History’s Largest Oil Disruption, Oil & AI, Sundar's New Pay Deal | Alex Epstein, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, Charles Lamanna, Julien Bek, Eoghan McCabe, Michelle Volz
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History’s Largest Oil Disruption, Oil & AI, Sundar's New Pay Deal | Alex Epstein, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, Charles Lamanna, Julien Bek, Eoghan McCabe, Michelle Volz

3:09:44 Mar 9, 2026
About this episode
Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(02:43) - Ships in Gulf Declare Themselves Chinese to Dodge Attack (04:32) - Largest Oil Disruption in History Reactions (16:18) - Oil & AI (41:22) - Sundar's New Pay Deal (50:12) - Four Loko For Sale (01:02:01) - Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, co-founder of Eon Systems, discusses the company's recent achievement in creating the first multi-behavior upload of a fruit fly brain, marking a significant advancement in whole-brain emulation. He explains how Eon integrated existing research, including the FlyWire connectome and NeuroMechFly simulation, to emulate the fruit fly's neural activity and motor functions, resulting in naturalistic behaviors like walking and grooming in a virtual environment. Dr. Alex emphasizes the potential of this work to pave the way for future emulations of more complex brains, such as those of mice and humans, aiming to enable human and non-human minds to operate in the cloud. (01:21:47) - Charles Lamanna, President of Business & Industry Copilot at Microsoft, leads the development of intelligent business applications and low-code platforms with generative AI. In his recent discussion, he introduced Copilot Cowork, an AI assistant that automates tasks across Microsoft 365 apps, integrating Anthropic's Claude model to enhance functionality. He also highlighted the upcoming Microsoft 365 E7 suite, which combines Copilot, Agent 365, and advanced security features to provide a comprehensive AI-powered productivity solution. (01:36:33) - ? Timeline Reactions (01:40:59) - Julien Bek, a partner at Sequoia Capital based in London, began his entrepreneurial journey in high school, building hardware companies before transitioning to software investments. In the conversation, he discusses the impact of AI on software businesses, emphasizing the shift from selling tools to delivering outcomes, and highlights the importance of combining AI's intelligence with human judgment to create defensible, service-oriented companies. He also shares insights on leveraging AI to enhance venture capital workflows, such as automating meeting analyses to improve decision-making and prioritization. (02:01:12) - Eoghan McCabe, co-founder and CEO of Intercom, discusses the company's recent $250 million funding round aimed at expanding their AI-driven customer service platform, FIN, which has achieved nearly $100 million in annual recurring revenue with 8,000 paying customers. He highlights the evolution of FIN from handling basic customer queries to addressing complex problems, emphasizing its ability to provide faster, more accurate, and cost-effective responses compared to human agents. McCabe outlines plans to extend FIN's capabilities across the entire customer lifecycle, transforming it into a comprehensive customer agent that enhances interactions from initial inquiries to post-purchase
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