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

Founder and self-described "agentic power broker" Charles Cormier on why human relationships are the one moat AGI can't cross, how to use a podcast as your B2B funnel, and why comfort is death.

What if the next frontier isn't a metaphor, it's a market?

Venture capitalist Nectarios Economakis (Partner & Co-Founder, Amiral Ventures) just closed the first $40M of a new $75M fund built to keep Canada's best builders home. We start with the brain drain and end up at asteroid mining, and somehow it all connects.

In this episode we get into why "San Francisco is just a wrapper on Waterloo," why Canada is great at inventing the future (two of the three godfathers of AI, the transformer, the smartphone) but bad at commercializing it, and what it actually takes to build a generational tech company north of the border. Then we go off-planet: collapsing launch costs, compute in orbit, solar cost down 99.7% since 1970, and why investing in space is really about helping things back here on this pale blue planet.

▶ WATCH & SUBSCRIBE: / @palebluenexus

🎧 LISTEN (Apple Podcasts & more): https://palebluenexus.com

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— ABOUT THE GUEST —

Nectarios Economakis is Partner & Co-Founder at Amiral Ventures, a founder-led Montréal VC firm backing the next generation of Canadian technology flagships. Previously co-founder of The PNR and the first business-development hire at Google Montréal.

• X: https://x.com/nectarios
  
• LinkedIn: / nectareco
  
• Amiral Ventures: https://amiral.vc
  
  — ABOUT PALE BLUE NEXUS —
  
  Pale Blue Nexus is a podcast about technology, AI, and what they mean for humans. New guest episodes regularly — subscribe so you don't miss the next one.
  
  👉 Subscribe: / @palebluenexus
  
  💬 Drop a comment with your take on space, AI, or Canadian tech — we read them all.
  
  The Aloomii Playbook is the operator's manual for putting AI into relationship-driven businesses — not theory, not hype, just the system we use to run our own agent fleet (OpenClaw) and our clients'.
  
  Three editions for where you actually sit: Founder. Solopreneur. Operator Leader.
  
  → Get the Playbook on Gumroad — $179
  
  https://www.aloomii.com/playbook/
  
  https://aloomii.gumroad.com/
  

DeepInfra (https://deepinfra.com/) is serving over 5 trillion tokens a week and just closed a major raise backed by NVIDIA. In this episode of Pale Blue Nexus, host Yohann Calpu sits down with co-founder Nikola Borisov to unpack how DeepInfra is challenging the hyperscalers on price, why he compares inference optimization to Formula 1, and what the future of open source AI looks like.

Nikola shares the technical playbook behind DeepInfra's aggressive pricing (including the famous Mixtral moment), how quantization and KV caching drive efficiency, the company's deepening partnership with NVIDIA on the Dynamo project, and why he believes the real demand for AI infrastructure is just getting started.

We also get into the harder questions: prompt injection risks, the NemoClaw security model, hardware depreciation cycles, and what's actually overrated in today's AI infrastructure boom.

Nikola bet early on open source inference. What's your bet? The Aloomii Playbook is the operator's manual for putting AI into relationship-driven businesses — not theory, not hype, just the system we use to run our own agent fleet (OpenClaw) and our clients'.

Three editions for where you actually sit:

Founder. Solopreneur. Operator Leader.
→ Get the Playbook on Gumroad — $179 https://www.aloomii.com/playbook/ https://aloomii.gumroad.com/

The Last 20% is the LinkedIn newsletter for operators who'd rather build the system than read about it, field notes, frameworks, and behind-the-scenes from running Aloomii's agent fleet (OpenClaw) and our clients' AI transformations. No theory. No hype. Just what's actually working. →

Subscribe free on LinkedIn / the-last-20-7445126674708451328

Austin Armstrong has 5 million followers across social, 11k affiliates, a $2M ARR AI video SaaS
(https://syllaby.io/?via=yohann80), a startup incubator in Durham, NC (Bullhouse), and a conference in Dallas he used to attend as a fan and now co-owns (AI Marketing World, Oct 21–24).

He sat down with Yohann to talk about the moment he saw the AI wave coming and bet his agency on it, why founder-led sales has a ceiling, the comeback of in-person community in an AI-displaced world, his strong (and possibly controversial) take on AI UGC and FTC compliance, and why the 40-hour work week is already dead.

🎙 Pale Blue Nexus is hosted by Yohann Calpu. Same curiosity, wider lens, conversations on AI, space, physics, and the ideas shaping what comes next.

Austin bet early on the AI wave. What's your bet?

The Aloomii Playbook is the operator's manual for putting AI into relationship-driven businesses, not theory, not hype, just the system we use to run our own agent fleet (OpenClaw) and our clients'.

Three editions for where you actually sit: Founder. Solopreneur. Operator Leader.

→ Get the Playbook on Gumroad — $179
https://aloomii.gumroad.com/

🔔 Subscribe for new episodes weekly.

Follow Austin: [@socialtypro]

Follow Yohann: [@realmtbman] Aloomii: http://aloomii.com

Jack Couch was the security guy in the Vista war room, personally set up Xbox Live's network in Japan, watched the iPhone kill the Zune in real time — and then went and built Sophtron, the AI-powered platform that lets agents access banking data the banks don't want them to access.

He calls his company "a security firm wrapped in a fintech veneer." It supports 14,000+ banks, 60,000+ connections, with about two dozen data scientists doing what Yodlee needed 2,000 employees to do. And he thinks frontier AI labs are going to acquire companies like his — because they've hit the data wall and Sophtron spent a decade getting at the data nobody else can.

But the real reason this episode is going to make you think (or argue): Jack believes sales and marketing as a profession is fake — a legacy from a time when data transfer was lossy and you had to fly to Vegas to figure out what to buy. He thinks Money 2020 is "proof of bling." He thinks office mandates are "fake daycare for adults." And he says it with the calm certainty of a guy who has watched four hype cycles roll through and built quietly through all of them.

🎧 Pale Blue Nexus — Making sense of the future, from right here.

Connect with Jack: sophtron.com

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@palebluenexus

He co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, gaining 4,200% returns in a single decade. He drove around the world twice, once on a motorcycle and once by car, setting two Guinness World Records. Then in 2007, he sold his New York City mansion for $16 million and moved his entire family to Singapore because he believed the 21st century belongs to Asia.

Jim Rogers has spent 50 years making bets that everyone else called crazy...and being right.

In the inaugural episode of Pale Blue Nexus, Jim sits down with us and gets personal. Not about markets. Not about commodities. About the decisions that actually shaped his life; Why he had kids at 60 after swearing he never would, why he’s raising his daughters to speak Mandarin, and what he tells them about a future most people aren’t prepared for.

He also said something we can’t stop thinking about. Something that reframes how you think about success, risk, and what it actually means to do what you love, not as a bumper sticker, but as a survival strategy.

This is Pale Blue Nexus. Where the biggest ideas meet the people bold enough to act on them.

🎙 We record Pale Blue Nexus on Riverside. Try it here:

https://riverside.sjv.io/1G5m7m

Yohann Calpu introduces the relaunch of his podcast and the switch from the NFT Hype brand, which will cover his expanded curiosity beyond NFTs, the launch of the Pale Blue Nexus podcast, and the intersection of technology and humanity.