Artemis II Recap, Work vs Leisure, AI Backlash | Krste Asanović, Peter Diamandis, Balachandar Ramamurthy

(00:44) - Artemis II Recap (36:08) - Work vs Leisure (39:20) - Altman's House Attacked (44:11) - We Can't Stop China's AI (01:00:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:11:41) - Balachandar Ramamurthy, CEO of Critical Loop and former SpaceX engineer, discusses his transition from aerospace to energy, emphasizing the need for reliable, cost-effective power solutions. He highlights Critical Loop's approach of deploying energy storage and flexible generation at the grid's edge to reduce long wait times for industrial power access. Additionally, he mentions the company's recent $26 million funding round led by Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover. (01:22:12) - Krste Asanović, a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and co-founder of SiFive, discusses the evolution of SiFive since its 2015 inception, highlighting its recent $400 million Series G funding round led by Atreides Management with participation from NVIDIA. He explains the company's shift from custom silicon to providing RISC-V IP designs, emphasizing the growing demand for high-performance CPUs in data centers to support AI workloads. Asanović also notes the collaborative nature of their work with customers, tailoring CPU designs to specific needs, and discusses the technical and business challenges in developing high-performance processors, including power efficiency and the use of advanced process nodes. (01:31:50) - Peter Diamandis is a Greek-American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur, best known as the founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which has launched over $600 million in competitions driving more than $10 billion in research and development across various fields. He discusses the rapid progression of technology, emphasizing the importance of viewing advancements like AI as opportunities rather than threats, and envisions a future of abundance where every individual has access to essential resources. He also reflects on his long-standing relationship with Elon Musk, highlighting Musk's consistent delivery on ambitious visions and their shared commitment to solving global challenges through innovation. (02:02:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, April 13th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Alcatraz Dome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. Welcome to the show. Wild, wild weekend. Some really great white pilling stuff, some very disappointing news. We'll go through it all. We have a great show for you lined up. We have to hop work on some special projects, so bit of a shorter show, but we still have three great guests joining us. One from Critical Loop, the next from Sci5, and then Peter Diamandis is joining to discuss everything. AI, technology, life extension.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  Abundance.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  He goes all over the place. Abundance. Yeah, he's the original, the OG Abundance, Abundance Maxer. Well, I read a bunch of different pieces this weekend. Tried to sort of tie them together into the newsletter today, but thought we could kind of go all over the place, starting with what we talked about a little bit on Friday was the Artemis 2 mission. It was scheduled to land at 5:07 PM Pacific time, and it landed exactly at 5:07 PM Pacific time, like within the exact minute. Everyone was joking like, whoever's in charge of this should be in charge of Uber Eats delivery times or something like that, or DoorDash delivery times, because it was remarkably accurate. I think they predicted it like days or maybe since the beginning of the mission. Like, everything was timed out perfectly.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you can like predict these things, right?

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is physics. But still, I mean.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  We know, you know, when the next solar eclipse will be for the next 10,000.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, 10,000 years. But I don't know, it still feels remarkable that there is no, that there's like no flexibility.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  Was that predicted pre-takeoff?

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, right? I don't know. We should, we should dig.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Or was that like updated after, after they had exited?

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, because you'd think there'd be something about like, oh, like this engine fired a little bit too much or a little bit, so we had to make a small adjustment. I don't know. We'll have to, we'll have to figure it out. Anyway, the reactions were really, really positive. Elon Musk said, "Welcome home to the NASA astronauts. Welcome home, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy. The Artemis 2 astronauts have splashed down at 8:07 PM ET, bringing, bringing their historic. 10 day mission around the moon to an end. I watched it live and it was, uh, yeah, it was remarkable moment. I mean, we haven't done this, uh, in my lifetime. We haven't done this in a very long time. So, uh, Reid Wiseman says, uh, thank you, Elon Musk. Uh, the four of us glimpsed the red hues of Mars far in the distance as the sun slipped behind the moon.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  And there was zero doubt in our minds that the creative genius of our greatest minds will have us there very soon. Let's go. And so, uh, I, I really like this. It's great. No, no, no. It, it is remarkable. And, uh, uh, this was inspiring for a few different reasons because I felt like, you know, people were not voicing skepticism publicly beforehand. Like you don't want to jinx it. And also you don't want to be negative about anything and it makes sense.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  But the space people we talked to off air ahead of time were extremely nervous.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Not, not even just the space. There were like people in every, every single person had a different take on like, oh, this is risky. This is, this is aggressive. Uh, this has moved very quickly. The government hasn't done something like this in a long time. And so, you know, can America pull this off? Like America, there's been a lot of worry about the government being able to do things effectively. Uh, like, and like all government, like many government projects, there had been delays and cost overruns. Uh, the country, uh, has been extremely divided. Everyone knows this. And this mission in particular required Americans, uh, from all different backgrounds and political persuasions to come together to work on a common goal. Like, um, and we saw some of this, we can talk about it later, but,

• 3:44John Coogan?

  uh, even, even NASA administrator Jared Isaacman had been through his own back and forth on the way to getting confirmation. And so he was like sort of new on the job, even relative to this mission, which of course, uh, has been in the works for years. And so, there were, there were a lot of different things. There's also the pressure from the private space industry, you know, can the SLS work in this case? Uh, well, everything did and it was very, very good. Uh, there were lots of things that could go wrong. Even, even the Apple executives seemed to be a little bit, uh, sort of nervous about this. There's a, there's a post in here that we-

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  I would love to know how they test that parachute system.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  I think they launched it off of a plane or something. I don't know. How do they?

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm sure there's a good answer, but.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you have to imagine that it's three parachutes because it can probably survive with just two.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  And there's actually two stages of parachutes. So there's one set and then these break away and then there's a new set of parachutes. Once the atmosphere gets thicker, I believe, but look at that. It opens up perfectly. And what an inspiring image. Look at that. Yeah, it was really cool. So Jaws over at Apple said, "Welcome home to the Artemis 2 crew. Honored that NASA astronauts brought iPhone to space with them." Not the iPhone, not a couple of iPhones, iPhone. This is in the official Apple brand. You don't say the iPhone. You say iPhone. But they brought iPhone to space with them. One small step for iPhone, one giant leap for space. And so NASA posted this on April 4th, said, "This view just hits different."

• 5:16John Coogan?

  They took a moment to look back at Earth as they continued deep into space toward the moon. And they showed photos, basically selfies, taken with the iPhone or with iPhone, I guess, of the Earth. And then Tim Cook waited until they landed safely. Congratulations to Artemis 2 on a successful mission. You captured the wonders of space and our planet beautifully, taking iPhone photography to new heights. And we're grateful you shared it with the world. Your work continues to inspire us all to think different. Welcome home. And so Aaron pointed out, to the tune of 3 million views, "Notice that Apple didn't comment on the iPhone pictures from Artemis 2 until the crew safely landed." So, you know, everyone was like, you know, on the edge of their seats,

• 5:58John Coogan?

  hoping for the good outcome. And that's exactly what happens. There was also, it was very, very high stakes, but it was also in many ways, America at its best. Even the never ending culture war took a backseat to this. There was this interesting back and forth between Jared Isaacman and someone who is not a fan of, I guess they deleted the post, but the Artemis 2 crew was listening to Pink Pony Club by Chapel Rohn. And that didn't align with someone's politics. And so they said like, "This is ridiculous. Why, how can they, how can they possibly listen?"

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Because like the last five bands that have come up on the show, it sounds like a made up band.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Chapel Rohn? Oh, she's big.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  But Jared Isaacman was like, hey, like, let's cool it with the political rhetoric. It's not my choice in music, but the astronauts rode a controlled explosion into space on a journey farther away from Earth than any human before, with everything around them trying to kill them. That's a crazy way to put it, but it's true. They can listen to whatever song they want. And I thought that that was a really, really, really important moment when everyone is so divided. And so the job is very much not finished. Artemis III, which aims to land on the moon in 2028, will be a much bigger challenge. And there's some extra context today in the Wall Street Journal. And we can talk about the difference between Artemis II and Artemis III and sort of where this

• 7:24John Coogan?

  is going. So the Journal writes, Micah Maidenberg says, Artemis II was a blockbuster. Landing on the moon will be a lot harder. And so flying around the moon may end up being the easy part for NASA's Artemis program. This month Artemis, this month's Artemis II flight captivated people around the world as the agency pulled off the deepest human spaceflight ever recorded. And the first crewed mission to the moon since 1970s. Really, so, so long ago. NASA and its contractors must now get through a series of sprints that would culminate in astronauts landing on the lunar surface in 2028. President Trump outlined that expectation in an executive order he signed last year. The path to the lunar surface is open, but

• 8:06John Coogan?

  the work ahead is greater than the work behind us, said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Castria at a briefing Friday after Artemis II crew vehicle splashed down. So Artemis III, planned for next year, will focus on docking the Orion spacecraft with lunar landers in low Earth orbit, a precursor to a planned landing on the moon. Some current and former NASA spaceflight officials are skeptical that a 2028 landing will be possible, given the technical and operational milestones the agency and companies involved need to overcome. Among the challenges. Showing one or both of the moon landers that SpaceX and Blue Origin have been developing

• 8:47John Coogan?

  can safely transport astronauts and preparing new spacesuits made by Axiom Space. ULA needs to develop upper stages for NASA's SLS rocket. Space missions often take

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  They gotta do, they gotta do logos all over the spacesuit.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  They should.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  Private companies should be able to help fund the mission.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  They really, they really should. And there's, there's another story in the journal here about that, that viral video of the jar of Nutella that ended up floating on Artemis 2. So I, I was convinced this was like VFX or AI when we pulled it up. Apparently it's real. We can dig into a little bit of like how this actually happened. Ben Cohen has the story in the Wall Street Journal. As millions of people all over the world watched Artemis, the Artemis 2 lunar flyby this week, there were minutes from seeing, they were minutes from seeing astronauts travel the furthest distance ever from Earth when they were suddenly captivated by another majestic sight. It floated through the spacecraft, tumbled right past an astronaut's head and drifted

• 9:45John Coogan?

  across NASA's live stream, leaving roughly 252,000 miles away with the same question. Wait, was that a jar of Nutella? Back on this planet, in a precipice New Jersey conference room, executives at the brand's parent company were taking their seats on Monday for their 2:00 PM Operations Committee meeting, oblivious to the flying object that had appeared far, far away at 1:52 PM. Their meeting was quickly interrupted by a message in the Microsoft Teams chat, flagging that Nutella was in outer space. As it turns out, the people who spread Nutella to every corner of the Earth were more surprised than anyone to see it near the moon. They only found out about the most famous jar of gooey, gooey stuff in the galaxy when they followed a link in the chat to a social media post.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Dang, how much did Nutella pay for this product placement? And we saw that post and we had the same question. So Nutella says zero, they did not pay for this. This is not product placement, but it is remarkable. They didn't know their chocolate hazelnut concoction was a bored Orion. They didn't even know that the astronauts took it with them. And it's still weird to me that astronauts can just bring random stuff with them, but I guess it's just a bus at the end of the day. You can put whatever you want on it.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember your first time trying Nutella?

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe, not really. I'm not that big of a Nutella guy.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  For me, it felt like the first day of the rest of my life.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Really? You're a big Nutella fan?

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Not really anymore, but as a kid discovering that, it was that it was like a peanut butter like thing that was just on an entirely different level.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  It was.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  It is, it is a weird.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  It was magic.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Isn't it? What is it? A condiment technically? What is it?

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  A spread?

• 11:22John Coogan?

  A spread? Is that a thing?

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  It can be a lot of things.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  But, but it's always, it's always sort of bothers me that it sort of larps as chocolate. Like it looks like chocolate, but it's like hazelnut technically, which I think is like sort of a betrayal. I don't know. Uh, sound off in the chat if you have strong opinions about Nutella. Uh, David says Nutella is like crack for kids. Uh, and Jordy is being paid by the Nutella Corporation. Uh, no, we are not sponsored by Nutella.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  I wish. We'd have a big jar of it right here.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  So it's a chocolate hazelnut concoction.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it has, it has, um.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, hazelnut in it, but it has chocolate in it as well. Uh, so Nutella, the corporation did not know that Nutella, the hazelnut concoction was aboard Orion. They still don't know which astronaut brought it.

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  You just know that, that for the next mission, Red Bull will pay any price to have cans of Red Bull floating around the cabin.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Somehow, I feel like the NASA astronauts' tax records will be deeply inspected to see that they're not selling ad slots out the back.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  We need some iPads floating by with like B2B sass.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  That'd be good. Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  That'd be sick.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, the, the, even, even the phone code could be monetized. There's some certain, aren't there some venture capital firms that just have dates as?

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  Seven, uh, seven, seven, six.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Seven, seven, six. It's like, that's the code that gets you thinking. I don't know. Anything can be sold, I'm sure. Uh, they still don't know which astronaut brought it. And like us, they weren't even sure the video was real when they watched the jar hurdle across their screens at exactly the right angle for the label to spin into focus. It all looked too perfect. Uh, I couldn't have filmed it any better if I tried. Said Chad Stubbs, who is their chief marketing officer. What a great name for a CMO of Faro, North America, who owns Nutella. Uh, but once he reviewed the NASA footage and saw a levitating tub of Nutella, he knew that a marketing opportunity had landed in his lap and that he was no longer sitting in his most boring meeting of the week. It was a lot more interesting than talking about shipping details.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  And so from the conference room, they started a Teams group to discuss the logistics of their improbable operation. They called it Nutella Mission Control. Before, most Americans had never seen the original video. They posted a slow motion clip set to the iconic theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The tagline Nutella is out of this world. And I wonder, I wonder if they could just rip that on Instagram using like the integrated music functionality? Or if they had to like quickly license that? Because getting like an official theme from a Hollywood film like 2001: A Space Odyssey is, it's definitely within budget for something like this, but it's usually a back and forth with some emails. But maybe as a, as a large marketing team, they had everything like wired up already.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Anyway, for as long as humans have been leaving this world, they have been taking products along for the ride. But in this age, when every inch of the planet is sponsored, space has become the most prestigious real estate and marketing, because it's the only place where marketing is banned. NASA has a strict policy against promoting or endorsing commercial products. And Tyler's booing. And enforces it so aggressively that not naming brands might as well be part of basic training for astronauts. Unlike college athletes, they can't get paid for their name, image and likeness. As long as they're employed by NASA, they won't be showing for Nutella.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not saying the astronauts should be able to do it independently. I'm just saying that NASA should try to, try to build out a multi-billion dollar.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  You gotta go straight to the top. You gotta go straight to the government.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  And, and, and say, hey, you know, Lockheed showing up with some stuff. SpaceX is contributing. Axiom Space is doing the, the space suits. Blue Origin's doing a moon lander. Why not Nutella chipping in as well? At least, at least paying for part of it. I don't know.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  It would just be extremely American.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  It would be extremely American to make the Orion capsule look like.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was saying. Pay-per-view and ad, you gotta have a pay-per-view.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, pay-per-view for sure.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  You can watch the stream when they're just kind of hanging out, traveling. But for the, anything like a landing, splashdown, takeoff.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's which is pay-per-view mode.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  I think they gotta sell the windshield. They gotta sell the windshield. When you're taking photos of Earth, you gotta just tie it. You gotta see tide across the windshield. It's like, oh, seeing the blue marble from this distance is amazing.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Reminds me, I have some laundry to do.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  And I kinda have to put the camera in between the I and the D.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  Podcast ads over during the stream too.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  There is a lot of dead air.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Just letting you guys know, in T minus 30 minutes, we'll be coming around the moon.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  And this, uh, this segment, this moon passing, is brought to you by Athletic Greens.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Yep. Great. Okay, so, as long as they're employed by NASA, they won't be shilling for Nutella. When one Artemis 2 crew member let slip in a press conference that he was bringing an iPhone to get mesmerizing photos of Earth, he caught himself. He said, "I don't think I can actually say that as a government employee," Reid Wiseman said. "We have small, highly powerful computing devices that we'll take with us, uh, with outstanding cameras." And so, yeah, uh, what is an iPhone if not just a small, highly powerful computing device with outstanding camera? Uh, while in the cosmos, they also found other purposes for those powerful computing devices. One picture shared by NASA showed Jeremy Hansen with

• 16:54John Coogan?

  an electric shaver in one hand and his iPhone in the other because he was using it as a mirror. And that wasn't even the most amazing part of the shot. Anyone who looked closely would have spotted another, another product in the corner, a container of Jif peanut butter. Now, what's interesting is that the, the government does have, uh, at least with peanut butter, uh, are you familiar with NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Tech, Techniques or Technology or something? NIST? Uh, so NIST, uh, is like our official weights and measures. Like, they keep like the canonical, like, what is the one pound? What is one gram? They, and they have a whole bunch of standards for all sorts of different things, and then different companies can, uh, can like agree on, okay, well, we are both, you know, saving to a certain standard.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Reinventing and defining the gram.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, but all sorts of things. And one of the things that NIST like has is peanut butter, reference peanut butter. So if you are doing some sort of lab experiment and you need to say that you are testing this product when it comes into contact with peanut butter, you can go to the government and get the most standard, the official peanut butter.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Official peanut butter.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Because otherwise, somebody might say, well, did you use Jif or did you use Skippy? Or did you use something else? And this way you can just say one thing. And so there is a world where the government would say, okay, don't bring Jif peanut butter, bring NIST peanut butter. But I don't know. But anyway, Jif got another shout out in here, although I can't see it in this image. But to find out, to find out more about space oddities, this journalist at the Wall Street Journal said he called Robert Perlman, who obsessively tracks them as the editor of Collect Space. He told me something curious about outer space. The deeply ordinary parts of NASA missions resonate back home as much as the extraordinary. We

• 18:44John Coogan?

  remember the astronauts who flew around the moon and the flying Nutella. It makes us feel closer to the humans who have never been further away. After all, most of us will never see the dark side of the moon. Disagree. And I think we're gonna have Peter Diamandis.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Looks like a Coachella set.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  It does look like they're twisted knobs or something. What are they, what are they doing there? Okay. Oh, they're checking the watches. Okay.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Wrist check?

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Wrist check.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Artemis two wrist check?

• 19:12John Coogan?

  I mean, there was, there's been a knockout, drag out fight between all the watchmakers to make sure that their watches are the ones on the wrists of the astronauts, going back to the original Omega Speedmaster Moon Watch Edition, that one. And was it gonna be a Rolex? It wound up being an Omega. That was a big moment. So, in fact, this particular jar of Nutella was just one of the 60 million sold in America over the past year. When Nutella was invented, nobody could have imagined that it would one day be in space. Nobody had ever been to space. During a post-war cocoa shortage in the 1940s, an Italian pastry chef named Pietro Ferrero had the genius idea to combine the scarce resource with an ingredient his town had in abundance.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Hazel nuts.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was engineered into a spreadable paste in the 1950s and officially launched as Nutella in 1964. So they had a shortage of chocolate of cocoa and so they they were cutting it. They were cutting the brick with hazelnuts and it was sort of a Jevons paradox situation where where by dropping the cost of a spreadable chocolate substance, consumption skyrocketed. It's good news. It's the ultimate white belt. Five years later, NASA launched Apollo 11. Even then, one product was already synonymous with the wonder of spaceflight. Do you know what we're talking about? Can you take a guess? Uh. What is the main product that was like famously designed for astronauts in space? Is it the ice cream?

• 20:41John Coogan?

  No, no, that that's close. The freeze dried ice cream is up there. Whipped cream? No, what? Whipped cream? No. Tang? And no one knows Tang? You don't know the story of Tang? I think that's before our time, John. There's Tang. And then there's also, you know, those super bouncy balls? Those super bouncy balls? They're, I don't know how apocryphal that is, but there's always been this story, at least when I was a kid, it was introduced to me that those super bouncy balls were designed as rocket fuel or something like that. And and that the experiment went wrong and like, this was all they could come up with. Fake news. Probably fake news. But as as an eight year old, like, I was like, this is lore. This is peak. This is peak lore. This is, this is peak lore. So let's talk about Tang. Cinema.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  The beverage was struggling. Tang, which is sort of like a Gatorade, it's a, it's like an orange, orange juice type liquid, but it comes in a powder. You mix it. It's actually the early AG1. It's early AG1. Or Element? Yeah, or Element. The beverage was struggling until NASA realized it could mask the metallic taste of water on board. So tap water on in space, apparently a nightmare. Got to get Aurora up there. That's the next move. There we go. And every kid who wanted to be an astronaut instantly wanted the neon orange powder. I was one of them. I remember learning about Tang and being like, this is cool. A half a century later, the drink that was once a flop would crack one billion of annual revenue. Let's go. 50 year overnight success. Yes.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  To this day, brands dream about making it to space because they know the most valuable marketing is the kind that isn't really marketing and can't actually be valued. And there's been a whole, there's been a whole trend on YouTube of YouTubers taking products and putting them on weather balloons and driving the, and flying the weather balloons up technically past the Karman line with a GoPro and they take the footage down. And no one really counts that, but it still like gives you a little bit of the aura of space. It's not the same as like a national.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Calculate how many weather balloons we would need to attach to you to take you to space.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  I think, I think that's been done. I think Red Bull did that with.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  With Felix?

• 22:47John Coogan?

  Felix Baumgartner. Is that his name?

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  He just rode weather balloons up?

• 22:51John Coogan?

  Yes, that was weather balloons. That was not rocket.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was like a high altitude plane.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  No, no, no. The whole thing was weather balloon all the way up. When he gets to the top, he jumps out of the capsule and then he just like spins on the way down. It's one of the craziest things. That's amazing marketing stuff. I talked to the, the head of marketing at Red Bull who was behind that and the numbers, like the ROI, that it might be the highest ROI marketing campaign in history. Like it was truly like remarkably affordable for what, for how massive that campaign was. So speaking of similar space campaigns, for this trip, the astronauts wore Omega Speedmaster X33 watches and brought cameras made by Nikon and GoPro in addition to their iPhones, which we talked about in an earlier essay that Brandon

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Guerrel wrote for the newsletter, tbpn.com. While onboard, Christina Koch even asked mission control.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  This is extremely disappointing. ChatGPT says, I would need dozens of large weather balloons.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  But look up the Felix Baumgartner thing because that was.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  That could have had some type of, like, like.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  I don't think it had a rocket on it or something, but it also might not have gone that high. Like it went higher than anyone had ever done that jump, but it might not have gone all the way to like the Karman line or all the way to space. Right. But it went really high and it was very impressive. So while onboard, Christina even asked mission control for help finding something essential. Her favorite Honest Hand Lotion. Honest? That's Jessica Alba's brand? Interesting.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  The honest company.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Got some honest company, uh, uh, organic media there. As he watched the Artemis two mission, Pearlman waited for the moment when that a random product popped up. He knew it would happen. He didn't know when or what it would be. Nutella, he told me, wouldn't have been at the top of my list. As it happens, the product was at the top of his list of another type of chocolate, M and M's. In microgravity, even the men and women on NASA missions can't resist the opportunity to gobble up floating dots. Astronauts love becoming human Pac Men. On this mission, they had access to 189 menu options, five different types of hot sauce, precisely 43 cups of coffee, and one crew preference that NASA simply calls chocolate spread.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Hours after that chocolate spread bobbled through the cabin, the Artemis two crew disappeared behind the moon and briefly lost contact with society. When their signal returned, Christina's voice crackled back to Houston with a message for humanity. "We will visit again," the astronauts said. "We will construct science outposts. We will drive rovers. We will do radio astronomy. We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other." And at least one of them would choose Nutella. Uh, that's a funny story. Anyway, back to what's going to happen in Artemis three. Space missions often take years to come together as teams of engineers stitch together complex machinery and software

• 25:44John Coogan?

  that must be able to deliver in harsh conditions, creating systems that keep astronauts safe adds to the pressure. NASA and its contractors have struggled with delays during Artemis program. The first Artemis mission missed several earlier launch date goals and the agency ran into problems fueling the SLS rocket for the mission before starting it in late 2022. Questions about the Orion spacecraft's heat shield contributed to delays for Artemis two, with officials pushing off the expected launch date twice in 2024 alone. And I remember there was a lot of nervousness about the heat shield. And then when it came back, there was a, a picture.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  What a good idea from PRA.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  What we got?

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Artemis two Nutella, Artemis three GLP one. How, how much would one of the, the GLP one manufacturers pay to have one of them? One of the?

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  That could potentially fund the whole mission.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  I feel like if you're, don't astronauts have to be in like peak physical condition? I feel like if they're, if they're not natty, it's not really, it's a, you know.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  You want, I don't want my astronauts to be natty. You want them optimized.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  I guess.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  There's no anti doping organization in space, John.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  I suppose, I suppose, but you, you want, you want the astronauts to be like the pinnacle of, of, you know, what, what humans can achieve. You know, we talk about Johnny Kim, the, the Navy SEAL turned doctor turned astronaut, you know, you want, you want to see what's possible when someone just puts all of their effort for years and years towards like achieving greatness, you know, not, not just, not just clicking order online. Anyway, NASA and its, and its contractors have struggled with delays. We talked about this. Everything starts with the premise that NASA should not do anything that's unsafe, but there's no question that we need to move faster, said Senator Jerry Moran, chairman of a subcommittee that set

• 27:34John Coogan?

  funding levels for the agency. So there's these trade offs here. Keeping the next Artemis mission on schedule will be a major test for Jared Isaacman, former guest of the show, who's aiming to ensure the agency returns an American crew to the lunar surface before China while starting to build a permanent base there. Isaacman in February rolled out new plans to accelerate the return of US astronauts to the moon's surface. Officials said the approach resembles the Apollo program in the 1960s. Officials in the 1960s, when a stepping stone approach built up confidence in the systems needed for constructing the historic Apollo 11 landing in 1969. Under the revised plan, Artemis III will no longer feature a landing on the moon as the agency had previously hoped. The agency also aims

• 28:19John Coogan?

  to move faster with the SLS rockets, in part by jettisoning an upgrade to the vehicle that had been in the works. We're not going to turn every rocket into a work of art. We're going to increase launch rate. We're going to do it in a logical evolutionary way, Isaacman said in February. And this ties to his experience, you know, riding aboard SpaceX and building a company with Shift 4. And you can imagine that he is pretty, pretty in favor of like iterative design. And so when you see something like Artemis 2. Very successful. Uh, the, the inclination should be run it back immediately and, and, and start adding little, little tweaks constantly.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  So the Artemis, the Artemis three mission next year is supposed to help set up NASA and its contractor to attempt one or more visits to the moon in 2028. So that's Artemis four and five. NASA's inspector general said in a recent report that both SpaceX and Blue Origin have run into delays developing spacecraft for Artemis missions. Each company has been working on in space transfers of super cold propellants to power lunar flights, fueling operations that are still largely unproven. So that is a very, very complex and new technology that we are, that the entire space community is clearly working on. The in, the, the in space refueling is sort of critical to actually getting to the moon in a meaningful way, not just sort of ripping it up there and then figuring out how to get back and just blasting back.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Um, to, to set up a full lunar economy, you need to be doing tons and tons of refueling operations, which are obviously incredibly complex. Uh, a NASA safety panel separately raised questions about how quickly SpaceX's human lander, based on its starship vehicle, would be ready. A landing operation of astronauts with the starship lander within the next few years appears daunting and to the panel, probably not achievable, the group said in a report released earlier this year. The companies have key tests coming up, uh, that will inform their lunar work in vehicles. SpaceX next month plans to launch an upgraded version of its starship rocket while Blue Origin is working towards launching a cargo lander to the moon with its new Glenn rocket. So with, all of this has like the backdrop of the SpaceX IPO.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  And you have to imagine, um, that even if it was incredibly cost intensive, we're in this weird dynamic with SpaceX where the capex requirements of something like this and, and, you know, sending a rocket to the moon are probably less than Colossus V or some crazy data center. And so you could be in this interesting situation where, uh, where Elon is incentivized to, to move a lot faster, probably not with humans onboard, but get even just a basic Optimus robot up there, get a lunar lander up there, just continue to deliver payloads because it just shows so many more milestones. And as you go public, it's, it'd be, I think it becomes more difficult to, uh, to stay focused on this like 30 year. Yeah, part of, part of like.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  The value of actually sending humans to space is entirely like kind of marketing and just to prove that it's possible.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Like you would think that you would hope that a lot of this is

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  Like it's just very cool.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  It's very inspiring.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  I feel like it's important. Uh, but at the same time, you would think that NASA should just be optimizing for how, how do we get as much mass as possible?

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  Up to the, you know, whether, whether it's space or the moon, uh, et cetera. Uh, and just basically leaning a lot more into drones.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  And, and going more for volume versus these sort of like high risk, high cost.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. At the same time, I mean, uh, we, we'll, we'll see where the humanoid robots go, but uh, there is no, there's no current substitute for the versatility of having a human astronaut in a space suit there being able to, I mean, we talked to, uh, the, the folks from Fly or Fly and they were sort of digging up moon dust and analyzing it. Uh, things open up when you can get a guy out there with a jackhammer, right? You gotta just get a human to be able to, you know, do so many more, uh, like flexible build outs and move equipment around. Like clearly there's, there's current leverage that you get from having a, a human there, uh, at least for the time being, although you can do a lot with, with drones and robots.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Well, um, so let's, uh, let's, there are a few more reactions to the Artemis landing. Uh, Trung Phan had, uh, posted, did that go away? Um, what else is here? Um, Jared Isaacman dropped out. There's a little bit of a story about Jared Isaacman because he was personally on scene for the splashdown of the Artemis two crew. Eric Doherty has a, a video here of them, uh, talking to the astronauts. Uh, and there's a little bit of history on him. Uh, Jared Isaacman dropped out of high school at 16 and started a company in his parents' basement with $10,000 his grandfather gave him. Tonight he's on the deck of a Navy ship, wait, waiting to welcome four astronauts home from the moon. That basement company is now shift four payments.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  It processes 200 billion a year in credit card transactions, about a third of all restaurants, hotels and casinos in the U.S. Went public in 2020. He ran it.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  And 100% of, of firearms retailers.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  Probably, yeah. Yeah, he's carved that out perfectly. He also co-founded Draken International, which ran a fleet of over 100 retired fighter jets, whose entire job was playing the enemy in combat training for US Air Force and NATO pilots. He sold it to Blackstone for over $100 million. He has over 8,000 hours in the cockpit and can fly more than a dozen types of military jets. He personally owns a MiG-29, a Russian fighter jet that tops 1,500 miles per hour, which he bought from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's the only one in private American hands. In 2009, he flew around the entire planet in a small Cessna jet in 61 hours and 51 minutes, a world record. I didn't realize

• 34:09John Coogan?

  he held the world record for, what is that, transatlantic, transcontinental? I don't know, circling the globe. In 2021, he paid for and commanded Inspiration 4, the first all civilian spaceflight, four people with no astronaut training, three days orbiting the Earth, 250 million raised for St. Jude's Research Hospital. Then in 2024, he went back up on Polaris Dawn and floated outside the spacecraft. I didn't realize he'd been to space twice. I thought he'd only been once. That's crazy. He ran it back, held on to by a 12-foot cable in the first spacewalk ever done by someone outside of the government space agency. That same flight reached 870 miles above Earth, further than ever any

• 34:51John Coogan?

  human had been since the Apollo crew in 1972. And so there's some more, there's some more facts about Jared Heisman there. But I had a wild proposal, which was to make April 10th a national holiday, celebrating Artemis II. Is this the biggest achievement NASA has ever done? No, not compared to landing on the moon, but I think it symbolizes a very important turn in, in our capacity as a country to do bold and impressive things. And there are currently no federal holidays in April, and I think people would enjoy it. And it's hard to think of anything with broader support than this mission. There are so many interesting projects happening, a lot of them, even electric cars have pushed

• 35:34John Coogan?

  back from different people. And there's like so many things that are controversial. and this was one story that I just saw continually cut through the noise and see

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, three day weekends have not been very controversial.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Because nobody sees a three day weekend on the horizon and is, you know, slamming their

• 35:53John Coogan?

  No.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  computer into their desk.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Not at all. And so I was thinking back to the benefits of more federal holidays, more national holidays, and I was reminded of what we talked about last week regarding Alex Tabarrok's piece in marginal revolution. So he compared improvements in productivity that came during the industrial revolution to expected improvements in productivity from the AI revolution. And so if you look back between 1870 and today, the hours of work in the United States fell by about 40%. Americans used to work 3,000 hours per year,

• 36:37John Coogan?

  and now they work about 1,800 hours per year. And so what wound up happening? Hours fell, but employment did not increase. And so we were literally were doing more with less because of productivity increases. And so he frames this, you know, around AI. He says, "So if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and Wonderland boils down to distribution. It's not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that proposition is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover,

• 37:21John Coogan?

  we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example." And I thought April 10th would be an interesting place to start. And so it is still too early. I mean, Tyler, you were talking about like Is AI causing unemployment? There's been a lot of hiring freezes, a lot of AI tool deployment, but we're not really seeing replacement yet.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  It seems hard on a macro level to really definitively say that AI is causing a huge effect on the labor market.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, but...

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  The only thing that seems definitive is that companies are willing to lay off people to help fund their AI build outs, right?

• 38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  And you could also argue that those people probably were on the chopping block anyways.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  But so far, that's been...

• 38:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  That's been happening.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  And so, it is still a little early to net out all the effects of, is this going to be more Jevons paradox type of fact where the competitive dynamic is that you have humans and AI at your disposal, you have a token budget and a human capital budget, and I have a human capital budget and a token budget, and in order to actually compete and win, we want to deploy both as aggressively as possible. And so, the game theoretic Nash equilibrium is that we both employ a lot of people and use a lot of AI, and we do, and both of our products get better, and we continue to compete with each other. That's certainly one possible outcome.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  But there's also, you know, there are, you know, a real risk of true labor replacement effects. And so, taking a leap of faith here and adding a federal holiday a bit ahead of the curve feels like the type of action that America needs to cool tempers during a time of rising unrest, as seen over the weekend in San Francisco, which I'm sure you all saw. There were a variety of attacks. Sam Altman posted a blog post covering a Molotov cocktail that was thrown at his house. Then there was a shooting outside.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  Friday morning, really early hours.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Said 3:45 AM in the morning. He said thankfully, it bounced off the house and no one got hurt. And I saw another article that said that the suspect is in custody. And he says, and Sam goes on to sort of restate what he believes. He says, "Working towards prosperity for..." Everyone empowering all people and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for him. AI will be the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen. Demand for this tool will be essentially uncapped and people will do incredible things with it. The world deserves huge amounts of AI and we must figure out how to make it happen. And then he also says it will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  We are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, perhaps ever. Maybe bigger than the industrial revolution. And so you would expect the life and the existence of the American populace to change over that period of time. And we have a duty to make it as smooth as possible. And he says, we have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model. We urgently need a society wide response to be resilient to new threats. This includes new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get to a much better future. AI has to be democratized, power cannot be too concentrated.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  George Hots actually had an interesting rebuttal to Sam Altman's post, sort of rearguing for open source, which is something that a lot of people have not been arguing for lately. But it was sort of interesting to see him continue to push.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  Was it just about open source or was it about sharing research?

• 41:15John Coogan?

  It was, he was saying that you don't have an obligation to open source the weights of a model that cost a billion dollars to train. He's not arguing for that, but he is saying that you should open source the tricks, the research ideas. Basically publish the research papers again and empower a broader community. And of course, there's a lot of competitive dynamics there. But that is something that could potentially happen via regulation or something or happen just due to, you know, just a competitive dynamic. Like there are other labs out there that don't have as much compute and might realize that they have great researchers and maybe they want to open source more.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  There are a lot of different ways that this could. play out. So he says, I do not think it's right that a few labs, few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future. And so there's been a bunch of, a bunch of back and forth about the, the, the attacks and what's driving them and how, uh, how risky the rhetoric has been. I think in general, it's, um, it's, it's a very tough situation because the, the, like, you don't, uh, like, you don't want to, you know, sp- uh, just spark more controversy and more discussion around this stuff. You mostly want to move towards more security and more, um, more.

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, of course, the notable, you know, it's been shared widely at this point, but the notable, uh, one thing that was notable about Friday, the attacker from Friday is just, they were sharing all of the, uh, if anyone, all the AI Doom material. They were clearly consume, consuming it.

• 42:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, sort of caught up in it.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  And, um, yeah.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Andrew Mihal, formerly of Andrew's and Horowitz, out there with a new fund, AMP Public, uh, said, "Time is running out for technology leaders to show they care about public benefit above all else. Slow down your layoffs, reinvest in reeducation, mentor the next generation. We are all on team humanity." And I, I think that's a good message. And so as the AI race continues to heat up in America, geopolitical dynamics have consistently acted as a binding constraint, limiting the viability of proposals set forth by AI lab leaders. And so we've seen this at Davos with various lab leaders saying, "Well, we would agree to a slowdown if we could all agree." And then, and the Bernie Sanders, the, uh, the data center ban.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  And all of this feels, uh, very intractable in the backdrop, uh, in, with the backdrop of geopolitical, um, competition. If you don't have buy-in from all the different countries, uh, you wind up just falling behind another country and you have the same dynamic again. And so that piece of the discussion has sort of fallen by the wayside because it's so difficult to argue if you're running a private corporation in America and you're like, I want. To make foreign policy now, that's a really tall order. But fortunately, I think people are starting to at least investigate what the path towards some coalition between different countries might look like.

• 44:25John Coogan?

  And Sebastian Malabai, author of The Infinity Machine and former guest of the show, published an op ed in the New York Times outlining one possible solution to the US-China dynamic. And so we can go through this and and try and understand Sebastian's points because he makes a he actually went to China and talked to lab leads there to try and get their side of the story and what they might be open to in terms of collaboration. So he says in 2022, the Biden administration tried to arrest China's development of artificial intelligence by denying it cutting edge semiconductors. This was the CHIPS Act, which at the time I was very in favor of.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  But of course, the policies have all evolved and there are much more complex situations with the entire semiconductor supply chain and how fast the technology is advancing. So President Trump has relaxed that policy a bit without a clear plan to replace it. But the chip export controls have failed. And so he dives into, you know, how chips are actually getting to China. China's tech sector is too sophisticated to be stopped from building powerful AI. In pursuing an impossible objective, the United States is missing an opportunity to to try for one that sounds fanciful, but which, after a recent reporting trip to China, I believe is more realistic. America should negotiate with China on a global pact on AI safety,

• 45:54John Coogan?

  which would impose universal limits on a technology that can do much good, but in the wrong hands would do much harm. The premise of the export restrictions was that the United States would be able to successfully block China's access to powerful AI chips. The premium chipsets used in AI data centers are the size of skateboards and can't be smuggled in a simple suitcase. And it's hard to put them to use without hands on support from the chipmaker's engineering teams. But Chinese developers circumvented controls by training their AI models. And chips located in other countries. They're using cloud instances and and neo clouds in other countries. And this is always a question of even if you stop the flow of chips into the country. Can you set up a a holding company that allocates?

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this was a question last year of like, wait, how is Singapore placing that many billions of dollars of?

• 46:42John Coogan?

  And Malaysia was another one that was and and and even in the Middle East, there were always questions about. Okay, well, if the Middle East gets chips, are they going to be able to, you know, have Chinese companies as clients remotely? And there were discussions of folks basically putting training data on hard drives and and or model weights on hard drives and just flying them from one country to another. It's very, very hard to actually contain the the movement of the critical pieces of the AI value chain. So so he says, a Chinese model builder needs only to rent capacity on an AI data center in one of China's Southeast Asian neighbors, like you mentioned. Concealing the model's Chinese origin is straightforward, partly thanks to this loophole.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  He says, let's see, partly thanks to this loophole, China has rolled out a series of excellent AI models. China's ability to skirt US controls will not change, even if the Senate follows the House in passing a bill to restrict China's access to outside data centers, which is the next the next domino to fall in the chip ban and chip control project. China is learning how to do without cutting edge chips by stacking less powerful chips together. And Huawei, the nine, ten B, nine, ten C, the Huawei Ascend chips seem to be less powerful. But if they can actually manufacture them at scale, they can wind up marshalling the same or similar.

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Power being less of a constraint.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Exactly, with the Three Gorges Dam and other nuclear power plants and all sorts of different initiatives that they've done. They have a ton of solar, they have a lot of energy. So its model builders also take full advantage of a process known as distillation. Every time a US lab produces a cutting edge model, Chinese rivals quickly reverse engineer its capabilities and build a copycat version. Has the advantage, he says. American AI scientists used to say the competitors being able to fast follow would not matter. An intelligent explosion was approaching, the argument went. As AI AI systems would soon become capable capable enough to write upgrades to their own code. AI would create better AI, better AI would create even better AI. Recursive self improvement would drive performance skyward.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  The nation that had just reached this so called singularity first would be the winner of the AI race. So more more the AI race than winning the AI future messaging. Even if the fast follower were just a few months behind leader. Three and a half years after the Biden administration chip controls AI is generating code to upgrade itself. The promised feedback loop has started, but the accelerating power of the leading models won't determine who wins the AI race. It's AI deployment that will matter to transform economies and armies. AI must be embedded into the business processes and weapon systems. The raw power of the cutting edge models must be turned into applications, he says. The upshot is that China and the United States are roughly level in the AI contest.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Top Chinese models may be a few months behind American ones. And the relative position on military applications is difficult to ascertain as much as as so much is classified. But on industrial applications, China seems to be leading. US sanctioned companies such as Huawei and Hikvision are rolling out AI systems that perform maintenance checks on high speed trains. Managing mining operations, scanning water samples to assess pollution and more. At Huawei's campus near Shenzhen, he recently took a ride in an autonomous car. A device in the passenger seat massaged my back and the steering was immaculate. Tyler, do you generally agree with most of these takes here?

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Uh, no.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  So I think, yeah, to start, I think, I think Chinese labs are further behind.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Their only reason that they're close behind is because disillation.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Disillation.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Um, I also think.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he's kind of saying like, he's saying that the chip export ban is not working.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, also.

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  But I feel like the the them being behind is proof that it is working. And he's also saying. You know, the labs want to get to recursive self-improvement. We're starting to see early signs of that. And so I feel like there's some kind of inconsistency.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, also, just on the chip stuff, like, we're clearly not policing it as hard as we could. We could do things way harder, right? I remember it was like Super Micro. We saw those videos where they had smuggled in the boxes and it was like extremely.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  You had the hair dryer.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, if we really want to solve this issue, like, we for sure could.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Let's check in with Super Micro's stock.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  It's up 17% the last five days.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  But like very clearly, I think among like the leading labs in the US, you are seeing some kind of like takeoff, like among them, right? It's like very much recursive thing.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  The models improve the harness, which improves the next model. Like, I think this thing is actually true. Like, you're not seeing open source labs, like, kind of keep up, I think.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it was very, very remarkable watching like DeepSeek not accelerate in the same way that I think a lot of people expected.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, like, Qwen is kind of what DeepSeek, what people thought DeepSeek would be, and Qwen models are good. But again, like, I think most of the reason that they're good is just because of distillation.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  It's clearly like they have good researchers, right? Tsinghua is like a great university.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  But I think, like, generally, I think people are too bullish currently on Chinese AI.

• 52:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there are too many, like, too many secrets that are still locked up in US labs.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, even if it's like, okay, at some level, like, AI, if you're super AGI pill, it's all about the compute, which means it's all about capital. US has better capital markets.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  How much is it about secrets versus just raw scale?

• 52:25John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  Access to compute.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Well, let's continue. So.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Sebastian Malley writes in the New York Times, "Fans of chip controls continue to insist that even a modest slowing of China's AI advance is worth pursuing. If China is a formidable adversary, imagine how much more formidable it might be if the chip controls were lifted. But the controls are failing to deliver the prize of a China with limited AI, so it's worth considering their cost. My China trip persuaded me that the cost is too high. The Biden administration made a strategic choice to prioritize the slowing of China rather than addressing other worries." The alternative would have been to say, China, the alternative would have been to say to China, this would be the Biden administration to the Chinese Communist Party, "You are a

• 53:13John Coogan?

  tech superpower. We are a tech superpower. Let's work together to make sure AI doesn't fall into the hands of rogue states and terrorists." The goal would have been an AI equivalent of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a regime that would require all countries using AI to sign up for safeguards on it. The Biden team didn't think China would collaborate on something like that, but over a dozen conversations with AI leaders in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou made it clear to me that China's elite does care about AI safety. And this was something we dug into previously, Tyler, looking at the statements from AI leaders in China and

• 53:55John Coogan?

  the Communist Party directly. It did seem like they were not wildly accelerationist. Was that generally your takeaway?

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you're comparing like the statements of the actual CCP to like the government, the United States government, CCP definitely looks more like pro-safety than the US government does.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so, I mean-

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Within groups within the US are certainly much more, you know-

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Safety pill.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, safety pill than China's generally.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  Totally. But, yeah, but the- Like the pushback against that was always that, okay, well, it like you are encouraged to be pro safety when you when you don't have the lead because you're just like slow down the fast one, right? And and so that could be the dynamic, but if if if the rhetoric is true, if Sebastian Malabai's reporting is true, then there is an opportunity for some sort of accord that could be good if if that's, you know, indeed a critical path to the to the good to the good ending. And that's sort of what happens in AI 2027. You know, the good ending is is like a like a geopolitical sort of come to Jesus moment

• 55:04John Coogan?

  where everyone decides to, you know, rein things in. Is that your read on it?

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Yes, but you know, there are there's two there's two paths.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  There's two paths, yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  It's like a choose your own.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a choose your adventure, but the good path requires something like this.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's like a slowdown, everyone agrees.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. So he says, he visited a prominent tech company that builds and distributes an AI foundation model. So I imagine that's DeepSeek or Alibaba or or some other big Chinese company, but he says, for now, that model is open source, meaning that users can download and modify it at will. If a user prompts the AI to conduct cyber attacks, there's nothing anyone can do to stop that person, except for the fact that it might be, you know, deeper in the in the training data and in the model behavior, that even though it's open source, it might not be completely turnkey, but it does pose a risk. And he says, the chief executive of this company made a striking admission.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  As AI becomes more powerful, it would be crazy to continue making it open source, he said. That's the exact opposite of the George Hotz position, interestingly. You wouldn't open source a nuclear weapon, he added. During my trip, the controversy surrounding the advanced model OpenClaw illustrated the rising concern for AI safety. Throngs of ordinary Chinese downloaded the digital assistant eager to experiment with a capable AI agent. The enthusiasm apparently confirmed that China loves innovation more than it fears it, but researchers and industry leaders told me they were appalled. "It makes your computer naked," an eminent business school professor told me. Soon after that, China's leaders firmly discouraged the use of OpenClaw in government systems and warned citizens that the agent might wreak havoc on their

• 56:45John Coogan?

  data. For now, China's instinct to race for powerful AI overwhelms any caution. This is a rational response to a US administration that is equally determined to put speed ahead of safety, but if a US leader went to China and offered to scrap chip controls in exchange for collaboration on AI nonproliferation, there would at least be some chance of the proposal succeeding. This presumes that US-China dialogue is even possible, but the West should not succumb to the self-fulfilling fatalism. At times during the Cold War, the United States pursued its interests by switching from confrontation to detent. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty came just six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now is a good time to recall that history.

• 57:29John Coogan?

  And so, I thought that was an interesting sort of contrarian take at a time when the general consensus has been, continue to push forward on the chip controls, maybe go deeper in the supply chain. There's always been a more complex discussion. He doesn't mention Taiwan, which is a whole other complex issue. But it was sort of a reminder of a potential collaboration that I think is maybe worth considering. So, everyone is still in the early stages of working through the situation, but the reporting here just generally shows that there might be more opportunity for collaboration than many people previously thought. So, I like that.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  AI 2027, which has been shockingly accurate to date, has "Mid-2026, China wakes up." They say, "In China, the CCP is starting to feel the AGI. Chip export controls and lack of government support have left China under resource compared to the West by smuggling, banning Taiwanese chips, buying older chips, and producing domestic chips about three years behind." The US Taiwanese frontier, China has managed to maintain about 12% of the world's AI-relevant compute, but the older technology is harder to work with and supply is a constant headache. A few standouts like DeepSent do very impressive work with limited compute, but the compute deficit limits what they can achieve without government support, and they are about six months behind the best open-brain models. Of course, they're using...

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, they mash up all of these.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  So, DeepMind plus OpenAI, and then they do M+DeepSeek and stuff.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  The general secretary had long dreamed of doubling down on real-world physical manufacturing and avoiding American post-industrial decadence. He viewed software companies with suspicion, but Hawks in the CCP warned that the growing race towards AGI can no longer be ignored, so he finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research, creating an immediate information-sharing mechanism for AI companies. Again, that's like an advantage that they could, and to date it seems like they do have, which is like there's a very real incentive to just share everything at the moment, or not everything, but at least more than what our labs are doing. It will escalate over the course of a year until all the best researchers merge into

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  a DeepSent-led collective, where they share algorithmic insights, data sense, and compute resources with each other. A centralized development zone is created at the Tianwan Power Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in the world, to house a new mega data center for DeepSent, along with highly secure living and office spaces to which researchers will eventually relocate. And to close it out, but China's falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies, among the best in the world, double down on their plans to steal OpenBrain's weights. This is much more complex operation than their constant low-level poaching of algorithmic secrets. The weights are a multi-terabyte file stored on a highly secure server.

• 1:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Their cyber forces think they can pull it off with the help of their spies, perhaps only once. And again, it goes on and on and on. So we'll see. We'll see if they wake up. I'm not at all convinced that there's going to be any type of effective multinational...

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Collaboration, especially just given what's going on in the Middle East.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's chaotic time. Well, if you want to know how much your government taxes paid for across everything the US government spends, if you paid taxes in America this year, Riley Walls has launched a website for you, taxwrapped.com. It's Spotify wrapped, but for your taxes. You can see what the government did with your money. And it's a very fun, you know, one-off website, a drop, because even when you open it on desktop, it renders like it's an iPhone app. It's very, it's like entirely mobile first. I think that's an interesting trend is if you're doing one of these, just, just make it work on the phone, because that is the endpoint for all of these things.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  So you can, you can type in exactly how much you paid, whether you're a W2 employee, or 1099, how much you, if you have dependents or children, and then it will walk you through every segment.

• 1:01:53Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna do an example for someone that made a hundred thousand dollars in 2025.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  If you want, if you want, if you want the team to do it, they can actually click through it.

• 1:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Okay, do it.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Can you pull up taxwrapped.com? We can actually.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Here we go, here we go. So a hundred, a hundred thousand dollar, a hundred thousand big ones.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  There you go. And then do single, do W2 on the left, and then just do no children.

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  So you pay 21,000 in taxes, 6,700 goes towards income security, and I think, I think I filled out the same one here. So you can see, let's see.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  I need to.

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  So that's going to social security.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  It really goes through everything.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Housing assistance, federal employee retirement and disability.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Health.

• 1:02:46Jordi Hays?

  5,000 to health, so that's Medicare, healthcare services.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  I think people might be surprised that defense is so low. I've always, I feel like defense is always the largest like.

• 1:02:58Jordi Hays?

  John, this, there's, I would say the.

• 1:03:02Jordi Hays?

  There are a lot of people in this country that would look at the $3,812 and be

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  No, of course, of course.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Very upset about that.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  Of course, of course, but, but the size of the US military, the size of the defense budget has always been so big, it's felt like the number one expenditure category, but it is in fact not, next to social security and Medicare and healthcare services. But the military is significant, obviously. And Riley, on the next slide, puts up

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up again?

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  About the government deficit.

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna wanna see this.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  So, the government spent more than it made last year. Seven trillion spent, 5.5 trillion in revenue.

• 1:03:46Jordi Hays?

  The government's strategy is literally, we're gonna burn money for a while, but we're gonna make it up with scale.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Basically, and maybe inflation, who knows? It's a tricky situation. So, the deficit was 1.5 trillion last year, and that overspending, it goes on the national credit card, which has been racking up debt since 2001. It's now about to cross 40 trillion dollars, which is about 114,000 per person. That is not something to be fist bumping about.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  I think I was listening to Teller Cowan this weekend, and he said, I think it was him, he was like, "Well, you know, if you're really AGI-pilled, right, the deficit should be way bigger."

• 1:04:24John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  There's like all these things. I think it's actually

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  We were riffing on that with Dylan Patel the first time he came on. We were saying, like, yeah, like

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  So it's not a black pill?

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Government spending went up, like, extremely AGI-pilled position. If GDP starts growing significantly, sort of the opposite of this treaty scenario, which is certainly what I hope happens. But, yeah, George Tautz also posted some other blog post last night about this idea of making everyone a billionaire, creating a $1 billion bill, and printing 300 something, 360 million of them, giving everyone one, everyone is a billion, everyone's a billionaire then. And he's making jokes about, like, obviously that wouldn't work, and, but the, but the impact would be to destroy the dollar and go back to the gold standard, which is something he's a fan of these days.

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, the person who pays $100,000, who makes $100,000 is paying almost $3,000 in interest payments on the debt, $430 on transportation, $350 on government operations, $260 in natural resources. There's some, on agriculture, $76 goes towards researching agriculture. There's international affairs. And spaceflight and research science is $71 out of that $100,000 a year paycheck. It's an interesting project and we're big fans of Riley Walls over here. So go check it out. There are a bunch of other posts in the timeline before we bring in our first guest of the show.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  Tyler Cowen talk about how we're growing like half a point?

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Oh, the GDP.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  GDP.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  I'm sure he linked to it.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  You gotta ask him if that's good.

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  It could be better. Could be better. Well, let's move over to something else in the timeline. Andrew Reid has a funny post here. Wow, 12,000 likes. It's like Apple built little ejection seats for your AirPods when you drop your case on the ground. That is like extremely real, right? Jordy wouldn't know anything about that. He's not an AirPod enjoyer. But when the AirPods hit the ground, they truly explode everywhere.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  I got to experience that before I was enlightened.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  You were enlightened.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Before I went wired.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, people, they really do go flying. People really, this really resonated with people, 12,000 people liking this.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Lulu says this is the real reason they're called AirPods.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, they get, they get some air. Clouseau Investments is joking about, uh oh, physical delivery of crude.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Dear client, this notice is to inform you that your, that your account carried an open long position in WTI crude oil futures. As a result pursuant to NYMEX rule 200.01, a physical delivery obligation has been designed to your account. So get ready to receive 2,000 barrels.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  So

• 1:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Cushing, Oklahoma.

• 1:07:18John Coogan?

  This is an April Fool's joke.

• 1:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Meet me at Tank Farm 7 Bay 14.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  No. This is, so this is an April Fool's joke. This is not real, but I believe this has happened in the past. Uh, I think, uh, didn't oil go negative at some point during, uh, COVID? And there was something that was going on there with the potential risk that certain traders would have to take delivery that created this weird economic incentive because there's a cost to take delivery and if you're not set up for it, uh, you could be in a weird position. Uh, but it is, it is a very, very bizarre situation and never been a crazier time to be an oil trader. I'm sure the commodity, uh, markets are, are absolutely wild these days. Um, there's an interesting narrative violation.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Uh, after decades of slumping sales, vinyl records are making a comeback. And so we can pull up this chart vinyl, of course, was booming in the seventies and the eighties. And then fell off precipitously from 1984 until 1990, when of course the cassette tape and the compact disc, the CD, uh, took off like a rocket. And so, uh, cassettes had their moment in the late eighties and early nineties. The CD dominated the nineties and two thousands. Then quickly digital downloads start spiking in the 2005, 2010 period, followed by the massive rise of streaming, which has come to dominate nearly every category.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  But vinyl is making a comeback and for 2025 generated $1 billion of revenue for US, uh, recorded music revenues, which is more than CDs, more than three times as much as CDs and more, uh, and more than

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Even more than digital downloads.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Jordi Hays?

  That is.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  People aren't paying for 99 cents a song anymore.

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  You will own nothing and be happy.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  Except vinyl. You will own a lot of vinyl.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Own a lot of vinyl.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  And I think you'll be very happy with it. I think that there's a chance. I mean, we've been joking about, you know, pressing the show onto vinyl and the, uh, the, the, the new acquired FM homepage is all vinyl themed. Vinyl has this, uh, because it's like the first stored music medium. It's the oldest, so it will stick around maybe the longest, whereas CDs and cassettes just don't have. It's like, if you're gonna go retro, just go full retro and go with vinyl instead of going half retro and saying, oh, we're doing a CD.

• 1:09:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's throw a CD on. Set the mood.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  Doesn't quite do it. It doesn't quite do it. Um, A-Track was really short. A-Track in the precursor to the cassette tape, uh, sort of big in the late seventies and then fell off.

• 1:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever have a cassette era?

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  I had a cassette era. I would get, uh, books on tape.

• 1:10:05Jordi Hays?

  You were.

• 1:10:05John Coogan?

  Literally books on tape.

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

  You were using cassettes because it was the normal thing to do, I imagine.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  I was using them sort of ironically.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Ironically. No, I remember I had a, I had a Star Wars book that was on tape and I would put it in the tape player.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  And I would listen to it. Book on tape was great.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  So hard.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, uh, and I, I was never super.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  It was the most satisfying medium, like throwing a, throwing a cassette into a car.

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I remember I had to do a lot of reading over the summer, uh, for school and audiobooks have always been easier for me to process. So you go and you find the cassette version of it, the audiobook version of it, and you listen to that and then you, you know, you retain way more. If I'm an auditory learner, uh, it was a good time. Well.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  That's so insane to me that vinyl is more than 10% of.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Screaming revenue.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  I really, yeah, the vinyl is really big.

• 1:11:01Jordi Hays?

  Who's, there's gotta be like a vinyl billionaire.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Power law. I mean, certainly collectors, but I don't know. I think there is something special about, even if you just like, even if you don't have a record player, you might say, I want to support that artist. So I'm going to buy the highest tier. Like I believe the Taylor Swift drops come like they she also sells vinyl and you you get it and you don't necessarily listen to it, but you have it as like a lamento and it's almost like an artifact that you put on your desk or in your house or you might frame it. You might not really

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Benny off sent us some

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have a Metallica vinyl. We still got to get a record player. But anyway, without further ado, we have our first guest in the waiting room. Follow Remo Murphy from Critical Loop, the CEO, working to accelerate grid access using autonomous control, storage, and flexible generation for industrial and mission critical power needs. How are you?

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  I'm doing fantastic. Great to talk to you guys.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time to hop on. Since this is your first time on the show, would you mind kicking it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, of myself, I'm an engineer by training and I founded this company.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  And I worked at SpaceX for 12 years before that.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  So much soundboard, sorry.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  I'll stop and let you talk. We're just having, we're having fun.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  SpaceX for 12 years. What decade was that exactly? Is that

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  That was like from prior to sending the first Dragon capsules to the space station.

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  Flying human spaceflight. Wow. I kind of left efforts to make Falcon 9 suitable to fly humans. And then decided to turn my attention to the electricity grid because I think it's that important, you know?

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Unpacked, you said the grid. What was the term that you used?

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, just the electricity grid is pretty important. You can take manufacturing. I mean, everybody talks about data centers, right? But let's take just the, you know, the power that you and I use, the power that's required to manufacture, all that stuff needs a reliable source of cost effective power. And right now, kind of the condition that people have is like, you know, companies are going to the utility. And waiting for multiple years to get the power they need. And so we decided to start this company with this vision of how can you get the power that you need quicker, right? Like, how can you better utilize? You know, the crazy thing is, since you guys seem to like stats, the grid is pretty underutilized.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  Right? It's like less than fifty percent.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Sorry, give us the stat. You have to wait for the stat and then you play it somewhere.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  I got, I got over, you said it was underutilized. I got, I got kind of excited.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I mean, it's always exciting to find something underutilized and figure out how to make it more, you know, better utilized. And the way to do that is to throw energy storage at the edge, a close, it's close to where, you know, the industrial customer is consuming. Sometimes some generation as well, right? So basically we can take this like multi-year wait time and instead make that, you know, months and maybe even days, right? So that that's kind of what critical loop is about.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so maybe let's, I get the general idea, but is it, you're saying putting storage at the edge? So that you can take power during off-peak times and store it to kind of like smooth out demand? Is that, is that generally?

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So when you look at the history of grid infrastructure, right? It's always built historically to the worst possible condition, like the hottest day of the year, when everybody's going full blast on ACs, also running their peak AI training loads, et cetera, right? It's designed for the peak. And so the paradigm that we're trying to work towards is like, you know, what if you could, you know, what if instead of overbuilding the grid to support that peak, what if you could take some of the storage and some generation at the edge and offset like basically the upgrades you would have otherwise made for millions of dollars, right? For a fewer million dollars. So, so, so basically, yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  Exactly as Jordy said, like, you know, you're using, you know, you're switching to more local sources of power. You're either storing or generating power more locally and to do that requires, you know, pretty sophisticated orchestration to do that seamlessly. And that's what critical loop is about.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  So, uh, do you see this as like?

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  The, do you want to jump straight to like the gigawatt mega projects? Or is there actually more opportunity with like smaller scale? Like I remember seeing like, wasn't Colossus two originally like a washing machine? Factory or something like that? Like, there's a lot of industrial like buildings that make things and they draw a lot of power. And they probably only operate nine to five, or maybe they have a night shift. But for something like that, they could put a battery installation, be absorbing power from the grid when usage is low, and then deploying that during peak hours without straining the grid. Is that the general thesis?

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the general concept. There's a massive middle here, right? As you point out, right? And, you know, a lot of referrals come from, of customers come from commercial real estate, right? Where people are signing up to a facility, then they're going to throw some machines there to do some cool stuff. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, wow, we have to wait five years for the power? That's, that's, that's a problem. And, and so by then deploying this energy storage at the edge and this orchestration layer that Kripaloo is created, you have the ability to like identify like when there's capacity on the grid, use power from the grid. When there's not capacity, store that in batteries, use generation, you know, traverse that gap. And, and so like, you know, our customers range from, you know, everything from like ports, airports,

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  like critical infrastructure, logistics hubs. Um, it's the whole range. And I mean, that's not to say we won't one day take on some of these gigawatt things. Because it's the same operating system, if you will, right?

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Talk about the technologies that are actually like augmenting power generation onsite. Because I, you know, you always hear the story about like the hospital has a one megawatt diesel generator or onsite or something in case there's a blackout. And it feels like we're moving more towards battery banks. But what are you actually seeing in terms of various technologies that are going through? Scale up on the manufacturing side, becoming more economical? We've talked to a lot of nuclear founders who are sort of saying, in 2030, you'll be able to have a one megawatt nuclear reactor. That seems farther out, but what, what are you, where's demand right now?

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think your most efficient source of generation is always going to be sort of the centralized one. And the challenge has to do with like how you distribute it. And so that's why battery capacity is like, you know, the cost of batteries generally coming down. And the power conversion technology advancing more. And you have this ability to store and dispatch battery power like AC or DC eventually, right? To serve whatever machines that are at the site. And so that also allows you to save money on the generation. Like, you know, imagine like doing a bunch of fuel drops. If you can, you can avoid that, you might use the battery.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  So, I mean, we also, I mean, the cool thing about our systems is that, you know, we run sites where there's like propane generation and batteries. That allows you, I mean, generators are in super high demand, right? And because centers and whatnot, this a lot, what our technology allows is like you can use like more commonly available generators and use the batteries to do the peak power. So, I mean, reactors, I mean, I'm a huge fan of SMRs too. And like, one day we're gonna, you know, make all of these things work together. And like, you know, who owns the management of the grid at the edge? That's kind of what we're excited about.

• 1:18:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Matthew in the chat is talking about how you're placing the cells on semi trucks as well. So they're, they're, they're mobile, is that, is that?

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, that, that's a, yeah. So when you look at this general problem, right? It's dynamic in nature, right? Like a big logistics facility moves in, all of a sudden they're like, we're gonna add robotics to this site, right? Uh, to, and then, but that problem might change as time progresses where the utility pulls out a transformer eventually, right? And so you can think of like the maximum return on investment way to run this business is like you, you're able to physically relocate these assets. Uh, batteries or generation to new sites or the life of these assets. And that's kind of this modular and relocatable approach is kind of fundamental to how we think about it.

• 1:19:47John Coogan?

  What did you do to earn the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal?

• 1:19:53Speaker 03

  That's it. This is the first time someone's asked me this question. But yeah, I certified Falcon 9 for human spaceflight. So I made it to fly astronauts and I was the chief engineer for the first flight of Bob and Doug, the astronauts who lost space.

• 1:20:07John Coogan?

  That's amazing. I love it.

• 1:20:11Jordi Hays?

  What was your, what was your reaction to the Artemis 2 mission?

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I was excited, man. Like, I mean, funnily enough, I worked on that project too in 2007 and my first job at college. Yeah, so I worked on the Orion capsule. So it's a long time coming. It's a long time coming and I was excited to see it. And I'm really hopeful that lots more cool things will fly in space in the next year.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Why did you?

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  Why did you put Nutella? Why'd you put so much Nutella on board?

• 1:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Why, why, why not continue on, on your, your space journey? You seem like you, you, you be on the potentially path to going to space.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I, I enjoy a good challenge. So to me, the next most complex machine, or, or, you know, maybe even more complicated machine than a rocket, was the electricity grid. And then how do you fix this thing? Which is like, you know, there's so many regulatory aspects and like, you know, industrial and utility clashing and like, how do you make this machine work? And to me, that's fundamental. That's not to say that I won't be interested in space again. I call it my hobby now.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tell us about the round. Someone hit the gong.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we closed a $26 million round.

• 1:21:34Jordi Hays?

  From who?

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover led the round. They're really seasoned operators in, in the realm of energy and we're super excited to partner with them.

• 1:21:46John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, congratulations. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Very interesting career. Excited to follow the company.

• 1:21:54John Coogan?

  And very important work.

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Cheers, guys.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  See you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have the chief architect from Sci5 announcing a massive fundraising to scale RISC-V CPUs and AI intellectual property for data centers.

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  If we have some time.

• 1:22:09John Coogan?

  Yes. I think our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  Hi, doing okay. You hear me fine?

• 1:22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you fine. Thanks so much for taking the time. Since it's the first time on the show, I'd love an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 1:22:27Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I'm Christopher Sanovich. So I was a professor at UC Berkeley. We developed RISC-V, which is an open standard instruction set. We then, a couple of my graduate students, we set up a company, Sci5, to commercialize RISC-V. And we just completed a Series G round to go work on data center CPUs.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  That's amazing. How long have you been actually working on the company? I mean, Series G, it seems like there's been a whole sequence of events. Can you take me through a few of the milestones that unlocked growth and sort of where the company is today?

• 1:23:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we founded the company in 2015. So it's been almost 11 years now.

• 1:23:10Speaker 04

  When we first started the company, we thought we'd be doing custom silicon. But then when we started talking to customers, you know, get out there and into the trenches and talk to customers, they all wanted RISC-V IP, like designs they could use in their own silicon. And so we pivoted a little at that point, started making IP for them. And, you know, RISC-V, the ecosystem has grown over that 10-year period. And so initially, a lot of our designs were smaller, lower-end embedded processors. And then we sort of, over the years, grew, you know, going through the various rounds of funding, as we grew the product portfolio, we added more higher-end processors and processors specialized for doing AI kind of tasks as well, what we call our TIGS line.

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  And then this last funding round really signals we're getting back to very high-performance CPUs that sit next to GPUs in data centers.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, like, help me understand if I have this correct. You know, AI is very GPU-intensive, but the GPUs need to be filled with data that needs to be processed through a CPU. If you're doing some sort of reinforcement learning environment, you might need to spin up a piece of software, and that requires a CPU. And so even though we are in a GPU crunch, we are also in a CPU crunch. And so... More and more companies and hyperscalers are developing their own CPUs and GPU companies like Nvidia are also doing this where they have a CPU that is designed to work directly with the GPU to make sure that the workloads are as efficient as possible. And so you're

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  able to license your intellectual property to make those CPUs more efficient, more effective. Is that roughly correct?

• 1:24:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's roughly correct. So what made you think about it is AI, the last few years has been focused on building those models, getting that working.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:00Speaker 04

  Now they're being applied at massive scale.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  And if you have an AI coder, if it's going 30 times faster than a human, you need to compile stuff 30 times faster. So it's putting that load on the regular compute.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Speaker 04

  And that can be the bottleneck, not the GPU side. It's getting the work done on the CPU side as well. It could be the bottleneck.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  So if you're not doing, it sounds like you're not fabbing chips yourself. So the raise seems very significant. It's large. Is this mostly to hire talented researchers to advance the designs? What is the use of funds?

• 1:25:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the very high-performance processors take a significant engineering investment. Very large teams working for a long time. You're working at the very edge of high-performance core design. We're working at the uppermost tier there. And so it's very expensive to need the talent. You need a lot of work, a lot of modeling, a lot of development. So it's quite a labor-intensive process to get those designs. And then, this is why an IP company makes sense. A lot of companies are focused on the more system aspects. They just want to have a very high-performance CPU that can drop in.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:19Speaker 04

  For example, you may design an airplane, but you get the engines from Rolls-Royce.

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:24Speaker 04

  Similar kind of model here. Like you want to design a high-performance system. But you want to get your CPUs from a good source like Sci5.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  So those CPU companies that will actually go and, once they license your technology, go and produce the chips with some fab, are you forward deploying folks into their organization? Is there some sort of, do they just come to you and they just want like a design document and then they're all good? Or how collaborative is that process?

• 1:26:52Speaker 04

  No, so that's part of this, you know, some of the folks involved in the financing are some of these lead customers as well and partners, they view it as a collaborative development. We have to work way ahead of time to figure out, like I'll use the airplane analogy, like do you have the right kind of engine for the kinds of planes you want to build? You don't just, you know, put in the catalog and say, pick one of these three we built previously. We have to understand where the customers are going, what their needs are. And one of the benefits of Sci5 technology, we make our cores quite customizable. So for different customers, we can adapt and configure it to their needs, to their workloads. And so we have to work with them ahead of time to understand what they're going to try to do. And so we can plan our products appropriately.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  How is, how are the design trade-offs changing around custom CPUs and just custom silicon in general? Is it, is it just all about performance versus, you know, like flops per watt, like or, or price to produce the actual chips? Like, what are the key levers that companies are most interested in pulling these days? And how is it changing?

• 1:27:56Speaker 04

  If you look at the overall picture, it's just classic business ROI. Like if I make this silicon, am I going to make more money by saving on, you know, cost of ownership, power, whatever those other things are? And also can I offer a capability that brings me customers? That's going to increase my top line. So it's just a classic business decision of buy versus build. And what you'll see is the big companies will be buying some chips, they'll be designing their own chips. Depends on the application and domain. In each case, they're making their own, you know, ROI judgment on what's the right thing to do, buy or build.

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  How do you think about depreciation or just the lifetime of a chip? There was a big discussion over will GPUs burn out over six years? And at the same time, a lot of people have computers that have one CPU that they've been using happily for 20 years. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a trend or change in the lifetime of CPUs that are going to be used for AI workloads in data centers running very aggressively, probably 24/7 for years. Are we seeing these chips burn out faster or is that a sort of surmountable hurdle?

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  Well, there is a, there's one technical problem, which is the chips are literally burning out faster just because of the finite geometries. You know, wires move and melt and so we're dealing with aging failures like we have them before. But at the business side of things, I think companies trading off a bunch of things. One is it's hard to get new silicon. You see all the shortages, the fabs can only make so much silicon, AI sucking up all the, all the capacity in terms of new production. But the incentive to build new silicon is that I have a limited power budget. So if I want to do more, I can't just get more power from PG&E or whoever. I need to go bake more efficient systems. So sometimes I'll swap out those racks for a new rack that's 2X, 3X more power efficient. I can do more with the same power budget.

• 1:29:53Speaker 04

  So it's sort of capability cap on some of these companies. They just, you know, need to replace the silicon if they want to grow their capabilities.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Zooming out, do you think that the, the tech community, the AI community is, is doing a good job of using all different process nodes effectively? There's been so much focus on the, the leading edge, TSMC, 2 nanometer, 3 nanometer, the really advanced nodes. There is a lot of lagging edge capacity out there, at least it felt like there was. I don't know if there's, do you think that there's low hanging fruit there that we might see the AI industry or the tech community start figuring out a way to get more out of in the future?

• 1:30:35Speaker 04

  Well, I think for the large data centers, probably not. I think, again, these power constraints, you want the most advanced technology. However, as AI gets pushed out and permeates all these applications in the real world, I think those trailing nodes will be used for, you know, intelligent doorbells, you know, robots. There's lots of places where, you know, they're good enough. And also, there's some applications where you're interfacing with higher voltages, where you're working with unvotable memories that are not available in advanced nodes. And so those older technologies definitely have a place, but probably more in the edge AI space.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Tell us about the round.

• 1:31:11Speaker 04

  Before you go, tell us about the round.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:31:13Speaker 04

  So we raised 400 million.

• 1:31:20Speaker 04

  Uh, who participated? Uh, lead was Atreides, um, was the lead. We had some other, you know, notable names, including Nvidia, participated in the, in the funding. Yeah.

• 1:31:32John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and explain it to us. We appreciate you and good meeting you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:31:38Speaker 04

  Okay, thanks.

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Peter Diamandis. He is the founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE. He's an entrepreneur, a futurist, and is known for incentivizing breakthrough technologies. We're very excited to be joined by Peter Diamandis. How are you, Peter?

• 1:31:56Speaker 04

  What's going on?

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

  Guys, a long time coming.

• 1:31:58John Coogan?

  A long time coming. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Everyone's very excited.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  Lots of applause, lots of applause. Uh, I would love, I would love to start with just, uh, your, your, your temperature check on, on how technology is progressing, how you're feeling. Uh, I, I saw you in the fabulous AI doc. I think you did a great job of articulating some of your view of how technology is progressing over the next few years. But when someone comes to you and they, and they, you know, they see things moving so quickly, uh, they might have some anxiety. What are you, uh, returning to? What are the ground truths that you start with?

• 1:32:39Speaker 05

  Really important point. I mean, first of all, it is overwhelming. I mean, I spent at least half my week consuming, trying to understand what's going on, basically trying to interpret it and project where things are going and teach about it in my Moonshots podcast, whatever I'm doing. And I think one of the questions is if you're in a state of fear or overwhelmed, that's the worst place to be facing the future from.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:02Speaker 05

  Um, and it's really, you know, your ability to feel like AI and all this technology is happening for you instead of to you.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:10Speaker 05

  It's the difference between success and failure today. So, um, I think one of the things I've spoken about and I've written about is the coming age of abundance.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:20Speaker 05

  Where every single human on the planet has access to all the food, water, healthcare, education that they want. And I think we're most definitely heading that way at a rapid speed. Um, and the question is, we have got to reinvent society, which has been very different and has been, you know, our current society is based on the industrial revolution and not the AI revolution. So there's going to be a lot of rewiring.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Speaker 05

  The social contract, what, how people, you know, uh, get purpose in their life. And, uh, it's going to be a bumpy road for the next, you know, two to six years.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:55Speaker 05

  But on the backside of that, it's going to be extraordinary.

• 1:33:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree. Um, I, I, I do enjoy your podcast. I was wondering, um, it feels like, uh, you go way back with Elon Musk. How did you first meet? What have you learned from him? I'm very interested about that relationship because you've done so many interviews with him over the times, like, how do you think he's changed as a leader? What have you learned from him?

• 1:34:19Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  What, yeah, what's that journey been like?

• 1:34:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we met in 2000. I was running a top secret, uh, private robot mission to the moon called Blastoff.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  That's so cool.

• 1:34:31Speaker 05

  It was, it was fun. It was with, uh, Idealab and Bill Crowe, so the CEO. I'd hired a team out of NASA. We had bought two launch vehicles. We were building robots to go and land privately on the moon and do the first pay-per-view back then.

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  No way! No way! Pay-per-view?

• 1:34:46Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I, you, you, I don't know if you caught earlier, but we were, we were talking about this. I was saying like, I, I think there's a world where NASA could make certain parts of the mission pay-per-view. Of course you can release the replay if you want to watch live.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  It's so thrilling.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  Pay up.

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  I love that.

• 1:35:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was funny because my biggest cost was not the rockets. We bought a Taurus. We bought a Dnepr from Russia for these vehicles. Our biggest cost back then was Akamai. It was the cost of distributing the signals to all the users. Anyway, it was under wraps. And then hits the dot com apocalypse in April 2001. And I'm introduced to Elon as someone who might fund our private moon mission. Just so he just sold PayPal to eBay. And he didn't do that. Ended up joining our board at XPRIZE and was part of that adventure for our first private space flight.

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

  But I met Elon just when he was deciding what he was going to do next after PayPal. And it was, you know, energy in the world and rockets. And, you know, he's extraordinary, one of the most brilliant people on the planet. And he went from basically reading college and graduate textbooks in aerospace to building now a dominant mechanism by which humanity gets into space forever, it looks like. And what I've seen continuously is he actually implements everything he says he's going to do. It may not be in the timeframe he says he's going to do it, but ultimately he's consistently deliberate on all of his visions.

• 1:36:27Speaker 05

  And a lot of people get wrong, I think, the fact that he's in it for the money or for domination. I think consistently what he's done, he's just looking to solve problems and try and accelerate humanity's potential going.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  I was sort of grappling with that, his post about the mass driver on the moon. And I was working backwards with a couple AI models, trying to understand like, what is a reasonable timeframe on this? We talked to a lot of investors who are very pro Elon. And I mean, Elon didn't give a timeframe, but everyone was saying like, okay, this is 10, 20, 30 years out. That's really far. And I was processing and I was like, yeah, maybe it is, but I still think that there's a benefit to having a leader in technology that is actually talking about something 20 years away or 30 years away.

• 1:37:19Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:37:21Speaker 05

  I mean, the idea of mass drivers on the moon goes back to the 80s. There was a guy named Gerard K. O'Neill at Princeton University, who had this space studies institute. And he actually built the first mass drivers on Earth, right? Demonstrating the ability to accelerate to lunar escape velocity. And it was always thought that we were going to-

• 1:37:39Jordi Hays?

  What was he driving at, what was he driving at the time?

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  Just rocks, basically?

• 1:37:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know, it was basically just a carrier, just a shuttle, a carrier that would accelerate in the vacuum of the moon to a lunar escape velocity. But the, his original idea was we're going to mine the moon for nickel and iron and oxygen and silicates and build solar powered satellites in Earth orbit. The idea was we build satellites in orbit that, that gather the sun's energy and heat down to Earth. Not sure it made full sense because of, you know, solar was demonetizing at a very rapid rate. But the idea of building data centers on the moon, or at least the components for it launching into Earth orbit could make sense, but of course, that's, that's next after doing it from, from the ground.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Speaker 05

  So, I mean, Elon's, you know, terawatt in Earth orbit based upon ground-based future Starlink satellites. It's an insane number of satellites, it's like, you know, I think it's a launch, I think Starship launched every hour. Uh, get that capability up there. Which, if it, if you think about airplane operations, that's nothing. But for rocket operations today, it's two point, you know, it's a launch every two point, three days on, on Falcon.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. But that, I mean, that ramp was unbelievable to watch. You've seen the, the, the time lapse of Falcon launches from Florida. And it starts with just one and then it doubles and you can see the exponential growth. And so, it doesn't seem that crazy, especially with the new landing infrastructure where you catch it and immediately put it on another one, like, yeah, it's going to be years, it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of effort. But, uh, it certainly doesn't break the laws of physics, as Elon likes to say.

• 1:39:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, the fun thing is watching the entire evolution of humanity's journey into space go from government programs to private companies, right? So in 1996, under the Arch in St. Louis, I announced a $10 million prize for private spaceflight.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Speaker 05

  And this was when, you know, we had just had the shuttle era that was coming to an end, and it was always government astronauts, government programs, but could we flip it to commercial? And, you know, I thought suborbital flights would be the lowest hanging fruit. And of course Elon and Bezos have come along and just decimated, not in a bad way, but way overcome suborbital flights to now getting to orbit on a regular basis. And, you know, we're going to see commercial flights to the moon. You know, Apollo, you know, what we just saw with Artemis 2 was going around the moon and coming back to Earth. We'll see Starship offering seats on flights like that, eventually to the lunar surface.

• 1:40:25Speaker 05

  And it's the beginning of, it's the early 1500s of Europe coming to America. And that's an exact right.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  Well, in that future, what do you think the role of government, space exploration, or scientific research is? Because when I think about the helicopter that landed on Mars, like, it's really hard to underwrite that as an investor, but I love it because now we have a new data point on how that works. And if there is some gain from that, every private space company can take whatever the learnings are and immediately start commercializing them and competing to figure out, okay, is there an economy here? Is there a business?

• 1:41:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, and that is the role for government. It's going to be, I mean, there's like four epic science missions that NASA has planned over the next few years, right? With nuclear powered inter-solar system transporters and going to Europa. And I think ultimately... Basset is going to be funding these these science missions.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:41:33Speaker 05

  Uh, and when they say funding the science missions, they're giving those missions to the money to private companies to go and do that work on behalf of that. On behalf of the government.

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, where, where else are you seeing promise? Hey, we're in this weird moment where we're seeing incredible growth in the power of artificial intelligence. Uh, but it's not curing cancer yet. It's, uh, you know, the, the best case scenario is that it's going to make all of our cybersecurity systems way more safe because we're going to go and find all the bugs, patch every hole, and we're going to navigate that system so that the white hat hackers have the tools longer than the black hat hackers before they get to them. And, and, and that is good. That's a positive externality, but that's not the same as, as curing cancer or abundant food. What is the next domino?

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  We cured obesity and John's like,

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  I, I guess we did.

• 1:42:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm moving the goalposts. I'm moving the goalposts.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  But, but yeah.

• 1:42:30Speaker 05

  Isn't that amazing? Because we always forget how far we've come. And we just sort of like say, ah, okay, show me some other miracle, please. Cause that went as yesterday. I, I think what people don't realize, and I, I wrote a paper with my mentor, Alex Piesner Gross, who's our resident genius called Solve Everything. And I think what's really exciting, what's coming in the very near future is the fact that these AGI, ASI systems are going to solve math. They've already effectively solved math. What comes next is physics and chemistry, biology, material sciences. And so we're about to see this extraordinary, uh, golden era of, of scientific discoveries that are going to occur at a rate far beyond anything else, right?

• 1:43:13Speaker 05

  Scientific breakthroughs, Nobel prizes came at a rate of the number of geniuses on the planet. But we've now increased the number of genius individual equivalents by billion fold. And so we're going to end up with a situation where, you know, we get room temperature superconducting and we've got new substrates that allow us to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, carbonate at a rate like never before, or, you know, allow us to reach longevity escape velocity. So I had Kevin Will from OpenAI on stage with me at my abundance summit this year, and Kevin used to be the chief product officer at OpenAI. He's now head of science at OpenAI. And what an incredible position to have.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:54Speaker 05

  Where you're using these models to solve physics and then all the breakthroughs that come out of there. So people talk about the revenues that are going to come from large language model, the agentic systems that the frontier labs are creating. I think what they're not talking about is the massive revenue that comes out of the breakthroughs that these that these companies are able to create. If you've solved longevity, what's that worth?

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk about longevity, but first you mentioned desalination. I've always been extremely interested in water desalination because I live in California and there's always been this debate over where the Colorado River goes and what, you know, what the opportunity in Arizona and Nevada is if California could desalinate the ocean and wouldn't need to pull so much water from the more central parts of America. You could wind up with more green areas and more farmland potentially in desert areas. But I'm wondering, is desalination, is it a material science problem, a physics problem,

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  a science problem, or is it permitting or marshalling the resources or just economics? Like, what do you think is interesting? Because that feels like such a such an amazing technology if we can unlock it in any reasonable amount of time.

• 1:45:16Speaker 05

  I think it's all of those in some degree. You know, I run, I don't run, I'm now executive chairman of the X Prize, amazing Morgan Nunez, I'm sorry, runs X Prize, and we've launched About $600 million in large-scale incentive prizes that have driven about $30 billion in R and D. And the largest prize we have going on right now is a desalination X Prize. It's funded out of Abu Dhabi by the President of Abu Dhabi.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:41Speaker 05

  And it's asking basically to increase the energy efficiency of desalination. It's also asking, one of the challenges with desalination is when you pull the water out and put the saline back, it's got an impact on the environment.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Speaker 05

  So you have people to, you know, to ameliorate that impact. And so we're going to see additional breakthroughs. It's going to be material science, it's going to be energy and physics that are driving that.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:07Speaker 05

  But the other thing that's going on is the idea of atmospheric capture of water, right? There's quadrillions of liters of water in the atmosphere. We call it rain when it falls on us.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Speaker 05

  But there's technologies now coming online at scale that for the majority of all countries on the planet, you can extract water from the atmosphere. So I, I think the water issue, um, be solved by desal, by atmospheric capture, and by actually AI, uh, looking at efficiency of water utilization, because we overuse it in some places and not in others, and then it's going to be recycling of, of water. So, you know, as I wrote in my first book, Abundance of the Future is Better Than You Think, back in 2012, technology takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant.

• 1:46:57John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:57Speaker 05

  Right? We talk about water wars and water scarcity. There's plenty of water on the planet. The challenge is, you know, 97% is salt, 2% is ice, and we fight over no less than 1% of the water in the, in the freshwater.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  Wow. Uh, what, what do you think needs to change around the narrative of, of energy? Does, does it, do, do different new energy projects have a narrative problem? Because it feels like nuclear, we're, we, the, the technology has been around for so long, we're, we're close to breakthroughs here. We talk to founders all the time that are building in nuclear, uh, but it feels like there's still some nervousness and anxiety about actually rolling that out. Solar is a whole different, uh, a whole different question, but how have you grappled with the, uh, the, the trade-offs between the, the technology, the government, and, uh, and just popular responses to the idea of a nuclear renaissance?

• 1:47:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, so new, so energy first is the single innermost loop. It's the most important thing we've got going on.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54Speaker 05

  You know, we've seen chips as the gating factor for a lot of AI. It's no longer chips.

• 1:47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:00Speaker 05

  It's now strictly energy, which is why, you know, Elon's looking at

• 1:48:03John Coogan?

  Space.

• 1:48:04Speaker 05

  data centers in orbit.

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:05Speaker 05

  Uh, but in the near term, I think, you know, this is not investment advice, but I'm investing more in energy companies than I am in AI companies these days, because how fundamental it is. Nuclear, um, you know, the challenges were stuck in the nuclear paradigm from thirty years ago with Gen one and Gen two fusion, uh, fusion plants.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:48:25Speaker 05

  Which were not safe. And we saw Fukushima, we saw Three Mile Island, we saw all these, these disasters. Um, but the new generation plants are in fact safe.

• 1:48:35John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:36Speaker 05

  Uh, and, uh, you know, they're coming, uh, small modular reactors are coming, uh, fusion is coming, and we need everything. We need all of them. But at this point, you know, I'm fond of saying I would put a nuclear supply, uh, power source in my backyard.

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:48:52Speaker 05

  They're, they're safe enough, right?

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:53Speaker 05

  And so, um, I mean, there's also, you know, communities need to understand this, that there's a direct correlation between the amount of energy you have in your community and the GDP of your community, the health of your community, the intelligence and education levels of your community. Energy scales all of these things. And so you should want access to the most energy you possibly have in your country, in your city, in your

• 1:49:18John Coogan?

  Hmm. How do you think about the aesthetics of, of technology and the impact of aesthetics? Because, uh, it feels like Elon has been very, uh, very deliberate in the way he designs the Cyber Cab and the way he announces these and the future should look by the, should look like the future. It certainly looks futuristic. Maybe there's a little cyberpunk edge there sometimes, but, uh, we were talking about this with data centers that, uh, you know, there's a lot of things around power, but that's solvable. But the aesthetics is another piece. So, you know, people are more likely to, you know, drive by a, a cellphone tower that's dressed up like a tree and not think about it as opposed to if they just see something that's, you know, uh, very machinic.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering, uh, how you process that as, does that need to be more of a first-class consideration for technologists if they're working on mega projects?

• 1:50:09Speaker 05

  So first off, I think one of the things that's interesting is we're going to start to repurpose the energy plants already there, right? So the coal plant.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:17Speaker 05

  The coal plant already has got permitting to some degree. It's got all of the supply chain coming into it, has the power lines coming out of it. So what you're going to probably see is the coal plant was, you know, used to have a coal-fired boiler. You're now going to pull out coal segment of it and put in a fusion device to boil the water there instead. So you're going to maintain the same footprints. You're just going to actually replace the engine with something that's more powerful and is cleaner, which I think is an important thing to realize. That's one of the transitions that's going to occur. And yeah, I think making things beautiful needs a little more attention and

• 1:50:58Speaker 05

  you can get there. And I think one of the things that AI can do, if you ask it, is how do you beautify something that might otherwise look, you know, just hideous?

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about longevity. Do you, how big of a deal do you see GLP-1s? It feels like we've been dealing with an obesity crisis for so long. It's still really early to see a jump in life expectancy. But if there was one horse I had to bet on as a new technology that enabled life extension, it would probably be GLP-1s. But how have you been processing that boom relative to other next-gen solutions that might be coming down the pipe in five or 10 years?

• 1:51:40Speaker 05

  I spend about half of my time in AI and half my time in longevity, right? I've written a few books there. I have a large venture fund investing in tech, building companies in the space. And you're right, GLP-1 by the longevity health community is considered really the very first longevity drug. And part of it is, we know that if you are metabolically unhealthy, if you're carrying too much visceral fat, if you're carrying too much fat on your body, that that shortens your life. And so GLP-1s enable you, hopefully to change your diets, your habits. But what's coming, so yes, it's the first and we're seeing generation two, generation three, generation four GLP-1 drugs coming online right now, which will enable you to

• 1:52:25Speaker 05

  keep the weight off and also maintain muscle, which is the downside of the original earlier versions of the GLP-1 drugs. But what's coming on the back of that are a whole set of new longevity therapeutics. So one of my friends, David Sinclair, not sure if you've had him on the show. Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, he's amazing and you definitely must. That'd be amazing. David's one of the most, you know, one of the great geniuses in the longevity space, as is George Church. Yeah. And David has, for the first time ever, we see a age reversal technology going into human trials. It's his OSK trial that's being done by Life Biosciences, full disclosure, I'm an investor, advisor to the company.

• 1:53:10Speaker 05

  But they demonstrated that three of the four yamanaka factors, I won't go into detail there, are able to reverse the age of cells. And they did this work first in mice, then they evolved it to primates, which were very similar to humans, and demonstrating that in the, your eyes in particular, for a couple of different conditions, macular degeneration and nigh on disease, that you can reverse the age of your visual system. And now, this month, they're going into humans. So it's the first time, and because it's an age reversal technology, while it's being

• 1:53:52Speaker 05

  tested in the eye, the concept is that it will work on all organs in the body. And we're heading towards a world in which, hopefully, we'll be able to take a therapy and knock back your functional age by 20, 30 years. And another X Prize, you know, the DSAL was the largest at 119 million, the next largest is, we call it the HealthSpan X Prize, it's a $101 million X Prize.

• 1:54:21Speaker 05

  It's $101 million because Elon had funded a $100 million prize for carbon capture.

• 1:54:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:28Speaker 05

  And sponsor of this one wanted to be bigger than Elon.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  That's great. I love, I love a competition like that.

• 1:54:34Speaker 05

  I know, it's funny. I said, okay, you toss an extra million bucks, so we'll do that.

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:38Speaker 05

  So this is a prize asking teams to come up with a longevity therapy.

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:44Speaker 05

  That I can give to you in less than a year. It reverses your functional age by 20 years in cognition, muscle and immune. Which means you've got the cognitive function you had 20 years earlier. You've got the muscular function, ability to build muscle, maintain muscles. You had 20 years younger and immune function.

• 1:55:03Jordi Hays?

  You got John's attention now.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Jordan, imagine, imagine if you had the mind of a nine-year-old.

• 1:55:11Jordi Hays?

  Many people have said I have the mind of a...

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  Tyler over there could be living the life of a two-year-old. We take him back 20 years. But yeah, of course, this is more relevant.

• 1:55:23Speaker 05

  So it's, um, it's exciting. We have over 700 teams competing for this.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:29Speaker 05

  And we'll have a winner by 2030. So there's this idea that, uh, you know, Rick Kurzweil has been a dear friend, my mentor. I started Singular University with him.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:38Speaker 05

  And he talks about something called longevity escape velocity.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:42Speaker 05

  And he says, we're going to reach longevity escape velocity by 2033. What is that? Well, it's the idea that at some point, for every year that you're alive, science extends your life for greater than a year. And at that point, you know, where's the limitation? So David's doing amazing work in that, in that area. There are others, um, uh, that are backed by, uh, like Retro that's backed by Sam Altman. Uh, and, uh, another one backed by, by Brian Armstrong. And all of these are working towards reversing aging. Not slowing and stopping, but reversing aging.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the thing that stands out to me about, uh, about where you're spending time is the, the, the revenue ramps in AI have been unbelievable. But they also have been unbelievable in the GLP-1 space. When you look at Novo's revenue scaling to tens of billions of dollars. Eli Lilly, tens of billions of dollars, right? And so, um, yeah, it almost feels like there's, there's... There could be quite a, quite a lot more people going after opportunities.

• 1:56:49Speaker 05

  There is all, all of these things are, I mean, the greatest wealth is your health. And in communities of, you know, ultra-high wealth individuals, I say, what would you pay for an extra 30 years of health? It is like everything.

• 1:57:05Speaker 03

  Everything.

• 1:57:06Speaker 05

  Right? So if I could just do a quick plug, my book comes out tomorrow. It's called We Are God.

• 1:57:13Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 1:57:15Speaker 05

  A Survival Guide to the Age of Abundance. So I wrote Abundance in 2012. This is a follow-on book.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Speaker 05

  And talks about how, but we've seen abundance across the board in everything. We've also seen some negative, Elon's abundance, too much carbon, too much microplastics, too much depression, all those things. But the single thing that people need more than anything else is the mindset to, to intercept what's coming.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Speaker 05

  Right? Feeling like AI is happening for you, not to you.

• 1:57:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Speaker 05

  Having the agency and agility to utilize these technologies. Cause we're, you know, as Elon says, about to hit a hypersonic tsunami that's going to change everything.

• 1:57:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  What, I would love to know, like, you know, looking back through the last few decades, there's been so much sci-fi and like futurism that just turned out to be pretty, pretty accurate. And that makes me wonder, who should we be paying most attention to today? You know, futurists, authors that are writing sci-fi, you know, on a, on a, on a go-forward basis?

• 1:58:30Speaker 05

  So let me, let me riff off that one second. One of my biggest concerns is that Most of Hollywood's content has been so negative about the future. Right? We've got Ex Machina, Terminator, Black Mirror. And they're just painting this, you know, negative future of killer robots and insane AIs. And if that's the future that you see, why would you ever want to live there? Right? And it's causing fear. Fear about job loss is one part, but fear about, you know, these technologies that we can't control because that's what we see in the movies. And so, a month ago, I teamed with Mark Benioff at Salesforce, Google,

• 1:59:13Speaker 05

  Kathy Wood at ARK Invest, Rod Roddenberry, the son of the creator of Star Trek. And we launched something called the Future Vision X Prize. People go to futuravisionxprize.com.

• 1:59:23Jordi Hays?

  You got an X Prize for everything.

• 1:59:25Speaker 05

  I do, I do. And so, and so what is it? We're asking teams to deliver a three-minute trailer

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:34Speaker 05

  that shows a hopeful, compelling vision of the future. And we're going to make the winner's movie. So we're going to create an engine of positive storytelling. Because when I was growing up, way before you guys were born, Star Trek was basically what inspired me to do everything I've ever done. You know, I'm 28 companies in, inspired by Star Trek.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:54Speaker 05

  And it showed this hopeful vision of the future. And so, we're lacking those. Having said that, Hail Mary was pretty damn good.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  It was great. Yeah.

• 2:00:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  No, I know. I thought it nailed that perfectly. Last question for me. Reflecting on the work of Ray Kurzweil, what do you think? It feels like his predictions have held up incredibly well.

• 2:00:15Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Incredibly well. I mean, to nail the Turing test date within a year, if not exactly to the day, basically. You can quibble on all these things, but it feels remarkably accurate. What do you think enabled him to predict and project the future so accurately?

• 2:00:33Speaker 05

  I mean, he did it by the math. He was looking at doubling rates.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:38Speaker 05

  He actually looked back in time to look at what was happening and what were the doubling rates. He calls it, you know, Moore's Law is a certain part of it.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:00:47Speaker 05

  It's basically integrated circuits, but he has something called the law of accelerating returns, and he applies it to everything. And so what's interesting is what is he predicting next? Right? So longevity escape velocity by 2033.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:00Speaker 05

  And high bandwidth brain-computer interface, uh, BCI.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:04Speaker 05

  You know, being able to connect your neocortex, your, uh, 100 billion neurons of your brain to the cloud. Um, you know, by 2035, I mean, these are extraordinary futures coming our way. It's like we're, we're speedrunning every science fiction movie ever made.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  That's why we need more positive

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:25Jordi Hays?

  science fiction today.

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:26Speaker 05

  We do. Absolutely do.

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I, I've always had this, this, uh, this take that like even in the dystopian sci-fi movies, they usually wind up having good endings where the humans overcome the negative potential ending and wind up victorious. And I think that's something that's really important to remember is that even if you wind up temporarily threatened by some negative sci-fi scenario, you can in fact use human agency to overcome it and be inspired not by the Terminator, but Sarah Connor, maybe narrowly.

• 2:02:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  Uh, and, and, and fight back against whatever negativity, whatever negative outcomes are happening. Because we've been through this, uh, time and time again with climate change and so many other, uh, you know, the, you know, car accidents, and we fought through that and we invented new seat belts and new cars and new lane, you know.

• 2:02:18Speaker 05

  We're still here.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Things. We're still here.

• 2:02:20Speaker 05

  Humanity is still here. We're overcoming.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 2:02:25Speaker 05

  My pleasure, guys.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an honor to finally have you on and, uh, yeah, come back on soon. Excited for the launch tomorrow.

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:31Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Go, everyone listening, go find the book. I'm sure it's available everywhere books are sold, As We Are Gods. Thank you so much.

• 2:02:39Speaker 05

  Thank you all.

• 2:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, Peter. Have a good one.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Well, there is some, some massive news out of the Cowboy State Daily. CowboyStateDaily.com says, uh, so the Safari Club's Big Game Trophy Collection is going to hit the auction block. So if you're into collecting taxidermy.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Ultra Dome?

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  This is very important. The Safari Club Restaurant's Big Game Trophy Collection that took more than 50 years to grow into a world-class taxidermy display is packing up to be sold. An auction company specializing in big game animals mounts, uh, will, big game animal mounts will arrive next week to pack up the massive collection that gave the Safari Club Restaurant its name. The restaurant was founded in the early 1980s by Jim Mills in Hot Springs State Park in Thermopolis and was a tourist hotspot and the place to go in the Big Horn Basin. Mills' collection had already been growing for years before the restaurant opened and then was then shared with tens of thousands of customers over decades. We're so proud of my dad who created the Safari Lodge. The collection is the culmination of his life's passion. The inventory has not even been done yet on the

• 2:03:47John Coogan?

  extensive collection to determine how many pieces are heading to auction. The mounts range from an ordinary moose to an extraordinary specimen such as the two antelope locked in an eternal battle. Dad was able to hunt and fish and follow his passions since the 1960s. The hotel and Safari Club represented my parents' travels over the years and sad to see the end of an era. And so if you're in the taxidermy world, you're going to want to pay attention to this.

• 2:04:10Jordi Hays?

  A lot of attention.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  This is a very important story.

• 2:04:12Jordi Hays?

  Attorney General Ken Paxton, uh, of the great state of Texas, has launched an investigation into Lululemon over the potential presence of toxic quote-unquote forever chemicals in activewear. Uh, sort of surprised that, uh, that they would call out one company in particular.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, you'd think it'd be a broad.

• 2:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Because there, there are thousands of companies and so, um, yeah, of course, Lululemon is one of the largest retailers.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Is this potentially an opportunity for Outdoor Voices? We've talked to the founder about sort of like, uh, Ty, uh, Ty Haney about, you know, revitalizing that brand, switching things up.

• 2:04:51Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I mean, try find, try, try to find, uh, like breathable activewear.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, without microplastics.

• 2:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Without.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  But that could be a business opportunity for someone.

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there, there's plenty of brands. There's a wave of brands that are using natural fibers, cotton, wool, things like that. They're not as like quote-unquote performant. In a lot of different ways, but likely healthier. But yeah, again, it feels like somewhat unfair to launch an investigation into a single company when I think this is.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  Also, it's unclear if there are any like broad FDA rules or broad like federal, like what are they bumping up against? Because as I, as I, at least to my knowledge, there's no like major rule around, around microplastics, forever chemicals, not there shouldn't.

• 2:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like how about you, how about you launch an investigation into the company that makes the.

• 2:05:49John Coogan?

  The forever chemicals? I'm in the forever chemical business and business is booming or it has been.

• 2:05:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there, there are plenty of, this is a good place to end it. If you want to, if you want to, if you're in Florida and you want to signal to other drivers on the road that you're ready to rumble, why not get a UFC license plate?

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  The UFC, it doesn't just go on the bottom. It actually goes before the, the letter. So you can only have five letters.

• 2:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Is your license plate technically UFC?

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  Maybe C12?

• 2:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Like is it, is it?

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Are those letters included?

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  I would imagine you have to select an available plate that's just five characters and you could not get a plate that's just normal, but the same five characters. So those five characters have to be available, but wouldn't, wouldn't absolutely wild choice.

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  Really, really silly as a UFC fan. I, I, even if I did live in Florida, I don't, I think it'd be tough to get behind this.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  You'd stick to the bumper sticker.

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's a handful of people out there that this made their, this made their day and I'm, and I'm happy about that.

• 2:07:01John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you for watching TBPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will be off tomorrow, but we will be back Wednesday at 11 a.m. Pacific. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

• 2:07:14Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:07:15John Coogan?

  Goodbye.