006, 2007 at a wonderful co-founder”

Q And how was the culture in the UK different when you moved there?

A The UK was a lot more formal. In the UK, I remember being shocked that you had to stand up when the teacher came into the room, and if you wanted to go, you know, to the bathroom during class, you couldn't just stand up and go, you had to ask for permission, and you had to wear a school uniform, and you had to make an appointment to see a friend of yours. You couldn't just show up at the house, which is what we used to do in Israel. And so again, I felt like their society has, well, firstly, been formed over a much longer period of time, right? Israel is a much, Younger country, and a lot of things there are still evolving and adapting, whereas in the UK, there was a lot more structure, and a big part of that is because, you know, these structures have been evolving for hundreds of years, and these customs have been too.

AI assessment note: “The UK was a lot more formal. In the UK, I remember being shocked”

Q We ended up working a lot on entrepreneurial stuff, investing together. You're my chief of staff for a couple of years, and you have this kind of cultural anthropologist analysis now of the Soviet Union and Israel and UK. What, what was different versus Goldman Sachs London versus, you know, working in the entrepreneurial world?

A Oh, a lot. Goldman is full of a lot of really brilliant people. Um, but what I found was different is that Goldman was a lot more hierarchical than what I saw in Silicon Valley, right? Goldman, as someone in your early twenties, most of what you're doing is you're doing what others tell you to do. So there are very clear structures around meetings. You know, it really mattered when I was there, who's, who, which order you put the names of people in the true line and emails. And that can become pretty repetitive, right? A lot of what you're doing is You're taking instruction from your associate, who's taking instructions from their VP, who's taking instruction from the managing director, and so on. And something that I was honestly really inspired by when I met you was realizing that you don't need 10 years of work experience to want to solve a problem, and that if you're someone who's intellectually curious and willing to work really hard, you can, in your early twenties, start making a huge difference to solving these problems And actually taking a lot of ownership yourself.

AI assessment note: “Goldman was a lot more hierarchical than what I saw in Silicon Valley”

Q So the construction industry is notoriously adverse to change. These people are stubborn and, you know, there's lots of inertia just doing what they're doing. Uh, I mean, did people think you were crazy trying to do this? Like, you know, what was the initial reaction?

A I mean, people definitely thought I was crazy. Um, I mean, when we got started, people constantly would tell us, aren't your sales cycles going to be 10 years long? You know, are people actually going to use the product? And the reality is that construction fundamentally changed 10 years ago. You know, up until the advent of smartphones and especially tablets and iPads, there was no connectivity on job sites. And so, That essentially meant if you wanted someone on a job site to use tech, you would need them to exit the job site, go back to their trailer, open up their laptop, and do their work there. And around 2011, when iPads and tablets came out, that really changed the game. And so what we realized is that starting from that point onwards, the possibility of getting technology onto a job site was just dramatically transformed. And that meant that sales cycles weren't 10 years anymore. Now you had both that dynamic coupled with this generational shift of people saying, well, you know, I use DoorDash to order food and I use Amazon to order goods. Why am I still needing to call my distributor and handle everything over the phone?

AI assessment note: “I mean, people definitely thought I was crazy.”

Q What are some of the structural issues these companies face? Like, why aren't they solving all the problems that some of the new startups are solving?

A Well, that's a good question. I think that, ah, the biggest issue they face is that they kind of wait around for the government to tell them what to build, rather than going out there and trying to invent New solutions for the problems, and, and the government does things on a, along a structured approach, uh, you know, they used to call it the Klinger-Cohen approach, or, uh, sorry, the Klinger-Cohen approach. Klinger-Cohen, uh, was the, the name of the act that set it out with the DoD architectural framework, and various milestone A, milestone B, analysis of alternatives, all these different contracts that go for 10 or 15 years, and by the time they arrive at a solution, it's obsolete already. Because they've taken so long thinking about it and sort of gradually incrementally funding it as opposed to what we did at Epirus and others have done at other startups where they've come in and said, you know what, we have a way to solve this problem. We're going to run as fast as we can in sprints and iterate rapidly to get to the right, what we feel is the right solution. And that requires taking a risk.

AI assessment note: “the biggest issue they face is that they kind of wait around for the government”

Q And Nathan, what do you think about the future of Epris? You're not running it anymore, but you have a lot of really great talent you've hired there. What's it look like?

A I mean, everything I hear is absolutely amazing and great things. I mean, they brought in, it's kind of funny, they brought in my, uh, my old boss, uh, Andy Lowery, who Beau and I started working for all the way, 13 years ago as COO and Chief Product Officer. And, and Andy, Is really good at, you know, driving these things to scale, and he, his, his first company, RealWear, actually just did a, uh, a meaningful SPAC deal, not like a vaporware SPAC like we've seen. I think they're coming out for eight hundred million on the exit in the augmented reality space. Um, so I, I, I, the way I see it, directed energy weapons are a game changer on the battlefield. They don't have any of these magazine depth problems. The, the headlines right now are plagued with ammunition shortages and missile shortages and how are we going to replenish all this? The easy solution. Don't use ammunition at all. And EPRS is key to kind of breaking that wheel, uh, if you will. And then I think on top of that, the commercial applications of high power management for, you know, telecommunications for, for grid infrastructure management, uh, even medical applications open up hundreds of billions of dollars in, in, in total available market that otherwise, uh, would, would be unavailable. So, I mean, I'm really, uh, Honored and thrilled that I got to be part of it at the beginning, and I'm really excited to se…

AI assessment note: “I think that the sky's the limit for this company.”

Q Got it. So you got at Briscoe and you guys built, you learned a lot. I know you ended up replacing yourself in some different ways, moved on to Spartan. Tell us about Spartan Radar. What inspired you to start this? It's an automotive radar company.

A Yes. Yes. So, uh, Spartan, our, our mission is really to make the world's Road safer, um, you know, for both cars, trucks, specialty vehicles, all of it, through better radar software, right? Uh, I had a, uh, about a few months after I had, uh, kind of, uh, left, you know, stepped away from EPRS, um, I got a call from an old mentor of mine, Dr. Theogenes of Batsiglou, who taught me almost everything I know about radar signal processing, and he had retired a couple years before, was working as a consultant, uh, for a couple of, Uh, automotive radar companies. And he said, Nathan, I think I've come up with a way to build an automotive radar that has five times the resolution with a quarter of the parts. And I go, well, that sounds intriguing. Maybe that's something that we can, we can turn into a product. So I looked at it and said, well, you know, maybe there's more to this. So I started diving into it and I realized that they were still building automotive radars in a lot of respects, the same ways that we had built airborne radars, 3040 years before very single function devices that do one thing.

AI assessment note: “I got a call from an old mentor of mine, Dr. Theogenes of Batsiglou”

Q What's lifespan versus health span? How do you think about that?

A I mean, lifespan is the obvious sort of binary part of this, right? Which is like you're alive or you're dead. So that's the, that's the digital piece. I think the analog piece is the harder one to Sort of described, but that's the health span piece. That's the quality of life. And I think there are three metrics. I think there's the physical side of that. So, um, you know, are you free from pain? Do you have, you know, muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardiorespiratory fitness, all of those things. And then, um, and then there's the cognitive side. So are you give good memory processing, speed, executive function, all of the things that define you guys. And then the, I think the arguably the most important, but the least, uh, Easy one to quantify as the emotional health piece, right? So what are your, you know, are you, are you fulfilled? Do you have a sense of purpose? Are your relationships good? All of those things. And I, and I think, again, to have the others without that is, is purgatory, right?

AI assessment note: “lifespan is the obvious sort of binary part... health span piece. That's the quality of life.”

Q so we're just all safe. Uh, Israel has less than ten million people that produces more tech stars per capita than almost any other country in the world. Are there things we can learn from Israel from all of this? Like obviously we can't all have a network of global Jews helping us and we, Does the military service or other parts of the culture things that can be copied?

A Yeah, I think, I think there are a lot of things we can learn, but I'd want to start with this because this is a place where I think America and the rest of the world can also take some great guidance. If you're at 8200, of course, which is the most famous of the Israeli military units in tech and in cyber, although there are many, um, when you leave the military, believe it or not, you're actually encouraged to take that technology with you. Now, I don't mean if it's top super secret, but they want you to take that technology. What happens? You build a company, look at Checkpoint. They were the original folks, three guys out of the 8200 back then, they took that technology and they built a twenty billion dollar company, so not only has it funded the treasury, but there have been hundreds and hundreds of companies that have been spun out of that. Look at Mobileye, right? Bought by Intel for sixteen billion, just went public for 22. The leading company in the world, driving autonomous cars, that came out of necessity from the military. When they left the military, they took it, and look what they were able to do with it. So I think working closely, more closely with our militaries is one major lesson. Uh, To learn.

AI assessment note: “working closely, more closely with our militaries is one major lesson”

Q How did that hustle tie to your faith? And how did the American enterprise tie to your faith? I'm curious. How do those relate to each other?

A Yeah. So, so, you know, the prophet Muhammad made the peace and blessings of God be upon him. He was a merchant. He was a merchant. And so he, he's unlike, for example, Jesus, who is a revered prophet in Islam, but, uh, uh, the, the prophet is he, he, before he actually is, uh, receives revelation, he is known as Al-Amin or the reliable and his first wife, Was a businesswoman who actually selected him as the person who would, um, who would guide her caravans across the deserts, and was so impressed by the manner that, in which Muhammad did his work, that she proposed marriage. And so there's, there's this notion, I think it's kind of deep in my identity, that the manner in which you do your work really matters. Uh, in Islam, there's this beautiful concept called Ihsan, I-H-S-A-N, which means Excellence. And, and, and excellence is beloved of God. Um, and, and so that's just, that's how my parents approach their work. That's how I approach my work, whether as a writer of books like We Need to Build, or in my work at Interfaith America, which is an organization that believes that the best of our diverse faith traditions shape us into virtuous people, and we ought to be coming together On those shared values of, you know, you know, Joe, you write about Tikkun Olam on your website, for example, right? There are similar concepts in Islam, like Sadaka. Uh, well, we ought to be guided…

AI assessment note: “there's this beautiful concept called Ihsan, I-H-S-A-N, which means Excellence.”

Q Speaking of China as the big brother in a couple relationships, obviously they're a lot more powerful in a lot of ways than Russia and then Putin, and it feels like they must have had to sign off for Russia to do what they're doing right now. Is that the dynamic that we see in general?

A Boy, I, you know, I, I don't know that they would have signed off on this. It would have been a little more nuanced than that. They certainly would have been prepared, briefed for it. They might have been asked what they thought, but I think Putin had his full intention of doing this, uh, regardless of what Xi Jinping said, but having now failed, having now demonstrably been unable to execute the, at least the military and diplomatic objectives of the invasion of Europe, I think Xi has even more leverage over Vladimir Putin today. Think, uh, think energy as their sole customer, near sole customer, uh, a host, a host of places in the diplomatic world where China now has even more capacity to control what Vladimir Putin does going forward.

AI assessment note: “I don't know that they would have signed off on this. It would have been”

Q That's a huge compliment. You mentioned, cause originally doing business in Japan, it sounds like one of the difficulties, which I've noticed as well, is it's hard to get a no. They'll, they'll, they'll always say yes. But so how, how'd you get past that to the point where you were able to get more done with them? Is it just building trust? What, what is it?

A It's simple. It's just building trust. I mean, um, When I'd go to Japan, I guess you've been to the karaoke bars when you're in Japan. You want to go to karaoke? I'm going, man. Let's go. You want to drink sake? I'm drinking. Let's go. You want to play golf? Let's, let me take you to one of the best golf courses in Asia, and we'd play golf. So we built a relationship, but more importantly, the office was run by Japanese nationals. And we, they would come spend time with us in New York, and then we empowered them to run the office. So when people saw me or Dick Fisher or other senior people going to Japan and really being part of the Japanese management team and the way we interacted with them, I think that really gave us a great kind of boost in reputation. These are the people we want to work with and work for.

AI assessment note: “It's simple. It's just building trust.”

Q Let's, let's talk about education more broadly in the US. Uh, I understand that just over 50% of public high schools nationwide offer over one class. My friend runs code.org, sorry, offer more than one computer science class. And, and, you know, why have we been so slow to adapt? Why are only half, you know, half the schools offering computer science, and how far behind are we?

A Well, I think it's really hard. When you look at India, India has this incredible initiative right now to get a makerspace in every single public school in the country. And they've already implemented more than 10,000 of them in the past five years. That is incredible. And we need issues like that that foster the hacker mindset here in the US. I think the reason we don't have more computer science classes in schools in this country is because it's frankly really, really hard. It's hard to find teachers. It's hard to find good curriculums. If you know how to code, you have the choice between being a public school teacher or making double or sometimes triple your salary.

AI assessment note: “reason we don't have more computer science classes in schools in this country is”

Q One of the, one of the shifts you're seeing right now in education, especially with COVID is a lot of people are going to homeschooling. A lot of people are going to hybrid learning. Is this a big shift in education? And is this, is this going to change how hack club works potentially? Do you engage with, with kids who are outside of the system?

A Yeah, there's a number of hack clubs started by teenagers who are homeschooled. And I think that's amazing. The thing I want to see in the future is I want to see more young people being the owners and the drivers of their own learning. Something that's What's incredible about the internet is you can become a subject matter expert as a thirteen-year-old without having ever met anyone who lives in that, who works in that field. And I think that we need way more pathways to support people like that. An example of this is I was talking with a hack clubber two months ago named Felix, who has learned the ins and out. They're 15. They live in San Antonio right now. They've learned the ins and outs of the networking protocol as a power of the internet. And they built as a fun hack, a chat app that uses this protocol called ARP. Which is part of how computers talk to each other. We can talk with your friends using just ARP. It went viral on Hacker News. Over 10,000 people have used it. They have over a thousand stars on GitHub. And that's the sort of thing where you could never learn that in a computer science class. That's only uniquely possible because of the internet. And I think we need to create more opportunities for young people to engage with learning in any subject like that.

AI assessment note: “there's a number of hack clubs started by teenagers who are homeschooled.”

Q So what was, what was it like working on like the first, this is the first massive lithium ion mass produced batteries for, for, for automobiles that you guys, like what do you have to do to, to achieve that?

A So there's a ton of skepticism, right? The, the auto industry basically looked at it and said, look, there's, you can't use laptop batteries to make cars. That's just dumb. It's never going to work. Uh, it's unsafe. You've got 7000 of them. All those connections are going to fail. So there's a huge amount of skepticism that we heard all around. But it was sort of one problem at a time, and you don't know, you know, as a young engineer, you don't know any better that, that something's not supposed to be doable, and you just figure it out. So the key issues were, how do you connect 7000 cells together? Um, some of the, some, you know, the wire bonding you saw is a big part of it. Um, uh, six, uh, 99 groups in series, 69 in parallel. Um, and the, so that was a big challenge. The other big challenge was really safety. So, so batteries, Can develop defects. They can go into thermal runaway. And one of the big things we solved is that if that happens, you know, in one battery, that it not propagate to the rest. So, so if one, if one happens to have a defect, uh, that causes a failure, if it, if it propagates, you have a problem. And if it doesn't, you have an inherently safe system. And so we were able to make an inherently safe system with a lot of thermal, thermal, um, challenges in order to make that work.

AI assessment note: “So the key issues were, how do you connect 7000 cells together?”

Q And just, and just to go a little bit deeper, just for people who are interested, Like, like what are the bonds that are storing the energy? Is it like lithium and it's not, it's not interacting with the silicon or is it, or what's going on there?

A So in conventional batteries on the, it's, uh, it's the, the atomic, uh, structures, essentially six carbon atoms and one silicon, uh, lithium atom sitting in the middle. Uh, and so it's, uh, LIC six is the chemical kind of how it compounds. And then in the cathode, it's, uh, it's a metal oxide in your phone. It's a lithium cobalt oxide. So Li, cobalt CO, uh, oxygen O two. Uh, and so that's a crystal structure. And again, the lithium atom kind of sits in the middle or in some part of that crystal lattice. Um, and so those are relatively kind of weak bonds and, and it stores a sort of a, you know, a nominal amount of energy.

AI assessment note: “those are relatively kind of weak bonds and, and it stores a sort of”

Q field. So, you know, a lot of people, I think we talked about earlier, like with our friend Rick, that they were in a revolution in bio right now, which I know you, you agree with. Like what, what are, give, give our audience some of the reasons we're in revolution in bio. What are the key things that have just started this revolution? Why is this happening right now?

A Yeah. Yeah. So I think, uh, you know, it's kind of like, it's always hard. I think we have to choose arbitrary dates for this because it's like, at what point in an exponential growth graph did everything get exponential, right? And the definition is that it's always, always looks exponential along different scales. But, like, one sort of window I love to think about is between 20 11 and 20 12, right? Like, so I talked about how, uh, AlexNet wins ImageNet, and that was really the sort of Fosbury flop for deep learning, uh, and, and, but at the same time, within, like, the same sort of span of period is, is when, uh, Jennifer Doudna's work and Fang Zhang's work came out on CRISPR, so my friends who were into genetic engineering working on, like, talons or zinc fingers all of a sudden saw Their entire field upended at the same time.

AI assessment note: “Jennifer Doudna's work and Fang Zhang's work came out on CRISPR”

Q Well, so, so, so someone might, who doesn't know this issue might say, well, that sounds really heartless to me. You're just trying to take these people and not look at them and send them away. Like, so what, why, why is enforcing the ban the good thing for the homeless people? Isn't that, isn't that just like pushing them out of our sight?

A No. So, I mean, you know, when the city's We see what happens both when cities do and they don't enforce the bans. And let's, as you mentioned, you know, there's, we've already discussed some of the, the public issues that there is crime, there is a disorder on the streets and all of that, but the main issue should be like, well, how does this affect the homeless? And, you know, one of the examples I cite is in Los Angeles, uh, where LAPD commissioner Willie Bratton, uh, one of the best cops in American history, he was famously a former NYPD commissioner, came over there and said, we're going to enforce the safer cities initiative. We're going to actually Really banned camping on Skid Row in, uh, in LA. Now, of course, infamous. And it worked. A study done right afterwards showed that, uh, crime and violence in the area, mainly against the homeless themselves, went down 40%, and it didn't seem to spill over to these other neighborhoods.

AI assessment note: “crime and violence in the area, mainly against the homeless themselves, went down 40%”

Q So, and, and, and what, what, are there lots of good nonprofits you've encountered? Or like, what are the ones that seem to be aligned with the right answers?

A Yeah. I mean, there, there's a million good people working on great stuff out there in homelessness, and I've been astounded in my, my work on the issue, uh, the number of them, uh, you know, two of the ones that, the one we feature in the, in the documentary, uh, for PragerU is, uh, Community First, which is outside of Austin. A man named Alan Graham started this up, a developer originally, who devoted his life to kind of a, you know, the community first name was kind of imagined as a counterpart to housing first. He says, well, the issue with someone in the street isn't just, well, they don't have, you know, four walls and a roof. They, they need something.

AI assessment note: “the one we feature in the, in the documentary, uh, for PragerU is, uh, Community First”

Q Did you put a battery too or so?

A Yeah, we did. And, um, and the, the idea was how do we extend the hours in the classroom? How do we give that school the ability to educate women? Because women are fetching water till about noon every day. And so we put solar on 2750 schools in 17 countries. Um, as I went back to those schools and visited, kind of made me sad. Because, um, there's a lot of guys that plug their cell phones into these schools and go figure women don't want to sit in classrooms till seven o'clock at night when they've been fetching water till noon. So now what GivePower does, we still do schools, but we also build solar water farms, and it's some pretty cool breakthrough technology. Each container allows us to provide around 75,000 liters of water every single day.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, we did. And, um, and the, the idea was”

Q Charles Koch's father was well-to-do, right? He was in the oil business, but what Charles did with it was itself amazing.

A But this, but this is a good example, right? Because Charles' father had, there's about twenty-one million revenue when Charles took over the business, and I believe he grew it about 10,000 times, and, and, and if, but if he had to start from zero, He might be at maybe a 100th of where, 100th of where he was today, because, because that's the way these numbers work, which means he would have had much less impact on society given what he's able to do. And if, and if you and I agree that he's funding a lot of things that we think are quite impressive for society, that might not have happened if his father hadn't given him the business.

AI assessment note: “Charles' father had, there's about twenty-one million revenue when Charles took over”

Q And what kind of reforms have you seen? Like what are the schools doing differently in order to attract the kids?

A I think they're being more responsive to the parents and the needs of the kids. So for example, We have a, a school locally called Lyft Academy in Pinellas County, where I'm, where I'm from, which was, which is designed specifically for kids who have autism. Because the families who had sent their kids to the public school didn't feel like they were getting a tailored education to help their children. So they started this school. Well now, the school district is robustly in that space and trying to make sure that they have the services, you know, appropriate for those kids. So I think that you're seeing them really have to step up and compete because the incentives are there.

AI assessment note: “the school district is robustly in that space and trying to make sure”

Q And you were, and what were you doing with circuits before you were doing EPRS?

A Yeah. So, uh, so at Georgia Tech, we were building, um, silicon neurons. So the, uh, thesis was you can, we worked on the DARPA, uh, synapse program where the idea is, um, if, if you build, uh, neurons out of, um, silicon that work much more like the brain, you can operate much more efficiently than like what you can on a GPU. So then from there went to, um, um, IBM, uh, worked on Watson. So I was on the, on the chip team that built Uh, the chips were Watson. That, that was just a great experience. I ended up, uh, there. And then I've always thought, um, and I think, uh, very similar to, uh, your, uh, some of your thoughts, Joe, that I share like this strong passion for defense. So I wanted to help out. And so I went to, to Raytheon, uh, to work in the aerospace and defense.

AI assessment note: “at Georgia Tech, we were building, um, silicon neurons.”

Q Why, why, why hasn't this been done a long time ago? Is it, would this have been a lot harder to do with chips? 20 years ago.

A Yeah, so the big thing that we've discovered is, it's like, uh, I was, it's like, uh, uh, uh, the power line example. So like, if, if I want to manage, uh, like a power, the power going through a power line, right now, uh, outside that powers all of our houses, there's this giant transformer that uses 20, uh, kilovolt lines. Um, previously there was no hardware to manage, uh, you can't, You know, a digitize a 20, a kilovolt line. There's no hardware that goes high enough power. And so the same, the same analogies on a vehicle, right? 600 volt is a common voltage. It's a flowing around a lot of these vehicles. 800 volt in some of the new Porsches electric that are coming out. And so previously there was no hardware. I couldn't, it was all analog. I couldn't digitize it because that's too high of a voltage. So what we've invented is a gallium nitride chips and a silicon carbide chips. These new chips That can handle 1200 volts, 2000 volts. So we've digitized.

AI assessment note: “previously there was no hardware... we've invented is a gallium nitride chips”

Q And, and, and so in terms of how this shaped your life, I understand in 1994 you, you founded Peace Works. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

A Yeah, so PeaceWorks, um, is a company, I started right after law school, and I was a confused Mexican-American Jew trying to sell sundried tomato spreads made by Arabs and Israelis. And the concept was, and, and, um, it became, I started ventures all over, but I was not really focused, so I didn't really know what I was doing. I was selling, uh, food products without any background in, in food sales or any background in, in, in, That type of business. But it was a concept of using business as a force for bringing neighbors together. People from conflict regions having a vested interest in preserving those relationships because they're trading in commerce and profiting from those relationships. Correct. And even more important, when people discover each other's humanity, you shatter stereotypes, and then you discover that there's no absolute evil, that it's much easier To hate the other when you haven't actually met them. If you have a conversation, if you have a dinner, let alone if you're interacting, almost always, not always, but almost always, you, you discover each other's humanity.

AI assessment note: “PeaceWorks, um, is a company, I started right after law school”

Q So the second year, how much did you lose?

A Uh, we made 5000 dollars the second year. I was really cocky. Man, we made 5000 dollars. I got a viable business here. I know. Let's relocate it and triple the size. Which, of course, the existing investors said, no, let's stay where we are and make some money, and then maybe we'll see how you do. And I said, and I, I said, how about if I find new capital? And I did. I found new capital. And then we were able to make that relocation. And that, uh, that relocation and a merger with another small natural food store changed the name to Whole Foods. And that first Whole Foods market was, it quickly became the highest volume natural food store in the United States. It just took off. It was incredible success.

AI assessment note: “we made 5000 dollars the second year.”

Q So, um, how long do you, how long do you age most though? If you're buying a 25 dollar bottle, how long did that age for?

A 25 dollar bottles. Usually we're aging at like four to six months, um, versus, uh, some of the really complex, uh, extraordinary wines in our iconic collection, reserve collection. The reds will be 22 to sometimes 33 months. Um, we have a new kosher wine that just came out that was aged 33 months. We've got a, uh, A diamond, uh, a red diamond, um, uh, AVA from Washington, one of the, um, best rated AVAs in general in the world. Um, and that is, uh, that's 30 months aged. And then our Fumé Blanc here, um, is 10 months aged in new French oak as a white wine. And so we'll age some of the nicer white wines, 10 to 12 months.

AI assessment note: “25 dollar bottles. Usually we're aging at like four to six months”

Q And then you, and you build relationships with the farmers, get, get access to the grapes. You then build relationships with the people who are doing the next part or what?

A Um, yeah. So, um, early on, Um, we were able to partner up with the Mondavi family, and Rob Mondavi Jr., Robert Mondavi's grandson, the creator of Robert Mondavi and Opus One, and really, um, I think the pioneer of our last generation who put Napa on the map along with a few others. Rob, um, would make our wines along with Tony Coltrane, their longtime family winemaker. We started getting to a scale where we really needed our own full-time winemaker that would just do our wines, and so we hired a woman named Mari, uh, Wells Coyle, And, uh, she's an extraordinary winemaker. She's the one who's made some of these, um, incredible like rated wines and gotten these accolades. Rob's also worked with her on collaborations. And so we do all of our wine making in house, um, even though we outsource the majority of our farming. So we're very asset light, but then we control the processing from that point forward, even though we also borrow other people's wineries to continue to stay asset.

AI assessment note: “we do all of our wine making in house, um, even though we outsource”