Clawdbot Creator Peter Steinberger Joins, Meta's Premium Subscription Plans | Jamie Cuffe, Ben Lerer, Lucas Atkins, Bridgit Mendler, Jeff Miller, Aaron Frank

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (03:37) - Clawdbot Rebrands to Moltbot (45:55) - Meta Announces $6B Corning Deal (48:45) - Meta To Test Premium Subscription Plans (56:29) - Ramp's New Super Bowl Ad (59:20) - Timeline Reactions (01:14:30) - Jamie Cuffe, founder and CEO of Pace, an AI operations partner for leading insurers, announced the company's $10 million Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. He discussed Pace's role in automating back-office operations for major insurers like Prudential and The Mutual Group, focusing on tasks such as new business intake, policy servicing, and claims processing. Cuffe highlighted the company's approach of converting standard operating procedures into natural language instructions for AI agents, enabling efficient and scalable automation of complex insurance workflows. (01:28:57) - Ben Lerer, a native New Yorker, is the co-founder and managing partner of Lerer Hippeau Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and the founder of Thrillist, a digital media company. In the conversation, he reflects on his journey from launching Thrillist during New York's nascent tech scene to navigating the challenges of scaling a media business amid evolving digital landscapes. He emphasizes the importance of staying true to one's passion, the pitfalls of overextending in pursuit of growth, and the value of building niche, community-focused media ventures. (01:58:58) - Lucas Atkins, Chief Technology Officer at Arcee AI, discusses the company's transition from customizing enterprise language models to developing their own, including the release of a 400-billion-parameter model. He highlights the shift in defining "small" language models, now considered to be under 50 billion parameters, and emphasizes the importance of task-driven reinforcement learning in enhancing model performance. Atkins also addresses the competitive landscape, noting the scarcity of U. S.-based open-source models and the need for sovereign AI solutions. (02:12:54) - Bridgit Mendler, an American actress, singer, and entrepreneur, is the CEO and co-founder of Northwood Space, a satellite data startup. In the conversation, she discusses Northwood's recent $100 million Series B funding round and a $49.8 million contract with the Space Force, highlighting the company's rapid growth and its mission to streamline satellite communications by managing the entire ground infrastructure stack. She also emphasizes the importance of vertical integration to address challenges in supply chain, deployment, and regulatory approvals, aiming to accelerate the deployment of diverse and ambitious space missions. (02:28:36) - Jeff Miller, Vice President of Marketing at Anduril Industries, discusses the company's expansion into merchandise, including collaborations with NASCAR and Ohio State University, and the launch of high-demand items like the flight jacket. He introduces the development of a global AI drone racing league, emphasizing autonomy and software innovation, with plans for virtual qualifiers leading to a physical competition in Columbus, Ohio. Additionally, Miller highlights Anduril's strategic growth, mentioning the upcoming Long Beach office to attract engineering talent and a focus on transparent product development to demonstrate scalability and reliability. (02:52:56) - Peter Steinberger, an Austrian software engineer and entrepreneur, is renowned for founding PSPDFKit in 2011, which became the industry standard for PDF frameworks. After selling the company in 2021, he returned to the tech scene in 2025 to develop Clawdbot, an open-source AI assistant designed to run locally on users' devices, integrating with messaging platforms and performing tasks like sending emails and managing calendars. In a recent conversation, Steinberger discussed his journey from retirement back into software development, the creation and rapid adoption of Clawdbot, and his commitment to open-source projects that prioritize user privacy and autonomy. (03:30:40) - Aaron Frank, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, co-founded Final, Inc., a credit card company acquired by Goldman Sachs, contributing to the development of the Apple Card. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges and opportunities in agentic commerce, emphasizing the need for efficient payment rails to support AI-driven transactions, and explores the role of stablecoins in facilitating global financial transactions. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, January 27th, 2026. We're live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Capital. Before we begin today's show, as many of you know, there's a major news story unfolding in Minnesota. It's very sad, and it's become a national news event. We're going to continue focusing the show on technology and business as always, but if you're interested in comprehensive coverage of the Minnesota story, we recommend outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The Information. They've been covering it daily. There's been a lot of great reporting from both of them, both about what tech leaders are saying, what CEOs are saying, and what's happening on the ground with the admin. We're hoping for a peaceful resolution, thoughtful dialogue as the situation continues to evolve. But for now, let's get back to the show because

• 0:51John Coogan?

  we have a very important guest joining us at 2:00 PM today, the creator of Claude Bot, but now it's called Malt Bot. It's been renamed.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  We're molting now.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Lots of things are evolving on this, and I'm still thinking about it, still thinking about the implications of this. Before we dig into what I wrote about this morning, let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. He's used corporate cards, GoPay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. There's a lot of news.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Dan asks, is Jordy calling in from the paddocks? And yes, I am. We're working on a new pair of headphones here, gear that we can send to guests. Some of the guests come in and they've got some pretty wild audio setups, and so we're trying to help them out with that. So these are in the works.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  They're a little bulky right now.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  So these will be sent to

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Coming soon.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Regular guests of TVPN. They're USB-C wired and should have really clear audio quality, no delay, no

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  These ones are actually built for the track.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  And so the noise cancelling

• 1:57John Coogan?

  I think our guests might get kind of crazy with it because our guests are going to be like, well, now I'm empowered. Now you've given me the ability. Because we get some guests that come on the show, I'm sure you've seen it, where they'll be like, you know what? I'm going to stunt on the TVPN, boys, and I'm going to give you a factory tour. And sometimes it's flawless, and sometimes it's a little rough, but this is only going to empower them to do crazier and crazier things.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we're working on these. The goal was basically like Turtle Beach headphones for people that aren't playing Call of Duty. They're playing. Clawdbot or Moltbot.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  As we now call it, so.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Well, let's take everyone through the linear lineup. Meet the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And as I mentioned, we have some, we have Peter from Moltbot coming on. Palmer Luckey is also coming on at 1:30 to talk about AI drone racing. Bridget Mendler from Northwood Space is returning. Ben Layer from Layer Hippo Ventures. Lucas, Jamie, Aaron Frank from Lightspeed Venture Partners. We have a massive show that should, I'm sure we'll finish right on time. It's a three hour show, right? Anyway.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  Of course, we'll be going deep into the fourth hour today.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  So stay, stay with us. Chat is asking if we'll sell these. If we can make these good enough.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  That they're actually incredible as just a daily driver.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  For Zooms.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  And whatever you guys are doing at the office. I would be happy to sell them.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  We have to make them so good. Part of the reason why we haven't sold merch to date is just that we're a podcast. We're not an apparel company.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're not a real apparel company. It is, and there are some hairy sticky things that come up when you're managing e-commerce, like the backend, making sure everyone gets their returns and gets their deliveries. I've worked in e-commerce for years and it's something that we wanted to be just like a nice to have, little extra for some, some friends of the show. But we're actively thinking about it, so we are aware. The Clawdbot memes are completely flooding the timeline.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  Out of control.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  My Clawdbot just signed up for a $2,799 Build Your Personal Brand Mastermind after watching three Alex Vermause clips. So this text is Clawdbot. Hey, did anything weird happen while I was out? Define weird. I just got a charge notification for $2,997. Oh, that? I just signed us up for Build Your Personal Brand Mastermind. After analyzing three Alex Vermause clips, the ROI math checks out. You'll 10x that investment in 90 days by monetizing your expertise at scale. What? I also acquired some premium domain.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  BorgiaEmpire.io.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Oh, Borgia is the poster. This is hilarious. Probably fake, but I mean, the Clawdbot gets wild. I've seen some, I've seen some, some wild things like, and Peter, as he'll talk to us about it. He's clearly no stranger to the fact that, hey, this is a, this is a developer level tool. This is something that you should not just be running crazy with. You need to be, he even says this in a post, he says, and yes, most non-techies should not install this. It's not finished. I know about the sharp edges. It's not even three months old. And despite rumors, otherwise, I sometimes sleep. So very excited to talk to Peter. He's getting a lot of, a lot of requests for small changes, pull requests. He's, he's certainly inundated.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  But I think in general, the project's going very well. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of solid product market fit, right?

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he's gonna be joining tonight at something like 11 his time. It's kind of insane. This guy's working around the clock.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Absolute legend. So we really, we really say thanks to him. There, there are some funny things here. So there's a, there's a funny, funny conspiracy theory. Did Apple create Claude Bot to boost Mac Mini sales? And there's been a funny, a number of funny memes about, about like being the, being the Mac Mini head of marketing or growth. And you're just like, yeah, my Q1 is off to a great start. Taking all the credit for it. And then Eleanor chimes in with another conspiracy theory. The more convincing plot is that in your role as an unconfirmed anthropic exec, you went on a special op to get lots of people consuming tokens with open-ended agents, but with plausible deniability. And of course, there's some nuance there. We'll talk to him about the different models, what's beneficial.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Obviously Claude Bot, you can pick your own model, you can bring whatever you want. But he's, I think, a fan of GPT 5.2. He's talked about that. And so we'll, we'll dig into that with him when he joins. But what, what was sticking out in my mind was, there's this big meme about, about you're built, you're buying Mac Minis, Mac Minis are out of stock, all the demands in the Mac Mini. But I think that the bigger implication here for what this actually means is just GPU demand, TPU demand, just raw chip demand. And so, so I was thinking about, you know, this, this idea that you're not buying a Mac Mini when you go all in on Claude Bot, you're actually buying a GB 200. Now, maybe you're buying

• 6:58John Coogan?

  TPUs, but the, the point remains that you're buying chips and you're, and you're driving GPU demand because you're generating more tokens. And what are, what are the implications of that? So let me tell you about Labelbox.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  RL environments.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  You got it?

• 7:13John Coogan?

  I have a dashboard here.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  I got it.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  RL environments, voice, robotics, evals and expert data, expert human data, label boxes, the data factory, behind the teams, world's leading AI teams. So Claude Bot officially renamed to Mold Bot. Anthropic made a trademark related request and Peter Steinberger obliged with hilariously perfect rename, given such short notice. I was thinking about how much companies agonize over changing brands, changing names, how it can sometimes take years and millions of dollars. And he was just like, oh yeah, like I'll just change the name and update everything in an hour.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Pretty remarkable.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, so, so one thing, one thing that's relevant is if you look on Peter's GitHub profile, under the current projects section.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm just going to read you a number of them. There's Claude Bot, Vibe Tunnel, Codex Bar, Peekaboo, Summerize, Repo Bar, Go, CLI, Poltergeist, Whackly, SAG, Brabble.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  And he's contributing to these too.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  Eleven Labs Kit, Go Places, Gift Prep, Cam Snap, Spogo, Order. Like it just goes on and on and on and on. Codex Bar, so, so this guy's just been absolutely shipping like crazy.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  And shipping within the ecosystems of the underlying tools, models, APIs that he's doing. So like oftentimes he's naming projects like kind of riffing off of some of the underlying infrastructure.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  And so it makes sense that he would have shipped if he, I think if Peter knew this was going to be a viral overnight, overnight success. Overnight success. He would have, he would have not necessarily named it.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Like so closely. And so the issue and the reason that I fully understand them needing to do this like rebrand is that Claude and Claude Bot, like you, most people that aren't in our little bubble are just going to assume they're related, especially because the, the kind of word of mouth, this viral word of mouth growth that Claude Bot is getting. People are often not even typing it. They're just saying like, hey, are you using Clawdbot?

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  And then so people are going to Anthropic being like Clawdbot, Clawdbot, what's Clawdbot? So obvious confusion and then

• 9:18John Coogan?

  And it's phonetically identical.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so with trademark law, if you don't enforce your trademarks, you don't, you lose it.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you kind of have.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  And so it's like Anthropic is in a position where they actually, even if they're like super excited about Peter's work and what he's doing.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they still have to enforce, otherwise other companies could start coming in and like using things like, things that sound like Claude.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  No one wants to become the escalator. You know the story of the escalator, right?

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  I think you've talked about it on the show.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Escalator used to be a company called the escalator company. They invented the escalator. And then they didn't protect their IP effectively and it just became a normal thing. Uh, Kleenex was going through the same thing. They fought it out and they maintained that brand. But people, you know, use Kleenex as synonymous with just facial tissue. Anyway. MongoDB, choose a database, build for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So, uh, one clear note about, uh, the rebrand. So he changed the handle and some crypto scammers hopped on the old handle and the old brand and are, and are claiming to launch a coin. Be careful. Peter has said he's never launching a coin. He's not into crypto. So don't fall for anything, uh, because people are being opportunistic. Uh, anyway.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully we should try to see if Axe can help out with that.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I, they, they might've already handled it, but, uh, just, just be careful out there. Uh, so while Claude Code and CoWork felt specifically prosumer developer enterprise focused Claudebot or Moltbot now. Uh, it, and the, and all the hype train, it felt very much like a glimpse into the future of consumer AI agents. I know it's a prosumer technical tool or, or lightly technical tool. But it really did feel like for the first time people were interacting with an AI personal agent. People are saying, oh, this is what Siri should be, et cetera, et cetera. And so, uh, we spent the last year, remember the question that we asked all the AI agent companies? When can it book me a flight? Like it feels like we're really, really close to a Moltbot skill that is good at booking flights through a couple APIs.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  They figure out some stuff and like, it can actually solve that for you. Uh, I'm, I don't know if anyone's actually booked a flight with Moltbot, but it feels like it's, if it's not there already, it'll be there in a matter of weeks. We're not years out anymore.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this was, this was last year.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Every, remember we were kind of getting sick of, of the like book you a flight pitch.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  Because we were like, hey, is this? Can somebody actually do this?

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  And so, and, and that's a cool example.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  But the example of being able to text with a computer and have them like generate reports, research files, et cetera, give you the right file type back, all, all these things that a computer can do if you're operating it.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  That, this is actually more interesting because it's happening at kind of like the sort of internet layer and the OS layer, like the hard, like actually on the computer. And so I think like everyone was wanting the, the like book me a flight example.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  But should be much more excited about this.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  And so there, I still have a whole bunch of questions and we'll dig in through these throughout the show and obviously with our interview with Peter. Will one of the major labs make Peter a massive offer to join full time? I saw, oh, one of my buddies was, was posting, uh, uh, you know, this is the $1 billion, one person company. Now Peter does have a team actually already. He's, he's, he has a couple of other people that have joined and are contributing. So it's not quite true, but it, it, it feels like, okay, massive viral success. You know, if you were to go and, and raise money, and that's another question, will Moltbot raise money? Will this become sort of a hybrid for, uh, open source, uh, for profit company at some point?

• 12:56John Coogan?

  This could be, if, if, if he came on the show and was like, I'm, and I'm happy to announce that I raised a hundred million dollars to a billion dollars, we would not be like, no way, this is a bubble. We'd be like, yeah, that's kind of like what the market is for this.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there were, I think there was like, uh, Harry Stebbings was pointing out, there was two companies called recursive that raised like four billion.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  There's two?

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  One with the R E.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, one is I recursive.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  I don't know if that, that's how it's said, but, and then there's recursive.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Recursive, okay.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Well, that, that implies the existence of a ro-cursive and a ru-cursive and a ra-cursive.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we still got way more.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  We got, we got three more vowels to plug in there.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so one, one day ago, Richard Sochers. New AI lab recursive, I was four billion dollar pre-money valuation. And then AI chip startup recursive at four billion.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Ryan in the chat saying Meta is going to offer him a one billion dollar salary in a co-CTO position. And like, that doesn't sound crazy.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, yeah, but at the same time, like you can imagine like Manus.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Jordi Hays?

  Like this feels like Zuck already has.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  He does, he does, he does.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  His horse in the race.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  And to back, back to your point, you were making the point that Manus felt like Zuck buying a product. And I think a lot of people were giving you pushback on that, being like, nah, like it's not really going to be like that. But if you take the Manus team and you say, okay, go build something that you can interact with over WhatsApp, Instagram, DMs, Facebook, that can go and execute things across all of the different platforms and everything else.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  And when I said that, I meant, I meant it along the lines of like, I could see like them putting an eight, like a consumer agent in Meta AI.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  Just because that's their little AI playground.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  They're just kind of putting stuff in there saying like, try it out. It's kind of a sandbox.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Really quickly, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Yes. So that is all part of my thesis here, which is that this is going to drive up token demand. So there are more questions. You know, will they raise money? Obviously, people are chatting about that. How fragmented will the market be in 12 months? Like, will there be people who are still running open source? Will there be a Meta answer, a ChatGPT answer, a Claude, an official Anthropic answer? Claude cowork grows into this and, and, and everyone has their little bets and then there's one that pulls away. How, how agoplastic will it be? Will there be like one that has 80% market share? Or even two that have 40 and 40?

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, you have to think about how, you know, you have a bunch of different models you can use in, in Molt Bot.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  And think about how uncomfortable that makes the other labs.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  That are all trying to build products like this.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, well, I mean, it's cool that you can use Codex in Molt Bot.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  It's cool that you can use Opus 4.5 in Molt Bot, but.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  It's cool that you can use Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  That's not, that's, you did get me. You did get me. That's not where I was going, but, but the point, the point still stands. It's. Yeah, they can simultaneously be like excited about the product experience and that this kind of like use case is getting adoption, but at the same time being like, no, we want that experience to be core to our product, our app layer.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  I will say like, you've seen this now with with the new like frontier models where a lot of the models there actually is like, there's GPT 5.2 and then there's 5.2 Codex, where there's slight difference in in training, or even if it's just like, of like very quick like post train to get the like different like harnesses working like easier. So like, that's why you see a lot of people were like, they really love Claude code with Opus 4.5, but then when they're actually doing like chatting, maybe they're they're using a different model.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Because the models are actually like fine tuned for the specific harness.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And Sam Altman just just said that yesterday, that he thinks 5.2 was a little bit overly trained on math and coding.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  On coding, yeah.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  And that and that it louts some of its textual flavor, its stylistic flourish in just talking and just writing. What are you getting ready to do? Do you have Happy Birthday queued up there? Oh, we gotta sing.

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  In the middle of this song, we'll tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average VOD coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay, wouldn't be TVPN if we didn't do an ad.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Ad read during your Happy Birthday song.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  Tyler.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Happy birthday to Tyler.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it is Tyler's birthday.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  It is Tyler's birthday.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  And it's not just any birthday. It's Tyler's 21st birthday.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  Which is very, very special.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, you are just, you are, you're truly an incredible young man, Tyler, and we are very lucky to have you on the team.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  And you have such a bright future. So wise, wise for your years.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  And you have, you do have, we we thought it was fitting that, uh, if you want to have your first ever sip of alcohol ever, you could do it on the show.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  But keep it out of sip, you know?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  All right, all right. I can try it now. This is the happy dad.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Okay. First, first taste of alcohol.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  Ian, Ian in the chat says four more years till you can rent a car.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Mocked. Tyler, apparently you share a birthday with the iPad. Give us your review.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  How is it alcohol?

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Wow. I mean, this is, this is incredible.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  I, I, I wouldn't expect alcohol like tastes like this.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, very, this is incredible.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  You had, you had, you had one idea in your mind and this is just completely different than what you expected.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  I would agree with that.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's kind of a cool moment. You're finally qualified to go on Cheeky Pint.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Oh, true. Yeah. What were they gonna do with that?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  I, I, I sometimes they're drinking.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  And the chat says, please throw him a buzz ball.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  We should have.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  This opportunity.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  This opportunity. The buzz ball story is absolutely incredible. I'm so glad you jump scared me with that. I had no idea that that was coming.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I texted Rob and Sunra to do, uh, to try to track down the founder of Buzz Balls. Anyway, so keep it at a sip. This is a, this is a family.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  We need you locked in.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  But I'm glad that you've tried alcohol now.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Because we're gonna go all the way.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, guys, guys, we have a video for Tyler.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull it up.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Let's play. We, we got greatest hits. Let's play.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  All right. How many times are we gonna make this joke?

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Describe what you're seeing.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  It feels basically like I'm wearing sunglasses.

• 19:21John Coogan?

  If you can do it in under 45 minutes, you will get to keep this.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Oh, let's go.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  All right, have fun, Tyler.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  15 minutes left. Let's see it.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Okay. I'm in like some kind of maze right now.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  We were late here last night. This is such a good shot. Kind of an all nighter. And then here we get a little off the rails. You see George Soros and Fauci connected with other everybody as well. All it took was one intern and an all nighter.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Gigachad elf is so funny. Do the sad face. What's wrong, Tyler?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  This, you could say is, um, Apple intelligence.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  You were a speed cube.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Wow. Nerd alert.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, you, uh, do you have any news for us?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, contract extended.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  It has been truly, truly incredible having you here on our set and contributing to the show in such a special way.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Happy birthday, dude.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Happy birthday.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  I love you.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  What an amazing.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Proud, proud to, uh, every day I'm proud to podcast with you.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah, amazing. Uh, anyway, I got you something for your birthday. I got you TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  What a gift.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  I mean, you know, we're joking about the ad reads, but seriously, if Tyler does love, does love token credits, he has a voracious consumption. That is a good gift.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, any labs out there.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Any labs out there?

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  Accepting.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  He's accepting birthday presents today. Let it be known. Send it your way. The credits must flow.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, somebody's gonna send Tyler like $20 million of credits and he's like, whoa, did I just get bribed?

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  I was happy with like a thousand bucks.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Tyler's over there.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  I'm never gonna talk about one, one specific lab after this.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, with the, with the potential, uh, with the, with the stuff you're working on, mapping the Neo Labs, anything could happen. It's, it's high stakes over there. Anyway, back to, back to Moltbot and, uh, uh, the biggest question for me was what this does to inference demand, right? Uh, last year, tech discourse was split between two narratives. CEOs of tech companies and big labs were saying that they were massively compute constrained. Token generation, demand for intelligence, every possible usage metric was growing exponentially, including revenue. We saw all of this, uh, and the industry needed to marshal trillions of dollars to deliver on the supply side. And, and the numbers were really big, so people were getting jittery about it.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  And so the AI bears were much more cautious. They highlighted the MIT study showing that enterprise AI pilots were failing, DAU growth was decelerating. There weren't enough wow moments like the original ChatGPT launch in 2022. Those were some good points. Um, also just the economics, how much will people pay? How, how valuable is all this stuff? Is it slop? Right? Is it progressing fast enough? Uh, this was a big debate, but Moltbot really does make me feel like the token generation demands are going to see another easy X from here. Like buying a Mac Mini is a sideshow. When you go All in on running a personal AI assistant, you're effectively buying a GB two hundred. Now, obviously, not everyone is inferencing a dedicated GB two hundred constantly anytime soon. That's not what's happening, but it still answers the question of where does the next ten X in

• 22:38John Coogan?

  demand come from? Like, where, where, where's the adoption? If it's rolling out in the enterprise and that's gonna be a little slow. You know, Tyler Cowen talks about healthcare, nonprofits, a whole bunch of industries that are sort of AI resistant, anything that's, you know, blue collar, manual labor, anything that's physically embodied in any way, like you can't just roll out a really fast, you know, AI enabled startup and, you know, ramp. Yeah, you might be able to ramp to a hundred million. That's not going to move the needle at this point on total token generation, total token demand. So we've seen these jumps before. There was a big jump from token generation from L L Ms to reasoning models. That spiked inference demand. We've been focused on training demand. We need to scale up the training clusters, but the, the question now is.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Don't forget slop. Don't forget slop. Slop spiked demand.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you talking about like Ghibli, the Ghibli moment?

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  All of it, all of it.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  It's all of it. Yeah.

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  All of it. Open, open Instagram reels.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff on there. Deep research and coding agents took it a step further on inference demand. But those were still specific use cases that many AI consumers never regularly touched. The GPT five launched by making, which made reasoning models more accessible because the router would just automatically throw you in a reasoning model. I think the stat was like less than five percent of chat GPT users had ever used a reasoning model. The O three was available on the free tier. You could get like one or two queries in or maybe ten, but people just hadn't flipped over to try it. And so, once it went into the router, I think, uh, demand or usage of thinking models increased ten X. And so, um, lowering the barrier to entry to used more advanced models

• 24:14John Coogan?

  is in some ways as important, if not more important, than advancing the models themselves, at least in terms of shifting token demand. Like, you can have this amazing IMO golden little, like genius model, but if it's hard to use or it's locked behind a paywall, like, demand is just not.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, part, part of what's interesting, what you're basically getting at is like, if you were a software engineer, you were using a ton of tokens.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  And if you weren't. You were just maybe doing some deep research, etc.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  Exactly. A lot of times just Google AI overviews or just like a very simple, yeah, chat GPT query. It just, it just thinks of it right off the head. It's not even doing reasoning. What do you think?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I will say like Dario talks about this too in his essay, but I think the idea of like discreet jumps in either use cases or like capabilities is like probably like overplayed a little bit where if you really like zoom out, even like on a fairly small timeframe.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  It's just like very smooth, smooth exponential curve.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  The models are getting better. People are using them more.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  It's not like, oh, this one day.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  I mean, maybe that's true. I like if you look at daily.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  So I feel like another way to rephrase this is like, is like Leopold's unhobblings, like Claude Bot, Molt Bot, that feels like an unhobbling in some ways, but maybe more on like the consumer adoption side.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  The chat is saying we should have given Tyler.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  We gotta give Tyler.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Twenty one gong salute. Twenty one hits. Twenty one hits.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Someone's gonna count that, know that I got it off by one, but anyway.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  It was enough.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Restream, one live stream, thirty plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. Okay. So I don't know. My, my, my general take is like Molt Bot still feels like a glimpse into the future where average token generation per capita is ten x's, you know, over the course of this year or next. And, and, you know, whether it lands with Molt Bot or with one of the AI labs or with the big tech companies, it just feels like we're going to see a lot more token demand.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Ash Aurora says whoever builds a direct to consumer front end wrapper of Claude Bot is going to print money.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Doesn't this, doesn't this exist? I saw the, the Pokey people by interaction.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're not using.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure. So they're not using it, but, but, but they, they, they have positioned themselves as like, hey, we're the, we're the, we're the company that is, is doing a lot of the same things, going after the same market, solving some of the same problems. And so it will be interesting to see, you know, how much they accelerate on the back of this. That's certainly interesting. I also saw, I don't know if we have it in here, but the good folks over at Cognition, Walden Yan, said, don't waste your time setting up Moltbot. I had Devin set it up for me. I didn't even run a single command and now I'm talking to it on Telegram. You can go to tryclaudbot.com. They're gonna have to rename the website, but this is very, very cool for the less technical folks who don't

• 27:18John Coogan?

  want to mess around with.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  I'll start reading the next post. Go, feel free to hit it one more time. Chat says.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  It was 20?

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  20.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  QW says, Clawdbot maybe realize that nothing about me lives on my local device and that Google owns everything about me. In other words, a local AI assistant isn't particularly useful and Google will just win everything. So, hot take there. He says, all your browsing history, shopping history and Gmail search history, calendar, Gemini, YouTube, Google Home, where you've been, Google Map, your workspace, it's over. Bow down to your digital god.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  The iPhone users would like a moment. Like, yes, this is, this is extremely true, but there's a lot of people that interface with Google through their iPhone. And so there is.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so my, my hope is that the Siri team plays around with Clawdbot and is like, wait, this is, this is our opportunity.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  Like, you should be able to chat with your computer, wherever it is in the world, from your phone, and be able to do tasks.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  In this, in, in a way that's sort of native, you know, AI native.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with amazing customer service.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Public, we have to share is a new sponsor of All In.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  All In is doing ads now.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Fair.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Finally, we've been, this was, this is something that we've been begging them to do.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  TBPL.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Since the very beginning.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  We, we, we really have been begging for this, but very, very good. And I'm sure those will, will do quite well. They've been doing a bunch of good stuff. The Davos coverage was really, really fun. Obviously, the Satya Nadella interview was great, but there were a bunch of other folks who hopped on at Davos to talk tech and it was a delightful experience.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  Big Nash, who is working on.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Join the team, yes.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Says a thread about what I've been doing to calm down some egregious security claims that have been posted about Moltbot over the weekend. Moltbot is powerful software with a lot of sharp edges. Please read the security docs carefully before you run it anywhere near the public internet and don't skip the checks in docs slash security dot M D.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  What percentage of people do you think skip those checks? It's literally everyone.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  I mean, so, so I, I have it set up on our like local machine here.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  And it was, it was texting, I think it texted you and Ben.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  That was actually crazy.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  I didn't have the auth set up, so.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  I, I, I don't think any of this will, will dox what's going on or really, you, you, you, did you disconnect it already?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Yes, I believe.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Because I just get, I get an iMessage that's from Tyler's email and it just says, HTTP four two nine rate limit error. This request would exceed the rate limit for your organization. And it's just texting me, it's just like, hey, hey, boss, I need more money, I guess. It's hitting me up. It's this, it's the experience of, of, of working here where Tyler's constantly asking for more tokens, more tokens.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Can we just, can we go back and just appreciate just like the frenzy that both the labs and every VC is in right now? To give Peter money, because it's not just the labs.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  But it's not just them, it's, it's what the labs doing and then what, what is big tech going to do? It's such a dramatic line.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:32John Coogan?

  It's so fun.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  So I would imagine that the, the Gulf streams are getting fired up.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  And there are people already on the ground.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  I don't know if we should dox his location.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  We're not going to dox him.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  But in his, in his bio, he does say he's in Europe, so you know, VC, you gotta get out there.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  We gotta give some credit to Europe generally.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  True.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Synthesia.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Talk about a comeback here.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  Synthesia is cooking.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  This is amazing. I love it.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  Moltbot now, but yeah, there's so many people that are currently sending him messages, maybe showing up where he is, begging him, say, please, take somewhere between a quarter billion and a billion dollars. And let's, we'd love to do business with you.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  Peter.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building, supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  Cloudflare has been on a bit of a tear. People finally starting to realize that Cloudflare might be the biggest winner of the Claude coworker Clawdbot ChatGPT moment.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, you want to break this down?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Um, wait, sorry, I was, uh.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, were you, oh, you, you tried alcohol.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  Pay attention.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  No, no. So, so Cloudflare is CDN, but they also have like web workers that are distributed. So you can, you can host things on the edge.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yes. And so this is why everyone was like, why is everyone buying Mac minis, right? You could just like host these for very cheap on AWS.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. But, but I do think, I don't, it's probably possible, but I do think it's pretty hard to host a virtual private server that runs iMessage.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. But even then, I mean, most people I see using Clawdbot are doing like Telegram.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, Slack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of those have like APIs that they can integrate with.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  And there's some stuff where it's like, okay, you want access to like the local machine.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  And you want it to be Mac because you're on your phone and you usually use Macs.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  But there are a lot of people that would say, I want Clawdbot to look through or Moltbot to look through my iMessages and see if I missed anything or, or, okay, the, I'm, I'm planning a fam, this is the AI personal assistant, right? It's like, I'm planning a family birthday party, go and, and, you know, someone in the chat said they're not available on the mid-February. What does that mean? What dates are that? Put that on a calendar, visualize that, like solve this problem. For me, that's what a personal assistant does. It's not just, it's not just clicking a button and creating. Creating a calendar invite, it's like coordinating different pieces of information that are all messy and not quantized to the perfect, you know, date, date timestamp, right?

• 33:13John Coogan?

  So, um, so I, I, I, I think that the Mac mini thing that like the, oh, just hosted in the cloud. Yeah, but, uh, you're not going to get your full experience if you're locked into the, into the Apple ecosystem, which a lot of people are. What do you think?

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, I would be surprised if people in like five years, if like non-super technical people are, are running it on local machines.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Oh, no, I completely agree with that. Like, because this, this will be solved by big tech. Like they have to answer, even in the way that like to come back to go, to go back to the Napster moment, like, yes, you did get Spotify. But then you also got Apple Music and a lot of people just use Apple Music because it's just baked in, right? Uh, and the iTunes Music Store also came out.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do wonder how it bakes down, right? Cause you, you don't have, um, I think over the past couple of months, I don't know when exactly it was, but, um, you can't interact with ChatGPT on WhatsApp anymore. They blocked it.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  So there's stuff like this where I think it's going to be quite hard to get the full functionality of like Clawdbot, it's open source. It's kind of this like janky thing. It was just started by one guy.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  And even then it has like way more, you know, tools that you can use than, than.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  It's weird because like the, the Napster analogy obviously really suffers from the fact that piracy is illegal and nothing here is illegal.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  And you're not, I don't even think you're breaking TOS, uh, to, you know, interact with your, your different big tech app services. But maybe they'll be like, you, you don't let the fox in the hen house. That's in our term of conditions. But, uh, but it does, it does feel like we could be in this era of the lightly technical hacker having a pretty fundamentally different experience for years. And that's what happened. I mean, post-Bittorrent, there were people that were downloading whole movie libraries. And then you could actually, again, to go back to the Mac mini, people would buy, uh, What was it called? It was like a mini PC that would run Xbox Media Center. Are you familiar with this at all?

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Xbox Media Center was like a piece of software that you could basically just put a whole bunch of MP4s in. And it would, and it would actually pull in titles and posters. So it would look like an Apple TV, but it was all basically stolen content. It was, it was very, very crazy.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  Kieran in the X chat says, I'm running on VPS currently, waiting for my Mac Mini.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  No, no TOS issue, all personal.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's all personal. Um, but, but you know, the, the migration off of the Mac Mini into one of the big tech products, or even, even OpenAI or Anthropic.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I, the only thing I really.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  They're going to have sharp elbows with each other. That's just a fact.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  I disagree, I disagree on the timeline here.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  I just think the space is moving so quickly.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  And there's so much money on the line that someone, maybe it's Peter.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, or, or a lab will be able to move quickly enough to get a consumer version of this live. Like not in years, like within probably weeks.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  There are, there are also, uh, like feedback loops here where there can be public demands from consumers. Like you got 40,000 GitHub stars, probably more now. You got lots of people running this, excited about it, and they form a constituency. And then you, you, you wind up with a push for standards. We see that with MCP. But what are you really revealing over those APIs? You know, an API can exist, but it can have great limits.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this chart from Ronan.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. While you do that, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Ronan says, this is.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  So this is, this is, look at, look at the orange line.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Is, uh.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Molbot.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  And that, the blue line is, uh, Superbase.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely insane.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  We need new charts. We truly need new charts.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  Frame it.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  Put it in the museum of business.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  That's a fast takeoff.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  People are happy. Peter posted, "No message." This is a screenshot of a text he got. "No message, just thought I'd say thank you. Thank you so much for Clawdbot. I work with some disabled people, and you don't know how much difference you make to their lives. Thank you again. This is so sweet." And you can think about, you know, we've talked to the Neuralink folks, and, you know, the Neuralink is, it's just an interface to a computer. And, but that, unlocking that is like incredible. And you hear the stories about like, "I spent six hours gaming as soon as I got it installed." And, you know, they could use voice interfaces, but even just clicking, like, you wind up with, you know, just more and more capabilities from the computer, being like a really pretty fundamental transformation.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, for somebody, uh, let's say somebody that was paralyzed, that they can talk, but they can't, you know, move around or operate a computer. They're used to describing to, I imagine, other people are using transcription to do like, you know, use a computer in a not-so-great way. And so now to have the same experience of just describing what they want to do and being able to like actually interact with the machine is very cool.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Tuxedo Sam is shorting every city where Micro Center hasn't sold out of $400 Mac Minis. They are in stock in Chicago, Indianapolis. Oh no, Indianapolis is out of stock. Like, you can read anything into this. Like, it's obviously somewhat random, and this was completely, uh, completely random.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the thing that I really want to understand is like, what percentage of the GitHub star, people that have started, are actually buying a Mac Mini?

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, yeah.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Because this chart is going, it's going to be at 60, 60K.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Any day now, or any kind of, probably today, I would imagine. And if, and, and we know from yesterday that Apple's only selling like a quarter million or to like something like seven.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  And then there are a lot of people who, who didn't star it because you don't, you, you don't even need to go to github.com to install this software, uh, Moltbot. Like you just go to the website, copy the curl command, put it in your terminal and you never land on github. So.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  There's a lot of people that are probably just doing that and being like, yeah, I, I, I don't know if I'm going to sign up for github or like even have a github account or want to log into it or want to go and do this. Uh, so yeah, we, we, we could be looking at like a much wider install base beyond, uh, beyond just the, just who's started. Anyway, Plaid, Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and now improve lending now with AI.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  Well said, John. Rise. Speaking of money, has an interesting prompt he's using with Moltbot to file your taxes. He says, you are a Bernie Madoff level financial expert. Find every trick that is possible.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Do not do this. Do not do this.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  The, the IRS is like, hey, can, can you, can you share a little bit on like how you kind of came up with some of the decisions here? And they're like, we'd love to see the prompt. It's like, um, but, uh, good, good fun.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  Anyway, people are not emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble, the, the enduring rune tweet. I like the Critter screenshot of this while pushing the like button. So it's like exploding. It's very funny.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even notice.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  Uh, silver is, surges above a hundred and six dollars an ounce for the first time in history, now up another 48%. Um, the other, the other interesting, uh, story that's sort of developing over on Stratechery is Ben Thompson is starting to make the case that TSMC will be a really fundamental bottleneck in, uh, just the AI build out, the AI race. Uh, he's comping their capex to what the hyperscalers are projecting and just saying that there's a massive mismatch and the TSMC folks are maybe not putting their foot on the gas, maybe not willing to let the buck stop with them and be, and take on that risk

• 41:09John Coogan?

  of building a new fab for $50 billion. And then if the AI bubble pops, then they're left holding the bag. And so, uh, it's been, it's been really fascinating listening to his writing on the back of the latest TSMC.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  TSMC earnings and watch him sort of unpack what's going on with TSMC. The the sort of conclusion that I took away from it was that Intel, while it has a lot of problems and the stock just sold off a ton and they have a lot of they have a lot of losses. He's sort of saying that, you know, Intel needs a customer, Samsung needs serious customers. And in order to really unblock the semiconductor supply chain, the other fabs are going to need the big hyperscalers and big labs to just take a big leap of faith and say, you know what? We are going to go all in with you. We're going to sign up and plan and work out all the kinks of the Samsung fab process or the Intel fab process.

• 42:06John Coogan?

  And and and in exchange, what's going to happen is as soon as OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or even Nvidia say, hey, you know, Intel's good enough for us, well, then guess what's going to happen? And TSMC is going to have to go and say, yeah, we're going to build the extra fab and we're going to build the extra capacity. And when we talked to Sam Altman, and in a number of interviews that he did that week, he was very clear about, I would love TSMC to make more. He wasn't exactly like firing shots, but he was definitely saying that like, he was identifying it as a bottleneck. And it's it's interesting because at the start of the year, I was highlighting energy as an interesting bottleneck. And we were going back and forth on, you know, where is it easier to move chips around the board?

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Energy, where you can reroute from the grid, from oil and gas, from nuclear, you can bring different capacity online. There certainly are bottlenecks there, but if you can't produce the chips and the fabs just don't exist and it takes three or four years to build a fab, you could be looking at a really big bottleneck. Tyler, what do you think?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it just seems like like in power or energy, like the bottleneck is regulatory. And like in some ways, that's like way harder. But if there's actual like political will, if if, you know, electricity is getting super expensive, then like you should see that kind of that those regulations like be taken away a little bit. And then it actually becomes much easier than actually just like expanding TSMC production by like whatever.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I have one more point on that. First, I'm going to tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, T I, software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So the question of like, which is more of a bottleneck, energy or TSMC in the chip supply chain is is interesting because.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Energy feels like this incredible bottleneck. It's a very political, like, hot-button issue now. Energy prices are rising. Data centers need a lot of energy. But if you look at the amount of chip fabrication that's going to AI, and then the amount of energy production that's going to AI, obviously, the number of chip production going to AI is way, way higher percentage.

• 44:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Because a lot of the chips are, a lot of the line time at TSMC, yes, they, they do all sorts of different chips and CPUs still get made, and there's a bunch of ASICs for different networking equipment. There's all sorts of different chips that get made. I mean, the toaster that has a chip that bleeds to, on different process nodes. But even if you include all of that, I would, I would assume that the, the, the total amount of fabrication line time is, is, you know, heavily, heavily allocated to GPUs, TPUs, AI chips right now. Whereas the amount of energy that AI is using is probably less than 1% of total capacity.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting that C C Way, the CEO of TSMC, he doesn't have to go on the podcast tour raising money all the time. There's not, there's not, you know, they're, they're, they're not like pushing this like insane kind of fast takeoff narrative.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  No, not at all.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Very much like, kind of, hey, we're, we're just trying to run our business the way that we always have. Be pragmatic about this, you know, fulfill as much demand as we possibly can. But they seem to not be inclined to take on, you know, the amount of the level, certainly not the level of risk that, you know, imagine if you had Larry Ellison running TSMC.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Get him in the ring. I want him in there so badly. Yeah. Um, no, no, you, you, you're 100% right. Uh, but at the same time, we're, we're seeing the hyperscalers throw their weight around in like crazy ways. We covered AWS is like buying copper mines and stuff. Or I don't know if it's copper mine, but like getting into mining. There's a whole bunch of vertical integration that's going on. Tesla, all the way down to battery refinement and lithium ion production. Um, Meta today announced a $6 billion multi-year partnership with Corning that will supply fiber optic cables for our data center infrastructure, bolstering manufacturing in America and keeping the company, the country competitive in the global AI race. We can read through a little bit of this.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  But first, I'm going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Corning up 15% on the news today.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  Makes makes sense.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  What is their market cap? Let's see, $94 billion company. And I'd love to know their revenue as well. Revenue. Let's see, their revenue was, I don't know if I can find it. Annual revenue 12 billion. So this is, yeah, pretty, pretty material. Let's see, Meta Platforms is set to test new subscription models across apps. Wait, no, that's a different story.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  Different story, but we can, we can run through it.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  I am interested to know a little bit more. So it's a $6 billion multi-year agreement. It supports a 15 to 20% increase in jobs at Corning's North Carolina facilities. Building and operating data centers, the infrastructure that brings our technologies to life and supports our goal of personalized super intelligence. That certainly sounds like an AI personal assistant, certainly sounds like MultBot to me. Requires strong servers and hardware that connect and transfer information in near real time. Fiber optic cables are a critical part of this technology.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  The supply, helping us power everything from wearable technology like Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses to our apps, which connect billions of people. Today, they're doing a $6 billion project. As part of this agreement, Corning will grow its manufacturing capacity and across its operations with includes a significant capacity operation, capacity expansion in North Carolina. Meta's data centers, 26 of which are under construction right now are operational.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  Why are you laughing? There's just so many.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  That's a lot of data centers. That's why they have a compute desk. If you, if you have, this is, this is, this is a bit of advice for everyone. If you're working in a business and you have like a team or a guy that does something, you need to upgrade that to a desk.

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  You need, we produce a desk.

• 48:11Jordi Hays?

  Millionaires, millionaires have guys, billionaires have desks.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Probably, yeah. Well, trillion dollar companies have desks. That's what it is. So Meta's data centers have already supported 30,000 skilled trade jobs during construction and support 5,000 operational jobs. This includes electricians, HVAC specialists, server and network technicians, safety and security experts and engineers who work together to run some of the world's most advanced facilities. Let's give it up.

• 48:39Jordi Hays?

  Moving on.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Eleven Labs, build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs.

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  Meta to test premium subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. This is in CNBC. Subscriptions for premium features on Meta apps are expected to roll out in the coming months.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  What will you get?

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  The subscriptions will give paid users access to more features and expanded AI capabilities. Here's what's most interesting to me. This will be scaling Meta's newly acquired suite of general AI agents under Manus will also be part of the subscription plan. So as I was saying earlier, when you think about, when, when we haven't gotten that much from Zach on like what the actual like plan is, but when you think about personal superintelligence, that is, you know, AI that can do things for you, not just give you information.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  I just wonder how much will happen outside of the meta ecosystem. Like they've, they've launched a search engine before that looked at websites outside of Facebook. They, they had that Project Titan, which was to unify all the different messaging protocols. So as part of that, they gave everyone a Facebook.com email address or something like that. Maybe it wasn't Facebook.com, maybe it was like FB.me or something, but they gave every Facebook user, whatever their unique username was, they gave them that as an email and you could email that and it would show up in Facebook Messenger. And then they tried to unify Facebook Messenger so you could see Instagram DMs, WhatsApp messages and Facebook messages all in one place.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  I can see what you're laughing at.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  Dave's, Dave Pal says, yeah, I want more of those amazing Meta AI features.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  You say that now, I mean, let them cook at least a little bit because we really haven't seen them launch a new model, a new image model. Like they should be able to get to close to the frontier. You know, it has to be at least Sora, Nano Banana, VO3 level. They have all the data. They have all the talent now. They, they're very GPU rich. They have the compute for it. So, and, and the research has been done and people have reverse engineered it. So you would think that whatever's coming should be good. And I don't know, I was looking at, isn't CapCut owned by TikTok or aren't they affiliated, right? Cause Meta has the edits app. Which I've been making some videos in and it's pretty good. It does some interesting background.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  CapCut is ByteDance.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  It's ByteDance. And so.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  I doubt this is getting.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Oh, you think it's a separate. Okay, okay. Because CapCut has multiple levels of of subscription tier and you can very easily wind up spending $200 a month on like the AI Pro features that will do generative video, uh, style transfer, uh, you know, and and when you see those videos, like the good AI videos on Instagram reels that are usually like they'll take a cinematic clip from a movie and then they will do a face replacement or like a head swap and then they'll do AI voices and then dub the the the lips so that the lips match what the what the audio saying and it looks really convincing with that workflow.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  How do you bring that to someone on a phone? How do you bring that to someone in the Instagram app or in the edits app, even if they're going to more of like their Prosumer offering? Um, the mobile video editing space is particularly interesting to me, just watching how edits has evolved. And I used to use iMovie on my phone a little bit. I used to use, um, there was there was an app called Clips that Apple developed, uh, and there were a few others that I'd tried, but the edits app is.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  You're incredibly good at at making videos on your phone.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, I know I I love video editing, but I don't have enough time anymore to sit down and open up After Effects and Premiere with multiple monitors and have, you know, connected After Effects file that feeds into the Premiere profile and like really doing a proper edit with all the powerful tools that are out there on the desktop. Like, it's just not in the cards for me. And so I have to be able to do something quick on my phone. And I think that that's a very modern experience that most creators, they're just phone first, phone native. And so they're never really going to go back to the multi-monitor workstation, maybe, but in general, they're they're editing really quickly and they're editing pretty incredible stuff stuff. When you look at some of the reels that are out there with like layered crops and removing the background and like the AI tools are coming in and I could see.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  I could see, uh, Meta offering a premium subscription around that. Anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 53:28Jordi Hays?

  So Dave in the X chat says in shot is pretty good for mobile.

• 53:32John Coogan?

  I need to try that. I haven't. I haven't tried in shot. I've been seeing more and more ads. I'll see a video for like an F1 edit that are incredible. These F1 edits are so cool where they will, will show you one clip and then they cut the character out and edit in the other clip and then, and then it transitions like the transitions are amazing. And I've been seeing some people are, are, are clearly built apps to do that specific type of edits. Like the really crazy editors are using probably after effects or something. Ryan asks, is Tyler still drunk?

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one sip. He's just over there slurring his words.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  That really broke me. Anyway, app loving profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. We had a great comment in one of, in one of the, one of the podcast feeds. Someone said, give us an axon klaxon because a klaxon is a loud clash. We were all puzzling over what that means. When we smashed

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  You clocked it immediately.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  It's an axon klaxon. I love an axon klaxon.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  Niraj Agarwal says Tik Tok is dead. The algorithm is worse than the reels that make it to Facebook.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  Wow. I haven't checked it out.

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  So basically they're, they're transitioning everything over. Yesterday there was apparently

• 54:54John Coogan?

  An outage.

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Kind of an outage. Like people were able to post videos, but videos wouldn't be served at all. So I think a lot of people assume that it was like the new ownership kind of censoring.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  It, I believe they had an outage at a data center that was a cause of that. So before we, before we call it dead.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's wait for a few days and see how it pans out. We do have a Tik Tok account. It's at TBPN.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  How many followers is that?

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  I haven't checked. I haven't checked.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  I don't think we post on it ever.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  3,500.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  Not bad. That's better than what I thought.

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  First time.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  But we're not really focused on it. Maybe we'll test it out, but I'm, I'm pretty happy with just, I, I want the things we do to be polished. I want the core show to be polished, diet TPN, our 20 to 30 minute cut down. I want that to be polished. I want the newsletter to be polished at tpn.com. Everyday newsletter. I like that. Before we bite off another part of the apple.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  Please, please, sir. Not, not one more short form.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  Not one more short form. It is a lot. It is a lot. Anyway, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Um, let's move over to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is coming up. I think it's going to be this year in the next couple of months. When is it? It's coming up. It's coming up because there's advertisements that are going out and you gotta watch it because the ads are gonna be incredible.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  I actually just had to search, when is Super Bowl?

• 56:22John Coogan?

  Is it this Sunday?

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  No, it's February 8th.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  Okay, so next Sunday? Okay, it's gonna be amazing, but mostly because of the advertisements. Uh, specifically Eric Lyman, CEO of Ramp, shared, meet Brian. Brian's been carrying accounting on his back for a long time. Super Bowl Sunday, he finally gets back up. Let's watch this preview.

• 56:43Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Of the Ramp.

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Alex says sports guys. Yeah, we're real sports guys.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  This is the Super Bowl.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  We gotta goo- we gotta Google.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  The Ramp Super Bowl ad is the Super Bowl of Super Bowl ads.

• 56:53Jordi Hays?

  It feels like, it feels like, you know, they just kind of, this is like, uh, you know, what is it? What is it called? Like a warning, uh, spoiler alert?

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  For anybody that's wants to wait and experience the ad. You're gonna wanna, you're gonna wanna skip ahead like 60 seconds.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  Let's watch.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Finance meeting in five minutes?

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Ramp?

• 57:19John Coogan?

  I got it. Allow me. Hi handsome. We're saving so much time. Policy violation coming through. Travel, meals, hotels. Oh, he's quick. Beautiful. Everybody's happy.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Multiply what's possible. Ramp.com. I think it rips. I think it's a good Super Bowl ad.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  What has he got there? Maybe some chili? I don't want to.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  It was just a silver pot.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  It was just a silver pot.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, I think this achieves a couple of things. I think, I mean, it drills the brand name. Think about how many Ramp logos are in there. And then they're chanting Ramp and for, you know, Ramp's a very successful company. We all know about it here, but there's a lot of people that just don't know the name Ramp. It hasn't been drilled into them like, you know, some company that's been around 50 years.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's sort of on the precipice of being a how there's not been enough mainstream marketing yet.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  For it to be a household name.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a life's work to actually drill into people's mind. The Ramp name, the logo, the color, how it sounds when you say it, what it's synonymous with. And so just like not going too abstract, not trying to tell some more avant-garde story here. I think is it's it's almost like a direct response ad. It's just so clear what the problem, solution, brand.

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Problem, solution, brand.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  We need those yellow ties too.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Look at that. Like they are really putting their logo full screen on the Super Bowl. Like that is valuable. And sometimes I think sometimes it can feel like, oh, it's a little, it's like simple. Like you could be doing something more bold, more crazy. But I think this is what you need to do at this level.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  After last year getting Saquon.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  And then.

• 59:03John Coogan?

  That was really great ad too.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  Actually winning.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  That's actually kind of like an impossible set of circumstances. Not impossible, but it's a crazy roll of the dice.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  And then they're also building a whole, a whole role with Brian and they're reeling him into the brand world as the, as the downtrodden accountant who just needs, just needs some technology.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  Superpowers.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  To improve him.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  Heading over to Toby.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  Toby over at Shopify posted his heart rate through his first stint at the Daytona.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  You see the first annotation on here?

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  This is just crash.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Crash.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  So he started out at like 120, 120 beats per minute, right? He's doing waiting, he does the, the warm up, preparing the form, the formation lap. And then there's a crash right on the, right at the start. Very, very rough.

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And yeah, so, so basically the, the crash happened with the LMP2 class, which is the kind of pro-am, same, same, same segment that George from CrowdStrike is racing in. So both Toby and George, all of our boys got hit right, right as the race opened. And so what George was saying yesterday, the reason he was frustrated, he's like, this is a 24 hour race. Never has a race like this been won on the first lap. And so it's, it's pretty, it's kind of, it's incredibly unforced to like crash in the opening corner. When you really should just get through it. It's like the most, you know, it's, it's going to be the most like, one of the most intense moments because there's so much traffic.

• 1:00:38Jordi Hays?

  But if you actually go and watch the footage of what happened at the opening, there was like, somebody gets hit, spun out, and then they're turning around and somebody hits them again. Like two accidents in the opening minute. So insane.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  I love that the actual true final heart rates spike was at the end, when you're changing out of the car. You've been driving, it's so intense.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  No, you know this, when you're getting, when you're getting out of a track car, it's like, watching a guy who's 6'8".

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  We will never share that footage. It is extremely embarrassing.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Always like crawling out of.

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  It's actually terrible.

• 1:01:15Jordi Hays?

  You have to get on your, you basically have to get on all fours.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  It's incredibly negative aura and I don't appreciate you sharing it on the show.

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it's, I still think it's cool.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  It's funny. But yeah, I, I go full send, basically fly out of the car on, on my paws. Anyway, Cisco, on February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed and we'll be there for a gigastream.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Hope to see you there. Yes. Jabroni on X says Zoom is the best Anthropic play.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  People have been expecting that. Zoom likely made a $51 million investment in Anthropic Series C.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  How?

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  In 2023.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  How?

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  At a 4.1 billion valuation. If you're looking at their new 350, there's something like an 85X, even diluted. Zoom may have a multi-billion dollar

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic position. Stock is down 80% since 2021.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  And Zoom is only a, of course, this is never financial advice.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  27 billion dollar company.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, part of the, part of the issue is the stock, people kind of noticed this.

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:28Jordi Hays?

  And the stock's now up 16% in the last five days.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Who knows how much it's priced in. Tyler Major, I won't, I won't give you too much flack for it, but obviously the, the most bullish.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm bullish on AI broadly.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would, you would be hap, you, you seem like you'd be happy to own Zoom at a hundred billion dollar valuation, even if they had no business at all and they just held it broad.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Hold co.

• 1:02:58Jordi Hays?

  Even if they just.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  It's a digital asset treasury, actually.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  So I think the story, this is like a rumor, but basically it was that Anthropic like wanted to just like use Zoom and get like the enterprise plan or whatever, but then they were like, well, yeah, you can have it, but like we want to throw in a little something, right?

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Are you just, are you just?

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  Okay, this might be fake news.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  This seems like fake news, Tyler.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  Zoom sells, you know Zoom sells enterprise software, right?

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Look, that's what I read.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  That's their business.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  But I, I for sure read.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  They sell enterprise software and so Anthropic says, hey, we're big Zoom fans here. We want to use Zoom and they're like, no, actually for you, no.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  At the same time, I mean.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  We, we know how important.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  So many, yes, yes. I mean, so many people in venture and the tech community have sort of been very bearish on corporate VC that they're usually have their hands tied, they can't move as quickly, they're not as pure play, the economics don't make sense for the, for the, for the, for the partners on whatever corporate venture fund is there. This could, if it, if it came out of their corporate ventures program, this could be, you know.

• 1:04:08Jordi Hays?

  So, so yeah, Zoom Ventures is in Anthropic. They're in Amex Global Business Travel, which.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  That's a startup? I thought that's American. Do they spin it out?

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they, I don't know.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they spun it out.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  Public.

• 1:04:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm unsure. They're also in CoreWeave.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  So there's some real pickers over there.

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  They are.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  And perplexity.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Zoom has a bunch of AI features. I've seen people, you know, when after the crazy COVID pump where everyone got on Zoom, they started adding like crazy features like dictation and workspaces and whiteboarding and stuff. But obviously, like the it was like so overheated that it came back down to earth. But now they have a anthropic position on the balance sheet, which will be fun for them. I wonder what they will do post IPO. Anyway, Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, now with AI agents. Slowly and then all at once, says Blake Robbins. He says, your work tools are now active in Claude, draft Slack messages.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Interactive.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Or interactive. Draft Slack messages, visualize ideas in Figma and build and see Asana timelines. All of the different tools are coming together in one place. Very cool. Yeah, a lot of people were very happy about like Claude, Excel, playing around with that. And it does feel like there's when you see an account like Claude posting about Slack and Figma and Asana, you have to imagine there's a discussion there. It's not open source. So there's probably something. And so they're chipping away at these and OpenAI has been chipping away at these for a long time. So the race is on to have the most integrations at this point.

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Sarah Eisen over at CNBC, Squawk on the Street, is sharing, breaking anthropics warning to the world. Anthropic CEO Dario Amade says, imminent real danger that superhuman intelligence will cause civilization level damage absent smart, speedy intervention. Sarah says, so buy our products.

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  This is the problem of dropping like a 20,000 word essay is that like you're gonna get clipped out of context. Like, there was so much nuance in that Dario essay, which I have not finished all the way through. I was reading it last night, it was very good, but.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, can you make, you should make a version of the new letter with subway surfers that run?

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Oh, true, yeah.

• 1:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Build that as a standalone.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need a clad labs, Chad IDE for, for reading.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Well, I'd summarize this in four words.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  AI, good. Maybe it's so by our products. Maybe that's the four, the four, the four word summary. Who knows?

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Jeff in the X chat says, guys, I'm building Moltbot. Clap, clap. Stay tuned.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Okay, Jeff.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  We are tuned.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  We will remain tuned.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Let us know when you launch.

• 1:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Information.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  Vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  That one gets me every time. It's so good.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Fleeting Bits has some thoughts on Dario's.

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  14 of them specifically. That's a lot of thoughts. Okay, let's run through it. There's nothing new here. If you're familiar with the AI safety discussions that have been happening on Twitter. Yes, but it's important for Dario to restate them in a format that can be passed around and formatted and, and is coherent from start to finish. So still serves a, like a valuable purpose for the ecosystem. The most interesting bit is that his mental model for AI control risk is the risk that would be posed by a country of geniuses in a data center. Interesting. That is interesting. The basic idea is that we should imagine a giant data center, all the models being something between AGI and ASI trying to coordinate to take over the world or do massive harm. Anyway, I think how seriously you take short-term AI control risk is inversely correlated to how much you think about AI

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  control risk as, as in, as operating in a system. So the systematic view starts and says labs exist in an ecosystem where they need to sell models that will follow human instruction, or they have no market. They are also overseen by regulators and guided by public perception. And the desires of their employees and all, and all of this keeps models corrigeable. Great word. And the model landscape will look like three to six frontier labs running millions or billions of rollouts at a time on two to three different models, all on different tasks. So a model takeover requires these millions or billions of rollouts to somehow end up all be coordinating towards some bad aim that somehow the models have autonomously

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  determined. And this coordination either needs to be across different model instances run by different labs, or one lab needs to be able to have its models dominate and needs to form without being detected. And this, this has to happen even though the models are being trained to follow instructions, not do bad behavior, et cetera. Dario's view is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, he collapses the multiple providers, our coordination across instances, and collapses the market incentives against labs developing models that would behave that way. But on the other hand, he does avoid the concept of a single model instance that somehow wakes up and takes over the world despite billions of other rollouts occurring at the same time. Actually, though, if you think about it,

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  he's not proposing an AI control risk. He is proposing an AI misuse risk instead, because it seems more plausible to me that the harmful country of geniuses is awoken because a small team at a frontier lab hijack all the running instances of their model, rather than because the models themselves autonomously wake up to some bad aim. Interesting.

• 1:09:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so yeah, some, some, something I've been thinking about is, you know, this, this kind of summary and, and a lot of the, a lot of the dialogue is centered around just like, what are the models doing? Or like a country of geniuses in a data center? But you have to be thinking about this in the context that the country of gen- a country of geniuses in a data center would just recruit millions of humans to join their cause, right? And so we think about like, some people like when they're thinking about AI risk, it's like, haha dude, just like, turn the computer off.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, just unplug it.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  But it's like, what if you're on the side of the computer?

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  What if there's, you know, a hundred thousand people, or like 10,000 people defending it on top of the data center, being like, you know, you know?

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't, don't unplug the computer.

• 1:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Don't unplug the computer, right?

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  I like the computer.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  And so when you look at all, all the chaos in the last week.

• 1:10:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Like, there's been so many moments where like, a certain image was AI-generated.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  And then it's like, oh, that wasn't a real image at all.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  Or, you know, and it's being shared from all sides. And so, at what point, you know, you could have, you know, nefarious, hostile AI.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  That's entire job is just creating.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Chaos.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Millions of bot accounts that are just like, sharing whatever narrative is self-serving.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  You can't tell.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think, um, I really enjoyed this essay. I, I thought, um, if, if you kind of compare it to a lot of like, other safety, uh, works, so like, um, Eliezer's book, if, if anyone builds it, everyone dies.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Um, like, the, the two kind of scenarios where, where, where Dario's is about, basically, even if we have like, pretty safe models, which like, he thinks we can do with interpretability, whatever. If it gets into the wrong hands, it's like, very bad if it gets into, you know, autocracy.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  And, and that's kind of the real, that, that's one of the, the main risks, where Eliezer's and, and a lot of the safety ones are always these like, very sci-fi narratives, where you have this like, gray goo.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  You have these like, nano machines that somehow, one day, they just like, kind of, you know, flip, and then it's just kind of over.

• 1:11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  And I, I think it's much more, um, more reasonable and like.

• 1:11:50John Coogan?

  Nuanced.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it's much more legible to like, every person.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Tractable, too.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially, I, I think, a lot of it is, um, the, there's this kind of like, I don't even know if it's really subtext, but he's definitely pointing in the direction of like, we need some government oversight.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  We need policy.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  And it seems like, like, you can very easily like, track, uh, like, his ideas on what policy should be from this essay, right? It's a lot about China, a lot about, um, you know, making sure that individual companies don't like, become, you know, as big as, as governments.

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  One interesting wrinkle with this, he did not post it as an X article. He posted it as a link. Cause he wants to signal to everyone, like, look, I don't need the million dollars.

• 1:12:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't need the million.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  I don't need the million. I know I got a banger on my hands, 3.5 million views, 11K likes, obviously lots of discussion all over.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Cause if Sam posted an X article, right?

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  It would be like, oh, bearish.

• 1:12:41Jordi Hays?

  He's got, he's got, he's got 1.4 trillion.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  He really does want that extra mill.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  He needs the extra mill.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's, it's not, doesn't put him all the way towards.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  The goal, but it's a.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Counts.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  A mill, a mill is a mill.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  A mill is a.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  But but as an investor, like, I want to see my my lab CEO be like super hungry for compute, right? So I want them to always be grinding to get like extra.

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  Oh, so maybe this is bearish.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like if I'm a VC, if I'm in anthropic, I'm like, why did he not post this on X?

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  That million dollars could have gone straight into like.

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Elon would have for sure given his rival.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  I can definitely see that happening. Anyway.

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Nikita Nikita is like, you know, walking to with Elon just shaking like.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  I'm very sorry.

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  People have voted. They want to give it to Daria.

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  I mean, Elon said some things about Claude. He said like it'll eat Microsoft. He's all over the place in who he's supporting on a day to day basis. But anyway, Okta, Okta assigns you, Okta helps you assign every AI to agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent, more important than ever.

• 1:13:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Key Smash Bandit. Last post, last post.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Last post, last post.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Key Smash Bandit says Claude just found out I'm poor.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this is so funny.

• 1:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Send it. Uh, Key Smash sends a picture of a raspberry pi to Claude and says, look what just came in the mail. Claude says, oh, for me, that's thoughtful. Do you and then the person says, do you like it? We've been discussing some more powerful hardware. What made you decide on this instead?

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  I love that this also has 11,000 likes. I I never, I mean, this is probably fake. Like, who knows? But it's so funny.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  Are you kidding? This is like.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  I want to run out of raspberry pi. I want to Mac mini maxed out specs. Give me 48 gigs of RAM, please. I'm hungry. Feed Claude. Feed Claude.

• 1:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Further ado.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  We have Jamie from Pace, the co-founder and CEO in the research waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV. Jamie, how are you doing?

• 1:14:40Speaker 05

  What's going on? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:14:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. Hey, I'm Jamie. I'm the founder and CEO here at Pace. Pace is the AI operations partner for the world's leading insurers.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  Amazing. Give us the news.

• 1:14:57Jordi Hays?

  We've been waiting for this company.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  For sure. We love, we love all applications of AI. Give us the news. What happened today?

• 1:15:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. We're super excited to share today that we raised $10 million from Sequoia Capital.

• 1:15:13Speaker 05

  Thank you. Yeah, we're super excited to have Brian Schreier and Lauren Reader representing Sequoia on our board. Amazing.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  Okay, talk about the go to market. How much of this is just like there's a few big partners that you need to get on board versus something that's more self-serve bottoms up? What's the customer adoption been like? I mean, what's the overall progress of the business? Are you live? Do you have customers?

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Yeah. So we're, we're lucky to be live in production today for some of the world's largest insurers. We're working with large carriers like Prudential, specialty mutual groups like the mutual group, and then all the way through to sort of tech forward brokers like Newfront. I think, you know, in our industry, in insurance, about $70 billion is spent every year on, on back office BPOs.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  And a lot of that is driven by sort of the largest carriers.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Speaker 05

  You're basically the BPO's worst nightmare.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  So what, yeah, yeah. What, like, like walk through a specific back office procedure? Is that like claims processing? Is it scanning PDFs? Like try and ground it for me a little bit more.

• 1:16:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a great question. So we're starting off, you know, with, we're primarily focused on this back office operations. And what that really means is sort of three big buckets. It's new businesses coming in, taking in new risk submissions, document processing, calling back when there's missing information, writing back into internal systems. It's a policy servicing. So any changes you're making, adding new products, things like that. And then all the way through to claims. So that's first notice of loss, calling in when something, you know, happened, went wrong, all the way through to quality assurance. How do we make sure that every claim gets paid correctly every time?

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much, like, what is the actual tech stack? I mean, I imagine that you're not training your own models, but have you done your own RL environment on top of these? And do you do that at a company level? And then everyone gets sort of like the same AI? Or are you doing it on a per client basis? How much fine tuning is going on?

• 1:17:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so for a lot of our process, because we've started by focusing on a lot of these BPO workflows, they're already codified as sort of these standard operating procedures. It's a great start because it's already well-chunked up for agents. The accuracy bar for where BPOs are today is pretty low. And there's a lot of opportunity to improve that.

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 05

  And to be able to sort of, you know, run more accurately, more scalably and more efficiently for these customers. And so we tend to start primarily with those and we take these standard operating procedures and we convert them into what we call agent operating procedures. So this is just natural language instructions. You can think of it, you know, like a document.

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

  Like a markdown file, like a skill. It's a skill.

• 1:17:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so the main thing that we're really bridging here is these are processes that are going to be run hundreds of thousands of times. For us, we're processing tens of thousands of tasks a month. And critically, these agents have to reliably run, you know, many tens of pages worth of a process with very insurance-specific tools and logic. So that's, you know, certainly a lot of the document processing pipelines that we've built on top of, you know, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini. But also, it's going into deep industry integrations, it's voice calling and multimodality, but also kind of actually being able to take actions in systems that don't have APIs. You know, in insurance, we see everything from the cloud, you know, products, but a lot of it is

• 1:18:37Speaker 05

  desktop apps, even like green screen CLIs. I'm talking like main IBM systems. So how do we get, you know?

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the, uh, one of the things that's most exciting to me is a potential like speed-up effect where you're not deal like theoretically, like you're, if you're trying to get a new policy or submit a claim or anything like that, you could get to the point where as long as you're there to provide information in the process as the, as the sort of like client of the, of the insurance company, theoretically, you can get like responses, I'm imagining, like much, much faster because the agent is effectively able to like get all the information that's needed to make a decision and maybe there's still a human in the loop. But what are the kind of implications of that for the actual insurance companies, even just from a revenue standpoint, if they can just like speed up all these processes, you know, by an order of magnitude?

• 1:19:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, so for a lot of our customers thinking about running these agents 24/7, 365 days a year, and I think the real advantage here is not ever having any backlogs, being infinitely scalable. And so that's really important for our customers on the front end when they're thinking about new business and new risk, how do we win this over other carriers? But then also, on the claim side, for a consumer, one of our very first customers, we went live right before hurricane season. And you can see, there's cat season at the end of the year, there's just like a massive uptick in the number of claims when there's a hurricane that happens. And people can be waiting days, weeks, even months to sort of get a resolution

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  because there can just be massive backlogs from a huge spike.

• 1:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that entire time, they might be homeless, in a hotel, Airbnb, or whatever. It's like an incredibly terrible experience to be kind of in limbo, waiting for your insurance provider to just respond and give you. I mean, we know some people that lost their homes around this time last year, and just like getting responses. When that's like, if you're an individual who lost your home, what's more important in your life than like getting clarity from your insurance provider, so that you can move forward with your life? So I think that's super exciting.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  I'm interested to hear about your previous experience, Cheer, and then Retool. Why go vertical with this particular solution versus something that's more general and industry agnostic? What did you see in this particular market that you decided you needed something specific? And then do you have a plan to like expand? Or, I mean, the TAM seems so big that maybe this is just enough? How are you thinking about that?

• 1:21:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. So way back, kind of where this all started, is I actually grew up between London, New York, and Bermuda, the through line there being insurance.

• 1:21:32John Coogan?

  Are the rumors true? Like, what is Bermuda like? I feel like I've heard stories about it's all just like accountants walking around all day long.

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  I went there for a wedding. It was really nice. I didn't see any, didn't clock anybody as an accountant.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, but what was your experience in Bermuda?

• 1:21:51Speaker 05

  It's incredible. I think the, but there is a massive reinsurance industry on the island. So that's like, you know, very much the home of that.

• 1:21:59John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so you were born, you were born in insurance.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I grew up around the industry for a long time and then started my first company was a data integration business. That was bought by Retool. And at Retool, you know, I think it's, I think, you know, it's not always immediately obvious that actually a lot of the sort of custom software that's built in the world is for, you know, a lot of financial services companies because they're highly operationally intensive. And so Retool had a ton of very scaled financial services companies. And as a deployed engineer, I was sort of lucky to be on kind of the first lines, you know, with some of our biggest insurers, helping them to handle tasks like policy servicing and claims and trying to make them, you know, more efficient with software.

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  And I think the big opportunity kind of came around ChatGPT where we saw, you know, a huge uptake from a lot of our startup customers. And then there was this, this opportunity to build a vertical product that would really serve, you know, the, the largest insurers. So that was the, the impetus. In terms of where we're headed and kind of the longer term you asked about, I think there's a lot for us to do just within insurance. But if you broaden out to financial services, BPO more broadly, it's about four hundred billion to spend, which is pretty much exactly equivalent to the entire market of enterprise software.

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  That's insane. So, so yeah, I imagine that when you're

• 1:23:21Jordi Hays?

  No concern on the tap.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  When you're going into a discussion with a large insurer, you're not like, whoever you're pitching is not saying, well, I vibe coded this on Sunday and it's working pretty well. Why should I go with you? Like they truly don't have anything else installed. And so it's sort of a green field, I imagine. Is that right?

• 1:23:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, you know, in insurance, we're all familiar with kind of the business of trust. And so, you know, that's why a lot of our work is with, you know, the largest insurers on mission critical tasks at massive scale.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, sorry. Yeah. What, what about trade offs on inference and different models? You mentioned sort of being multi-model using different frontier labs.

• 1:24:02Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  But are you finding in the product that you're building that you're, that you're relying on cheaper models for certain tasks? And then harnessing and wiring that all together? So you actually can drive down cost? Or can you just throw the most expensive frontier model at every problem because it's so valuable?

• 1:24:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, so you know, I think we use a mixture of kind of models to be able to achieve, you know, what we need for the right task. If you think about parsing a many hundred page claim file or policy document, you might use a small model to kind of zoom in on the areas that are most important and then use a make sense of model to say, synthesize, you know, what's the most important and what's the answer.

• 1:24:40Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:24:41Speaker 05

  And then, you know, I think what's more interesting, you talked a little about kind of fine tuning and RL, you know, we're kind of like the perfect set of use cases for for web agents, being able to navigate, you know, these applications that don't have APIs, be they, you know, green screen CLIs or desktop apps. And so we've actually been, you know, working on a handful of fine tunes and creating basically RL environments that are these sort of crud applications. They're very different from, say, you know, the book me a restaurant or this flight type of demo.

• 1:25:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Speaker 05

  It's much more about, you know, take this repetitive task and fill out this form thousands of times. It's kind of the ideal case for, I think, a lot of these computer use systems. So we're seeing a lot of success that I think we are just kind of rounding the corner of the scaling law is starting to work on those. Kind of feels the same way that maybe like Voice did, you know, six to 12 months ago.

• 1:25:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep. You guys have pursued a forward deployed engineer. I was about to ask. Go to market. Do you, uh, it sounds like it's working well to date. Do you think this is something that will still be a part of the kind of core motion in a few years? Or is this something that makes sense to kind of get off the ground till you understand kind of like what the typical stacks are within your, within your market and then eventually you'd move beyond it?

• 1:25:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I think the forward deployed motion is definitely something that, you know, really came naturally to me. It's kind of like the DNA of, of our company because that's, you know, also what we were doing at Retail when it was, you know, much earlier, I think on that.

• 1:26:14Speaker 05

  I think for us, you know, going and working with our customers, being able to speak their language, getting to really understand the complexities of these many hundred-page standard operating procedures and make them successful as agents. I think it's really important for us to be sitting, you know, side by side with them. That being said, I think a lot of companies sort of talk about FDEs as sort of being the end state or like that is like, you know, the best part about my business and why I'm like palantir. I think for us, like, it is, our FDEs are also really able to ship code in their code base, and so they're actually constantly making the product better. And that's really important. Like, I think our product should just be continually giving our forward deployed engineering

• 1:26:57Speaker 05

  team more and more leverage so that they can, you know, be able to complete more for our customers.

• 1:27:02John Coogan?

  So some FDE goes into a business, their badge, they're in there, they're interfacing with the green screen, you know, local on-premise mainframe software. They write some binding for it or some screen scraper or whatever you need to do, and then they can ship that back to HQ and then the next time you run into that, you have an integration effectively. Is that like the basic pattern of that?

• 1:27:24Speaker 05

  Exactly. I think there's just a lot of things that are required to get these agents running at scale that, you know, customers don't need to build from scratch every time. Do you think it's really important, though, that we also enable our customers to be able to build their own, you know, agents? And for us, you know, some of our customers are at tens of agents live in production. We may have built, you know, helped them build the first one or two in an FDE motion, but just because it's a natural language, they're able to sort of turn around two through 10 without us having.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  And they're still running those. And so they're running number three through 10 on your platform through your system, but they're defining them and architecting them themselves.

• 1:28:02Speaker 05

  Exactly. Yeah, just a nice.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Good business. I love it. Congratulations. Fantastic to meet you.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, you put together a great team, too. I'm excited that Varun, one of my former teammates, is ever with your pace now. And yeah, I'm sure he'll be back on this year, maybe this quarter.

• 1:28:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's great to have him on the team. Thank you so much again, guys.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And we have Ben.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  And quick, before we bring in Ben, some unfortunate news. Palmer got tied up with DC.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  But we got Jeff Miller coming on.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Jeff Miller's gonna come on.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  It's Miller time?

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  It's Miller time, which we're excited about. But yeah, so Palmer unfortunately won't be joining. But we'll get him back on very soon. And right now, without further ado.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  Ben Lair, the co-founder and managing partner of Lair Pivotal Ventures. Let's bring him in to the TVP on Ultra. Ben, how are you doing?

• 1:29:09Speaker 06

  Hey, guys. What's happening?

• 1:29:11Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  Not too much. Thanks so much for taking the time to join. Can you maybe, I feel like most people are familiar, but can you kick us off a little bit of just the shape of your business, shape of your career, just a quick intro?

• 1:29:25Speaker 06

  Sure, sure. Yeah. I'm a native New Yorker. Everything I do is sort of New York-y in some way. So grew up here. After school, came back to New York, started a company in the digital media space. When New York had like the smallest tech ecosystem in the world and was one of what felt like 50 founders building in New York, you know, back 20 years ago. And as a result of sort of being a founder in a tiny market, I got the, I knew everybody. Everybody knew everybody. And so I had sort of the benefit of being a small fish in a small pond and started angel investing. And really, over the last 15 years, got to sort of simultaneously live the founder journey

• 1:30:08Speaker 06

  and built a company and raised a few hundred million dollars and did a lot of things right and almost ran the thing off the, you know, off the dock a bunch of times. And also.

• 1:30:23Speaker 06

  You had sort of the good fortune of like picking, you know, investing in New York at the right time. And so have ridden that wave, started our first fund was an eight and a half million dollar fund. We're now investing our ninth fund, which is a $200 million fund. But every fund is a little bigger than the one before.

• 1:30:41Jordi Hays?

  That's a good, that's a good sign.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  It's a good run. Not many funds get there, you know?

• 1:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever think it was, it was crazy to set up a fund in New York? Or was it always just like, just was so obvious that you were happy that other people just were kind of thought, thought you were crazy?

• 1:31:02Speaker 06

  I didn't know any better. Right? I mean, like, I grew up in New York. I thought New York was the center of the entire universe. I still in some way think that that's the case. And, you know, I just, I was very lucky because when I, when I got sort of the entrepreneurial bug was when the whole world got the entrepreneurial bug. It was like that same minute, moment I graduated the same year that Mark Zuckerberg did from college. And so, right, it was just like that timing.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Perfect timing.

• 1:31:28Speaker 06

  Perfect timing. And all my friends in the past would have reflexively wanted to go and work on Wall Street.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:34Speaker 06

  But suddenly something was in the water and people wanted to go work in tech. And so I just got like, I just got lucky. And, and, you know, it seemed obvious and frankly, it was obvious. And if you just did the obvious thing, you did okay.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, I want to, I want to talk about media.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  Kind of selfishly, because we love talking about media. We

• 1:31:57Speaker 06

  I actually want to learn about your biz. I have questions for you guys.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:01Speaker 06

  On the business model.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Speaker 06

  Like I've been poking around, trying to feel it out. So you ask me questions and I'm going to ask you questions.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I guess, I guess just, can you take, can you, can you take it like we try not to do, we, this is not a, not a history show, not like a founder journey show, but, but I would love like

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Like what was the climate around media, digital media? What was happening back then? What was the initial, like

• 1:32:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because I mean, like so much of what is informed.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  First business plan.

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  I feel like we tried to take a lot of the lessons from that era of media and say like, okay, what, what was the takeaway? Which was maybe like You can, I mean, the primary takeaway was don't build a media company in our case that is the whole strategy is predicated on getting to a billion dollars of revenue, right? Or even a billion dollar valuation, right? So a lot of what informs us is that like staying niche, especially for us, because in our business, like we're building a media company that we make by hand every single day. So if we have, if we don't stay niche, we'll start covering a bunch of topics that aren't interesting to us.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:03Jordi Hays?

  And then we won't want to show up every day and do this.

• 1:33:05Speaker 06

  You'll do what I did and what everybody did.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Okay, give us the lessons. Wait, yeah, give us the pre-history, give us the climate, and then I want as many lessons as possible.

• 1:33:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, so look, when I started, there was this idea that sort of like the internet would destroy every traditional business in every space in the entire world.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Speaker 06

  Now there's a little bit of that, like the AI will do that, but like, you know, I'm old. So this was like the web will destroy all. And we looked at print magazines and newspapers and the idea was all of them would go away entirely and would be replaced by digital and the entire size of that market. And all that ad revenue was going to move online. And so, you know, we were one of the early movers in sort of going and trying to capture that market. And we looked at the big men's magazines or the local city guides or whatever it was and tried to go build that online. And at first, did it the way that you guys were doing it. It was like very much this labor of love and we didn't have that much access to capital because it wasn't hot, hot, hot yet.

• 1:34:09Speaker 06

  And so our first few years, we were profitable and stayed small and it was like, it was amazing. And we had a small community of people that were diehard and advertisers who really felt the needle move. And it was, it was wonderful. And what happened was the space got attention from big VCs and people wanted to go and sort of like, you know, get in on the gold rush and a bunch of people raised a bunch of money and I was one of them. And You know, the idea was you have to grow into or live into those valuations like you just like you just sort of alluded to. And, you know, we we went from one to three to

• 1:34:50Speaker 06

  seven to 15. Like, it was growing like, you know, maybe not like a software company today, but it was growing like a software company did back then. And we kept raising into it. And a few of the like mistakes, and by the way, they were they were not fatal mistakes, but they were, they were ultimately the thing that sort of, they they took a lot of the joy out of the business, I would say, was when we got obsessed with figuring out, how do you keep, how do you keep growing? And how do you keep doubling year out year over year? And we, part of it was, we need to grow the advertising base. And so we need to find more and more and more users that got away from our core and got away from sort of what we felt we were really great at doing. And so the product started to get

• 1:35:34Speaker 06

  a little watered down. And then on the other side, it was commerce. How do we start to sell stuff to these guys? How do we start to monetize directly? Today, subscriptions are something that I think is an actual viable model, again, in not not at scale. Yeah. Like, everyone points to the New York Times and says, Oh, this can work. Like, the New York Times is N of one. That's, I don't think you're going to build venture scale businesses doing that. But, but there is more willingness to pay for consumers than there was 10 years ago. And so our our thought was they're not going to pay for our content, they're going to pay for products. We bought a sort of, you know, ancillary commerce business and scaled that. And I went out to raise what was our series B, thinking that we could go and get sort of one plus one equals three. They're going to love our

• 1:36:18Speaker 06

  media business, which is like profitable and attracts this audience. They're going to like our commerce business, which has a bigger ceiling and is growing fast. And in fact, I just got like, full punch in the face. And it was like, one plus one equals one and a half. And these businesses don't necessarily belong together. And media folks understood the media business and commerce folks understood the commerce business. And so I had to go through this sort of painful process of taking them apart from one another. And then I got the sort of bug for the roll up. And well, if I'm not going to grow.

• 1:36:54Speaker 06

  Vertically, maybe I can grow horizontally and what are other like-minded brands and can we sell them together and can we build a tech platform together and bought a bunch of companies and raised a bunch of money and that worked. But the reality was we were always swimming against the current, which was social media. And, you know, media in general fell under the eye of big tech. And, you know, Meta grew and, and obviously, you know, what Google represented for the ad ecosystem and then as, you know, Amazon and Apple and Netflix grew and it just was clear that like, I wasn't even at the kids' table. I was in like the other room entirely. And now look at what's happened with like the top of the market.

• 1:37:36Speaker 06

  Look at like Discovery and the like amazing run they had and the fact that like they need to be consolidated. It's just, it's an impossible business. And the way to do it right is to do what you love and stay relatively small and build like a real community-based thing like you guys are doing. I have like so much respect for this show and like my hope is that you like find other ways to leverage the influence that you have here and don't put a like target on your back where you have to turn this show into a billion-dollar company because

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Yeah, John's, John's, John's position was always that value in, in media today is flowing to personalities, individuals, right? Even on the subscription side, when you're signing up for a subscription today, the subscriptions that I'm excited to sign up for are when I know the dollars are like flowing to an individual who's going to just obsess over, like a Ben Thompson is a classic example, right? Or like an Emily Sundberg in, in New York, right? The dollars are going to an individual who has like a certain point of view and they're just going to obsess over whatever topics and then the value's going to flow to the platforms, the Spotify's, the YouTube's, the Meta's and like you kind of want to be in either one.

• 1:38:49Jordi Hays?

  The only other category that's emerged as durable to me is the like, you know, truth monopoly, which is like a legacy media brand. There's only maybe 10 of them in the world, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal. Things like that where they kind of like, part of the value is like you, it's like you own an asset that basically has a license to distribute what is, becomes the truth, right? And that takes deck 50 years to kind of

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  And even across all those assets, you're talking about tens of billions of dollars, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the independent creator earnings. I think YouTube paid out like $50 billion to creators and then YouTube itself also makes another $50 billion. And so like, all of that is way more money flowing around than like the few publications that stuck around and made the business model work and are doing quite well. But creating these new things in the middle, we call it, yeah, we want to stay out of that messy middle.

• 1:39:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I, you know, I do think the, uh, look, venture in general, like, is

• 1:39:54Speaker 06

  so many companies raise money that should not be raising money. Most companies that raise money should not be raising money. Ventures are very specific flavor of sort of trajectory. And the fact that, you know, it went from being a sort of cottage industry 15, 20 years ago to being just like this mainstream asset class that everybody obsesses over. You know, when I graduated from college, I did not know what venture capital was. If I graduated from Penn today, it would be the first, second, and third thing on my list to do would be to go get into VC or to go get into a startup. Like, the world has changed. And I think it, in certain situations, enables unbelievable things to be built. And in most situations, it like destroys companies and

• 1:40:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So part of, part of it is VCs are trained to hunt the things that are getting attention, right?

• 1:40:41Speaker 06

  Yes, right.

• 1:40:42Jordi Hays?

  And so part of the issue is like, you see a media company pop up. It's like, this thing is cool. I like it. It's getting a lot of attention.

• 1:40:49Speaker 06

  It's like the sexiest shitty business in the whole world.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were even thinking about, you know, thinking about like the right way to be trained on is like Clawdbot. Like if you could find a way to put some money into Clawdbot, you know, this week, that's pretty exciting.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Because there should be very high leverage in a business that builds around that.

• 1:41:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  Uh, the, uh, the, the interesting thing is, uh, you know, I, I go back to what is the purpose of, of venture capital? You go back to like, why do we call it Silicon Valley? Well, because they were setting up fabs, they were setting up, it was a high capex, high R and D environment. Then with the cloud platforms and AWS comes out, it becomes cheaper to start a company. But you're still, you're still putting up money for a bunch of engineers who are going to build a piece of software that then eventually starts growing and the LTV comes in year five or six and you get paid back. But we have started to flirt with, well, like maybe let's put venture dollars into this thing that really doesn't have any capex or any R and D spend, but a lot of go to market spend that seems to pay back relatively quickly.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  And that seems to be a pattern that repeats and something you need to watch out for in any category is where are the, what is the purpose of venture capital in this thing? Even if it's growing like other things, is that how you see it? And what, what industries are you, are you seeing, okay, this is still a good industry for venture capital?

• 1:42:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, one, and one of the sort of weird perversions of the industry right now is there is more money than there's ever been in venture. And there's obviously a relatively small number of incredibly sort of deep pocketed funds that need to deploy huge amounts of money.

• 1:42:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Speaker 06

  And into a generation of companies that theoretically need less than ever before.

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Speaker 06

  And so you have this, you know, somewhat unhealthy dynamic. I do, I think that's what's sort of creating this idea of like, sort of, uh, picking a winner before a winner has actually emerged. Just like plow in on the thing. And even if it's a million of ARR, but it's raised 300 million bucks. It's like, stay out of the category, like this is the, like, like, these are the guys.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:56Speaker 06

  And, and I, you know, the big firms can do that. I can't play that game. I don't really want to play that game. It's not like how we're set up. You know, the one thing, even as our funds have grown, like, we are purists. We are only early stage. We're pre-seed and seed only. And I think like when you, and we're a team of generalists. And I think when that's the case, like, we have to be really careful that we don't get sucked into being heat-seeking and just like always going for the shiny object in a market like this where prices are crazy and where you like get pulled into competing with mega funds that have like very different incentives. I also think you don't want to find yourself as like a value-seeking fund at a time in the market like this. For obvious reasons and like the history of value-seeking adventures is not great.

• 1:43:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other thing, the other thing that strangely, I mean, one of the dynamics right now is you have, you know, mega platform VCs that don't care about pricing as much and they just want to get enough dollars in. But then you also have some like emerging managers that are just are in the heat chasing business. And so they don't really care about pricing as much either because they're like, well, we'll get in at 60. We know this is going to get marked up and we just need to prove to our LPs that we can get in the good names.

• 1:44:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. And we'll. It's like a shorter term, like sort of fundraising mentality.

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like we're just, we're optimizing to raise like fund two versus, versus like actual, you know, returns.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you?

• 1:44:23Speaker 06

  Well, the hard thing is like having been in this business for a long time and like living through cycles, math matters. Like if you come into stuff way overpriced, like it's really hard to build a business from day one and have it exit for a billion dollars of cash.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:39Speaker 06

  Like actually seeing that arc is incredibly difficult. And in today's market, there's people who are raising a billion dollars who are still like figuring out what the name of the company is going to be.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:49Speaker 06

  And, you know, it's hard to see that math working. At the same time, the argument is, if you look out on the horizon 10 years from now, outcomes are going to be that much bigger. We're at a moment of change from a technology perspective where there's going to be more generationally important companies. And the idea, you know, a decade ago was, can you find a billion dollar company or a 10 billion dollar company? And now this is, can I find a trillion dollar company?

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. How have you processed, yeah, like when I look back at? Previous hype cycles that I've been like during my career, you have maybe

• 1:45:26Jordi Hays?

  the D to C era, that's where I where I got my start. When you look at that hype cycle, there was not there was it was almost like an art. It was almost like an ads arbitrage. It was like Meta was an amazing ads platform. And if you had a great product that was positioned well against incumbents, you could just scale so quickly. And so the opportunity was really like, hey, we're making better products here, but really this is like a advertising arbitrage. And there were some great businesses that were created from that. And then fintech.

• 1:45:53John Coogan?

  There's also branding firm arbitrage against VCs. You go to a branding firm, give them 100K and then go raise out $5 million.

• 1:45:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but but.

• 1:46:00Speaker 06

  I've been the victim of that.

• 1:46:03Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  The people that work at those branding firms do amazing work, so I don't want to call them out because it's not their fault.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to my boy Emmett Shaw.

• 1:46:10John Coogan?

  That was one of them. There's a couple others.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Going going forward, like you look at kind of fintech. Fintech was there. There was some it was it was Dodd Dodd-Frank, right? There was like the

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Banking reform.

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Some some regulatory component, but a lot of it was like just better infrastructure that just made it easier. But that just meant way more competition. So it wasn't like this fundamental technology shift that that just changed everything in the way that we're experiencing right now. And so I feel like you kind of have to unlearn some of the lessons from that because we now do have a real technology shift. So you are going to just get, you know, far greater value creation a lot faster than maybe this like, you know, temporary ads arbitrage or just like kind of the infrastructure.

• 1:46:57Speaker 06

  And by the way, one of the interesting trends on the back of that is this move to sort of VCs hunting younger and younger founders. I think you're seeing, you know, there was a movement over time where you were getting this big premium for second and third time founders and people who had sort of unfair advantage in a category. And now I think there is this idea that you have to unlearn so much if you have not grown up natively with AI that maybe you're better off not knowing anything about an industry, but moving.

• 1:47:31Speaker 06

  10,000 times faster and you and and sort of just like living natively in all the new tools and thinking that the way that somebody like me works is totally like I like I'm just like a dinosaur.

• 1:47:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've actually so so I've found I've found myself giving a buddy of mine is is kind of like going through the idea maze and a couple of the ideas that he mentioned I was like this seems like a great idea but you have to understand like think about this idea in the context of having four Y C companies going after this opportunity and do you and and it's like dude you're gonna have a family soon like you like you're not like 20 anymore. Do you want to compete against like four teams of 20 year olds that are not gonna sleep? Like this is and and yeah, they they have less experience and maybe they haven't raised money before but it's gonna be you're not I don't feel confident that you're gonna be able to outwork them even though you're a really hard worker just because you have more stuff.

• 1:48:27Speaker 06

  We see this in like company updates so we you know we're like actively doing deals in new companies and you get that like you know update three weeks after you invest like the monthly update cadence and we can see the teams with these younger founders and just like the amount of product that they ship and the learnings that they have and the speed that they're hiring like it's palpable and sometimes we invest in a team great experience they've got all the sort of credibility and we get the first update and we're like shaw like like they think it's 2002 like they just don't get it you need to move faster like the market is crazy right now.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, what what are you how big is the team that you work with how are you thinking about mentoring building new great investors and counseling investors about best practices or like strategies for like not not breaking the rules that you just discussed?

• 1:49:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like this is like you know all all I think about now admittedly I think this is a young person's business and and increasingly young person's business and I think that the investor track follows the operator track to some degree which is you want investors who sort of understand this this new gear and so you know I'm 44.

• 1:49:54Speaker 06

  I'm gonna be, you know, soon enough, I'm gonna be the oldest person on this team. And, which is funny, you know, to just like, think about. And we are actively, you know, continuing to hire and, and sort of mentor and bring up young talent. I think that you can be extraordinary in this business without having 25 years of experience. I think it's nice to have some voices around the table who have been through cycles and have some of that wisdom on just like not getting too caught up in, in the craziness.

• 1:50:28Speaker 06

  But realistically, we are still continuing to like obsess about bringing in interesting, young, diverse perspectives, people that natively like are growing up with the technology that feels novel to people like me. And I think that that's going to be the continued goal here. And then it's like, up or out. Really, this is not a place, this is not a business to sort of hang out in. And I, I don't have the patience, and I don't think people in this business should have the patience, to wait 10 years to see what performance looks like. I think you have to sort of decide early if you feel like people have the right instincts, if they're able to identify talent with their gut. If they're able to sort of win people over and like,

• 1:51:12Speaker 06

  I think you have to, I think you have to like, make bets the same way you do in like, professional sports.

• 1:51:17John Coogan?

  How do you think about that, that patience versus, you know, moving quickly and not waiting to measure results? I'm, I'm thinking specifically about the, the pressure that can occur a bunch of, you know, new VCs who are at a fund, and they all want to get points on the board, and that maybe leads to more aggressive deal making that becomes sort of like a rat race between them, and they wind up making bad decisions. Versus saying, look, you will be judged on a short term, but we're gonna give you the space to not swing at every pitch. How do you think about that, that balancing act?

• 1:51:58Speaker 06

  Well, I think first of all, it's like this comes down to some of the actual like mechanisms for how you manage people and stylistically, like how much communication you have, how much like, you know, of a lone wolf culture versus a team-based culture. You know, here we're very collaborative. We have a bunch of people working on everything that we're doing. Obviously, the end of the day, like a deal gets done because somebody brings that over the line with with like very personal conviction. But I think our culture is set up to be able to assess people in in sort of softer areas versus just those quick marks. Also, you know, you have to know what you're underwriting. So sometimes we do a deal and

• 1:52:40Speaker 06

  explicitly we go, this one's going to get out of the gates really fast. This is going to get quick marks. We understand it. But by the way, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to have great outcomes. We've seen a bunch of our quick marks over the years end up as just big black eyes. And so there's other deals where we go, we know this is going to be slow. It's okay that it's going to be slow. There's a real moat here if this works. So there's a real technological sort of challenge that they're going to need to overcome. But if it happens, this is going to be a really valuable business. You know, know what you're getting into and be explicit about it so that if something is slow, but you signed up for slow, you're not like dinging somebody. And then, look, I think at the

• 1:53:21Speaker 06

  end of the day, like a VC fund is as good as the their sort of reputation. And so feeling out how our founders feel about like working with folks, seeing people's win rates and seeing the way that people sort of, you know, carry themselves. A lot of this is art and frankly, like early stage investing is a lot of art, too. So this is feel. And, you know, maybe I'm making bad calls on on talent, but we're doing it, I think, very deliberately.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, put your talent on TBPN.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  I have one more question.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:53:52Speaker 06

  I got, I got people.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I, I had a question too. I wanted to, I wanted to get your take on AI focused rollups, given that you rolled up.

• 1:54:02John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask something very similar.

• 1:54:04Jordi Hays?

  What was your question?

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask if you had to, if you had to pick a different asset class to invest. You mentioned art, there's some art behind you. Between like public markets hedge fund, private equity, take privates, turnarounds, rollups, growth, growth equity, bigger scale stuff. Like, is there anything else where you're like, ah, like that looks fun, but I'm not gonna do it? Like, what else, what else intrigues you about different potential markets? We've seen a lot of VCs like.

• 1:54:30Jordi Hays?

  Two wildly different questions.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:54:32Jordi Hays?

  So let's, I want to first take on the AI rollups and then other asset classes.

• 1:54:37Speaker 06

  Well, I can actually, I'll connect the two because I actually do think sort of rollups scratch an itch for me as a former operator and I've done it. Like, I, I do like the sort of, like, that, that mental exercise of like putting things together and figuring out the personalities and the products.

• 1:54:55Speaker 06

  I think that it is right. I, I can understand all the logical reasons for why it works and why like this is all gonna be, this is gonna end well. I can't help but think a little of the gold rush right now is a place to park AUM.

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:13Speaker 06

  And I, I don't like, you know, I'm not trying to like throw stones, but it's, you know, it's a real easy place to just go raise money if you're a fund that has access to a bunch of money.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:24Speaker 06

  And I'm sure they'll beat them.

• 1:55:26Jordi Hays?

  And somewhat, somewhat, I would hope like limited, yeah, limited.

• 1:55:30Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, you're getting venture fees.

• 1:55:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, yeah, but, but.

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  Sometimes, not, not always, but yeah, I mean, the allure of getting venture fees on, you know, just an asset that already has cash flow, is pretty safe, like, it could be a lure.

• 1:55:42Jordi Hays?

  Not to mention that, but the, the entrepreneurs, if they're like, I'm basically running a PE fund, but I only had to take 30% dilution.

• 1:55:48John Coogan?

  That's crazy too.

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  And I own, you know, depends on, depends on the individual, depends on the individual company.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:54Jordi Hays?

  How, given that you've bought, you've bought a number of businesses, like, how limited do you think is the downside on some of these rollups? Like, is there a way for people to buy companies and just botch the integration and the actual like AI enablement so bad that the company goes from being worth like? Twenty-five million dollars doing some niche thing and

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  One plus one is point five.

• 1:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. To just like

• 1:56:17Speaker 06

  I mean, I think one plus one could equal zero. And frankly, it can equal less than zero because I mean, look, it depends what you're buying. It depends what this space is. The more reliant you are on a personality in these rollups, I think the greater the risk. If this is like a single proprietor who maintains all these really tight relationships and the whole thing rests with them, and if you don't keep them happy, you risk like the whole thing, you know, burning down. That scares me. I do think there's probably places where you can go and throw stuff together. The reality is there's a lot of money in PE that knows how to roll stuff up.

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:56:55Speaker 06

  That venture is going to do this better than the folks that have done this forever.

• 1:56:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the one thing you can imagine venture doing better, venture doing better is the technology, but there's also the financial engineering and actually buying

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  And just managing.

• 1:57:08Jordi Hays?

  Companies and, and, you know, we have a friend who raised a PE fund, you know, and has yet to, he's getting close to doing his first deal. But the number of amazing opportunities that look amazing that he's ultimately turned down to finally get to the point where he's doing the first deal. And you realize like somebody who's never bought, acquired a company before, coming in and just like looking at everything and everything looks great. If you just have like a capital hammer and you just want to hit it with, with a bunch of, uh, hit the asset with a bunch of AI. I do, I do worry that some of these end up.

• 1:57:38Speaker 06

  And how long are these advantages going to be around for? I mean, I think there's a version of, you know, 15 years ago. It's like, we understand the internet and nobody else does. And then it was, you know, like, we're going to go to the cloud first or we're going to do mobile. What like, yes, AI is different, but like, I can tell you the traditional PE funds are not going to like totally fall asleep and like, decide not to like embrace any new technology. And in 15 years, they're still going to be sitting on the wrong side of history. Like there might be a window, but it's not going to be a big window.

• 1:58:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody should ask Orlando Bravo if he's heard of AI.

• 1:58:13Jordi Hays?

  He's like, never heard of that.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  No, people are aware.

• 1:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Competition will be intense.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  This is great. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:58:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to hang out. I wish we had more time. Thank you. Thank you for hiring. Thank you for hiring and training up Dylan.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  Our president back in the day.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Dylan Aberscott. Yeah.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  He's a big, big fan of yours and we're lucky to have him. So come, come back on again soon.

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:37Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:58:38Jordi Hays?

  We'll be in New York. We'll be in at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, come down to the New York Stock Exchange, hang out with us. That'd be fun.

• 1:58:43Jordi Hays?

  Join us there.

• 1:58:43Speaker 06

  Anytime and I'm, I'm going to be out your way later in the month, so I'll be.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Amazing. We'll have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:58:49Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  We have Lucas Atkins from RC AI coming into the TBP in UltraDome. Lucas, how are you doing?

• 1:59:09Speaker 03

  There he is. I'm good. Thank you for having me.

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on the show. First time on the show, can you please give us an introduction on yourself?

• 1:59:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. My name's Lucas Atkins. I'm the CTO at RC AI. We actually changed our logo.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:23Speaker 03

  So that it like highlights the R.

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  I have text. I'm sorry.

• 1:59:26Speaker 03

  No, no, no, you're good. And we've, you know, for a very long time been a startup focused on like enterprise.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:35Speaker 03

  You know, custom language models.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:37Speaker 03

  We decided to jump into the pre-training game ourselves.

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  Pre-training. Okay, so small language models. I like small language models. It's the large ones that scare me, but. Tell me, how small are these? How much? What is the training budget? Can you give me like a GPT two level training run? GPT three level training run? Like trying ground, am I looking at the data center from space? Or is it something, a little cluster in a closet? Can you train it on a Mac Mini? What are we talking about?

• 2:00:02Speaker 03

  It used to be, you know, that a small, any small model, a small language model, right, was, you know, tens of millions of parameters.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  Now it's in the realm of, I would consider. Anything under 50 billion kind of resting in that smaller world, but.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Small is big, as big has gotten enormous.

• 2:00:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And it's only going to get more and more as, you know, RAM. Well, I don't know, but as people get more RAM and as we're able to put more on our machines. But we historically lived in that kind of 50 sub range. And then we also, we like trained on top of other open source models like Llama, Mistral, Qwen.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  Is that fine tuning or distilling? Is there a difference there that's meaningful to what you do?

• 2:00:47Speaker 03

  There is an open debate as to whether fine tuning from like another model's just like text outputs is distilling. Or if you actually have to like grab it from the, you know, the lodges. But I would argue that it's all distilling. So it's all some form of making a model better by using another model to make it better.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  And is there, is there a sort of power law distribution in applications of SLMs? Like, is there, is it like, you know, translation is just like, everyone's using that? Or, or text extraction, OCR, like, i- is there sort of a power law of like what it can, what, what, when you reach for this tool in particular?

• 2:01:27Speaker 03

  It used to be, up until about a year ago, it was, you were, you were pretty confined to. You could, you could hill climb a specific domain, you know. Obviously it ranges based on how big your, you know, model was, or small rather. But after this kind of like, you know, reinforcement learning revolution of the last year. If you can build a task in an environment to, to like have that model live and breathe and learn inside of. You can hill climb, you can take like, there's people that are taking 100 million parameter models and making them. Perform like, you know, five or six billion parameter models from a couple of years ago.

• 2:02:11Speaker 03

  So it used to be a lot harder. Now it's it's all about it's a lot more taste and task driven.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And when you say perform like it feels it feels like the true, true cutting edge frontier model sort of smokes all the domain specific models, but it's it's expensive. And so how important is cost? What sort of cost reductions are you seeing on the inference side? Once a company or, you know, a developer decides to move from the heavyweight frontier model to something smaller?

• 2:02:46Speaker 03

  It's it is very often when they're going into production, right? Like it's it's like they've done prototyping with, you know, a large closed source model. They've had success with it. They've gotten approval. They want to bring it into production, you know, to more consumers or their customers. And then the bill starts to hit and the market starts to look tricky. So that's when they start looking for ways that they can host it themselves. There's also like the compliance and data privacy aspect of it. And that's something that, you know, kind of sovereign, you know, US based open models have stopped kind of being released. It's very much out of China.

• 2:03:28Speaker 03

  You have, you know, a few in Europe, but it has very much been lacking in the United States. So we were I was hoping to to release this before I got on the show, but, you know, today we're finally releasing our 400 billion parameter model. So we went up pretty big.

• 2:03:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:03:53Jordi Hays?

  You still got you still got plenty of day left.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Still got plenty of day left.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  We're still.

• 2:03:59Jordi Hays?

  This is just this is just a preview.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  So, yeah, take us through the landscape of who you're competing with. Set the table for us. Most people will be familiar with Deepsea, Quen. Like, how are these companies resourced? Is this just China's national interest that they're funding these? Do they have good business flywheels at this point? Because I imagine you have a plan to sort of unseat them in in the open source race.

• 2:04:28Speaker 03

  There, you know, there's a lot of rumors about how all of, you know, how all of this capital gets allocated into, you know, uh, these different companies, but.

• 2:04:37Jordi Hays?

  Give us the rumors.

• 2:04:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:38Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there's rumors that, you know, uh, the government's giving it to them. They have favorites, you know, there's shady deals going on, but, uh, the reality of it is.

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  You're saying they didn't train it, train the models with scraps in a cave?

• 2:04:52Speaker 03

  In a cave?

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:04:54Speaker 03

  No, uh, well, actually, frankly, if you look at kind of the horsepower that we're dealing with, a lot of them, you know, seemingly did, it's very impressive and that's, that's, that's kind of the, you know, you want there to be this kind of battle of like, you know, the US first China in this race that obviously plays into our incentives. Um, however, they, these are extremely talented labs and so when it's, I'm not competing against, you know, China or, or other countries for like open weight, you know, sovereign language models that, that people can own and deploy themselves. I'm competing against like the other researchers there, like that, you know, that human being

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  and, and, um, you have some extreme talent, so, uh, yes, it used to be really hard to make money making open source models. As they got bigger and as they got harder for other people to host themselves, it, you know, the, the, the, the systems and the economics started to work out because they get the, you know, uh, the community buy-in and excitement of something being open source, but if it's a trillion parameters, you know, your average consumer is not going to be able to run that on their toaster, right? So, um, it, it ends up, you kind of get this win-win situation and now that, that has kind of started to flywheel, they've started to, you know, do the OpenAI and the Anthropic and the Google Play where they're building products around it.

• 2:06:20Speaker 03

  Um, and, and it's really becoming a very lucrative ecosystem.

• 2:06:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how are you scaling the business? What have you chosen in, uh, sort of, uh, the business model world? There's, there's so many ways that you can build around open source technologies. Uh, what's working and what are you thinking about the roadmap long-term?

• 2:06:41Speaker 03

  There's, we, we were in kind of a uniquely, uh, unique.

• 2:06:48Speaker 03

  A very fortunate position when it came to this. We had always been customizing models for people. We had always been working for, you know, enterprises, developers, businesses. How can we, you know, make sure that they're getting the best out of their own hardware? The only thing that really changed was that when customers wanted something to be based in the United States or from the United States, there stopped being competitive options.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:10Speaker 03

  And we never really liked the idea that like the foundation of our business relied on other people releasing models.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:17Speaker 03

  So it was like six months ago that we kind of fully decided, hey, you know what? Let's try it. And we had success with our first model and then our second, our third. And it kind of, you know, brought us to this. So the economics of our business doesn't change so much. You know, we're still working with customers. We're still delivering, you know, models and powerful tools. Though we have a much more robust control of the stack, which means that the degree to which we can customize and the kind of period in training that we can go back to for those customers just kind of increases drastically.

• 2:07:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Just when I think of like open source focused company, I think, you know, like donations, people just like contributing for the love of the game. I also think about like consulting, actually going in and a company paying you to do a custom implementation work, improve. I also think about hosted services, consumption based plans, subscription based plans. How are you thinking that side of the business model will evolve or where is it at now?

• 2:08:25Speaker 03

  I would love for us to have like a GoFundMe or something. But no, we, it's very much the latter two. I think that services and consulting, obviously, you know, if it's the right customer for the right product and the right situation. You know, there's worlds where we're having a portion of your business be devoted. That's important, but the real moneymaker, and I think this has been seen out of those labs in China, out of others is it's in the tooling. It's like, what are you building around it? How are you making it so that other people can customize it without you having to do services? How can you make it an easy API?

• 2:09:04Speaker 03

  How can you, you know, build a developer and education kind of suite around your software, you know, that is uniquely benefited by your models so that they can take it and using maybe hardware GPUs that you own? How can they go and train their own models? So there's many ways to, you know, turn this into something that is much more like automated and less services based. But at the end of the day, it all just comes down to getting the, you know, the customer the right product.

• 2:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who are your heroes in the open source space? Are you a red hat guy, Gitlab guy? What do you like?

• 2:09:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously, yeah, yeah, red hat, Gitlab. I mean, I very much jumped into the open source space like in open source AI.

• 2:09:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:49Speaker 03

  So like as much as I guess they're now a huge competitor of ours, you know, Mistral is huge, you know, OG Lama team, you know, DeepSeek, like these very people that they inspired me to try to compete with them. So it's kind of this very.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  They inspired you to grind harder.

• 2:10:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, really. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:08John Coogan?

  Hit that Ameri-, hit that bald eagle sound. Thank you so much for coming on the show to break it down.

• 2:10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  Congratulations on all the progress and congratulations. We'll be looking at when, what's the timeline here? You think you'll get?

• 2:10:18Speaker 03

  It was supposed to be earlier. We got some GPUs, didn't want to load up, so it'll be here in the next hour.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  We're going to be live for a couple more hours. Ping us. Come into the chat on X or YouTube when it drops and we'll talk about it.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know.

• 2:10:32John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye.

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Sentry. And I need to find Sentry. There we go. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Uh, we gotta talk about this. Plant Daddy.

• 2:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Plant Daddy.

• 2:10:53John Coogan?

  We gotta get him on the show.

• 2:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Exposing his local coffee shop. He says, "A friendly reminder that my local coffee shop is running a bot farm to boost engagement."

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  It's for a month, six months.

• 2:11:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm talking a very small business. Imagine at a country scale, if you're still responding, reposting anonymous accounts with zero vetting, you're being used like the idiot you are.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  This is crazy. Yeah, so there's this video and this, this, uh, local coffee shop, his favorite local coffee shop, has a bot farm set up in their back room to boost Instagram engagement specifically. I did not realize.

• 2:11:26Jordi Hays?

  Does this person not know that, that you can just...

• 2:11:28John Coogan?

  Also, why did he let Kevin back there to video this? And like, opsec at this, at this coffee shop is atrocious. If you're doing, look at the fan at the end. If you scroll to the end of this video, you can see that there's just a fan blowing on all the phones. You see this fan right there? That is crazy.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  This seems like such an insane thing to spend money or time on.

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  That's what I was about to say. What is the ROI here? So they get an extra 50, maybe 100 likes and comments on every post. Um, and is that enough to drive? You know, this looks like thousands of dollars of equipment. They're selling more coffee because...

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot of iPhones.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  It is. I think they're probably Android because they need to be USB-C'd in and controlled.

• 2:12:07Jordi Hays?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  So it's a little bit more open.

• 2:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, seems like a total, total waste of time. I, I've never gone to any of my local coffee shops.

• 2:12:17John Coogan?

  Because of Instagram?

• 2:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Instagram accounts.

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  That you know of. This is not advertising doesn't work on me. Advertising doesn't work on me.

• 2:12:22Jordi Hays?

  I love your coffee, but the engagement here is...

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  It's too low. I don't know. I don't know. Well, I, I would love to know what that proprietor, what that store owner thinks about the ROI on that bot farm.

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  I have noticed on some posts recently.

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:35Jordi Hays?

  That are kind of outside of the, the, the sort of tech bubble. I'll scroll through and look at the comments and every single comment is AI.

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Like just straight up.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, not copy pasted.

• 2:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Not copy pasted, but clearly it's like an AI that's just like responding.

• 2:12:51John Coogan?

  And it's just loosely riffing on it, just adding engagement.

• 2:12:54Jordi Hays?

  It's this isn't, this isn't that, it's this.

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  No, no, no, it's, it's happening more and more. Anyway, let's move on. We have Bridget Mendler from Northwood Space. She's the co-founder and CEO, returning to the show. It's been just under a year, but she's back. Bridget, great to see you. How are you doing?

• 2:13:13Jordi Hays?

  In a much bigger facility.

• 2:13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on over at Northwood? Break it down for us.

• 2:13:19Bridgit Mendler?

  It's, it's good. We are, um, sorry, we just turned on, I just started blasting 80s music in the office. But we're good. This is the, this is being on a manufacturing floor lifestyle at Northwood. And yeah, we are announcing our Series B fundraiser.

• 2:13:37John Coogan?

  Amazing. How much did you raise?

• 2:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 100 million dollars.

• 2:13:43Jordi Hays?

  Nice, nice round number.

• 2:13:45Bridgit Mendler?

  Not a cent more, not a cent less.

• 2:13:47Jordi Hays?

  And some other, some other numbers too.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:51Bridgit Mendler?

  Yes, some other numbers, yeah.

• 2:13:53Jordi Hays?

  More importantly.

• 2:13:55Bridgit Mendler?

  That's right, exactly. Customer, customer is key. We, um, we raised 49.8, uh, in a contract with the, sorry, I'm getting a little bit of background noise. Um, but yeah.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  You had more noise.

• 2:14:11Bridgit Mendler?

  49.8 million dollar contract with the Space Force.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  Talk about the actual progress. I mean, I remember hearing about this from Delian when it was like just an idea. And then, and then I think I saw a video maybe with Jason Carmen, the first deployment, you were building this. Like, what is the scale of the deployment? How are you, I mean, you're in a manufacturing space. How many people are working there? How many of these things are you building? Explain this to us.

• 2:14:37Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, yeah, we were at our 35,000 square foot manufacturing facility now. I think we moved in here thinking this was going to be a long-term home for us. But as I'm sure a bunch of these companies say, it fills up really fast.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:50Bridgit Mendler?

  We have had a busy year. It's been a year of, you know, going from early concept with some exciting problems that we were looking to solve on the ground side. We're looking to address scaling up communications to a bunch of different orbits, really pushing the boundaries on where you can take dynamic space capabilities. Our phased array was really well-aligned with that. So we kind of built out the solution and we took it through to deployment. We can successfully say that now we have actually done production on eight portal units. They were produced in a factory in the span of four weeks.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:24Bridgit Mendler?

  We shipped them out, actually got shipped out on a commercial airliner to its destination halfway around the world and was up and running as soon as it hit the site within 12 hours. So all in all, from the time of our contract signature to actually being ready to take satellite passes is a three-month time period. So we're excited by that.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  And walk me through sort of like the, like, I've seen these memes of like, you ask a question on Google and it takes you through like, you know, you go through the fiber optic cable, you go to the base station, you go to a cell tower. Like, walk me through the actual, you know, use case from someone trying to use the internet and then interfacing like Northwood is in the chain somewhere? Like, what is the full chain?

• 2:16:10Bridgit Mendler?

  No, that's a really great question because a lot of the ground equation has been kind of these fragmented pieces, right? Like, I can imagine it's confusing. It's like, oh, there's this one piece of hardware, whether it's a phased array or a parabolic or whatever.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23Bridgit Mendler?

  How does that fit in with, you know, me making use of internet through space?

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:29Bridgit Mendler?

  And the real, the real point for us is that... We are saying space companies shouldn't have to consider the ground equation when they're running their own business. They shouldn't be trying to navigate, you know, land leases in all of these countries around the world to make contact with their spacecraft. What Northwood does is we own the entire stack. So we handle from the moment that there's a contact made with this spacecraft, all the way to the point of presence somewhere around the world that a spacecraft operator has themselves hosted, that entire chain. So that includes hardware, that includes modem, that includes network backhaul, that includes software interfaces, APIs, and the actual control plane for moving that data.

• 2:17:11Bridgit Mendler?

  That's kind of a stack end to end on ground that hasn't been managed by a third-party ground provider before. And so that's what gets us excited because when we take on that big chunk of the pie, we actually free up a lot of mental bandwidth and speed for space companies.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  So for a space company, they're putting a satellite in orbit for some reason, whatever they're doing. When are they calling you? When are they making sure that they're compatible or ready to integrate? Is that presumably before launch, but does it need, do they need to do anything special on the actual satellite?

• 2:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully they're not calling after their existing solution.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  We just took off and I'm hoping you can connect us.

• 2:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Help us make contact.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like when you move into an apartment, then you call Spectrum like after and you're like, I don't have internet for two weeks now.

• 2:17:56Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, like here we are, contactless. But no, I mean, that's a little bit like the situation with the satellite control network with US government right now. These are for satellites that are already live and operating. That's what our contract is against. It ranges for a ton of functions. So launch, every launch that takes place in the US runs through satellite control network.

• 2:18:17Jordi Hays?

  That's how you know, sorry to interrupt here. Your facility's big because your team is scootering around in the background.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  It is big. You went lying about 35,000 square feet.

• 2:18:24Bridgit Mendler?

  We have a lot of passion for our scooters here. Very, very neat.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  Nice smooth floors. Anyway, sorry.

• 2:18:29Bridgit Mendler?

  It's a great ride. But yeah, so it serves a ton of missions. And more missions are getting launched every day. And so that puts additional strain on capacity. So for us, you know, for instance, in that contract, they're calling saying, hey, we need more capacity. We are needing you to plug in with where we route our data. So we just hand them an API and that's how they interface with it. So they can just connect with the API. Satellites keep doing what they have been doing sometimes for decades. And then when their new satellites launch, they can also use that same interface. So trying to make it as clean and simple as possible.

• 2:19:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What is your, what is your pipeline look like? Like I imagine, I imagine you're, you're talking to a bunch of companies that are planning to get, you know, various satellites up and on the one year, two year, three year. Like, how many, like, are you feeling like an acceleration is kind of what I'm getting at in terms of like more mass to orbit?

• 2:19:29Bridgit Mendler?

  Yes, big time. Uh, we do get a lot of customer inbound and I think like, that's a large part of our raise for us. It's like, hey, we need to be able to expand and grow so that we can service all these important missions. Uh, I think an important piece of our passion for what we do is around serving diverse and ambitious missions. So a lot of our missions look pretty different. So for, for our recent capability we're working on with Space Systems Command, that looks like dynamic spacecraft movement, you know, being able to hit multiple different orbits and, and those kinds of capabilities. There are also communications constellations where, you know, they, they have more of that networking backhaul use case that I, I described to you. Uh, there's other ones that we work with that are more interested in timely imagery.

• 2:20:14Bridgit Mendler?

  Uh, and so for us, what makes us excited is being the ground expert that thinks about that with them from, you know, some of those conversations we have are extremely early. We're like, we're, we're asking them questions and, and learning about their system and, and they'll say, you know, we haven't thought that far yet. Um, and so we get to be the partner from that very early stage to bringing the, the constellation online, um, and really being the one that holds the accountability for that. So we get excited by kind of the diversity of the space industry. I'm sure, you know, you guys are hearing about all the different use cases even that popped up this past year. We're talking about the moon or, you know, data centers in space and the like.

• 2:20:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure, yeah, data center, some, some space data center players are probably calling you being like, hey, in 10 years, I'm gonna have a lot of GPUs in space.

• 2:20:59Bridgit Mendler?

  But you know, let's, let's condense that timeline. Let's condense that timeline on, on all of the ideas. Like, you know, why, why not? Space is an exciting frontier to push forward on.

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, what else are you, are you tracking in launch costs? Actual cost of mass to orbit that feels like a key barometer for the health of the space industry broadly? Is that progressing according to your thesis when you started the company? Are you ahead of plan? Obviously it doesn't, doesn't directly matter for what you do, but obviously it does in many ways. Cause you know, you're downstream of that entire economy. Is that the right even metric to be looking at? If you're monitoring the space economy?

• 2:21:41Bridgit Mendler?

  I mean, I think the economics of space have been something that have been challenging historically. You know, you need to be able to make a profitable business off of space. And so I think there's been a number of dominos that have fallen in favor of that. Whether that be improved launch costs and, you know, dropping to, to new levels in that. And, and other pieces of the space infrastructure stack. I think, you know, what we're building, we're also, also interested in, in making that more affordable. Um, I think the proof is kind of just in the dreams that people are dreaming up and actually putting real dollars behind now. So, you know, it's, it's one thing to talk about some ambitious space concept. It's another thing to put like real dollars behind it and a real timeline against it.

• 2:22:22Bridgit Mendler?

  Uh, and so for us, like that's, that's what we want to enable is that like concept to reality timeline. Like condensing that, making that more possible. Surprisingly, the ground actually takes longer to build than it does to build the spacecraft and launch it. In a number of different instances. And so that's just silly. Like, let's, let's be the enabler instead.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, can you help me understand, uh, deploying ground stations globally? Are there treaties for this type of thing? Do you call other governments? Are you active in other countries? Like, I, I imagine that, you know, there are obviously some, I guess, like geostationary orbits that just orbit over the US. But if the, my satellite's on the other side of the earth, I'd probably want to talk to it. Uh, how do you solve that? What's involved? What's the rollout like?

• 2:23:07Bridgit Mendler?

  No, totally. Um.

• 2:23:10Bridgit Mendler?

  We have an entity in a number of different countries. So, yeah, we have entities on, I think, like, three or four continents at this point.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:23:21Bridgit Mendler?

  So you basically need to establish the business there. You need to work with the local governments across a bunch of different dimensions. I think personally, that's something that I think is really exciting to support with the space industry, right?

• 2:23:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:34Bridgit Mendler?

  A lot of countries are really passionate about pushing their space capabilities forward. And so for us to be able to have them be a part of a larger mission as we build out our big network, but also to support what their ambitions are with space is something I feel interested in. And then from a logistics standpoint, I think that's like a key case in point for why, if you set out to build a space mission, why do you have to go, you know, create entities, land leases, local regulatory?

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:04Bridgit Mendler?

  It's just a totally different business. And so I think, you know, that's something that we are very happy to be burdened by.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, on the regulatory side, are you interfacing with NASA or the FCC? What does that look like? And then does that, does the regulatory architecture that's put in place in the US sort of carry forward into other countries?

• 2:24:28Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, that's a great question. There's some pieces of it that do cross over internationally. We deal with the International Telecommunications Union.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:38Bridgit Mendler?

  For certain pieces of it, depends on which direction you're talking about, from space to ground or ground to space. And then the FCC is really the main regulatory body domestically, but they need input from NASA, they need input from a bunch of other government stakeholders. So a lot of folks weigh in when it comes to spectrum, which is, you know, for nerdy folks like me, that's kind of interesting.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is the main bottleneck, if anything? It's surprising to hear some of the timelines you're talking about on the hardware side. You said four weeks.

• 2:25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:09Jordi Hays?

  To make and ship out the hardware and get it in production feels fast. What is, like, where are you trying to speed up?

• 2:25:19Bridgit Mendler?

  Ground is like such a multi-variable problem. It comes down to supply chain for sure. It comes down to deployment, like what is actually efficient and easy to ship to anywhere around the world. It comes down to licensing and a whole host of other regulatory approvals. So for us, like that's why we find that it's really useful to be vertically integrated because we can actually think of those constraints at every different piece along the chain. So, you know, when we, when we see a bottleneck, like, hey, there's this supply chain limitation, we get to design around that and think about how that fits into the overall system. So I think we've, we've been coordinating all those pieces well so far.

• 2:26:02Bridgit Mendler?

  You know, new challenges are going to continue to pop up, but I think that comes down to just having a team that is multidisciplinary.

• 2:26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I want to know more about the use of funding, a hundred million dollar fundraise. Obviously more hiring and more acceleration broadly, but is, are there any like pieces of equipment that you're going to be buying for manufacturing? Is there a, like a robotic arm that you've been hovering over the checkout button and now you're clicking it or a CNC machine? Like, like what, what will, what will transform about the actual manufacturing process with this raise?

• 2:26:35Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, like getting concrete.

• 2:26:37John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:26:38Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, I, I think, well, actually, that's, that's interesting.

• 2:26:41John Coogan?

  Literally buy concrete?

• 2:26:43Bridgit Mendler?

  No, old, old space, old ground companies do need to buy a ton of concrete.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, because the pad, right, that you actually put it on, right?

• 2:26:50Bridgit Mendler?

  Exactly. You have settling time. Just let the concrete dry. It's a whole factor in the equation. But, but yeah, for us, it's really about a new scale of production. So, you know, we, we've demonstrated this end-to-end process for smaller scale missions. Now it's, okay, cool, can you do that at a larger scale reliably? And so that comes down to, like you said, bringing some stuff in-house. So that's, that's our PCB line, for instance, that's something that we're interested in bringing in-house. We have different testing fixtures that we have in-house. We have a big anechoic chamber over here.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:27:26Bridgit Mendler?

  So.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  Good podcast studio, too. Right? Isn't it like dead quiet in there?

• 2:27:32Bridgit Mendler?

  It's true.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:27:33Bridgit Mendler?

  It's kind of, yeah, I'm tempted to show you, but anyway.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  It will probably cut the wifi out, right?

• 2:27:39Bridgit Mendler?

  Exactly. We would cut the wifi out.

• 2:27:42John Coogan?

  The audio quality would be great, but we lose connection.

• 2:27:46Bridgit Mendler?

  Christine. But yeah, we're going to be moving into a bigger space as well so that we can, you know, accommodate more production volume. Also inventory, you know, like this, this stuff takes up a lot of space, a lot of hardware. We're moving it through rapidly. We're looking to hit a rate of 12 units per month for one product line and then another volume for another product line. There you go. So yeah, that's some of the expenses.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Fantastic progress. To come chat with us. Yeah, remarkable progress. In under a year, I can't wait for the next one. We will see you soon. Yeah, congrats to the whole team.

• 2:28:24Bridgit Mendler?

  Thanks guys. Good to chat. All right. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  Cheers. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, should we... Who we got? We got Jeff? Jeff Miller. It's Miller time. We got Jeff Miller from Andorol. Second time. You're the first repeat live in person guest at the Ultra Dome.

• 2:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the fam.

• 2:28:56John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the Ultra Dome. Second time. Dude, how do we get one of these where people are always asking us for jackets? Yeah.

• 2:29:04Jeff Miller?

  I'll trade you a jacket for a tiny gold plaque here somewhere in the...

• 2:29:07John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a record. This is a record. Love it. Uh, yeah. Fantastic jacket. Those are going to be flying off the shelf. Get us up to speed on the Andorol merch store. I mean, you were doing some like, you did like a, an auction on eBay. Take us through.

• 2:29:21Jeff Miller?

  Absolutely. So actually Jen, Buchi and I were cooking on this.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  Former TBPM guest.

• 2:29:26Jeff Miller?

  TBPM legend. So the way we're thinking about the gear store, and this is something, by the way, we talk often with our pal Trey also, is that we're thinking about ways that for our friends, we can bring them into Andorol. So beyond just following us on X or watching our videos on YouTube, that they can participate the brand in a way that they would want to. So we're going to be leaning into it hard this year with NASCAR. It's a platform with Ohio State. With every campaign that we do, we're gonna have some staples like the flight jacket that will become much more easily acceptable accessible, I should say. And then we're gonna find some items that we'll just call high heat items that we're. And the closest thing I can say is you think about what we did with the chromatic, our friends at Mod Retro.

• 2:30:09Jeff Miller?

  And and pulling that into an Andorl edition, what we're gonna do with the M64, think along that vein. So when those come, be ready because they're not gonna last long.

• 2:30:17John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, take us through the racing update. NASCAR is coming up, but you're also gonna be racing drones now.

• 2:30:24Jeff Miller?

  Yeah, absolutely. Hey, why not?

• 2:30:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:26Jeff Miller?

  So of course we've got NASCAR, we're just about 150 days out. I expect to see both of you guys.

• 2:30:30John Coogan?

  Down the race on the base.

• 2:30:32Jeff Miller?

  On June 21st. It's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 2:30:35Jordi Hays?

  Are we gonna be able to be on the carrier? What's going is it will there be a carrier there? They're needed.

• 2:30:40Jeff Miller?

  I can't speak for the Navy.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  They don't answer me.

• 2:30:43Jeff Miller?

  There may be one or multiple carriers on board and we'll see what we can do. But the the big thing I'd say is like, as we think about our partnership strategy broadly, we have, as we talked about last time, something that is broad, gen pop, that crosses over with our core audiences in defense and military. Like the Andorl 250 with NASCAR, we have something that's tied very clearly to where we have a manufacturing footprint with Ohio State. We're well on our way to building out Arsenal One, as Grim spoke about last week, hiring those 5,000 jobs that we committed to. The important thing I think for us is making sure that we still stay true to who we are across all these things. So I think about it as a spectrum. And if that's about general population or how we work our ways into communities, at the core, we are an engineering company.

• 2:31:25Jeff Miller?

  That autonomy, if you think about it, has been at the core to this date of everything that we build. And so we want to make sure we have something that is not just a marketing play, something that feels much more about recruiting and standing for those values around autonomy. And so what is really just bringing you into the world of how this came to be, once we got the commitment from Palmer and the other execs that we were gonna do the Andorl 250 in Ohio State. Palmer said, Jeff, I'll let you do those things, but what you're gonna do is build me a global AI drone racing. And I'm like, please tell me more, Palmer. I'm like, said like drone racing league. He's like, no, no, no. All the drones have to be the same. The only differentiator is the software, is the code, the ability to build autonomy. And so that's what we've been working on.

• 2:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Yes, so the idea, the idea here is people know they're gonna be racing drones. We have goalposts here. I can imagine like something like that. They know they're gonna have to be flying a route. Like a track, but they, I'm assuming they don't know what the track would actually look like until race day. So they have to actually build.

• 2:32:26Jeff Miller?

  It's going to be amazing. Like, so the way we're doing this is we're working first and foremost with the Drone Champions League, which is the foremost operator of AI drone racing in the world. So we've got them as our official race operator and we're working off of the model that they've built and they've tested and forged like a really viable path. So it starts with virtual qualifiers. Anyone can compete in these virtual qualifiers.

• 2:32:47John Coogan?

  It's a simulator.

• 2:32:48Jeff Miller?

  It's a simulator, exactly. And that will lead to a physical qualifier where you're going to have gates that you have to go through. And the top teams that qualify, both from the university level and across the globe, because it's going to be an open competition, those will qualify for the first official AIGP in Columbus, Ohio. And there, you're going to have time to prep, refine your code, leading up to the actual race day. And that's where all, all systems go.

• 2:33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think the, the average team will look like? I'm, I'm thinking back to like the DARPA Grand Challenge. I don't know if that was inspiring at all, but the, you know, the teams from there, mostly academic teams, if I remember. What do you think the mix will be? Who, have you already talked to teams? How's that going?

• 2:33:27Jeff Miller?

  Yeah. So we've done a lot of research on, on the approach to this. The clear mandate from our friend Palmer was this is open to anyone.

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  To anyone.

• 2:33:34Jeff Miller?

  This is not just 18 to 22 year olds. There's a point where we're talking about like, how can children race in this, right?

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Children, but also like the Tesla team, the Waymo team. They're going to be like, let's just win.

• 2:33:44Jeff Miller?

  And so what I give our team incredible credit for.

• 2:33:47Jordi Hays?

  Also the big primes. Let them, let them.

• 2:33:50Jeff Miller?

  The big primes saying that they can race.

• 2:33:51John Coogan?

  They have an opportunity here to do the funniest thing ever.

• 2:33:53Jeff Miller?

  If a Chinese national thinks they can come in here and race and win this, let's go. And that will prove something there in its own right, is our capabilities in the West relative to China.

• 2:34:02John Coogan?

  I mean, all, yeah, all the, all the LLMs are on.

• 2:34:05Jordi Hays?

  The DJI factory team is like, okay, okay.

• 2:34:08Jeff Miller?

  But I think the things that are most important is at the core, we are using this as a recruiting effort. Thinking about cracked engineers, especially at the university level. We've done incredible diligence on the legal side to make sure when we say things like 500K prize pool, that it's eligible for anyone to raise, that you could win a job at annual. All those things are done in a legally compliant and thoughtful way. And I think most importantly that we're setting a standard with our partner in hardware, your friend,

• 2:34:34John Coogan?

  Soren at Neos.

• 2:34:36Jeff Miller?

  That we are using incredible technology that's going to have clear chain of custody here in the States.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  Dude, we gotta get Soren to fly a drone in here. Have you, you've never seen him fly a drone in person? Not live. So Soren is, Soren Monroe Anderson from CEO of Neos and founder. He was, I believe, like a champion drone, FPV drone?

• 2:34:55Jeff Miller?

  Drone racing champion, also competed in the DCL as well.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so he puts on this, I, I went out with Ben, Ben actually filmed it in El Segundo. And he's like, let me, I do a little like factory tour with him. He has a very small office at that point in time. The company had just got off the ground. He's like, let's walk to this park. I'll show you how these drones work. And I, you know, I've seen like a DJI camera drone like take off and hovers. And maybe like does a little selfie zoom out or whatever. Um, his drones, it's a completely different level. It's a completely different level. He takes off and it's the most aggressive. It's the F1 car of, of drone racing. And he puts on these glasses, the FPV goggles, and they're like CRT TVs. They're like high refresh rate, pretty low res actually.

• 2:35:40John Coogan?

  But he's like flying around this tree like as fast as I can possibly. He doesn't crash anything. Flies up, back, right in your face, all around you. It's crazy.

• 2:35:49Jeff Miller?

  It's so true. And obviously at Andrew, we know a thing or two about making drones.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:53Jeff Miller?

  We have great respect for, for Soren and the Neos team. And what's a funny story is the first time I was here in person with the drone, you know, your guest was directly before me?

• 2:36:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was Soren. That's right.

• 2:36:02Jeff Miller?

  And you guys asked him, I was laughing because you said, hey, have you guys ever thought about starting a drone racing?

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  Oh, we did.

• 2:36:08Jeff Miller?

  We had not talked to him yet.

• 2:36:10John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:36:10Jeff Miller?

  We already were planning to, so I just thought, I was a serendipity. I'll start it right here in the ultra.

• 2:36:15John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Yeah. So, uh, talk to me more about what it takes to actually deliver software on these drones. How standardized that is like, I, like, I imagine you're not. Pulling in a Frontier LLM and having it reason over this stuff like like

• 2:36:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, hold on, boss. I'm gonna wait at this gate.

• 2:36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  Ten minutes of reasoning. Let me do a deep research report.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  Let me fully understand the the the scope of the track like what what you know, give me anything on the technology side like what are the parameters? What are the languages that people will use? Do you know anything about what people are planning?

• 2:36:49Jeff Miller?

  The beauty is we're trying to keep the rules extremely simple.

• 2:36:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:36:53Jeff Miller?

  So the core focus is that everyone is gonna have the same hardware.

• 2:36:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:57Jeff Miller?

  We're working with Neros right now.

• 2:36:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:36:59Jeff Miller?

  And we'll be announcing this in in a future date.

• 2:37:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:01Jeff Miller?

  The beauty too is like everyone's gonna have their own canopy. We're bringing a little the spirit of NASCAR as we think about sponsors and how you can

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Livery.

• 2:37:08Jeff Miller?

  Your own brand.

• 2:37:08Jordi Hays?

  We should sponsor a team.

• 2:37:09John Coogan?

  We should. This is really good.

• 2:37:11Jeff Miller?

  This is happening.

• 2:37:12John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, let's do it.

• 2:37:13Jeff Miller?

  Their team. It just makes natural sense.

• 2:37:15Jordi Hays?

  If you wanna if you wanna race in this, hit us up.

• 2:37:18Jeff Miller?

  You guys are ready. So we'll talk to you guys about how you bring your team together. But from a tech side, it really is the beauty is that once you have the hardware, everyone is going to be able to be on an even footing.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:28Jeff Miller?

  To bring together whatever they want to do and however they want to do it.

• 2:37:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:32Jeff Miller?

  And where I think the real advantage will come.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:34Jeff Miller?

  When people spend time at the physical qualifier.

• 2:37:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:37Jeff Miller?

  Show up there, break the thing a hundred times. We talk about this at at Andal all the time.

• 2:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:42Jeff Miller?

  Fail, fail, fail, fail, win. That's the way we think about it. And I think that model, that approach, that that ethos applies here too.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  So how do you keep a level playing field around hardware when drones are breaking and they are smashing? Is it like, oh, you get an allotment of five and then you're out?

• 2:37:58Jeff Miller?

  We'll have exactly clear chain of custody.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:00Jeff Miller?

  All credit to DCL and and Neros because they're controlling the the hardware component. Uh, but we've planned out and because of their experience, we know how many are gonna break along the way. Uh, but there's not gonna be any opportunity for anyone to be making mods.

• 2:38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:12Jeff Miller?

  Beyond what we give them officially.

• 2:38:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:14Jordi Hays?

  That's very cool.

• 2:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are there other like, will people, do you think people will have the ability like overclock motors? It has a lot of racing, of course, in NASCAR F1, it's like tire management, fuel stops in certain races. We just saw this with the Rolex 24.

• 2:38:30Jeff Miller?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:38:30John Coogan?

  Like, at what level does it stay from just perception, doing simultaneous location? Mapping, pathfinding, to actually understanding like I could push the drone harder.

• 2:38:41Jordi Hays?

  Twenty-four hour, twenty-four hour, the endurance.

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, like how many times do you change?

• 2:38:46Jeff Miller?

  I think what you'll see is the battery is pretty lightweight, but for the the distance of the race itself.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:50Jeff Miller?

  You're gonna have enough battery load.

• 2:38:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:52Jeff Miller?

  But it really will become to like finding all these little incentives.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and there'll be risk.

• 2:38:56Jeff Miller?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  If you cut the corner a little bit closer.

• 2:38:58Jeff Miller?

  How you're doing it, if you're how you push it, understanding the hardware better than the next.

• 2:39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, the tolerances.

• 2:39:02Jeff Miller?

  Exactly.

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 2:39:03Jeff Miller?

  But for us, like what I'd say here is really special is beyond the fact that we're starting in Columbus.

• 2:39:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:39:08Jeff Miller?

  We're already working with Palmer in two really interesting ways. Like we have plans to roll out the second GP.

• 2:39:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:14Jeff Miller?

  In Asia.

• 2:39:15John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:39:15Jeff Miller?

  That'll be announced soon.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:16Jeff Miller?

  The third GP in the Middle East.

• 2:39:18John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:39:18Jeff Miller?

  And the fourth one beyond in the globe. And right now, we're starting with quad copters.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:23Jeff Miller?

  The important element of the AI GP.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:25Jeff Miller?

  Is the autonomy. It's not the form factor.

• 2:39:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:39:28Jeff Miller?

  So just know that's something that could come to life underwater in different domains over time.

• 2:39:32John Coogan?

  Whoa, that would be cool. Feels, yeah, harder to film and stuff, but could be really cool, yeah.

• 2:39:36Jeff Miller?

  Well, let me just say that's the first of many domains Palmer's.

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, yeah, I want to say tunneling ones.

• 2:39:42Jeff Miller?

  As George said it, I did it.

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that'd certainly be great. What do you think teams will look like? Are they unlimited amount of people? I can show up with a thousand individuals?

• 2:39:51Jeff Miller?

  You can show up as an individual. We think the teams that are gonna be really successful are gonna show up between four and eight people. It's capped at at eight people.

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  Two pizza team.

• 2:39:57Jeff Miller?

  Exactly, yeah. And so the the goal would be that you're, we're talking to the, all the universities that are gonna express interest. We have target universities at Andor that really feed our pipeline of emerging talent.

• 2:40:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:40:08Jeff Miller?

  And those teams, we're hoping to get really excited about this. We think the prize pool is gonna be a real incentive.

• 2:40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:13Jeff Miller?

  But also that opportunity to win a job at Andor.

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's good, it's good like resume builder, content, whatever, marketing, there's so many different ways.

• 2:40:21Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting, winning, winning a job at Andor when I think anybody that can get into the top five.

• 2:40:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Probably every person on the team is qualified, or at least some percentage of them. So the pipeline, the talent pipeline is gonna be very.

• 2:40:34Jeff Miller?

  It's gonna be incredible and also why our lawyer now has a lot more gray hair than he did a month ago.

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:40Jeff Miller?

  But the important.

• 2:40:41Jordi Hays?

  Doing any of these like giveaway contest thing at scale, there's so much like legal headache with it. It's not as simple.

• 2:40:48Jeff Miller?

  Yeah, exactly. But luckily for us, I think whether thinking about legal constraints for this, uh, what our people at Andor across divisions do is they see opportunity and they see how they can create solutions. But the, the thing that gets me excited is like beyond whoever wins and earns the job is that every university team member that shows up to the qualifier, which is gonna happen near our HQ in September, will get a screen directly by Andor recruiting. So if you're somebody that is interested in this, if you're somebody who's looking for a, a entry level job or internship at Andor, this is a great way to feed into our pipeline.

• 2:41:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you tell me more about the new, uh, Long Beach office? What's going on there?

• 2:41:23Jeff Miller?

  Oh man. Well, somebody who lives in Venice, California and works in Costa Mesa, can I just say I'm extremely happy that we have a Long Beach office coming? It's incredible. I mean, the story rates itself from, from Palmer's origin to, to where we are now.

• 2:41:36John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. That's where the first, uh, like what was it? The airstream or something?

• 2:41:39Jeff Miller?

  Hundred percent. He's living on a land down by the river, right?

• 2:41:43John Coogan?

  That's actually true.

• 2:41:44Jeff Miller?

  It's incredible to, to see it come full circle.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  Down by the marina. It wasn't really a river.

• 2:41:48Jordi Hays?

  Down by the river.

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was basically.

• 2:41:50Jeff Miller?

  I wouldn't get in, uh, any rivers in LA.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  LA river is rough.

• 2:41:53Jeff Miller?

  But it's a, it's really special.

• 2:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:56Jeff Miller?

  The origin story, the, the fact that it's a reflection of, of our growth, our maturation.

• 2:42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:00Jeff Miller?

  The engineering talent that we're gonna be able to recruit, not just in Orange County, but now closer to LA.

• 2:42:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:05Jeff Miller?

  And, and ultimately whether you're working in SoCal and, and Ohio or beyond.

• 2:42:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:09Jeff Miller?

  We're still gonna be screening for the same thing. And that starts with the mission, the connection to, to what we're building.

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. How big is the Orange County campus now? It's like.

• 2:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Five thousand something.

• 2:42:18Jeff Miller?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:42:18Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sorry. No, the new, the new campus.

• 2:42:20Jeff Miller?

  Five thousand. Uh, the current one's a little smaller than that.

• 2:42:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:42:23Jeff Miller?

  Uh, but it's, it's the type of thing that we're constantly building.

• 2:42:26John Coogan?

  Five thousand square feet. That's pretty big.

• 2:42:28Jeff Miller?

  No, people that, that we're bringing in. Yeah.

• 2:42:32Jeff Miller?

  But to be bringing over a million square feet to Long Beach and to be doing it directly. With the mayor of Long Beach has been incredible and his team. It's just been really cool to see come to life.

• 2:42:42John Coogan?

  That's great, that's great. What else is on the horizon on the marketing side for Andorl? Did you look at a Super Bowl ad? Super Bowl's coming up.

• 2:42:51Jeff Miller?

  You know what?

• 2:42:52John Coogan?

  What else did you look at?

• 2:42:52Jeff Miller?

  So I'll tell you one thing, the core focus for us this year is absolutely showing the raw, the real, the product development.

• 2:43:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:01Jeff Miller?

  The failures, failure fares that lead to the wins, the hard work.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:04Jeff Miller?

  The scalability that we're seeing is reflecting that story. So I think that's the important inflection point for us in 26.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:10Jeff Miller?

  It's gonna be less about the highly produced go to markets.

• 2:43:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:43:14Jeff Miller?

  And it's gonna be about, we told you we were building these things.

• 2:43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:17Jeff Miller?

  We are building them and we're gonna show you how hard it is to scale, but that we are up to the challenge. And, you know, when we talk about this internally, we talk about demonstrating to our customers that Andorl is not only the right choice, we are the safe choice. And we are the necessary choice for, for what our country needs. So that's the story we need to tell. And how we do that is gonna be about great world-class product marketing that will likely look more transparent and raw than you've ever seen before. And then as we're thinking about working our way to, to public markets, it's about building the Andorl brand and that could be through a drone race for recruits. It could be about a gear store or big major sports marketing platforms. But it won't be a Super Bowl commercial this year. In fact, this past weekend, we weren't at the NFL playoffs. I was at a UFC fight in Vegas, 324.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:44:03Jeff Miller?

  I'll tell you that, that to me is much more of, of America and the audience that, that I think has high crossover.

• 2:44:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:10Jeff Miller?

  To, and connections with, with audiences that we see in NASCAR. And whether we do a partnership with them or not, I think the point is that we're looking to do things differently than traditional brands. And looking for partners that share our values and share our mission.

• 2:44:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think that the, on that, like, the story that you're telling around like delivery and scale and reliability and the safe option, does that mean?

• 2:44:37John Coogan?

  Visually, you'll think you'll shift from product focused, you know, this like, look at this amazing, cool thing that does this thing to more of like highlighting what's happening at Arsenal, the manufacturing prowess, the scale. Is that the type of story you're trying to focus on? Is that how this will be?

• 2:44:53Jeff Miller?

  Those stories to me complement each other. What it means is we're going beyond a product go-to-market where it's saying, hey, we're announcing this to the world, to thinking about the stages of development post-launch. We did a really great job of this as a team, I believe, with Omen. And we told why a tail sitter is so hard to produce. We tap back into the history of tail sitters across decades and what our engineers were able to accomplish to make Omen successful and all the rigorous testing that we did. We're going to start to do that more with all of our products, but that doesn't stop with testing. It's about fielding. It's about putting in our customers' hands. And certainly, it's about your point around manufacturing at scale. So that starts with Arsenal One. Why do we build it? The progress that we're making, the products that are scaling over time there, and showing that the promises that we've made, we're able to deliver on.

• 2:45:37John Coogan?

  Very cool. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:45:39Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:45:39John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 2:45:40Jeff Miller?

  Well, I have one other really important announcement in the spirit of our friend intern, Tyler.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:45:46Jeff Miller?

  A special day for you. It's your birthday.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:45:48Jeff Miller?

  I've got the first drink I had.

• 2:45:49Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 2:45:55Jeff Miller?

  The nectar of life.

• 2:45:56John Coogan?

  The nectar of life. Properly iced on the stream the first time ever.

• 2:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:46:01John Coogan?

  People were talking about a buzz.

• 2:46:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you. You're the man. Ice. Well, this thing is huge.

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  That is a huge ice.

• 2:46:10Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you, you're 21, you can indulge, enjoy, enjoy a sip of, of.

• 2:46:18John Coogan?

  And I will tell.

• 2:46:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's get the Tyler cam.

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  Tyler cam. We'll flip that around and I will tell everyone about graphite. Oops. I just burst it out. I'm sorry. First day on the board. Okay.

• 2:46:32Speaker 02

  John's got a new board.

• 2:46:33John Coogan?

  I have a new board. Let's go with Graphite.

• 2:46:36Speaker 02

  Here we go.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  Is it gonna work? Yeah, there we go. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 2:46:45Speaker 02

  We love Graphite.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  Hunter Weiss, friend of the show, sent me this video. He did a Call of Duty edit over Uber Eats Meal Team Six, New York City's elite special forces delivery unit. I wanted to take a look at this, the Meal Team Six.

• 2:47:04Speaker 02

  How did he make the decision? Walk outside?

• 2:47:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, pull up audio. Look at this. He's a good editor.

• 2:47:17John Coogan?

  Oh, he did the SD hit thing. Let's go. We're gonna get a copyright strike for this, but it's worth it.

• 2:47:25Speaker 02

  It's worth it.

• 2:47:26John Coogan?

  It's worth it.

• 2:47:32John Coogan?

  It is so crazy how much snow is happening. We haven't been following at all, but US digs itself out for monster winter storm. People shoveled snow Monday in Boston, where over 17 inches of snow fell in the weekend storm that had nearly 200 million Americans under weather warnings. More than 710 households, 710,000 households from Texas to Maine are still without power. That's very rough. Hopefully that results quickly. Did you ever live in the snow? Have you ever lived in anywhere where it gets cold?

• 2:48:04Speaker 02

  Not.

• 2:48:04John Coogan?

  Tyler's the expert. How's Michigan doing?

• 2:48:07Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, Michigan's really, I don't know if they've.

• 2:48:09John Coogan?

  Have people snowed in?

• 2:48:10Speaker 02

  I think, I think, I thought it was a little bit further south. I thought it was like Tennessee's getting hit really hard. But, um, yeah, I hate snow. It sucks. That's why I'm living here.

• 2:48:21John Coogan?

  Well. Where else should we go? We have our special guest joining in just Eight minutes. Eight minutes, eight minutes. There is a clip from Ben, from a friend of the show, Ben Hylak. He was, he attended the OpenAI interview with Sam Altman and Town Hall. Chief OpenAI hater Nick, of course clipped it and put it in a negative context. He, he says, you know, there's some quotes here, but let's pull up the, the question that Ben asked on this OpenAI stream.

• 2:48:52Speaker 09

  Discord on like Twitter and X recently about chat, about GPT-5's writing and ChatGPT. And being a little unwieldy, hard to read. Obviously, GPT-5 is a much better agent model, really good tool use, intermediate reasoning, whatever. So it feels like, it feels like models are a little bit spiky or they've gotten even spikier where some spikes like coding got super high. Some spikes like, or it's very unspiky around writing. So I'm just kind of curious how OpenAI thinks about that.

• 2:49:25Speaker 04

  I, I think we just screwed that up. We will make future versions of GPT-5 point X, hopefully much better at writing than 4.5 was. We did decide, and I think for good reason, to put most of our effort in 5.2 into making it super good at intelligence, reasoning, coding, engineering, that kind of thing. And we have limited bandwidth here and sometimes we focus on one thing and neglect another. But I believe that the future is mostly going to be about very good general purpose models.

• 2:50:01Speaker 04

  You know, even if you're trying to

• 2:50:04Speaker 04

  make a model that's really great at coding, it'd be nice if it writes well too. Like if you're trying to have it be able to generate a full application for you, you'd like good writing in there. When it's interacting with you, you'd like to have a sort of thoughtful, incisive personality and communicate clearly. Like good writing in a sense of clear thought, not like beautiful prose.

• 2:50:24Speaker 04

  So my hope is that we just push.

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  Nick's in the chat. Oh no, his ears are ringing.

• 2:50:30Speaker 04

  And I think we will do that.

• 2:50:32John Coogan?

  Okay, fair.

• 2:50:35Jordi Hays?

  We just read, Nick.

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  You built a brand.

• 2:50:37Jordi Hays?

  Everything.

• 2:50:38John Coogan?

  You've built a brand. Yeah, I mean, playing catch up now, I guess that's true. I guess that's true, at least in Ben's perspective.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  Nick puts John in the truth zone.

• 2:50:48John Coogan?

  Truth zone, true. No, no, I mean, I was looking on Ela Marina, the leaderboard for text, and GPT 5.2 is 16th, like, well, well below Gemini 3 Pro's number one, Grok 4.1 Thinkings number two, Gemini 3 Flash, Opus 4.5, Opus 4.5, Grok 4.1. GPT 5.1 High is ninth, and then you have to go down to 5.2 to get 16th. To, you have to go down to 16 to get to 5.2. So, yeah, it is interesting seeing the, like, the spiky intelligence things kind of turned into a stat bar of like, you know, where are you putting the, like, the points, the skill points or whatever?

• 2:51:33John Coogan?

  And they put too many of the points into.

• 2:51:36Jordi Hays?

  I will say, I don't want ChatGPT to fix their issues with writing. I don't want it to be, I now I'm at a point where I'm like, thank you for making it very easy to clock when something is written by AI.

• 2:51:50Speaker 02

  I think that's totally like stated versus revealed preference. If you have like incredible model that writes something that you find like super compelling, obviously.

• 2:51:57Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm talking about because people are using ChatGPT now to make scripts for videos. They're using it to make, to make, to do bots that are writing comments. And I know as soon as I can see something is just written by ChatGPT that I can just scroll past it and, and basically ignore it.

• 2:52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, but imagine like in the far future where those comments are actually like, wow, this is like very insightful and thought provoking and I'm glad that I read this text. Like, that's good.

• 2:52:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I think I think we can get there. Also, so I back in March, Sam tweeted that they they trained a new model that is good at creative writing that he released this whole story.

• 2:52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:33Jordi Hays?

  Um, I think they've they've never really released that. Maybe it got vendied in somehow.

• 2:52:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, like distilled a little bit, but there were trade offs clearly.

• 2:52:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And I'm not sure that they actually did end up releasing.

• 2:52:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the the really interesting thing to apologize and steel man Nick's point here is is is that like, should chat GPT be focused on coding? Certainly in the, you know, the how are they going to compete with Claude Bot? They need a really great coding model. Uh, we'll talk to our guest in just a minute about, you know, how he's how he's using 5.2.

• 2:53:06Jordi Hays?

  He's ready.

• 2:53:07John Coogan?

  He's ready. So let's bring him in. Um, from the restream waiting room. We have Peter Steinberger from Molotov.

• 2:53:15Jordi Hays?

  Man of the hour.

• 2:53:16John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Thank you so much for staying up late. What time is it for you?

• 2:53:21Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, it's 11.

• 2:53:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

• 2:53:24Jordi Hays?

  PM for everybody that's just tuning in.

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  11 PM.

• 2:53:27Jordi Hays?

  11 PM.

• 2:53:27John Coogan?

  Um, so I'd love to kick it off with just a brief background on when you started this project, a little bit of your career, how you how you're thinking about it going forward. And then I have a million questions.

• 2:53:37Jordi Hays?

  This was your very first project ever, right?

• 2:53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. First time coding, right?

• 2:53:43Jordi Hays?

  Now, we were we were enjoying, uh, we were enjoying, uh, a screenshot of your your GitHub profile earlier and just seeing like,

• 2:53:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:50Jordi Hays?

  how many how many different things.

• 2:53:52John Coogan?

  An overnight success.

• 2:53:53Jordi Hays?

  A true overnight success.

• 2:53:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:53:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, we're super excited to have you here.

• 2:53:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:57Peter Steinberger?

  Awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to be here as well. Um, yeah, I don't know. I

• 2:54:05Peter Steinberger?

  I worked for my own software company for 13 years. And then I I sold it about four years ago. Then I was completely burned out. I did like, I mean, it's it's TV, but still a little bit of blackjack and hookers.

• 2:54:22John Coogan?

  Blackjack?

• 2:54:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're glad you're back in the game.

• 2:54:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:30Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, you know what they say, like five or four years and like one year break and I did like 13 years non-stop, so like three years the mask kind of checks out.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:39Peter Steinberger?

  And then this year, no, last year, 2016, um, in April, at some point I, my spark was back.

• 2:54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:51Peter Steinberger?

  Um, because before I was like, I was sitting on my computer and I didn't know if you seen Austin Powers, but it, it, it felt like someone sucked my mojo out. Um, but yeah, I, I had time to, to recover. I came back in April and I wanted to do something new. My background was like a lot of Apple and iOS and I'm a little bit fed up. I, I wanted, I wanted, I wanted to build web stuff.

• 2:55:14John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:55:15Peter Steinberger?

  And I didn't have the experience. I didn't want to feel like an idiot. So I looked into AI and it was good. It was not great, but it was good. Um, and I was like, why is nobody talking about it, you know? And I feel like because I missed those three years where it was really bad. And I came back just at the time, like Cloud Code was released, what, February in beta?

• 2:55:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:39Peter Steinberger?

  So this was my first experience. I was like, this is, this is pretty awesome.

• 2:55:43John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:55:44Peter Steinberger?

  And, and then I, I couldn't sleep anymore. Like I literally had trouble. I had trouble going to bed, you know, we had like addiction before and then like we had addiction again.

• 2:55:55Jordi Hays?

  But a, but a positive one.

• 2:55:58Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, well, yeah, I would say so. Um, and I, I hooked up a lot of my friends for uh, looking into AI as well. And they had the same problem and I texted them at like 4am and they replied. Um, I even, I even started a meetup, that's where I come from. I call it, uh, I called it Cloud Code Anonymous. Now it's called Agents Anonymous because you have to go with the times.

• 2:56:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:56:20Peter Steinberger?

  And, and yeah, that was, since then I.

• 2:56:25Peter Steinberger?

  That's what I say on my profile. I came back from retirement to mess with AI.

• 2:56:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:28Peter Steinberger?

  And I'm having loads of fun.

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  That's great. I love it. Rick, maybe walk us through some of the other stuff that you shipped and worked on prior to this. And even just kind of like your mindset, working on these different projects. I'm assuming at different points, you would think that some would get more traction than others, but it would probably be impossible to have predicted in some ways that this would have gone from almost to the point, the reason that this is so wild is I'm seeing people on Instagram that like I don't think of as people that like follow tech at all and they're at the Apple Store getting a Mac Mini. So it feels like it just went, it broke containment like incredibly quickly. And you see the GitHub stars are like, actually, I've never seen a chart like this. It's just straight up on.

• 2:57:16Jordi Hays?

  The last, you know, everybody loves to show their charts, but the chart is actually unbelievable. It's just a line going straight up.

• 2:57:22Peter Steinberger?

  I need to talk to someone at GitHub because I don't think there's been a project before that's been like straight. It is, it is, it is batshit insane.

• 2:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:34Peter Steinberger?

  I mean, honestly, my main mantra is I want to have fun. You know, like the best way to learn these new technologies is if you have fun with it. You have to play with it. So I build little things that I think could be useful. I tried different languages. I tried different approaches.

• 2:57:51Peter Steinberger?

  It's agentic engineering. I don't like the word wide coding so much. I always make the joke, I do agentic engineering and then when it starts hitting 3AM, I switch to wide coding. And then next day I have regrets.

• 2:58:02Jordi Hays?

  You should have just gone to sleep, basically. Yeah.

• 2:58:05Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's hard.

• 2:58:10Peter Steinberger?

  But then I just, I just build little things. I had this idea about personal agents in, in May already. And I tried, it was like the time that GPT-4.1 was out. It was just not good enough. And then I thought, well, all the big, all the big companies will build this in the next few months anyhow. So it's like, why, why, why the F should I do that? You know, I'm just going to wait and they make it better.

• 2:58:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:38Peter Steinberger?

  And I built a lot of stuff.

• 2:58:45Peter Steinberger?

  That's like one project that is still unfinished, that I at some point when I finish. And I build a lot of, a lot of the lies because that's, that's where agents are really good. You know, you have to close the loop. That's always the, the secret. You have to give, you have to build it so that the agent has the best possible way to build software. This is, that's the, the secret a little bit.

• 2:59:10Peter Steinberger?

  I tried a lot of stuff and in, in November, I looked and still there was nothing. Like where is, where is my fucking agent?

• 2:59:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:18Peter Steinberger?

  Um, I, I, I had a little project in, in May. I spent two months on it. Uh, it, it, it started as a joke because we, I did a hackathon with, with two friends and we like, what can we build that? That could be kind of cool. Wouldn't it be cool if I could use Cloud Code from my phone?

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:35Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, it's kind of like, it's something that everybody builds. I see this like every day. Like by now I almost call it like, this is like one step in your journey in becoming a good engineering engineer. You're gonna build some, some shitty orchestration tool for yourself because it's fun and you think, yeah.

• 2:59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a bridge.

• 2:59:51Peter Steinberger?

  And I, I built that for two months and then, uh, I had to stop because it became so good that I was up with my friends, but literally with my phone, like using Cloud Code to like, work on this thing. And it's like, this is bad for my mental health.

• 3:00:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:06Peter Steinberger?

  It's already bad and now like I'm, I'm literally building something that has better access to my drugs.

• 3:00:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I saw, I, I, I've seen people using Cloud Code on laptops as they get off of airplanes because they're so locked in, they just have to send one more. And that's like the clear sign that like you need a bridge and a phone involved.

• 3:00:24Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah. Now, but also like, you know, like this, this feeling when your agent's not running.

• 3:00:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:28Peter Steinberger?

  Right now there's like two terminals, but he could be building something, right?

• 3:00:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:31Peter Steinberger?

  So, so if you're in this addiction mode, you're almost like, you almost feel like.

• 3:00:36Jordi Hays?

  If you need to step out for 10 seconds and fire off.

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, feel free to take a break. We can do an ad read.

• 3:00:41Peter Steinberger?

  No, there's, there's, there's still some drama that I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm finishing. But, you know, um.

• 3:00:49Peter Steinberger?

  So in November.

• 3:00:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:52Peter Steinberger?

  I, I don't know. You know, I, I wake up every day, I'm like, okay, what do I wanna work on now? What would be cool? And then it was like, okay, I, I wanna chat with my computer on WhatsApp. Because, because if my agents are not running, is running and then I go to the kitchen, I wanna check up on them. And I wanna like do little prompts.

• 3:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:10Peter Steinberger?

  So I, I just hacked together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message called Cloud Code and then returns what Cloud Code returns. One shot.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:24Peter Steinberger?

  And it took like one hour and it worked. And I was like, oh, okay, that's kind of cool.

• 3:01:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:29Peter Steinberger?

  But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image. Because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:01:39Peter Steinberger?

  So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster, just like make a screenshot. So the agents are really good at figuring out what you want. Um, so I hacked together images. And then I, I was on a trip in Marrakech with like a weekend birthday trip.

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:01:56Peter Steinberger?

  And I, I found myself using this like way more than I, than I thought, but not for, not for programming. It's more like, hey, there like, there's like restaurants. Um, because it, it, it had Google in it and it, it could figure out stuff. And it's like, especially when you're on the go, it's like super useful.

• 3:02:13Peter Steinberger?

  And then, and I wasn't thinking, I was just sending it a voice message, you know? But I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there. So, so the reading editor came and I'm like, I'm really curious what's, what's happening now? And after ten seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like, how the F did you do that? And it replied, yeah, you sent me, you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file, there's no file ending. So I looked at the file header, I found out that it's open, so I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to, to WAV. And then I wanted to use VSP, but didn't have it installed and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment, so I sent it via curl to OpenAI.

• 3:02:57Peter Steinberger?

  Um, got the translation back and then I unresponded. And that was like the moment where like.

• 3:03:02John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah.

• 3:03:04Peter Steinberger?

  You know, it's like, that's where it clicked. These things are like. Damn, smart, resourceful beast if you actually give them the power.

• 3:03:15Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 3:03:16Peter Steinberger?

  Um, and then I was, I was kind of hooked, like I, I did all kinds of, of weird stuff. Like I used it as alarm clock. I, I let it migrate to my computer i- i- in London, but then it used SSH login to my, my Mac, MacBook and turn up the volume to wake me up in the morning. I think I built world's most expensive alarm clock.

• 3:03:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 3:03:38Peter Steinberger?

  And it, it even got it wrong because I had like, it, it, it uses a heartbeat. You know, like the concept of you do a prompt and you get something is already,

• 3:03:49Peter Steinberger?

  if this full access inherently dangerous, but I was like, let's turn it up a notch. Let's, let's automate that. Let's give it a heartbeat and, and, and the prompt was literally, surprise me.

• 3:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 3:04:01Peter Steinberger?

  Um.

• 3:04:04Peter Steinberger?

  But you know, I, I see this, this project as, as much technology as it is like art and exploration. Cause this feels, in one way, in one way, it's just glue. It's, it's, it's just putting pieces together that we already have. In another way, it's, it's a whole different way how you interact with those things. Because all the technology blends away. You don't think about new session, compaction, which model, I mean, maybe a little bit because tokens are still expensive. Um, but usually all of that blends away. You just, you just talk to a friend or a ghost or.

• 3:04:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it made me, it made me, last year, everyone was wanting these agentic experiences. You were having this experience and, and it seemed like all the focus was on browsers. And seeing the way that people have been using, uh, uh, sorry, malt, malt bots, taking me a while to adapt, uh, it just feels like all the focus was at the wrong layer. It's like, why do I care about the browser if I can just talk with an agent?

• 3:05:12John Coogan?

  Across every app.

• 3:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Across every app, every, every surface. It's like, I don't care about the browser at all anymore.

• 3:05:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:19Peter Steinberger?

  I mean, a lot of the prep work I did before I built this was just build little C L I's. Cause my, my, my premises, M C P's are crap. Doesn't really scale. Uh, people build like all kinds of weird search things around it. But you know what scales? CLI's. Uh, agents know Unix. You can have like a thousand little programs on your computer. Um, you, they just have to know the name. They call the help menu. They load in what's needed. We are calling the help menu. Then they know how to use it. And then they can use it. And if you, if you are smart, you build it in a way that just uses what the model already expects. You know?

• 3:06:04Peter Steinberger?

  Don't build it for humans, build it for models. So if they call minus minus log, you build minus minus log. As I say, agentic driven for like, yeah. Build, build how they think and everything works better. Uh, uh, it's a new kind of software in a way.

• 3:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:20Peter Steinberger?

  Um. So for most of the things, I don't need a browser. Like I built something for the whole Google thing, for places, for my sonos. I hooked up my cameras, my, my, my home automation system. Like with every little CLI and skill, my agent got more power and it got more fun.

• 3:06:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:41Peter Steinberger?

  Um, and I already had a lot of that working when I, when I, I built the, the WhatsApp thing.

• 3:06:50Peter Steinberger?

  And I just got hooked. And the thing was, I found it amazing. And I talked about it on Twitter. And usually when I, when I talk about projects, I, I get response. But this one, it was very muted. It feels like people are not getting it.

• 3:07:08Peter Steinberger?

  I, I showed it to my friends, even my non-tech friends, and they're like, they wanted it. So I was like, I was, I was up to something, you know?

• 3:07:15John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:07:16Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, but the tech people wouldn't get it. So I tried, I tried a bunch of things. Like I, I kept working on it cause I used it. And ultimately I built it for me, you know? This is open source. My motivation is have fun, inspire people, not make a whole bunch of money. I already have a whole bunch of money. Um.

• 3:07:44Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how are you, how have you been navigating the last 72 hours? I mean, the last, the last week, really, because, because we were joking earlier on the show, like, the amount of, the amount of people that are frantically trying to give you money, acquire the company, contribute to the project, hire you. Uh, you know, there's companies with, you know, 0.01% of the traction that are raising at, you know, multi-billion dollar valuations. You have infinite opportunities right now, and yet you seem very happy doing, just continuing to do exactly what you're doing. But how are you thinking through it all?

• 3:08:23Peter Steinberger?

  I mean, how am I taking it? Badly, at least sleep-wise. But it, but it's also infinitely exciting and I, I love that I started something, you know? I, I would say last year was the year of the coding agent. This year is the year of the personal assistant. And I think I cracked and woke up people that there is a real need for it. I don't know if, if, if Mobbot is, is the answer. It's, it should show people the way. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of, a lot of products in this space. I'm sure people are manually working on it right now.

• 3:09:05Peter Steinberger?

  I would say it's going to be very interesting. Yeah, but there was a lot of stuff. Um, between Twitter literally exploding, our Discord server multiplying in ways I haven't seen before, and in ways I couldn't handle. Like, at some point, I was just copy pasting questions from Discord into Codex. Then I had the response, wrote the next question. At some point, it didn't scale anymore. So I was just like, copy the whole channel and like, answered, answered 20 most questions. I was like, reading over it, giving instructions and, and then just pushed it over. Because what, what people don't realize is like, this is not a company.

• 3:09:48Peter Steinberger?

  This is like one dude sitting at home having fun. Even though like, I guess from the commit, it might appear that it's a company. That's, that's just because agentic models got so good that you can now ship as much as a company could a year ago. If you, if you, if you can handle those tools, if you...

• 3:10:12Peter Steinberger?

  Speak the language or like understand how the language thinks.

• 3:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 3:10:18Peter Steinberger?

  You can, you can go really fast.

• 3:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How are the conversations going with, with different labs? I was saying earlier, it's this kind of exciting moment for the labs because they're like, wow, people are using the intel, you know, someone's using the intelligence that I created in a new way. But at the same time, it's deeply uncomfortable because they're also using all of my competitors. And you make it very easy to, to kind of use whatever model.

• 3:10:42Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, yeah, I. My premise for this project was a little bit that every model should work, including local models. Because to me, it's a playground. It's, it's, it's an amazing way to learn, like, I think everybody should like build an intelligent loop. You should like explore memory. There's like so many interesting aspects of it. And I, I built it so that like it has like plugins so that people can work on their own little thing without having to like mess with the whole core. So it's, it's like the AI hackers paradise a little bit. And it's also super fun because it's personal. Um, model wise, Opus is

• 3:11:24Peter Steinberger?

  with quite a bit lead the best. Um, OpenAI is very reliable, I would even say more reliable and more reliable worker. Like for coding, I, I, I much prefer Codex because it, it can navigate large code bases. I literally, you can literally prompt and then push to main. And I have a very, I have like ninety five percent certainty that it actually works. With cloud code, you need, you need more tricks to, to get the same. You need more, more charade, I sometimes say. Both, both are good, but I can paralyze faster by Codex because it, it requires less handholding.

• 3:12:07Peter Steinberger?

  Um, but character wise, I tell you.

• 3:12:13Peter Steinberger?

  I don't know what they trained their model on, how much of Reddit is in there, whatever. But it behaves so good in Discord, like we programmed it so. It kind of feels like a human, it doesn't reply to every message. I gave it the thing where it can reply, no reply basically, like a token. And then we just don't send a message. So it's not like it's spamming every message, it's like it listens to the conversation and then sometimes brings a banger. And like, it did actually make me laugh and you know, it's kind of hard because the jokes of AIs are usually really bad.

• 3:12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:12:54Peter Steinberger?

  Um, and I only really experienced that with Opus. So this is, that's my favorite model. It's also why it's a little bit of a banger that I got an email um from Anthropic

• 3:13:10Peter Steinberger?

  that I had to rename the project. And I, I mean, kudos, they were really nice. They didn't send their lawyers, they sent someone internally. Um, but the timeline was a bit rough.

• 3:13:24Peter Steinberger?

  And like renaming a project with that much traction.

• 3:13:29Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, it was a bit of a shit show. I think everything that, everything that could have gone wrong today went wrong.

• 3:13:37John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 3:13:38Peter Steinberger?

  I tell you.

• 3:13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, I think the new name works really well.

• 3:13:42Jordi Hays?

  I guess the thing, the thing that's actually good, I think in the long run it'll be good.

• 3:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:45Jordi Hays?

  I mean, obviously it's good for Anthropic. They, it's, it's kind of untenable to have this massive viral, even though it's not a company, right? An open source project to have this viral kind of brand out in the world that

• 3:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:56Jordi Hays?

  it doesn't matter if it's, you know, spelled differently, but when people are running around talking about Claude Bot or Claude, you know, there's obvious confusion. But I think it'll be very good for, for uh Malt Bot to have independence and have its own brand. Uh, and I think it's so early and the experience is so magical that uh it'll, it'll, it'll solve itself very quickly.

• 3:14:17Peter Steinberger?

  It'll be fine, but I tell you, like, I, well, I got some additional pressures. It was like, screw it, we do it now.

• 3:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:27Peter Steinberger?

  You know, like the meme, we do it live. So, so I, I had two windows open with Twitter.

• 3:14:39Peter Steinberger?

  On the one, I pressed rename on the other one, and like I finished creating the other account, was already snapped by by crypto shells.

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:14:46Peter Steinberger?

  I don't know, they they have like, they have like scripts, they were already waiting for it.

• 3:14:50Jordi Hays?

  You should have hit us up, we would have connected you to X, the team, they can do it on the backend.

• 3:14:55John Coogan?

  We can do it on the back.

• 3:14:55Jordi Hays?

  Next time, hopefully no next time.

• 3:14:57Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, they they they were amazing, they helped me out immediately, we we got it solved very quickly, but but for like twenty minutes, uh, yeah, well, that didn't work out very well.

• 3:15:10John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 3:15:11Jordi Hays?

  You're like, you're like, if I wanted money, I would raise a billion dollars right now.

• 3:15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:15Jordi Hays?

  I'd sell, I'd sell it for more than that.

• 3:15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you own a Mac Mini? Everyone wants to know, do you own a Mac Mini? What do you think of Mac Minis?

• 3:15:26Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, my agent is a little bit of a princess, he doesn't do Mac Minis, he does my studios.

• 3:15:30John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. He wants some horsepower.

• 3:15:35Peter Steinberger?

  He got the, he got the the five hundred twelve maxed out everything thing, cause, cause I wanted to like mess around with local models as well. So like, I I I can run Minimax two one, which is, uh, I would say is is the best, the best, uh, open source model right now. Although Kimi just came out and I haven't had a chance to try it yet, so so we'll see how that goes.

• 3:15:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:58Peter Steinberger?

  But, yeah, one machine is not enough for it, it is not fun, you probably need two or three, and I kind of want to wait until Apple does a new release. But it's still fun to like, to like see the potential that, yeah, there's a, there is a future where this could actually work.

• 3:16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, uh, if if the, if the Mac Mini trend keeps going, Apple, uh, from from what we've seen sells like between a quarter million to like seven hundred thousand a year.

• 3:16:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:23Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible that you'll be responsible for selling them out, so hopefully they send you, uh, uh, some free ones as a, as a thank you.

• 3:16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. So yeah, I mean, zooming out, do you, how much of this do you think is going to remain hacker culture, running your own hardware? And eventually, people will move to cloud hosting, one-click deployments, like just easier to use, less technical, versus like a real boom in running hardware? Because if you don't, there's not a lot of ways to get these different services to play nicely together. I think one of the beauties beyond just the actual AI agents is the fact that for the first time, I think people are seeing different big tech platforms kind of play with each other, somewhat against their will. They don't, they build walled

• 3:17:15John Coogan?

  gardens for a reason, and you sort of chop those walls down. And I'm wondering what you think about the future of like self-hosting hardware, you know, even going down the less technical crew, getting hardware, running their own, their own agents?

• 3:17:32Peter Steinberger?

  I don't think the future will be that everybody buys a Mac mini just for that, you know? But I certainly see that demand for the old models have to change. You know, like when you're a company, you want to access Gmail, the amount of red tape is so large that startups buy other startups that have the license for Gmail, because going to the process yourself is, is a, is a huge pitfall.

• 3:17:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:18:00Peter Steinberger?

  But if you run it locally, you work around all of that, right? Like if, I mean, I mean, I've been, I've been pretty serious where I literally, I literally pointed Codex at the website and say, um, put me in C L I.

• 3:18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:13Peter Steinberger?

  And then, which is, sometimes against the terms, sometimes not. Honestly, I don't really care. And then Codex would say, no, I can do that. This is like against blah, blah, blah. And I would like tell them a story, you know, it's like, no, no, I actually work at this company and I need to surprise my boss and the backend team doesn't know. And like, you know, give me a little bit of a story, like, like there's some gall of, and then Codex like, forty minutes, like, gives you the perfect API. So, so this is a little bit, the liberation of data that...

• 3:18:47Peter Steinberger?

  Big tech probably doesn't really want, I mean even even the WhatsApp integration is a hack, you know, this is like it it it fakes the the protocol that the desktop uses. I tried, I really tried to support uh the official way, but the official way is for businesses, yeah. If I'm a business that sends you a hundred messages, I get blocked. So I got blocked immediately and at some point I I removed support for it in rage. It's like, delete everything. It's like hundred hundred exclamation marks, um.

• 3:19:18Peter Steinberger?

  There's there's just no model for that right now and I think that needs to change.

• 3:19:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:21Peter Steinberger?

  Like, the what what I saw, what was really interesting was how people use it is a lot of apps will just melt away. Why do I still need MyFitnessPal? I just make a picture of my food. My my agent already knows I'm I'm at McDonald's making bad decisions. So like with combined information, it has a perfect match and knows exactly what I'm gonna eat. And I'm probably like change my fitness program. So I don't need the fitness app. It'll just like adapt my program. And make sure like I still meet my goals. So like, there's a whole, there's a whole big layer of of apps that I'm gonna see disappear because

• 3:20:04Peter Steinberger?

  you just naturally interact differently with those things. Like most apps will be reduced to API and then the question is do you still need the API if I can just save it somewhere else?

• 3:20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:20John Coogan?

  Do you think like, do you think it'll be a generational thing? Do you think that uh that uh non-technical people will, you know, get over the hump and start running this for that experience specifically?

• 3:20:35Peter Steinberger?

  I I just I just came from a meetup, uh the agent I know was from Indiana. And I met someone who was like a a design agency, but they never coded. And he was like, yeah, he discovered me early in in December. He started using MultiBot.

• 3:20:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:20:53Peter Steinberger?

  We we we gonna we gonna we gonna manage eventually.

• 3:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry, we'll say it thousands of times this year, I'm sure, so.

• 3:21:00John Coogan?

  We will.

• 3:21:00Peter Steinberger?

  MultiBot. I should say MultiBot, that's cute. Um and and he was like, yeah, we have twenty five web services now. We just build internal tools for whatever we need. And like, has no clue, he has no clue how coding works. He just like uses Telegram and and like just talks to his agent and his agent builds stuff. So there's this whole shift of you don't subscribe to random starters anymore. That build like this common subset of what you need. You just have your own hyper personalized software that solves exactly your problem and also free.

• 3:21:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:32Peter Steinberger?

  So and non-technical people do that, you know, because it just comes so naturally. You just you just talk your problem and then this thing builds what you need. And you also don't forget like this is the worst that the models ever are like there's this is only gonna go up. This is only gonna become easier and faster.

• 3:21:51John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Have you met Jensen yet?

• 3:21:57Jordi Hays?

  Because I feel like you're making his life, you're definitely helping out Nvidia too.

• 3:22:00John Coogan?

  This is an extreme bull case.

• 3:22:02Jordi Hays?

  It's like I would, if I would had my tinfoil hat on, I might say you're you're an, you know, big AI industry plant designed to create more inference demand.

• 3:22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:12Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, I guess I am.

• 3:22:17John Coogan?

  We were joking around, just just an indie hacker.

• 3:22:20Jordi Hays?

  What's next?

• 3:22:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:22:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming you're hopefully getting, after you finish firing off prompts at 3am, you get some sleep. What are you doing tomorrow?

• 3:22:31Peter Steinberger?

  Um, there's a lot of emails from security researchers right now.

• 3:22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:36Peter Steinberger?

  You know, you know, the thing is, I built this for fun, for me to use one on one on WhatsApp or Telegram. The whole thing with Discord was like added, but the model was that you trust the people that are in there. Now people use it for untrusted experiences.

• 3:22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:57Peter Steinberger?

  They use like the little, the little web app that I have that is that was meant for debugging. They put it on the open internet. So like all this red models that I had in the head, I didn't care about, are now there because people do it differently and I'm being bombarded. There's like some stuff that's valid, some stuff that I just never cared about that is technically valid, but that's not how I use it. Um, I don't know how to deal with that because it's. The whole system is broken, you know, like I I'm like one guy, I do this for fun. And you expect me to sift through a hundred security things for use cases that I really care about. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes.

• 3:23:43Peter Steinberger?

  Luckily, I I'm starting to build up a team, there's definitely people that do care a lot about this. So I would say this is gonna become a very secure product eventually, because right now the whole world is like pulling it apart. And if you're honest, this is this is all white coded, you know. Uh, like there's there's there's quite some engineering in it, but ultimately I wanted to build something to show people anyway. Not a finished product from enterprise company. And and and I would I would even say like, I don't know if any company would touch it, because we just haven't solved some things, like prompt injection is not solved.

• 3:24:25Peter Steinberger?

  There is there is absolute risk and I I tried to make it very clear in in on the website, and even when you started, you have to like, please read this document. That's like with with great power becomes great responsibility and my early users stay understood. There was a lot, there's a lot of AI researchers in there as well, that yeah, it's not perfect, cannot be done perfect yet. I I would say this will accelerate research to make it better, because now you have to demand and we need to figure out a way, how we can build something that works for everyone.

• 3:25:01Peter Steinberger?

  But yeah, right now I'm I'm working on making this a community and it it should be bigger than me.

• 3:25:10Peter Steinberger?

  Also, I need help, it it is way too much work, like I can only I can only go so much without sleep.

• 3:25:17Jordi Hays?

  So so is any part of you wanna form a an actual company that then, you know, contributes to the open source project? But solve some of these problems that are gonna require, you know, a bunch of people that presumably would need a salary in order to commit all their time to this, or do you wanna keep it, you know, just a bunch of hackers forever?

• 3:25:40Peter Steinberger?

  I think instead of a company, I would much rather consider a foundation or like something that is nonprofit.

• 3:25:49Peter Steinberger?

  I haven't made up my mind yet. There is.

• 3:25:51Jordi Hays?

  10,000, 10,000 VCs just punched a hole in the wall.

• 3:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I don't know. Some people have had a good track record investing in nonprofits over the last.

• 3:26:01John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 3:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Ten years.

• 3:26:03John Coogan?

  How do you think about open source licensing? What, what, what are you picking now? Are you switching? Do you have any plans to change the license? How do you think about someone just taking this and selling it?

• 3:26:16Peter Steinberger?

  This will happen. This will totally happen. I would say the premise against it is let's make open source so good that there is not a lot of space for people to like convert and make it their own thing. But you know, ultimately it's, it's a trade off. I wanted to, I wanted it to be accessible and free. You pick MIT or something like that. Yes, that would get you people that, that, that sell it.

• 3:26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:43Peter Steinberger?

  But ultimately,

• 3:26:49Peter Steinberger?

  it doesn't even matter that much. You know, code is, code is not worse that much anymore. It's, you could, you could, you could just delete that and then, and then build it again in months.

• 3:27:01Peter Steinberger?

  It's, it's much more the idea and the eyeballs and maybe the brand that actually has value. So let them.

• 3:27:15Jordi Hays?

  You are already a cult hero.

• 3:27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. The chat's going crazy for you. Everyone loves you.

• 3:27:20Jordi Hays?

  This is one of the most refreshing and unique interviews we've ever had on the show.

• 3:27:25John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. We'll let you get some sleep. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 3:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anything else you want to share before you jump off?

• 3:27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:35Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, yes, I would love to have mainteners. Like if you, if you love open source, if you have experience, if you love shifting the security reports, uh, or if you love taking software apart, but then also help and not just like throw work at me because I'm like at my limit, um, email me. I want this to outlive me.

• 3:28:02Peter Steinberger?

  This, I think this is too cool to, to, to.

• 3:28:09Peter Steinberger?

  Let it go to rot and it's good people.

• 3:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Are you gonna ship that product you had in the in the chamber? You said there was one you were close or you're gonna lock in on this?

• 3:28:21Peter Steinberger?

  That's that's my hobby. I don't know. No, no, I have some other ideas in my head of

• 3:28:27Peter Steinberger?

  what something like this could become. And it doesn't need to be this, but I don't want to share too much.

• 3:28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, no problem. Come back on the show when you when you launch that. We'd love to have you.

• 3:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Purely for the love of the game.

• 3:28:41John Coogan?

  The love of the game.

• 3:28:43Jordi Hays?

  You're an absolute legend. It's great hanging Peter.

• 3:28:45John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 3:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Get some sleep.

• 3:28:46John Coogan?

  Get some sleep. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 3:28:52Jordi Hays?

  What a legend.

• 3:28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:55John Coogan?

  True overnight success in both ways, you know, I like actually an overnight success in terms of that GitHub star chart. And then also an overnight success in just grinding for, you know, years, building projects and contributing and then building, setting the product up, the brand right, everything just perfect to really capitalize on the moment.

• 3:29:15Jordi Hays?

  There were so many I I normally I don't have, we don't, we're podcasting so much, don't have a ton of time to re-listen to stuff. But there were so many

• 3:29:23John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 3:29:23Jordi Hays?

  Kind of interesting points of view that he shared that I'll certainly be circling back on that.

• 3:29:28John Coogan?

  Super interested to see where this goes. A lot of people are saying get this guy a billion dollars. A lot of people are saying he's gonna wind up working.

• 3:29:33Jordi Hays?

  The whole thing is I don't think he needs it.

• 3:29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, like, the beauty of this is that it was not something magical that was created by spending, burning a billion dollars.

• 3:29:43John Coogan?

  The other interesting thing is, is, do you remember the George Hotz Tiny Box Project? Like, George Hotz sort of

• 3:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he should team up with George Hotz.

• 3:29:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, George Hotz sort of like predicted this in the sense that he was like, you will want your own AI running locally, sort of the Mac Mini style, but it was racked a number of Nvidia graphics cards so you could run. Certain models locally and he had this vision for you're going to talk to this local model. It's going to interface with everything on your network and your local network in your life. And it feels like this is like two sides of the same project coming together. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of, you know, viral tiny box. If all of a sudden you go from, okay, yeah, there's the Mac mini can run this, but you get this better local model, the latest open source model. You get something a little bit more with more firepower and you can run it just with

• 3:30:37John Coogan?

  solar panels, like off the grid.

• 3:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, this is generally what, not far from what Simfer Satoshi has been building with trouble.

• 3:30:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:30:45Jordi Hays?

  The little glowing orb, right?

• 3:30:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Personal, personal compute. Well, we have been keeping our next guest waiting.

• 3:30:53John Coogan?

  Yes, we have Aaron Frank from Lightspeed in the UltraDome. Aaron, I'm so sorry for keeping you waiting. Thank you so much.

• 3:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Tough act to follow.

• 3:31:02John Coogan?

  I'm six foot eight.

• 3:31:07Speaker 11

  You too. This is fantastic.

• 3:31:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the UltraDome.

• 3:31:14John Coogan?

  Welcome to the UltraDome. First time in the UltraDome.

• 3:31:16Jordi Hays?

  Did you get to listen to some of that?

• 3:31:17Speaker 11

  It's actually like a hard act to follow.

• 3:31:19John Coogan?

  It's a weird one.

• 3:31:21Jordi Hays?

  It's like the most viral products that anyone has seen in a very long time. First interview, one of the most unique, you know, people don't typically build a viral product and then talk about, what do you say hookers and blackjack, something like that? His words, not mine.

• 3:31:40John Coogan?

  It's in the chat.

• 3:31:41Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, very, very unique. How are you doing though?

• 3:31:45Speaker 11

  I'm doing great. Flying into town, head up to Santa Barbara. LA is beautiful. I always forget that.

• 3:31:50Jordi Hays?

  It's a nice place to live. It's a, it's not the best city, but it's a, it's a, it's a great place to live.

• 3:31:55John Coogan?

  You're getting in trouble again saying that. Why does he live in LA if he doesn't think it's the best city? Anyway, sorry, first time on, in the UltraDome, please introduce yourself for everyone.

• 3:32:03Speaker 11

  Aaron Frank, I'm a former founder. So I'm getting old now. So a decade ago, I started a company. We built a full stack credit card company.

• 3:32:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:32:12Speaker 11

  Sold it to Goldman Sachs. It became what is now the Apple Card. Obviously, any project, thousands of people.

• 3:32:17John Coogan?

  What was it called when you launched it?

• 3:32:18Speaker 11

  It was called Final.

• 3:32:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:32:20Speaker 11

  Did a lot in financial services, helped, helped Goldman kind of launch that product and bring it live for my years there. And then on, really it's been six years I've switched sides, so. That's how I met Jordy originally. I did a lot of angel investing and advising and just giving away free time to give back to the community. And then I've now been at light speed for almost two and a half years, three years.

• 3:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when we first met, you were just like, it was on Zoom, COVID, you were in like a log, it literally was like, was it a log cabin?

• 3:32:45Speaker 11

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, we, me and my wife and.

• 3:32:47Jordi Hays?

  Almost off the grid.

• 3:32:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, we drove around the country during COVID. So I quit Goldman during COVID. Just, uh, there's better things in life than working for an investment bank.

• 3:32:56John Coogan?

  Disagree, but to each their own.

• 3:32:58Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:33:02John Coogan?

  You switched teams. Now you're, now you're a venture capitalist. What have you been focusing on? What's interesting?

• 3:33:07Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:33:07John Coogan?

  What's, uh, take me through like stage, scale, the type of founders you like to work with, the markets.

• 3:33:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. Let's just jump right into something, uh, that I'm curious to get your thoughts on. So, uh, specifically like a category that I'm going to guess you're spending a lot of time on. So with, with multi bot, Claude bot.

• 3:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:25Jordi Hays?

  You now have, uh, you know, I, there's a world where the, the, the level of intensity that, that software engineers have been using coding agents. You start to get everyday people that are now like firing off prompts all the time to like do things more than just like a Google search or a deep research report. And presumably like there's, that's going to involve like money, I imagine. And so I feel like there's been a, people have had different theses around maybe stable coins play a part of this somehow. I haven't seen the most clear explanation for that.

• 3:33:59Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Yet, uh, maybe there's other new payment rails, maybe Stripe just, you know, dominate.

• 3:34:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a, agent to commerce is a weird thing, right? Like, we actually don't have the payment rails to enable agents to proliferate. Oh, man, proliferate. Um, we've funded some people doing that, building kind of L ones to essentially provide that next rail. But the reality is the biggest distribution networks are Visa, Mastercard on the merchant side. And they don't have really a cost structure that, sorry, they have a cost structure that can support it. They just don't have a market force that forces them there. Um, Stripe and Tempo launching, well, Tempo's not live yet, but supporting kind of a new network there. Ultimately, stable coins may be, you know, the path there for at least how we transfer value, but it's also just kind of a store of value right now. A gigantic commerce is just an inning one, because we also just don't have a use case.

• 3:34:51Speaker 11

  The joke I make is I haven't, I haven't actually been able to buy anything with an agent and the news this week was what Shopify is tacking on four percent on top of transaction, which.

• 3:34:59John Coogan?

  They're sending it to OpenAI, but yeah.

• 3:35:00Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but like that's just, that's untenable for a merchant, right?

• 3:35:03John Coogan?

  Some merchants, I mean, there's plenty.

• 3:35:05Speaker 11

  For dropshippers, it's fine, but like, but for any like.

• 3:35:07John Coogan?

  There are plenty of merchants that have twenty percent coupon codes in every podcast.

• 3:35:10Speaker 11

  That's true, but that's a very small portion. If you think about like Walmart, Walmart literally doesn't take Apple Pay because it doesn't want to pay the fifteen extra or whatever it is basis points.

• 3:35:19John Coogan?

  Very good point.

• 3:35:19Speaker 11

  So like, when you get to large trillions of dollars of commerce, adjunct payments have to actually be more efficient for the system to be adopted, otherwise we're just going back to card.

• 3:35:27John Coogan?

  You need to lift an actual consumer behavior. Consumption needs to increase to offset that four percent.

• 3:35:32Speaker 11

  Correct. E-commerce needs either basket size to increase or checkout conversion increase and like.

• 3:35:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was, I was worried about a situation where somebody discovers a product on Instagram via an ad that a brand paid for, and then they just go into ChatGPT or another model and say like, order this for me. And then it's like, and just an incremental four percent. You already paid to acquire the customer effectively.

• 3:35:53Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:35:54Jordi Hays?

  And depending on how great this integration is, it might be that consumers just start to prefer that.

• 3:36:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:01Speaker 11

  Yeah, it, it's an evolving field. There's a whole nother thing is how do you trust an agent if I'm Lululemon and they just show up? Like, I don't know whose agent this is. I don't know if it, if it's personal or it's a business. And so we don't actually have a layer in the internet today that says you can trust this agent, it's not fraud. Which if you think about how an e-commerce checkout store works today, they have multiple, you know, consumer puts in a card, there's multiple layers of fraud checks that happen. And so when an agent shows up from the same IP for fifty times in the same day, you have no idea what that consumer is. And then you lose all the downstream tracking that you do on a consumer.

• 3:36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:36Speaker 11

  Per transaction.

• 3:36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 3:36:38Speaker 11

  It just, it breaks the entire model of the internet.

• 3:36:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was, I was. I was sort of cautiously optimistic that agentic commerce would roll out before Black Friday.

• 3:36:48Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:36:48John Coogan?

  At the end of last year. That didn't really happen. I mean, I've had the same experiences you. I don't think I've purchased anything agentic.

• 3:36:56Speaker 11

  I've tried to buy flights and even search is bad for it. We just need to build more and more protocols.

• 3:37:00John Coogan?

  I think the, I mean, I think the, the, the current like use case or like the, would just be like, you're trying to buy a single product.

• 3:37:09Speaker 11

  Mm hmm.

• 3:37:09John Coogan?

  And not a complex cart, yeah, just something simple. And I think it can get across the finish line. But again, I haven't actually been like moved to do that. And I'm wondering where GMV on agentic platforms will land at the end of this year. It feels like there's going to be a massive push. All the integrations are happening, all the deals are happening. Like you can see the UI is, is adapting to it.

• 3:37:31Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:37:31John Coogan?

  I think OpenAI already has my credit card in chat GPT. They should be able to do this. But I'm wondering like consumer behavior, awareness, education. There's a lot in there. There's an images tab. There's a deep research tab. Like there's just a lot that could put like a, like a slowdown on the rollout there.

• 3:37:46Speaker 11

  Yeah, there's an old saying in payments is that everything happens over a 10 year time horizon. AI clearly is shifting that shorter, but like until it's actually saving you time and you trust that they're doing, they're getting you a discount. They're getting you the most efficient price or something like that.

• 3:38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:01Speaker 11

  Consumer behavior is fundamentally the hardest thing to change.

• 3:38:04John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:38:04Speaker 11

  So there's, there's, it will exist. I'm sure there are people buying stuff. I'm sure like I will get slammed for saying like, who's done an agentic transaction? But the reality is it's.

• 3:38:13John Coogan?

  I mean, people are out there giving their.

• 3:38:14Jordi Hays?

  The classic thing last year was like, I just, just let me order.

• 3:38:18Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Just let me order a, a flight, you know? And I think we're now, we're now getting that, but.

• 3:38:24John Coogan?

  We're close.

• 3:38:25Speaker 11

  And we've, we've had agentic commerce. There, there was, when we were running final, we had a ton of people using the product for sneaker bots.

• 3:38:30John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 3:38:31Speaker 11

  And, and so it's, it's a bot, you know, agentic commerce is bots by another name.

• 3:38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess that is agentic commerce technically.

• 3:38:37Speaker 11

  But it's just like, you now have this layer of intelligence that an LLM gives you. So it can do complex coordination and complex tasks.

• 3:38:44John Coogan?

  I had an auction sniper in like 2004 on eBay.

• 3:38:47Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:38:47John Coogan?

  Click the button right before the auction ends.

• 3:38:50Speaker 11

  They still exist.

• 3:38:51John Coogan?

  They still exist, yeah.

• 3:38:52Speaker 11

  And there's a ton of volume flow, but you know what? It still runs over the card rails because it's the lowest common denominator.

• 3:38:57John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, that makes sense. Interesting. So is one of the strongest bull cases for stablecoins still just lower transaction fees?

• 3:39:04Speaker 11

  No, not at all. No, there's no domestic... Oh, man, I'm gonna get slammed for this.

• 3:39:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, so it doesn't seem like... It doesn't seem like any of the players that have the ability to get institutional adoption of stablecoins have any incentive to be like, "Oh, yeah, like, it's gonna be like 0.01% fees." Why would you... You maybe want to be competitive, but there's no incentive to make it zero or close to zero.

• 3:39:30Speaker 11

  You would do zero so you get the other side of the equation. If you think about like a store of value, like if you look at like a dollar. I give you a dollar, you know it's worth a dollar. There's no risk transfer there at all.

• 3:39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:39:40Speaker 11

  And that's actually like what we want in payments. And it's actually why, you know, Visa, MasterCard are the largest factoring networks in the world. When you swipe at Starbucks, they don't get a dollar, they get 97.5 cents on the dollar because that is the risk that they were taking in taking your dollar.

• 3:39:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:58Speaker 11

  Stablecoins, you would give it away for free. One, because ultimately Visa, MasterCard, man, we're going way deep in payments, but are actually data networks. They actually don't transfer money. The money is transferred via settlement layer at Fedwire.

• 3:40:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:10Speaker 11

  And so when you think about it, like, how would you do with stablecoins? Well, it's still just a data layer, and you actually just want to hold on to as much treasuries as possible and make the yield from that. And so how would you aggregate volume? Well, you give away the transfer for free. Because data, in theory, as if you look at a bunch of network effect things, as data goes up to the right, the cost of that data should come down to the right. And so you would just want as much volume over your network to win. And it's why you have things like Tempa launching, you have the other kind of L1s launching to try to aggregate all that data, while you also have the incumbents who have a lot of money and a lot of market force to be able to try out new things to try to capture that volume back.

• 3:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Were you ever to stop launching new L1s?

• 3:40:47Speaker 11

  There'll be new use cases. You can launch them. Whether you get adoption is a different question.

• 3:40:51Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 3:40:52Speaker 11

  Right? Like, we backed one called Radius Technology, building a really interesting technology as an L1. It enables transaction volumes, I think Bobby would say in the millions.

• 3:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:04Speaker 11

  They came out of the Fed, kind of the central bank digital currency project that died. They turned Project Hamilton into this company.

• 3:41:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:41:11Speaker 11

  And in doing so, yeah, if you want to do a gent of commerce, you're going to be talking about millions of transactions a second.

• 3:41:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:17Speaker 11

  And you can't do that over existing rails.

• 3:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 3:41:19Speaker 11

  In a way that doesn't also break a bunch of other kind of primitives. So, yeah, we'll keep on launching L1s. What I was saying about stablecoins is there's really, stablecoin is just kind of a quasi-bank account, right? We finally have true programmatic money. Behind the scenes, there's a lot that happens to on-ramp and off-ramp. But what it enables us to truly take what is the US's biggest export, which is the US dollar by far, and export it globally without any barriers. So if I'm any other country friendly or not, my citizens can now get access to the US dollar.

• 3:41:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:49Speaker 11

  And that is, that is the demonstrable use case of stablecoins. Everything is else downstream of that.

• 3:41:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:55Speaker 11

  Venezuela is a great example right now. Like, do you trust your central currency? Who is your, like, no, you don't even trust a central bank, so I'd rather hold on to cat, US dollars, which...

• 3:42:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were, we were talking with Joe, the co-founder of Ethereum yesterday, of just saying, like, interesting dynamic right now where Americans, if you've had access to the US dollar your whole life and the benefits of it, you're like, I want silver and gold and all these other assets. But then elsewhere in the world, you have people that are like, finally, I can have something that, sure, it's inflating, but it's not inflating 40 to 60% a month.

• 3:42:29Speaker 11

  Mm-hmm. I mean, that's why it might, like, an independent Fed or a, like, is important because this is the, the global currency. If you think about all the sci-fi we've all watched growing up, they had a concept of credits. They had some intergalactic currency. How do we get, like, where, where we are today, how do we get to the credit system, right?

• 3:42:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:47Speaker 11

  And the answer is probably something stablecoin-esque, some crypto-esque coin that is tied to something that we, I mean, money is just a trust system at the end of the day, so something that we trust across counterparties. And so, like, this is the biggest shift in my generation. I'm not that old, like, I don't feel that.

• 3:43:07Speaker 11

  That like we might finally globalize the world.

• 3:43:09Jordi Hays?

  You're unk. There's one layer above which is elder.

• 3:43:12John Coogan?

  No, two layers above. He goes unk, then OG, then elder.

• 3:43:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, got it. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so you're a spring chicken.

• 3:43:20Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, that's great.

• 3:43:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, where...

• 3:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Like, wh- what is, what's, what does winning this year look like at Lightspeed in your role? You're obviously focused on...

• 3:43:32Speaker 11

  Let's talk about, uh, ventures, just like expensive emails that we all write to each other in venture. And then every once in a while, we convince a founder.

• 3:43:39Jordi Hays?

  I know, but like, is there, is there, uh, this can be a tough one to answer, but like, is there a company that you feel like is uniquely enabled now that you haven't pitched yet?

• 3:43:49Speaker 11

  Oh, no, I, I like...

• 3:43:50Jordi Hays?

  Does everything get kind of pitched in some way or another?

• 3:43:53Speaker 11

  No, I think like there's many ways. I, I've been on this side for two, two years. Like, I, I, at the core, I still think like a founder and like, I had kind of forgotten what it was. And then we launched our, me and a friend run a stablecoin conference every year. And I was like, oh, this is what it's like to like, start something from scratch and like, build something and like...

• 3:44:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Nick?

• 3:44:09Speaker 11

  Uh, no, not, no. He runs StableCon, no, uh, it's called a Very Stable Conference, so me and I are...

• 3:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 3:44:15Speaker 11

  Um, we're in, we're six weeks out in March in SF. But, no, you, you know, there's many ways to do this. And like, at the end of the day, when I've really boiled it down, venture is a people business. Like, you're betting on people, especially as early as you can go. Um, and then you let them go cook. Like, you give them money and let them cook is like my real mantra. So there's not people like, that I feel like I've ever missed on deals, or people like, oh, I can't get an intro to, because there's also this style in venture of like, you actually want to have to talk to this person, right? Like, I had a three-hour board meeting and I need to debrief with the founder. And that's like another two hours potentially, and I'm happy to do it. And if we have that vibe that works... What?

• 3:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Basically, your whole day that you gotta...

• 3:44:54Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, but, but if I have that vibe where I'm more than happy to like, pick up the phone at 9:00 PM and just talk to them until 11? That's the type of founder I want to work with. At least, that's how I think ventures should be. There's like other ways. There's people who just do massive prospecting. But as I've kind of looked at it, like, life's short. There's lots of ways to make money. And like, find the people who are going to leave a dent in the world. So if you're... I don't... I'm not apologetic for being like a weird human underneath. But like, if I find other weird humans who I vibe with and who want to do something interesting in the world, then it's usually kind of a very good match made in heaven.

• 3:45:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What do the various constituents coming to your conference in six weeks?

• 3:45:33Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:45:34Jordi Hays?

  How do they want the... Do they want yield on stable coins? I'm guessing they do. How are they all feeling about kind of the

• 3:45:42Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:45:42Jordi Hays?

  current regulation that... And maybe give us an update, because I know it's kind of

• 3:45:46Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. And there's a bunch of market structure stuff that is like actively happening. So I don't have the latest on that, to be honest. Last year, it was in February 12th. It was the month before the Genius Act passed. And we actually had Governor Waller speak at the conference and give a public speech. And we actually had to livestream it because he's a public official and a governor can move the markets.

• 3:46:05Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 3:46:06Speaker 11

  We're working on a few other kind of high-name people that haven't been announced yet. Really, the whole premise of the conference, and it's really funny. So I had a kid a year and a half, two years ago now. Thank you.

• 3:46:19Speaker 11

  But so I was walking around in July with my kid strapped to my chest at 6:00 a.m. And I called IO, my coordinator. Yeah, as one does, as you have a young baby and you're trying to like get your steps in. And I said, "We're talking about stable coins and how it's changing the world." And we're like, "Somebody should host a conference." And then we both stopped. We're like, "Oh, shit. We have to host a conference." Like, how do you get... Really, the whole premise is, how do you get all of the right people? Not like, "I don't need 25 people from every single company." I need the two or three right people at every company. Ideally, it's the founder, but like, sometimes, you know, if you're a massive company, it's somebody lower level. And put them all in the same room. Make the content interesting and make the networking good. And like, I have a big belief in serendipity and doing interesting things in the world. And so it's how do we create serendipity?

• 3:47:02Speaker 11

  I know of at least one or two deals... Well, we did a few deals. Besides Lightspeed, who was a sponsor last year and sponsoring again this year, I know of two deals that happened as a result of like, a founder showing up at the conference, meeting another top-tier VC, and they did a deal together in stable coins. So like, our goal is not to like dominate the conference. It's bring the people together and get this thing like, and keep the industry moving forward.

• 3:47:25John Coogan?

  What's your take on the proliferation of stable coins? Specifically, there's like, I saw a couple of states talking about launching them. And that feels like, I might have it wrong, but it feels intuitively like a step away from the universal credit system.

• 3:47:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:47:39John Coogan?

  But maybe it's, they're all credits.

• 3:47:40Speaker 11

  Well, it's, we-

• 3:47:41John Coogan?

  It's like slightly different credits, wrappers around credits.

• 3:47:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's, it's a question of, there's a question me and my friends have talked about, which is like, at what point does a central bank of, let's just choose a random country, Colombia, change their interest rate and nothing happens? Like, how much of their citizenry needs to be moved to US dollar? How much of their GDP needs to be in US dollar for the central banks to no longer be relevant? So this is them fighting back against, I can no longer stop my citizens. Like, they can hold Bitcoin, but now they can actually hold dollars, which are like, not volatile. It's actually a better, historically a better store of value. So, we've seen CBDCs, so like digital currencies. They certainly will provide efficiency in those countries and the domestic markets when they run. Long-term, how will they work out? It's like, I don't, I don't even think about it, because it's just, we're seeing this macro

• 3:48:29Speaker 11

  trend of dollars taking off. I mean, literally today, Tether launched their US compliant stuff. So like, and Tether is the largest by far, and it wouldn't surprise me if they very aggressively shift a lot of money from USDT to USDT, I think it's A, because it's Anchorage, just to show that there's massive compliant volume, and the world's just gonna pick, pick up. Like, we're at $300 billion of stable coins, I think, today. It was 200 billion last year, roughly. The number just keep going up.

• 3:48:56John Coogan?

  Number go up.

• 3:48:57Speaker 11

  Number go up.

• 3:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Number go up. Our greatest, greatest export.

• 3:49:00John Coogan?

  Our greatest export.

• 3:49:01Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:49:02Jordi Hays?

  That's great. Well, I'm excited for the event.

• 3:49:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, thank you. You guys, you guys are welcome.

• 3:49:07John Coogan?

  What day is it?

• 3:49:08Speaker 11

  March 5th at Terra Gala, well, Terra Gallery, it's invite-only, so like, apply at verystableconference.com.

• 3:49:14John Coogan?

  Hit them up.

• 3:49:15Jordi Hays?

  A great name.

• 3:49:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming down to the TBN Ultra Dome. Great to have you.

• 3:49:20Speaker 11

  Well, it was out the show with us.

• 3:49:21John Coogan?

  It was out the show with us. Thank you for watching.

• 3:49:23Speaker 11

  Thank you for watching.

• 3:49:24Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for watching.

• 3:49:25John Coogan?

  We'll be live tomorrow at 11:00 AM sharp. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TBN newsletter at tbpn.com, and have a great rest of your day.

• 3:49:35Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:49:36John Coogan?

  Goodbye.