Qasar Younis on Applied Intuition's path to becoming the software backbone of autonomous vehicle and defense programs

mean Medallion Fund makes sense because they're doing such complex stuff, but stable coins seems simple to me. I don't know. Maybe I'm underelling them. I need to talk to If you're someone in a country like Nigeria, you have double digit inflation rates.

Your country desperately does not want you to be able to access US capital markets or even like, you know, things to hedge against inflation. You want dollars.

Y and so the demand for dollars has been so strong that you know people all over the world go through a bunch of extremely complicated UI processes you know they use Google use a bunch of these swapping who would possibly do this not an American consumer well it doesn't matter y and it's like mo most stable coins uh from tether issued on a blockchain called tron people here have probably never heard of tron um so it's it's a very international user base the pull of the market you know we talk about product market fit product market fit of stable coins is so insane um and the fact that there's a debate between you know the section of the house on should we write legislation that potentially kneecaps the one group that is doing the most to export the dollar abroad I think is extremely interesting interesting and this is on the heels of you know circle's trying to IPO right now we saw that perspective so compared to the 20 billion profit over the past few years I believe the um EBIT on Circle's $62 billion issuance was like 258 million yeah people did not like the S1 it was not um uh and and they were leaving a lot on the table they their distribution costs are high due to the the Coinbase relationship, I think.

But um but yeah, that makes sense. It's like um the the the tea bill is arguably the best America's greatest export, right? Like it's if you if you count the tea bill into trade deficits be like a much very general story that different story.

Um but uh but yeah, I think your point on hey, we're we're you know, Tether uh regardless of your opinion of them is exporting the dollar and getting getting more people on ramp to the dollar, which does have uh does have some benefits for sure. Yeah. So, we'll see.

We'll see who ends up winning out in the reconciliation progress. I think enough people are going to recognize that Tether's probably doing that good for the US. Like Genius will probably win out a little bit over stable, but I mean, it's it's still the early days.

We'll see who who on the hill are the biggest proponents of crypto. Who are the names the crypto founders need to be follow? Who's that guy who's the one politician with the laser eyes? Is he based Mike Lee? Yeah. Yeah. Mike, that's his account. I think no bas goes by online. Extremely based.

Um Ted Cruz was one of the first guys to understand how Bitcoin mining can actually help secure uh energy grids. He was he was extremely early to that. of course, uh, Gyllenbran services committee. These are all people you need to pay attention to.

And then there's, um, you know, a whole crop of of of new freshmen, uh, congressman and senators. Richie Torres is extremely on the money and he's not even, you know, on the right. So, this is very much bipartisan issue. Every almost every single person has brought up Richie Torres today. Yeah.

Lots of people lots of people like him. Um, that's great. How much time have you been spending a lot of time in Washington the last few months? Uh, I've been spending a little bit of time in Washington. Look, so much money was given by so many different groups in crypto that there are a lot of us on the ground.

So the people actually writing the language, working with the white house, that is extremely saturated. Where I have been spending a bit of my time is I'll meet with junior staffers. Uh you know, I don't have any face to lose. So I'm happy to sit down with, you know, the lowest of the low.

Everyone's actually really fantastic. But no, I'll go I'll go and I'll make sure that um everyone around a certain elected official uh knows at least what what are the uh the range of opinions that they should probably have.

I'm not going to say, hey, you should think this, but it's, you know, these are the arguments for one thing, these are the arguments against it. Is the crypto industry in somewhat of a what was the example you gave uh uh with with tech? It's like the dog that caught the car. Yeah.

Is that is that is that a good analogy here where that's the very negative take on on tech's relationship with DC right now is that like tech kind of came in, you know, made a lot of connections but now doesn't really know what to do. Yeah.

Look, I think uh you're seeing a lot of headlines saying things like Coinbase is trying to tank the stable coin regulation for market structure bill. I think it's it's of course going to be more nuanced than that. Um I think that there are groups that say, "Hey, we've won huge. We want to be able to go really hard.

let's get everything we asked for. And then there's others that want incremental wins. Um I will say that Saxs and Bo Hines, who is kind of his his deputy helping run many of the crypto operations out of the White House, they're incredible. Like Sax was a direct crypto investor. He was an LP in a bunch of crypto funds.

Founders that know him love him. And Bo Hines, not a lot of people knew him from before, but I mean he like in law school, he wrote, I believe, you know, one of his thesis on crypto regulation. He he he was a big investor. He worked with a lot of companies.

So they're they're really on the money and and yes maybe the the dog caught the car caught its own tail but I'm I'm actually extremely optimistic and then you know out of treasury bescent and and commerce lutnick you know both these guys are extremely pro Bitcoin pro crypto so what are you seeing in terms of US-based cryp are sort of crypto companies gen generally feeling more comfortable coming back to America are we seeing that now or are we seeing more offices being spun up or is it a little bit more like well we already did the work to set infrastructure internationally.

We we want to wait to see how this stuff plays out. Yeah, there there's a few things. So, the first is uh if companies don't come back, the founders are starting to. There were a class founders that wouldn't step foot in the US.

So, like Paulo, the CEO of Tether, he literally would not come to the US cuz he didn't know like maybe he'd just get seized at the airport. So, the fact that one they're coming back, they're being public about it, they're showing their face, they're meeting with people, that's big.

Other things that like you might not think of crypto conferences, companies would be scared to sponsor US-based crypto conferences. Wow. Because they're like, "Oh, if we sponsor this conference in New York, maybe we'll get the attention of the wrong regulator. That's over.

If you talk to the conference organizers, they'll be like, "Okay, no, our business is is back better than ever. " So, I think, you know, the next stage is offices open up, headquarters open up, and the market structure bill that hopefully will come later this year, um, will be a real catalyst for that.

And, uh, the other the other thing that's really important is a lot of trading activity has moved to the international offerings of these exchanges.

Um, when you look at spot volume, which is just, you know, if I buy Bitcoin directly versus perpetual futures volumes, which are derivative products, the majority of crypto trading volume is all in per uh are not really clear if they're legal in the US. Um, there's some guidance that will hopefully come from the CFTC.

They just did a request for information a few days ago uh earlier this month. Um, Coinbase has said that they plan to offer uh futures contracts with a settlement date very far in the future. So you could theoretically do like a 100red-year future contract.

It live rebalances and it fills the role of a per new regulation. It's illegal for futures contracts to not have settlement dates in the US. Sure.

Um so hopefully that all gets addressed and we can move the liquidity back to the US because every US-based crypto hedge fund has to set up offshore accounts to be able to trade their properties. Uh are you expecting any legislation around real world assets?

I mean stable coins in some way are taking uh a real world asset even if it's you know you know a number in a in a database uh and bringing them on chain. Uh what do what do you expect on that front over the next couple years? Yeah, a a lot of people get really excited about real world assets.

RWAS, it's a horrible name for something. I mean RWA in finance is another thing. Um, but uh I think that the way that the stable coin bill is written is that if something is directly redeemable as a receipt, you might be able to issue a tokenized version of it.

There's some specific language around, okay, if it's a, you know, a payment coin or a payment dollar issuer, um, these are the reserve requirements, but you could extrapolate that and issue smart. Interesting. Interesting.

Um, most of the time when people talk about real world assets, they they talk about it in the lens of either a we want to bring more liquidity to an asset class or we want to be able to use something as collateral.

being used as a sense if I was tokenize a share of you know if we start a company tomorrow we raise a 10 at 50 round and I want to tokenize that and say oh I want this to trade at 50 there's no one there's no buyer for that you need a buyer of last resort right no and that's the interesting thing I think the lending aspect is fascinating but ill liquidity is such a feature of private markets and everybody's realized that at this point right you don't want a company to be you a company will be on chain they they have a bad you know news cycle then suddenly it's trading at like you know n you know 90% less yeah totally and I think um there's some companies that I imagine we'll see get tokenized in some form maybe it's out of trust in Sweden or sorry Switzerland or maybe you know UAE or maybe even in the US um and and the ones to expect are did you see that Yahoo Finance has uh secondaries tickers no yeah yeah they have charts now where they show where secondary transactions are reported to have traded we need to add that we Uh well, this has been fantastic.

Thanks so much for stopping by, man. It's great to see you. Come on the show again. Yeah. Yeah, we'll have to have you back for a deep dive crypto day. Yeah, we're doing crypto day. Uh can we bring in case Ununice uh when we have a second? How are you doing, Christian? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's bring you in next if you don't mind waiting 10 minutes. Thank you so much for stopping by. I know you have a crazy schedule, so we really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. And congratulations on this on all the success. First off, uh would you mind introducing yourself for those who might not be?

I'm a short man. Uh yeah, whatever works. Some people are just doing this. Whatever whatever is best for you. I am clearly not. Uh so my name is Casser Ununis. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Applied Intuition, late stage company based in Silicon Valley. Um we do vehicle intelligence broadly speaking.

Let me explain a little bit of what that is. Sometimes people think we only do autonomy, but uh as I was just talking on stage at Hill Valley, like imagine you work on a mine and there's these, you know, giant dirt movers that move like, you know, uh the size of a house. You're mining operator.

You go up to it, you know, that machine should be intelligent enough to understand who you are, what you're trying to do as you get, you talk to it. There's this teaming concept. So we think about AI as like on, you know, in your screen, literally on your phone, maybe you talk in chat box.

So we we're the next kind of generation of AI which is this AI that's all around you. Y but specifically on moving machines, cars, trucks, tanks, planes and that human AI teaming that's the company. Can you talk about the path to full autonomy and what AI means in the context of just I guess vehicles broadly?

We've seen operation full autonomy even the right thing to be aiming for when teaming is clearly like you know like the the more natural way to collaborate.

So within vehicle intelligence a broad umbrella there sub subgroup is autonomy and within autonomy you can break that up into kind of two subgroups in itself uh just for simplification because you guys are not autonomy engineers right you're okay so all right so broadcasters all right we we won't we won't bust out any uh any software tests for you but most of the audience they're they're much better than we are so please don't dumb it down for us not them exactly exactly so so uh instead of talking about like society of automotive engineers like autonomy levels.

Just think about autonomy as is there a person in the driver's seat or not? The Whimo, there's nobody in the driver seat. In a Tesla, there's somebody in their driver's seat. And that rough analogy applies all the way to tanks, to planes, to what to drones, whatever.

Is there a human sitting there, a human not sitting there? So in the human sitting there, that's the assistance version. And really in the in the war fighter example, that can be one to many machines. Sure. Right. It's collaborative autonomy. It's multiple multi mode, right?

in the there's no human in the Whimo example, then it's a pure level four autonomous system and and that's the robo taxi. Both those things exist. So then the question is, well, why would you use one versus the other? Uh the Whimo version, broadly speaking, is way more expensive.

Tesla is already a functioning business model. You can go buy a production Tesla that has FSD and it works pretty damn well and it's profitable. Yeah. And it's profitable. Whimo hasn't figured that out and and it will. And just the nature of the actual machine, it's more expensive.

The compute is way more expensive, the sensors are more, the the entire operations are more expensive. But what you get is you get that last 5% Yep. of you know scenarios that Whimo will take care of that the Tesla requires your intervention cuz I can't do this.

And so then you can take that into other domains like let's say construction to get that last 5%. It's generally not possible right now because in those domains they're more let's say open. Yep. something. Take a fighter jet and you have to make a lethal decision.

That's where teaming becomes really important because the beauty of a car is a car can just stop, right? It's not like trans it's not like moving something that's very and could be damaging. Um how uh how much but to answer the question autonomy is here. Mhm.

It is here and it's just like a lot of times people ask us like oh when is self-driving going to be a thing it exists totally it's just now it's like mobile phones like when did mobile phones happen to ask that simple question between the 80s and 2007 when we had the iPhone moment but even then like the iPhone it's not like the everyone got no it was really expensive it took a long time even then the iPhone actually isn't the thing that consumers care about they care about the care about Uber and like if you try to think about like an Instagram like you can't even think about Instagram on an iPhone but the first iPhone, by the way, no app store, no frontfacing camera.

So, you couldn't even there's no such thing as Instagram, no selfies. So, the the the macro point is autonomy is the spectrum. So, you should think about autonomy as like it's going to come in drips and it's going to be it's unevenly like they the old Peter Teal saying technology is unevenly distributed.

How much has your vision