WWDC Reactions, Jobs Up Stocks Down, VC Horror Stories | Will Marshall, Baroness Dambisa Moyo, Samuel Hume, David Kirtley, Pete Florence, Jordan Bramble

(01:13) - WWDC Reactions (19:30) - Jobs Up Stocks Down (23:45) - VC Horror Stories (40:40) - Will Marshall, co-founder and CEO of Planet, discusses the company's mission to make global change visible and actionable through a fleet of over 200 Earth-imaging satellites that capture daily images of the entire landmass at approximately 3-meter resolution. He explains their vertically integrated approach, building custom components for their satellites, and highlights applications such as detecting methane leaks, monitoring deforestation in the Amazon, and assisting in disaster response. Marshall also touches on their diverse clientele, including defense and intelligence sectors, commercial industries like agriculture and energy, and recent capital-raising efforts to secure the company's long-term future. (57:45) - Baroness Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian-born economist, author, and investor who serves as a member of the UK House of Lords and sits on the boards of major corporations like Chevron, Starbucks, and Conde Nast. She discusses the critical role of corporate boards in strategic oversight, CEO selection, and societal engagement, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and partnership with governments, especially in the context of emerging technologies like AI. Moyo also highlights the need for companies to balance risk-taking with long-term sustainability, drawing from her extensive experience on boards of both longstanding and tech-based organizations. (01:27:16) - Samuel Hume, a medical doctor, scientist, and co-founder of Somatic Labs, is dedicated to advancing the frontiers of medicine and science. He discusses the challenges in biotech, particularly the impact of patent cliffs on pharmaceutical companies, and highlights the promising results of the RASolute 302 trial, where the investigational drug daraxonrasib nearly doubled overall survival in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer. Additionally, Hume introduces Somatic Labs' efforts to expedite drug development by automating systematic reviews using AI, aiming to reduce the process from years to mere hours. (01:43:25) - David Kirtley, co-founder and CEO of Helion Energy, discusses the company's recent $465 million Series G funding round and the development of their seventh-generation fusion system, Polaris, in Washington state. He explains Helion's unique approach to fusion energy, focusing on direct electricity extraction from fusion reactions to achieve high efficiency and scalability. Kirtley also outlines plans to build a 50-megawatt fusion power plant for Microsoft by 2028, emphasizing modular, scalable systems for rapid deployment and global impact. (02:00:51) - Pete Florence, co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI, has an extensive background in robotics and AI, including a PhD from MIT and experience as a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. In the conversation, he discusses his journey from academia to industry, highlighting his collaborations with co-founders Andy Barry and Andy Zeng, and their collective decision to establish Generalist AI to advance general-purpose robotics. Florence emphasizes the company's focus on developing versatile robotic systems that extend beyond humanoid forms, aiming to address a wide range of applications through scalable AI models and innovative data collection methods. (02:23:26) - Jordan Bramble, CEO and co-founder of Antares Nuclear, discusses the recent successful criticality demonstration of their advanced reactor design, the Mark-0, at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). This milestone, achieved under the U. S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program, marks the first privately developed advanced reactor to go critical in the U. S. in decades. Bramble emphasizes the significance of this achievement in revitalizing America's nuclear industry and highlights the collaborative efforts with INL and the DOE that facilitated this success. (02:46:22) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, June 8th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology. We're back in the fortress of finance. We're back at the capital of capital.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  It's so good to be back.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  It's so good to be back, and it's also so good to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Oh, the soundboard with the stinger, with the ad read. Chef's kiss.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Chef's kiss.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  WWDC, also chef's kiss, long overdue, two years, two WWDCs ago, we were talking about Apple Intelligence, and it's all finally coming together. The package is finally being delivered. I think the response has been really good. Some of the guys on the team have been watching WWDC already. We have a bunch of folks calling in to discuss WWDC throughout the week, but let's give you the high level first. Go through some of the immediate reactions, and of course, we'll be covering that throughout this week. So, Apple's annual worldwide developers conference started today, and it runs through Friday. Tim Cook just kicked it off with an opening keynote. The theme for this year's conference is all systems glow. All systems glow. Little pun.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, we're finally getting answers about what the next version of Siri will look like. I think expectations, expectations are in a weird place. Like, they're high. Everyone's expecting like this next version of iOS, which is what they're demoing. That's the main thing of the software version. This isn't an iPhone event. This isn't a hardware event. This is WWDC about the software. Everyone's expecting that the software will go through an actual transformation, and the next version of Apple software will be good, and people will be talking about how good it is because they will deliver a bunch of things. At the same time, expectations aren't so high, like going into Apple Vision Pro, where people are expecting a breakthrough that's no one, no other company has ever done before.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  All people are asking for is implement the best practices from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, like the stuff we know and love. Even Grok has like nicely interfaced into X, where like people say, hey, Grok is This really just pulls it up for you. I find myself on tweets just going, oh yeah, like I don't want to copy this text out and into another L L M app. I'm happy just asking Grok real quick for an extra detail or one more fact. Google search overuse like there's been a lot of A I diffusion into products that's been good, even ramp like ramp has like chat interface where you can just say like, hey, how much did we actually spend on Amazon last month and it'll just pull it up for you and it's not like this revolutionary.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's the thing, I think they did a, I think they did a good job. Just letting the hype build or the interest build organically, right? You rewind.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  A year or two ago, they were running billboards for Apple intelligence for gen emoji, all this stuff. Uh, so really setting themselves up for failure.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  That stuff was overhyped and I think this.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  And they were, they were a part of, they were, they were, they were hyping it themselves.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  They were like, are we coded?

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it seems like they have the right partnerships and the, and the right like product strategy at this point. People are familiar with these tools. So just putting them in different places seems reasonable. Models are good now, so make them available at the click of a button. Ideally, the Siri button, which has been completely nerfed for the last two years. Um, actually more than that because Siri has, has never really seen the adoption or love, product love that many other products have seen. Uh, and users will be happy. So Google search, Google A I search overviews are a good example that prove that rolling out L L Ms. Uh, and rolling out L L M responses and L L M generated text, it can be nerve wracking, but it's not rocket science. Like you spit the text out where people expect the answer.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  There will be funny viral hallucinations like right now, even with all the crazy Google I O news, amazing five point, uh, three point five. Foundation models like they're doing really good stuff. Deep Mind's really good, great team. Like you still say disregard and instead of just giving you the definition, it says like, okay, I got it. I won't. I won't do that anymore and it's, he gets confused. So there will be those like viral, like jokey, wow, it failed, it flopped. That's going to happen. To Apple, and that's not what Apple likes to deal with.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  Not at all.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  But I don't think any of that will show up in the user metrics. I think, I think that, you know, churn and usage will be unaffected from the viral moment of like, oh, Apple, like the Apple tech summaries, they're hilarious and they often hallucinate and get things wrong.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  You still keep them on them?

• 4:38John Coogan?

  I left them on. I don't mind them. And I think a lot of times they're sort of useful. And they're always delightful because they're funny, because they're so like hallucinatory. But your PR team will have many heart attacks, though, because you're not in the world of deterministic outputs anymore. So that's going to be a big cultural shift for Apple, I think, in this non-deterministic, stochastic AI era. But I think that they can get through it just by running best practices that have been established for a year or two years in the rest of the AI world. The other big questions that everyone's asking around, Ben Thompson circling around this, open ecosystems. So will Apple lean into the OpenClaw Mac Mini boom at all?

• 5:20John Coogan?

  That would be interesting to see, say, you know, in the next version of the software that goes on the Mac Mini. Hey, we're going to embrace OpenClaw, we're going to embrace AI agents. We're going to do things that make those tools more effective in our ecosystem. You already know and love the hardware, you're buying it nonstop, it's out of stock. But we could do more to lean into that community, or we could do less. We could say, hey, we're going to shut it down, we're worried about privacy. These are the two tensions that they're going to have to deal with. Will there be a pivot around vibe coding apps in the iOS App Store? You asked John Gruber from Daring Fireball this when he joined the show on May 29th. Fantastic interview, had a ton of fun with the Grub Nater.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  But it's a big question, and it's something that Apple is maybe, they don't really have to respond yet. They're pretty quiet when things happen, they usually go and solve the problem and...

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they really don't want to talk about it.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Uh yeah, but eventually they start like they didn't want to talk about climate change, but then they did a bunch of things to get to like net zero and eco-friendly buildings and solar panels on the roof and stuff. And then once they did, they were really noisy about it because they were like, we are carbon neutral or we will be by a certain day.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  And I think once they figure out how to make money on it,

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  then they'll start.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Which they should.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  Which, which, yeah, I fully, I will say, I fully support.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Exactly. Uh, so there's others, there's other questions. Will, will native iOS apps from other AI labs have more access to iPhone functionality? What's the pathway for ChatGPT interfacing Claude Gemini? If you're using those apps, how, how, how, how many hooks are there? Will they be able to siphon in your text messages? If you click, yeah, I want to share my text messages, my iMessage with my app of choice? Or will you need to, will you need to say yes every single time? Which will be a huge burden to having that integration happen. Uh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of social media apps that say, hey, we want access to your whole camera roll, all of it forever. And that's somewhat intimidating.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Uh, you get a number of different options. You can say, I want a temporary access. Just take this photo. You can't see my whole library. Now, people trust, many people, maybe they just don't know, but they, they feel like they trust a lot of these maps. So they just say, yeah, yeah, take the whole camera roll. Sort of a crazy thing to do that they can just download your entire camera roll. If you press that button, but people have. And so what will the, what will the AI version of that be? And how deep will it be? And how much will it build on top of the Siri app intense functionality versus other APIs that are deeper in the iOS ecosystem? Um, so lots to dig into and I'm excited to talk to some guests. There's one last thing, which is we, I mean, we talked about how Apple

• 8:03John Coogan?

  doesn't want to address eco stuff until it's like, okay, we got it solved. And I'm wondering if in the coming years, there's going to be pressure for some sort of response on the whole, like phones are reducing the fertility rate?

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Stats, because I don't know if you saw, but there was another research paper that was posted and Derek Thompson basically zoomed out and said that I wasn't convinced and now he is convinced that it's like up to 30% of the reason for the recent decline below two. And I don't know where you sit on it.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Below the replacement rate?

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Below the replacement rate, not good if you're a fan of humanity and having a high population, but that is something that you could see bubbling up to being something that big tech companies, social media companies, device manufacturers have to answer to when they're in like free form podcasts, basically. But you know that these companies are not going to want to address that. As opposed to the AI CEOs that are like, oh, you want to talk about killing everyone? Absolutely. I'd love to talk about that for an hour.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  The PM of Denmark or what country was saying?

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  It's time to return. I'd rather my kids.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  No, she specifically said, I would rather let my kids smoke cigarettes than use an iPhone, which is crazy. But I don't know, maybe there's something there. Maybe the cure for cancer is right around the corner, but the cure for brain rot is not.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's such a different debate because like clearly a single drag on a heater is no good, right? You're ingesting poison.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  A single look, a single look at a screen, right? Is not what is, you know, reducing the fertility rate. So anyways.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  It's interesting. I don't know. I do wonder if, how that pressure would bubble up. Like the way we have dealt as a society in America with those big questions before, before the era where every AI lab CEO goes on podcasts and just talks about everything constantly was in the hearings. So like a social media addiction trial or there is a privacy, you know, hearing on Capitol Hill and the senators all ask the, they bring in the leaders from all the different companies and they say, we've heard that there's this problem and we want you to answer our questions directly and it's streamed on C-SPAN and you can see that. And, and so, you know, that's where the famous Senator, we sell ads quote comes from, from

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg. And you could imagine that if there was, you know, an administration and a group of senators that were worried about the. Birth rate thing and they believe that the phones were related. They could bring in device manufacturers, social media executives and actually ask them.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, here's the thing. So, so millions of people build software on top of the iPhone.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  Designed to addict people.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Capture as much of their attention as possible.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal app.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  And so Apple can kind of.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  My screen time on the Wall Street Journal is through the roof.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. It's crazy, John. Um, but Apple can kind of sit back and just saying like, we're not trying to make the device addictive.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  We're trying to make it simple, easy to use. It's a utility.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  And truthfully, like, Apple, I think all of the native apps, none of them are brain rotty or addictive. They're very much like, this is the Maps app. It helps you get there. Close it when you're done. And where our business relationship is done.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  Say you're not addicted.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  They have ads in there.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Calculator app.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, they have some, but in general, their business model is not really aligned with like, screen time necessarily, although it should, it is in the broader sense because if you're using this thing all the time, you're like, eh, 2,000 bucks. I use it 40 hours a week. You know, I, I can underwrite it like, you know, people buy an expensive bed and they're like, I spend half my life on it or whatever, you know?

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I always did think it was funny that there, there never ended up being the, you know, the $20,000 phone, which there would be a pretty big market for.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  A lot of it's just the technology, like $20,000 gets you like.

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  You much.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  5% more battery life because like you need a $10 trillion manufacturing facility to actually deliver any bump there. It's not like 10x the price gets you 10x the performance or 10x the, like, you can't put a GB 200 in here. You can't put a Tesla battery in here. It just doesn't work. Uh, anyway, let's go to some reactions from WWDC, but first I'm going to tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So, Vibe's on Apple.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  iPhone.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to update your software tonight while you sleep. Next morning, iPhone says, I couldn't do it, bro. Just didn't feel right. Vibe was off.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  This is something that. I didn't know was so common, but I think everyone's been in this position, which is like a funny thing. I think it has to do with how much the battery is charged. But lots of low hanging fruit, hopefully resolved in W W C. I did see a whole bunch of stats about just little performance gains, 30% faster opening of the lock screen, 30% faster on opening this app and just little optimizations that I think will go a lot further. When we talked to Mark Gurman, he talks about how like the A I features are too abstract. People want battery life, cameras, beautiful screens, fast, like they want the basics most of the time. And so I think this is time to chop.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  It would be funny if they effectively threw up a model card. And they're comparing, it's like.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  They actually sort of did. The Bento box is the original model card.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  It's 2% better on.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  That's sort of what they do. You know, the Bento box, right? The Bento box with like how many cameras, megapixels, flops, and how powerful the G P U is, how many cores are over here, how much storage it has, like that graphic is their model card. We were riffing on this earlier, like when a product ceases to be sold on brand and is instead sold on performance, that's usually.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  You have margin compression.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Usually margin compression, like you comp it to cars, like if you're purely buying on like range and price and speed and horsepower and seating arrangements, that feels much more commoditized than you gotta have a Ferrari because it's a Ferrari. Don't ask about the specs. And I think for the Luce, this is the first time that people were talking about like, oh, zero to 60 in 2.5 for that price isn't actually that good. It's like, that's not the conversation you should be having about Ferrari. You should just be like, it's a Ferrari. Stop next question. Like, do you want one or not? Right? Anyway, speaking of Mark Gurman, hilarious post from Sam Henry Gold here. Of course, in jest, but they put up a Apple press release in the newsroom. Apple announces the death of Mark Gurman.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  It is done.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  It is done. Apple today announced the completion of Operation One More Thing, a multi-year initiative to permanently end the unauthorized disclosure of Apple's pre-released product information by Bloomberg Intelligence reporter Mark Gurman. Gurman, who had for 16 consecutive years obtained and published accurate details about Apple's products before their announcement, has been neutralized. Operation One More Thing was completed on schedule, on budget, and without complication. They're not that aggressive towards Mark Gurman, but he is probably a thorn in their side. And here he is. He has a live blog up, Live Blog for WWDC. Go check it out at Bloomberg.com. Eric Sufer is leaning in. Why is he leaning in? Because Mark Gurman says something about WWDC, says, "In addition to the focus on AI,

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Siri, and major quality and performance improvements across the operating systems, I'd expect two other focal points today: privacy and safety features." I imagine Sufer is leaning in because privacy, safety features, not great for ad monetization usually. You're hiding more information. Tyler, what's been your reaction generally? Take me through whatever.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yes, I've been watching the live stream. It's still going on, so they're still releasing stuff. But I would say, just on that point, they've been like every single time-

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Have you been watching or have you been studying?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  I was studying. Like, every time they talk about a new feature with AI, they always say like, "This is on a private cloud. This is like not public. This is like extremely secure." So they're really pushing on that point, I think.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  What does private cloud mean?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  I don't know. They're talking about like their own foundation models, I think, so they're trying to emphasize that.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  So it seems like they have-

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Have they said the word Gemini? Uh, I don't know if they said it, but it was on screen.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  So, so it seems like they have the ability, with their deal with Gemini, to basically white-label, fine-tune, mid-train, do whatever they need to, and then resell that with their own branding. That's a great deal. My question is like- Who's inferencing that? Because there's a, there's a billion iPhone users. And if they're all pushing the Siri button all day long, and they're anywhere near the frontier, that's a significant amount of inference. And has Apple built some sort of secret data center that can serve that? Are they, are they, are they saying private cloud? And really, it's like a corner of GCP? Like, where, is it a bunch of Mac Minis wired together?

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Like, what did they do to actually build that private cloud? Because even, even if they did it, even if they did it and didn't show up in the CapEx numbers, didn't show up in the, in the, any of the SEC filings, like, it would show up in the emissions data and the, and the ESG numbers. Because unless they have some crazy solar, nuclear-powered facility, where's that inference coming from? I imagine some of it can be done on-device. That's exciting.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jonah says on-device.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Can it all be done on-device?

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Tyler.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Groxen says they brought up rate limits and a subscription plan.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  Did you see that?

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  I'll look for that.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  I mean, you don't have rate limits or a subscription plan if it's on-device, because why would you? And then also, you would never say private cloud if you're doing it on-device. You would just say it's on-device. Of course, it's private. So, private cloud, cloud means not on-device. It's in the cloud. And so, I, obviously, Apple has a lot of data centers. They have a lot of cloud capacity across their, their productivity suite. Where are the, where are the photos stored? In iPhotos? Like, obviously, those are stored in the cloud. They have a lot of storage. Like, everyone gets two terabytes when they get a phone. So, they clearly have a lot of data center capacity. And they've done a lot to make that ESG compliant. But I'm very curious about where that goes over time. Anyway, we should move on to...

• 18:33John Coogan?

  The to the the news from Friday, the stocks are already back up. But first, I'm going to tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, one more thing.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  Apparently.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  One more thing, eh?

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  One more thing.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  We got one more take from Jordi about Apple.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  Jane says, uh, Apple concedes on liquid glass design compromising for usability and shares a couple screenshots here. Uh, and so

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Wait, so they're going deeper in liquid glass or pulling back?

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Pulling back.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  I I saw the new, uh, the new Apple Maps icon and, uh, it looked pretty good. It had a little feature of liquid glass in there. I thought it looked cool as a design element. Um, people, I I did hear people complaining about the new Mac, uh, operating system being like too, too bright or too dark or something like some contrast issue. I haven't noticed it, but it was something I saw people complaining about. Anyway, Friday, Friday was a big day in the market. We were off, but, uh, the news kept moving. So we're covering it today. Uh, the Labor Department reported that the US added a seasonally adjusted 172,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.3%. So on the cover of the

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Wall Street Journal, US hiring gathers steam, third straight monthly increase, uh, slight decrease from the previous month, which was slight down from the previous month, but still in adding territory in the hundreds of thousands. So, uh, the bubble popped. The bubble popped. Um, Friday was the worst day for the NASDAQ in more than a year, 4.2% down. It's over, but good news is that today we're back. We're up 1.5% now. Uh, it's officially 2003. People ask what year it is.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Re-inflating.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  It's no, no, it's not re-inflating. We're building back. The bubble popped. It's 2003 now. It's not 99, it's not 2000, it's 2003. We're well past the bubble popping.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Right? So, uh, but actually, quick explanation of what happened. So, uh, the US labor market is really picking up. 172,000 seasonally adjusted jobs added in May, third month in a row. Decent amount. Decent amount.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  Are.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Lot of healthcare stuff.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  For the World Cup?

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yes, and a lot of travel and, uh, and, and workers related to the World Cup stuff that's going on, tourism. So, uh, this is terrible news for all those black pilled AI leaders that have been praying, manifesting job losses. Despite their Herculean efforts, they can't get the unemployment rate to go up at all. It's crazy. They've been saying 10%, 20%, 50%, 100% of all jobs are going away. Good luck. Yeah, you're gonna have to work harder because the US economy is undefeated and the American worker is undefeated. As evidenced by this latest jobs report. Um, the AI job apocalypse is canceled, at least for the month of May.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  We will see where things go, of course, of course, but it is good news. We want hiring. We want jobs to be abundant in our society. Uh, and so in general, it's good news. I, I, I believe the jobs report. I don't think the numbers are going to be massively revised down. I think that, uh, they're, they're, they're generally accurate and track with the ADP numbers and a lot of other numbers. So, um, I think the jobs are, are really being added. They're not in all the most critical industries. There's a lot of nuance there. How long will it go on? But in general, the economy is healthy. Uh, but inflation is rising. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz has spiked the cost of gas and overall prices have been increasing more quickly than the Fed would like. For some time, even before the Strait of Hormuz, inflation was running a little hot.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well above the 2% target.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  For basically as long as I've been an adult.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, uh, this makes the likelihood of a rate cut more unlikely. In fact, it looks like we might be in rate hike territory soon, which is of course not good for tech companies that have earning forecasts that stretch out into the next decade. So the silver lining in high rates, if you want some copium, is that at least the Fed has something useful in the tool chest in case the economy does slow down. You know, like we're running hot, we have high rates. At least there's room to cut to 3%, 2%, 1%, 0%. If the market's selling off, if the unemployment rate's going up, you have something in the tank. Whereas during COVID, like the rates were already so low, there was a lot of unemployment

• 22:57John Coogan?

  all of a sudden, and it was just like stimulus, spend a bunch of money, you know, send mail everyone a check. There wasn't that much that the Fed could do.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was a time that we couldn't imagine this level of speculation in the markets at something like where rates are right now, right?

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  People that were sort of born in the ZIRP era.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  With all the speculation right now is by itself an argument to raise rates even further.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Well, yeah, once the rates spiked off of like that 3% jump, like the end of ZIRP, it was like, okay, like, like, there will never be froth again, certainly.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Certainly, like, tech stocks will never see meteoric rises.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  A friend of mine, Blake, made bumper stickers that just said, "Please, God, just one more bubble."

• 23:44John Coogan?

  And God delivered. Okay, so, the other story, VC horror stories. This was kicked off by Greg Eisenberg. I didn't realize that he was the one that started this whole thing and kicked the hornet's nest and everyone came out of the woodwork with their VC horror stories. So, he said, "He had a big discussion about founders' bad experiences with venture capital and a number of high-profile firms' VCs caught strays. Merckor CEO Brendan Foodie detailed what he calls the Sequoia scam," which is something interesting we should actually dig into. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince accused Vinod Khosla of offering to invest in his Series C only if he would fire a few of the people at the pitch meeting who had just left the room momentarily to go to the bathroom.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  See, there was a separate, so Greg Eisenberg, I was really crossing wires here because Greg Eisenberg is the one who says, he says, "I was once pitching in a boardroom at a top three VC firm for a $15 million Series A." That's pretty easy to narrow down. But anyway, he says, "12 people in the meeting, one of the GPs fully fell asleep." Because some of the top, like, you know, FF doesn't have 12 GPs. They don't really do partner meetings like this, so for $15 million series A, so even if you put them in the top three, you can't catch a stray here. Anyway, one of the GPs fully fell asleep, out cold for 30 plus minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone kept going. Then separately, Matthew Prince.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  Okay, founder or an operator falls asleep in the office because they're so tired because they're grinding so hard and they're a hero.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is what Paki said. When Elon falls asleep in the factory, it's no big deal. But when a VC falls asleep, it's the end of the world.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  We're aware of some static in the UltraDome.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we got a new, new, new mic line, but well, I'll try not to touch it and we'll see what happens. But so there's lots of chatter about the VC horror stories. Certainly, certainly a discussion worth having. You know, you got to keep them in check. But Silicon Valley has always been so high growth and positive sum that relatively good behavior is usually the equilibrium. It's pretty rare that you get a really, a really bad VC. Because even when a startup fails, investors can't write off the founder entirely because they might start the next generational company. And so they might wind up giving on a, on a non VC friendly sort of aqua hire because they're like, and help or like

• 26:10John Coogan?

  help them land a paycheck somewhere, get a job, serve as a good reference, maybe even fund the next product and the next company because they're just like, this is an iterated game and we don't want to have you on our bad side forever. Now, that doesn't mean don't, like they can't pass. And so there's basically this wide gap that I'm seeing in these discussions where there's VC pitch horror stories and then VC board horror stories. And I have much less sympathy for the former. Like, I don't really care about VC pitch horror stories all that much. Because you can just pass.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Because a lot of founders will have 50 meetings for financing. You would expect at least a couple to just be terrible, right? The person didn't know who you were, didn't read the materials ahead of time, was rude.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  And you might want that person.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Didn't show up.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  You might want a checked out VC who's just going to let you cook. And they're like, yeah, I see this purely financially. My, my, my team crunched the numbers. I'm in, but like. Don't count on me to value add like I'm not gonna be in the weeds with you every day. And then there's a different, there's a different VC who's like, I'm gonna be in the office.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  The best VCs, the best VCs will not even tell you, oh, I'm gonna be grinding for you every day. I'm gonna be helping you get all your key hires. They'll, yeah, they'll just tell you. One of my favorite VCs in the world just says like, I give you money.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  And then I will help you raise more money.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  And that's the only thing I'm gonna do.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  And that's fine.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna be your friend. We'll get dinner now and then, but that, that's what you can expect from me.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  And that's exactly what he gives founders. And so everyone is like, this guy's great.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then there's other, there's other firms that say, uh, we'll help you with go to market and they will. There's other people that say, we will help you with marketing and they don't. And you just wanna be transparent and accurate there. Uh, and so like as a founder, your job is to sell equity from time to time. Your job's to find buyers for that equity investors.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Actually only do that.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  They don't actually get it.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Stocking the product occasionally. So your job to find investors who wanna purchase that, that equity with cash, VCs. You need to reference check them beforehand, make sure they're fit, through, think through their competitive investments. Keep them entertained and awake during the pitch. VCs shouldn't be disrespectful, like literally falling asleep is. Uh, but this is the, this is far from the worst thing that regularly happens in the course of growing a business.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, it's, it's, it's just interesting because one, a bad VC pitch meeting, like you said, really doesn't matter.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  I don't remember any of them. I'm sure they've happened.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  No company has died because a VC was like rude to them.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Fell asleep or any of those things.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  And it also happens with customers, right?

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes a customer will just, oh, sorry, I didn't see the zoom link. You know, no show the call, right?

• 28:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  You're not like, all customers are.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  Or like a candidate will be like, hey, I like took another role.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  Right? And you're like, that doesn't mean the person's evil.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  It means like they're making the right decision.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  You win some and lose some.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  For themselves.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  So I have a tip. I have a tip for all the entrepreneurs in the audience who are pitching VCs, particularly sleepy VCs. You gotta analogize your business to an air horn. So you, you go to the VCs, the partnership and you say, like this air horn here. Do we have any, you have an air horn? Like this air horn here.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, grab the air horn.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  With one simple button press.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  You can do it. You can do it over there.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Okay, so like this air horn, my business is like this air horn. My business is like this air horn, venture capitalists. My business is like this air horn, one simple press, I'll amplify your business 100x. Everyone's gonna be paying attention, cuz at any moment you might push this button and let out the loudest noise, so they're not gonna be falling asleep. And if you, and if they do, you give them a little bit of this. So loud. It's really so loud. So, you gotta bring the air horn to the VC pitch meeting, you gotta fire it off. Every once in a while, if you see some sleeves and droopy eyes, let them know. My business is like an air horn, I could push it at any time, 10x your business, 10x the revenues.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  John was being an absolute menace this morning with the air horn.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  My customers love it. My customers love it. Uh, yeah, the air horn, you can go get, you think I might press it, see? You're not falling asleep at any moment.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're all wide awake, John.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  I might need to drive home the point, that business is like an air horn, and at any moment it could blast off like a rocket ship, so you gotta buy the stock now, you gotta invest, you gotta get me a term sheet, because at any moment, at any moment, I could do it. The team's so distracted, they can't even get the right camera on me. Anyway, uh, that's enough with the air horn. Uh, we use that randomly from time to time throughout the show.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  I love Dylan coming in, we pitched for Figma's seed round in 2013, most folks didn't get it, but everyone I met was super nice to me. Uh, yeah, it's so funny, when you, when you compare, when you compare VCs to the other, like I said, the other kinds of calls you have.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  VCs are probably like, what, generally, nice, way, way nicer, right? Like, a customer is less likely to like, be overly friendly if they're not interested in what you're selling, right? They're like, yeah, this like, doesn't really seem like a, you know, doesn't really seem like a fit.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  But, uh...

• 31:16John Coogan?

  Or a regulator.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  Brendan.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Talk to any VC, talk to any founder who's dealt with a regulator, like, look at like Brian Armstrong, he, has he had any problems with VCs that match up with what he's dealt with on the regulatory side? Those meetings, everyone's asleep, and they're like, oh yeah, like, we'll get you approval in the next decade.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  And we're trying to, we're actually trying to shut your whole company down.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  They're falling asleep, but as they're falling asleep, they're like, it's over.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  It's very rare that a VC is... In a meeting with you and actively trying to trying to kill your business. Every once in a while, they're like, okay, I'm going to go fund a competitor because I don't like this founder. And that's just like the competitive dynamic. You're in the arena. But anyway.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  Brendan from Merkor, former guest and friend of the show, is has a bone to pick with everyone.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  He's coming after Y C. He's coming after Sequoia.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  He is.

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  He says, in the last six months, I've seen half a dozen rounds where Sequoia invests in two tranches. Everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation. Founders misrepresent this to their employees and then chop it to angels too. Sequoia's blended price is blatantly deceptive. Fifty, uh, less than 50% of the one projected to the market.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  So they'll invest at half a billion and a billion, two tranches, and then the founder will go out and say, we raised 100 million at a billion. When really Sequoia got in at the blended price, right? Now, that's not illegal. There's nothing wrong with that, and that can make sense for both sides for a variety of reasons. You don't want to misrepresent that, though. If you go and misrepresent that to another investor and you don't tell them the actual structure of the deal, that can be securities fraud. So that is a major risk, but that's not on the V C. Like, the V C should not go to another investor and say, oh, yeah, we just did the full deal at a billion. They should give that context.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  But that doesn't seem like it's a unique thing. This is like classic, like, all the crossover funds were doing this, tons of funds have done this. This, I mean, also, this isn't some secret. Like, you go back to the original Sequoia YouTube investment memo, and it's trashed and structured. Like, they've been doing this for 25 years, and it's just like, nobody read, nobody read the manual or something. Because like, if you actually study and no ball, like, you would know that structured investments exist. But at the same time, I don't put it on every employee who's getting stock options and thinking about the heat on a company and every journalist to understand that structure. So there is, there is an impetus and a responsibility.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very aggressive and unnecessary to call this.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  A quote Sequoia scam because Brendan also replied to his own tweet saying just 30 minutes ago after the post had gone viral in fairness to Sequoia, this is common practice in the industry.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Three likes on that one, 1,000 likes on the other one.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Yeah. Yeah. Not super fair to Sequoia at all. I do think it's, I think, yeah, employees, employees should be aware of this and, you know, maybe ask the companies.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't mean that it's not a great company to join.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's tough. Anyway, Travis Kalanick said in 2001, I intercepted a partner at a VC who was trying to escape his office before our meeting was supposed to start. I ended up pitching him in his parked Lexus from the passenger seat. At one point, he grabbed my laptop, placed it on his large belly, which was pressed against the steering wheel and rapidly flipped through the slides himself. 2001 fundraising hit different.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  I want to know how the story ended.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  Did he invest or not?

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Did he pull out his checkbook?

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Because maybe he was like, you got me Travis, you know? Anyway, there's a lot of people that are going back and forth. I really, the worst part of this is that over the weekend, I was convinced because Matthew Prince talked about Vinod Khosla, who's coming on the show, by the way, and Matthew Prince is coming on the show. We're very excited to have them both.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Same day.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Same day. The, I was convinced that it was Vinod who fell asleep, but it wasn't. That's a different thing. Greg Eisenberg's found VC at one of the top three firms, could be anybody, fell asleep. Vinod, what Matthew Prince is upset about is that there's something about he wanted to, you know, redo the team, the founding team. He was like, do you need all these founders? Maybe you need a different team, which is like, it's a bold statement for a VC. It's like, would you switch up on your day ones? First question. And you're like, no?

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Not even your day ones, your current business partners.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Your current business partners.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  For a new partner.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  It's sort of a crazy thing. At the same time, sometimes founding teams do go through changes. Sometimes it's the right move. I don't know. It's a, it's a little, it's a little, it's a little iffy, but Vinod, you know, stands not guilty on the charges of falling asleep, although I was getting ready to steel man it because I think as much as I love Cloudflare and Matthew Prince, some details of...

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Content delivery networks might be a little boring. And so it's possible that an older man who's a legend and has done very well investing might fall asleep when he's hearing about the intricacies of delivering content across the internet. And we actually had, we actually had a plan to test this theory. Tyler, do you want to take us through it?

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so I was just looking at this. I found a study.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Basically, it was, they took a bunch of, of older men, sixty-six to eighty-three.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  This actually happened.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  They put them in a room.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Where it was kind of a slightly dim room.

• 36:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  There's not a lot of like simulation going on.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Like a lot of VC offices, they're very shady.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  And they just sat in there and they tested how long.

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  And read them cloud flares, that's one.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  And they, and they basically tested to see how long would it take them to fall asleep? And so the median was thirty-six point nine minutes.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  I feel like, okay, so.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  So if you.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  And here's the thing, a pitch.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Usually an hour.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, sometimes, I mean, if it's an early pitch, early conversation, maybe it's thirty minutes.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  If it's going well, it starts to drift over.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  But that's the danger zone.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  Danger zone. So, this is the lesson. This is the lesson for founders. If you have a boring business.

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  It's on you, you gotta keep it tight.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  If you have a boring business and you're pitching a VC who's an older gentleman, you gotta keep the pitch meeting to less than thirty minutes, you gotta bring the air horn.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Especially, so I think in, in that story, it also said, uh, the older gentleman was in a Herman Miller chair, which we know are quite comfortable.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Those are quite popular in Silicon Valley, too.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Only compounds the fact.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, that's an elite.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Sleeps up.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Spot for a nap.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  That's an elite spot for a nap.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  The chair was arguably designed for office nap.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  No one's getting like real work done in a Herman Miller.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  I think so. I think so. So, uh, yeah, I, I, this one's tough because it's easy to just jump right, I'm in Matthew Prince's camp, I'm in Vinod Khosla's camp. Also, uh, Vinod didn't fall asleep, so it's all moot, but, uh, we know, we know the secret. It's the air horn. Bring the air horn, no one's falling asleep. Problem solved.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tyler had a good story, uh, when, when they were building Divvy.

• 38:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  They pitched Rajiv Misra in the SoftBank Redwood City HQ.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  And then Masa in Tokyo, soon after, it was absolute cinema, popping zins, smoking a vape, loud coughing to throw us off.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Wait, why intentional coughing?

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  Assistants whispering in Rajiv's ear.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  That's a power play.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  That's a power move.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  You gotta respect that, for sure.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  See, that's a post singularity job right there.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Come in, whisper into the person's ear. It's good.

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Some of the most asked questions ever asked in Tokyo. Masa starts the meeting with, you have 10 minutes. We flew like 20 hours.

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  See, that's just a great way to get to the-

• 38:57John Coogan?

  You just got a power play, Tyler. Sorry, buddy.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that's-

• 39:00John Coogan?

  I think you just got a power play.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  That's just a great way to get, like, really get to the meat, right quickly.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  I think so. What did TJ have to say? He said, "The VC meme is very funny. If someone's falling asleep not liking your idea or ghosting you, gets you bent out of shape, NGMI. Go spend a day in private equity or try competing with an incumbent. Venture is arguably the most pleasant form of deal making in the world." And I agree. And I agree. So, uh...

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  I do, I do like that Vinod says, "Not only did we not fire them, we did not give them an offer to invest based on our assessment of the team." And then Matthew just responds with a term sheet.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  That's actually crazy. Cloudflare, up to $100 million. 50 will come from KV, Series C, pre-money 700.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  I like Vinod running the calculation. All right. I give it a 5% chance that he posts the term sheet. That would be absolutely insane. Only, only a post-IPO founder that's trying to buy a ski resort would ever do something as crazy as that. He forgot to, he forgot to, to, to check in. And of course, Matthew Prince doesn't really have anything to lose at this point.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, fortunately, we're joined by another public company CEO, Will Marshall from Planet Labs. Planet now. He's a co-founder and CEO. First, I'm going to tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't, don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, let's bring in Will Marshall. Ooh, new graphic?

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  New graphic for Will.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  How you doing, Will?

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  How you doing?

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Great to see you too, guys.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  It's been too long. I feel like we barely got to talk when we met a couple of weeks ago. But it's great to have you on the show. I'm a huge fan of the company. But I want to go so much deeper. But since this is your first time on the show, why don't you kick us off with a little bit of the backstory on yourself and the company? And then we can get up to speed with where Planet is going in the future.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Well, for those of you that knew the Planet, basically, we help make change visible, accessible and actionable. Help people make smarter decisions around the planet by having a fleet of over 200 satellites, the largest satellite fleet doing Earth imaging. They take pictures as they're going across the Earth's surface. We end up imaging the entire Earth landmass every day at about three meter resolution. It's a huge amount of data, but we track everything across the planet. So we liken it to Google that indexed the Internet to make it searchable. We're indexing the Earth to make it searchable with a combination of these satellites and AI on top. We're enabling people to make smarter decisions about what's going on on Planet Earth.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Walk me through the actual rollout of those 200 satellites. Obviously, you had partners on the launch side, but do you make your own cameras, your own lenses, satellite buses? Like, the company has been in business long enough that you're sort of like pre-space economy boom where there was a small startup for every piece of the stack. But what was it like actually rolling all of those, rolling those satellites out?

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's very, we're very vertically integrated. So we build the radios, we build the computers and everything that works together. We buy chips, but all of our boards are custom, our telescopes are custom, our radios are custom. And yeah, so basically, think of it a bit like assembling a smartphone. It's that sort of complexity of spacecraft. We're not building millions of them like iPhones or what have you, but we're building dozens at a time. We typically, we've launched on 40 rockets to get all of our satellites up to space. Um. We've launched over six hundred or seven hundred satellites at this point on forty rockets. Typically, we're launching twenty or so per rocket.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Most of the time, we're secondary payload on on on another a billion dollar satellite that's going to launch, or a set of other satellites that's going up. A couple of times, I think, three times, we bought our own rocket. But roughly speaking, we're we're we're hitchhiking at the launch site, trying to get a ride to orbit. Um. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but not much. Uh. So the launch uh has become a little bit more routine now, um especially with SpaceX, which is really cool. Um. But um but all the complexity is in the integration of all these satellites, the satellites working together, having to put ground stations all around the world that that collect all that data, send it back.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  And then we have a software company, if you like, that sits on top of all that data, doing all the analysis to make it usable for all of our uh clients.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it it's really crazy. As you say that stuff, I'm thinking of like Bridget Mendler's company that does ground stations now. And there's so many different pieces that you could like subcontract out in the modern era. But you had to do it all with like grit and figure it out yourself, I'm sure.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you can contract them out, but I mean, w- w- we have looked at those because we don't want to do ground stations. The only reason we're doing them is that we're far cheaper and it wasn't possible at all to buy those services.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Early, yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  But even now, it's, you know, uh uh we're so much cheaper uh infrastructure than anything you can buy online.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Uh uh or commercially.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Uh. Talk about the decision for altitude and the orbit. What trade offs are there? Where do you sit? Why is that the sweet spot that you landed with?

• 44:39Speaker 03

  We basically try and go as low as possible where you don't re-enter.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  The atmosphere. I mean, because you want the cameras as close to the earth's surface so you can take high resolution pictures. I mean, what's amazing with our imagery, if you you look at our satellites, they're about this big. Um. Some of them weigh seven kilograms. Uh. They're only um the size of a loaf of bread, basically.

• 45:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  A bit heavier than that. Um. And and we can see from San Francisco to Los Angeles, we can see things three meters across.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Five hundred miles away, you know, we're seeing things. It's crazy, right? And with our bigger satellites, you can see things thirty centimeters across now.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  I mean, just imagine the the it's it's incredible the power of these telescopes that we put up there um and all the camera systems that take all the imagery. And of course, we take a gob, gob's amount, a huge amount of it. We take four million forty-seven megapixel images per day. So each satellite is taking eight pictures per second and there's two hundred satellites. It's just huge.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  What was it like finding that, what was it like finding that sweet spot? Did you just one-shot it? You never, you know?

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Never burned it up?

• 45:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. Actually, recently, the sun's got angry for some reason at Earth and it's got a little bit more bright and the upper atmosphere went much denser and a couple of satellite fleets lost half or more of their satellites because they got the calculus slightly wrong. So it's not, uh, it's not messing around, especially when you spent millions of dollars on the satellites.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  On the, on the camera, do you have the ability to translate your specs into something that would feel like a consumer camera? Like, is it a fifty-megapixel sensor with a four-thousand-millimeter focal length or something like that? Is there some like-

• 46:27Speaker 03

  Well, actually, if you have a really powerful telephoto lens, it's not so dissimilar from the power. The main power for a telescope is the size of the optic. So the primary optic for our Dove satellites is about this big. The primary optic for our, um, uh, bigger satellites is around fifty centimeters, so a little bit bigger, like that. Uh, and, um, they're, they're, you know, actually, the design of the telescopes is not that hard, but getting them to work through the launch, which is fifteen Gs, uh, shaking of the, of the telescope and then explosive bolts as the upper stage and the, uh, uh, uh, and the lower stage separate, which sends a two-hundred

• 47:09Speaker 03

  G shot load through the satellite. Those sort of things are really gnarly. Uh, so you have to design all of this to survive that launch environment. Uh, that's where the tricks come in for, for space engineering.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about, uh, talk about what you guys have, uh, one of the, the use cases when, when we met, uh, I guess it was maybe a month ago at this point, you talked about, uh, how you're able to track gas leaks ahead of time and help get them shut off. I, I would love for you to talk about that because I thought it was fascinating.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we help people do all sorts of things around the world. I mean, even though we're having, the satellites are all in space. All of our applications are in the real world here down on the earth's surface. And we are helping farmers, we're helping energy companies, we're helping civil governments, we're helping security. But you asked about methane and we track methane leaks using a special hyperspectral camera that we got on one of our satellites and we're launching a couple more of those this year. Basically, this gas methane absorbs in a particular spectral line. So if you have lots of color bands, lots of spectral bands, so this one has 400 spectral bands, so it's like we have three RGB in our eyes.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  This has 400 and with those narrow bands that you can detect these absorption lines and we can tell actually the amount of methane in each leak as well. So we can then go along the gas pipelines of major oil and gas facilities, find leaks, tell them about it and help them to shut them off. And no one, not the energy company, nor the environment, nor anything else, wants all these gas leaks. It's bad for business and it's bad for the planet. So we have detected thousands and thousands of these and often these companies just go out and fix them. Another example, we track deforestation across the whole Brazilian Amazon, eight million square kilometers every day.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  It's almost the size of the United States, a forest the size of the United States. And we look across the entire thing for any tree that has been cut down, illegal mining operation, illegal narcotics, and we send those alerts to GPS coordinates to the Brazil federal police, they go and stop the illegal action. And we've helped them to reduce deforestation rates, 60% in the last three years because of that AI-enabled satellite data.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, work and another example in, in, in, um, in, in, in Ukraine, we've been helping them track Russian movements, um, in, in, uh, in, in Asia, we've been helping with Indo-Pacific Command, the commander of the US forces over in that region to monitor China, the South China Sea, monitor huge areas, give them alerts, because what, what you want is to try and get advanced warning of anything rather than having to go into war. So we're trying to help them have the data that stops wars rather than getting that.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Does the government not have spy satellites?

• 50:19Speaker 03

  They do, uh, but their, their spy satellites are better and worse at the same time. They're much, much higher resolution, but much, much smaller coverage.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  So they can, they can see things that are much better, uh, reading number plates is the canonical thing, whether or not exactly they can do that is a classified matter, but what they can see is much smaller than what we can do, at least 10 times better. Um, but what they can't do is image all of China or all of Africa or all of Brazil every day. They, because necessarily if you look more focused, you look at a smaller area. And so there's a trade-off there. We're the only system that images the whole Earth landmass every day.

• 51:00John Coogan?

  So what is the, the pie chart of customers for you or revenue? Is it, uh, I imagine you hear about like hedge funds, uh, you mentioned a bunch of examples of the government and, uh, it seems like even non-governmental organizations, nonprofits would be interesting, they probably pay different rates, but, uh, like where, where are the key drivers of the business? What are the different customers that are buying from you?

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Today, our biggest segment is defense and intelligence, so security, um, countries that need to understand their, uh, threats on their horizon, uh, be warned of things. Um, that's the US government, that's European countries, Japan, other countries like that. Um, and we've just started a new program where if a country asks, we'll launch them dedicated satellites, um, for that country. And these, we've done three.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Where a few, couple of hundred million dollars and we launch a set of satellites for them. They take over the joystick over their area of interest. And if you like, they get, ensure that it's just for them in that area. Um, but, but most of our, uh, uh, uh, business is data sales. And I think the future is mainly commercial, uh, applications and civil government. So floods and fires and helping people, you know, in the L A fires. We were not just the, uh, the first image, but we could eat, actually use A I on top that could analyze which house in the Palisades fire. Now that was damaged or not, um, and help the relief operators, the American Red Cross go, uh, used our data to plan their operations in aftermath of the fire and so on.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  But if we could get that data even sooner, um, that's even better. So we're working on trying to get the data ever sooner, but disaster response is an application. But most of all, all the commercial ones. So yes, hedge funds you mentioned, um, in principle, we have more alpha than any other company on the planet, I think. Because we can track all those soy yields, um, um, or, uh, uh, you know, or any other type of crop. We can track output from all the, uh, mines of all the different, uh, major commodities around the planet. All the shipping networks, all the other transportation networks. Um, we, if you like, have an overview of all the different economic activity going on around the globe. And so we do have some hedge fund clients, uh, that do stuff.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  They, they shan't be named because they, they wanna keep it private. But, uh, yeah, that's a, then there's lots of other commercial applications, energy, infrastructure, agriculture. You know, we help with a lot of, we just announced last week that we're working with John Deere, helping them

• 53:38Speaker 03

  drive their tractors so they know when to slow down and speed up in the field. Um, uh, based on the amount of crop in each three by three meter box. I mean, it's all terribly practical applications of our satellite data. So it sounds far away, like going to space, but actually it's having impact here on the ground.

• 53:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there are, uh, apparently some Koreans in our chat that, uh, that are, that are, uh, investors. It sounds like, uh, uh, have some questions around, uh, the new, uh, the new capital raise. Wanted to give you a chance to talk about that, why, why you're pursuing it and, uh, what it means for the future. I can't read, I can't read their messages, but I'm just sort of guessing.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, we just had our earnings last week and we have plenty of capital, over $700 million on the balance sheet. And we're growing very nicely, 42% growth, which is the answer to life, the universe and everything, if any hitchhikers guide the galaxy fans out there. So we felt very good about that. But, yeah, we did decide to raise some more capital, one of these ATM approaches, which basically enables us to raise at the market and when we want. And, you know, it's good to have more capital, it's good to have a secure balance sheet, it's dry powder, if we wanted to do M and A later, we haven't got an immediate need for it, but it's good to do that.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  We think that maybe there's other data sets, maybe there's other capabilities that we want, shoring up our supply chain. There's all sorts of things in this crazy world that'd be good to do to reduce risks. So we're trying to use the moment of a lot of excitement about planet and space generally, space is hot right now, to get capital that can help us secure the long term.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  Last thing, any insights on what the latest Blue Origin explosion will do to the launch market over the next, call it, two, three, four, five years? Is that, obviously it's a disappointment for everyone, but there's been some debate around just how much of a setback it'll be. I think every company like Planet wants more competition in the launch market, but how are you looking at it?

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean firstly, it's a real tragic event for the industry and not just for Blue, and it set back some of the lunar plans that the US government, where my Artemis two-pin, that was such an amazing mission, but some of the later missions that actually landing humans on the lunar surface are going to need Blue Origin in their vehicle, actually. So it's a tricky situation. I was just messaging with the Mass Administrator about this and I hope we can come together to still do those really critical missions that are some of the most hopeful things that we do as a society when we send humans on things like that.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Mission. So but I think I think they'll get back to to business relatively straightforward that, you know, by the end of this year, they've already said that they should be able to be back on the launch line. I think that timeline is about right. What we've seen historically, companies getting back to the launch pad. It's not quite as damaged as people initially thought. So I really wish them luck in doing it. And there is a booming array of other companies that are building launch capabilities that so I think competition really is coming over the next couple of years and it's exciting. And obviously, we're cheering it on. We're cheering all of those guys on.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Yep, we are too.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  Makes sense.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  We're cheering you on as well.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  Catch up, Will.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 57:28Speaker 03

  Welcome on anytime.

• 57:29John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Great updates. Hey, nice to see you.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We are very fortunate to be joined by Dambisa Moyo.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 57:48Speaker 04

  I'm so great. It's very glad to be here. Thank you.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  I would love to go back in time first and start with a little bit about your journey to where you are now. How do you introduce yourself? You have you're multi hyphenate, an author, an economist, investor. What else am I missing? Take me through it.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, everybody calls me Dambisa. So that's the easiest thing to do. I'm a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. So that's my sort of day job.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  I also serve on the boards.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Great day job.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not bad, actually. And then I serve on a number of boards. I'm on the board of Chevron, on the board of Starbucks, and Conde Nast. I know you had Roger Lynch here a few weeks ago, as well as on the Oxford University Endowment. But my also my other day job, multiple hats here, is I am co-principal of a family office, which is tech-based, actually, proceeds from a sale of a SaaS company in 2018.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Qualtrics, right?

• 58:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, Qualtrics.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  Fantastic. I love Qualtrics.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  That's my.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Let's stick with the board dynamics first, because we've been having a whole bunch of conversations about corporate governance in the modern era. It's at the top of everyone's mind because of governance of AI companies. And I'm interested in your lessons from working

• 59:04John Coogan?

  These very important boards, very established companies you mentioned.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  They've certainly had decades, if not centuries, to work out any of the kinks.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering about your thesis on high performing board management generally. Because we've had Eric Ries from Long Term Stock Exchange talking about different structures. They've been the triple bottom line. There's so many different options. And I feel like a lot of founders and their companies explode in value. They say, oh, maybe I'm different. Maybe I should do things differently. And I want to know how you weigh in on all this.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the longest sort of company board that I've been on was a company that was over 360 years old. That was Barclays Bank.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  And I think.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  When you think about, you know, multiple centuries, most of these companies have already experienced a pandemic. Probably in the 1918 to 1920 pandemic, they've gone through economic recessions. Obviously, peak 1929, you have a crash for 25 years. The Dow Jones Industrial doesn't clear.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Not many people going through COVID being like, here we go again.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Been here twice before.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So I think history is a great lesson. I think the other thing is advice that I received when I joined my first board about 15 years ago, which is anything can happen. And I think that's, it sounds very flippant and sort of obvious. But in a way, it has a lot of kernels of important truths for how we manage organizations, not just thinking about risk mitigation, but where the opportunities are and how to invest. Because ultimately, we're taking punts, we're taking bets, but want to make sure these companies last for another 300 plus years. So I think that's the really most important thing. I've had the privilege of being on boards that have been bookended by the financial crisis, the pandemic, but also companies which were trading close to $60 a share and they collapsed down to seven.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  You know, all of a sudden, you know, it's the Mike Tyson quote, all of a sudden your plan and your strategy gets punched in the face. But also, you know, we've had a CEO die in office, which is very traumatic in terms of resetting. But company, one of my favorites is a company. That we were absolutely certain would not get purchased. We were told that we were number two in the sector. This was SABMiller. Anheuser-Busch was number one and people said, there's no way they'll buy you. And they ended up buying us by issuing the biggest bond that year in 2016 and they bought the company outright.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  So, anything can happen and I think, you know, when you think about where we are today with the market valuations and you think about where rates are and even just this year, coming into 2026, thinking that oil would be around $50 a barrel.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Well, it's not and, you know, how does your balance sheet play out in that environment?

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  So, help me, help me square that idea of, of anything can happen. The job of the board, if I'm telling it back to you, this is obviously a condensation of what you said, but the job of the board is to sort of set the level of risk-taking in the organization. And I can imagine that instantiated in two ways. One is, we are going to the management team and saying that AI is real. We need to be taking more risk to put ourselves in a strong position. Or, the risk of oil going up this year is, is high, so we need to offset and hedge that. And you're, you're issuing sort of a prescriptive strategy notes. Versus, we need to, our job is only to hire the management team.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  And if we have a CEO who's not taking the right level of risk, too much risk or not enough risk, we need a new management team. How do you square those two?

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I would say, you know, fundamentally, there are three roles of the, of the board.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  One is strategic oversight.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  And so, you know, we meet, obviously, on a quarterly basis. We have strategic meetings. I think our job is to be additive to management and thinking about these longer-term risks. And we can talk about how those horizons have collapsed, just because of the, the spate and information, more technology, more information. So, there is definitely a shrinking in, in that delta. But the second thing is hiring and in some instances, firing the CEO. And that's a very important piece, as you've suggested, because the CEO's job is to bring in the team, make sure the team actually can execute on not just, again, risk mitigation, but You know, leading into investments, thinking about longer term opportunities for the business. And then the third thing, which I think tends to be discounted, but sort of ebbs and flows over time,

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  is how do great businesses partner with communities, with society, with government?

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:39Speaker 04

  Especially something like AI.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:41Speaker 04

  It's going to be so transformative beyond just what's the SpaceX IPO going to generate for my portfolio. I think we need to think about what does this mean strategically?

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  And so that's where I think those three things are very important.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  I, I love that third point, and it ties to my next question. People say data is the new oil. What can AI companies learn from oil companies?

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  Well, I think there tends to be, in general, and I've been on boards of tech companies. I think we just have to make sure that people don't poo poo a lot of the governance and the structural sort of muscle that we now know exists from 300 plus years of companies existing. So there's a lot of good governance, having an audit committee.

• 1:04:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Thinking about strategy, having regular meetings. That balance between what management does in terms of tactics on a day to day basis versus strategic thinking and overlay from the board. I think those are things that people can very easily dismiss when, you know, your, your returns are so high or you're, you know, 30% of the, of the stock exchange, the stock market. But I think really understanding what the purpose of the board is.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 04

  Especially for publicly traded companies where the board is really there on behalf of shareholders.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  And again, even that is, has changed. It's more stakeholders, including what the regulators care about and what does society care about more generally?

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  So with the regulators, I have this, I have this interesting, it feels like we're in entirely new era with the AI companies, where if you go back to the previous big, big organizations, like before we had big tech, we had big pharma and big oil and big. Tobacco, right? And each one of those companies went through a process of figuring out how they interface with regulators. And in the case of environmentalism and emissions and also in the big tobacco era, there was a, there was a feeling that those organizations were brought to knee by the regulators and that the executives at those firms sort of denied, denied, denied until it was staring them at the face in a congressional hearing.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  And then they had to admit that there was a negative externality and they figured out how to internalize that. And I still think that, especially when it comes to oil, a lot of great things have come from that technology. It needs to be balanced, of course, but we're in a new era in that it feels like the AI lab CEOs, the big tech leaders are doing the opposite. They're, they're going on podcasts saying AI is going to kill, everyone's going to destroy all the jobs. They're saying all the bad stuff and the regulators are like, what? I'm learning this from you. It would be like if in 1910, you know, an oil executive came out and said, we really got to worry about carbon emissions. Like that just didn't happen. And so what is going on and how should things change? Is this a positive development?

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  Well, I think most companies that have existed over a hundred years or plus 300 years have figured out that they have to be more partner, a partner, not just to government in thinking about what dislocations might happen to jobs or to productivity gains. What does it mean for more concentration in one sector versus another? And it's not just a capital markets question. It's also about what does this actually mean for our pensions? What does it mean for taxes? What does it mean? And I, you know, you can tell that I sit at the intersection of not just corporations and investment, but also public policy. This is absolutely a debate in the House of Lords, trying to think, what should we be doing?

• 1:07:11Speaker 04

  Should we be aggressively, you know, sort of imposing risks? I personally, that's not my, my, my view and I argue very compellingly. I hope that we need to be leaning into what AI can do. It can improve productivity. Activity, but that would be naive to just say it's all upside and having government as partners. It doesn't matter if you're an energy company, a tech company or a bank or even pharma. You you want to bring them on side so that they can understand what the second order implications of a technology might be and how we can get ahead of some of the downside risk.

• 1:07:44Jordi Hays?

  What is cultural or consumer sentiment around AI like right now in the United Kingdom?

• 1:07:51Speaker 04

  Um, very similar to what you have in the United States. I worry a lot that it's sort of seeped into the narrative in the policymaking. So I do hear a lot of my my colleagues in the House of Lords who are sort of, you know, reciting, you know, sort of tropes about AI, which, you know, I can it can be very compelling. You know, obviously in the United States, people are very attuned with the the difference between how the Chinese population views AI versus the United States population. And I think that just means there's a lot more work to be done, not just by the AI companies, but by regulators also. And say, this is the first super cycle, you know, in real positive sort of push for economic growth

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  and, you know, you know, that we've had since globalization, since women came into the workplace. And this is enormous and we need it. Growth has been flat.

• 1:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is it showing up in is it showing up in the in GDP in the UK?

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  Um, I think it's early, early indications of it. I think the, you know, the the sort of sky is falling down scenario is always, oh, what's going to happen to jobs? But, you know, I personally think from my experience in the boardrooms.

• 1:08:57Jordi Hays?

  The job market in the UK.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  It's pretty poor.

• 1:09:00Jordi Hays?

  What I've heard for going back to my college years is, you know, you're lucky if you graduate from a great university and get a job for like fifty, you know, fifty thousand USD equivalent.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look, the, you know, unemployment numbers for not just the average in the population, but for the youth is particularly problematic. There's no doubt about it. Even the current government, which tends to lean left, has just put out a report talking about youth unemployment. It's very similar to sort of double unemployment rates that you see for entrance levels in the United States. Some places it's even worse because it's permanent structural unemployment where people literally are not coming back into the workplace. And so there's absolutely a real issue that needs to be thought through. And I have my views on what needs to be done, but you know, ultimately, I'm just one voice and public policy needs to really change the narrative about what AI can do. It will have dislocations. It's all technologies.

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Is there, is there any type of reindustrialization movement or or energy happening in the UK?

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  Do you mean energy as a pun or you mean energy literally?

• 1:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Like as, yeah, as a pun, yeah.

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  Okay, well.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Or.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  A lot of reindustrialization projects are.

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Are about energy. Yeah, so I guess both.

• 1:10:19Speaker 04

  Well, don't get me started on the power situation. I mean, again, I've spoken about this in the in the Lords. The UK as an example, since we're talking about that, is on average about forty cents a kilowatt hour. The US is somewhere between twelve and sixteen cents a kilowatt hour, depending on which state you're in. And then China, some of the estimates are around eight to nine cents a kilowatt hour. There's no country that has achieved levels of per capita income without cheap energy. And so, of course, there's not a single person I know, you know, whether it's in my boardrooms or my colleagues in investing, who doesn't appreciate the the sort of second order concerns around carbon emissions, et cetera. But I think you can strangle economic growth

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  by doing some of the things that I'm afraid of are happening around the world, banning, you know, energy sources. I think that kind of approach is probably too aggressive and doesn't really work for the long term. We need the energy, so.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Have you wrestled with this question of the source of China's optimism about new technologies? I I sort of think about two possible, and they might both be contributing. But one is that it's easier to grow from a lower baseline, six thousand GDP per capita. There's a lot of room to go up. And so like the tide is so low that if it goes up, it will raise a lot of boats. But then there's the other side, which is the actual, not just the economic standing of the country, but the actual political structure and the jobs guarantees, the works projects, the the trains to nowhere and the empty buildings like.

• 1:11:57John Coogan?

  Those are rough, but they can create a lot of jobs. And so I think that there's maybe less fear mongering about job loss because at the very least, the CCP will put you and say, hey, go build a building over there and maybe it's empty, but you don't really care because at least you had a paycheck and you showed up and you had a sense of purpose. Have you wrestled with either of those?

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  I have, and I think maybe I'd add a third aspect, which is probably related to the role of the state, which is to say that a lot of the public goods issues, healthcare, education are areas even in the United States that have not benefited from technological advances, partly because of regulation, but there are a whole host of vested interests, et cetera. And so if you take that hat and you think about how sort of AI is permeating through the Chinese population, a lot of it is through those same public goods, through healthcare and the sesame sort of calculations, thinking about education, et cetera. And so, yes, it can be viewed as somewhat

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  heavy handed, but at the same time, I think people can more easily see a direct impact of benefit. Whereas, you know, in the United States, when you think of AI, I think a lot of it is still disconnected from the average day user. People maybe will see it more in, show up in terms of their social media or consumer, exactly. And so I think that's an area of opportunity, if you think about it in the West, where a lot of the public goods costs, social costs that we know are coming, could actually be, I think, a net positive, not just for the GDP numbers, but also for just for people thinking about more positively about what AI can do.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are conversations going on the boards that you sit on around AI adoption? And particularly, we've been grappling with a lot of, you know, CEOs need to experiment, they need to move quickly. At the same time, costs can get out of control, the risks, the benefits, not getting left behind. And then also just like, Does your business, is your business even technology like Chevron, Starbucks? I'm thinking like AI could be a useful tool for some back office stuff, but you know, the robots aren't going to drill oil or pour coffee yet. Maybe that's coming, but certainly that's not what's being sold right now by the AI lab. So what are those conversations like?

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  How, what is the mature way to think about testing and evaluating and rolling out AI at a large company?

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's all of the above, everything that you've listed out there. And I think any company worth its salt will be looking at these issues in a very broad way. It's a learning curve, obviously, to state the obvious. And I think that what the best companies are doing is trying to figure out not only what does this mean for our bottom line? Is this going to increase revenue and cut costs? And, you know, think about new metrics of, of how we compare ourselves, what are our new KPIs and the financial metrics, comparing ourselves to other competitors, other, you know, peers, but also other sectors. But I think they're also thinking about what does this mean for society? Is this a complete reshaping of how governments tax? If it's just going to be a handful of companies that are thinking about, you know, generating

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  revenue and concentrated success, concentrated returns, you know, how do we then think about where our role is in that? Of course, also thinking about the job market. I mean, I think it's Henry Ford's quip about, you know, you can't, you know, you have to pay people a reasonable wage for the work because ultimately, in a very cynical way, but I think it's something that I think about a lot is you need, you still need to think about consumers.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Customers, yeah. He said that he needed to pay his workers enough that they could buy a car.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  The ultimate circular deal.

• 1:15:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, no.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  But in doing so, it wasn't that every Model T was sold to a Ford employee. It was that he set the market wages at a certain level. And that created a sustainable ecosystem.

• 1:15:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think corporations get short shrift because people just think that they're these sort of 12 people on a board and a corporation, that sort of greedy shareholders that are just simply going and trying to gouge, you know, consumers. I think what I would say about AI is that the breadth of its potential impact is now bringing about a level of sophistication and discussions that goes beyond just narrow metrics. What's the shareholder return going to be? I mean, of course, if you want to compete in a capitalist society, those things are important, but I think the most sophisticated. Companies are understanding that their role and the role of the state, but also the role of the consumer is going to change, the demands of the consumer are going to change. Yeah.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Please. Can we talk about the family office?

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  I was, I was gonna ask the same thing.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Good timing. Uh, yeah, I wanna, your, your overall market outlook, how you think about, uh, you know, what insane year it's been. I think everyone, you know, was watching a set of geopolitical events play out and assume now would be a good time to bet against, uh, bet against the, the, the global economy. Uh, at least that hasn't been reflected in, in, um, in the markets, uh, just yet. Uh, but I'm curious, your overall view, and then I wanna get into more specifics around kind of managing, uh, the family office itself.

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, I think, um, I would say that the global economy, you, we need to be growing at three percent per year in order to double per capita incomes in a generation. So a generation's about twenty-four, twenty-five years. Uh, in order to double per capita incomes, you gotta be growing at three percent per year. The reality is, most countries are not growing at that rate, both developed countries across Europe, um, uh, you know, um, you know, Japan until recently, it has started to see some interesting story coming from there, but, but also large emerging market economies where have, that have at least fifty million people, they're stalling. I was just in Peru, uh, ten days ago, and there, everybody's concerned about growth. Um, and you can add to that other structural issues, the debt story, the Fiskus being challenged

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  here in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. We know about these issues. Um, but, you know, as I'm, I pointed out earlier, um, we're also at the early innings of a super cycle, which could really power the productivity contribution to growth, could really change the narrative about, uh, yeah, growth, I mean, P W C thinks growth, it could add, um, about sixteen trillion dollars worth of, of GDP by twenty thirty. That's four years away. So that's really constructive story. I mean, my concern, uh, would be that it's quite skewed. I think this is very much a U.S. story. You can't bet against the United States. Yeah. I think the, uh, changes and, uh, and rollout.

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  of this new era are quite choppy in places like China. I mean, there's some elements of it that are quite interesting, but China does have a lot of, you know, debt drag. It has, you know, demographic drag. I mean, they're thinking now by some forecasts that it'll be at eight hundred million population by the close of the century. So structural challenges remain there. Europe has been quite a disappointment in many respects. A lot of the larger economies growing somewhere between zero point five to one, one point two percent. A lot of the structural things we've touched on already, debt, but also now in the near term, real risk of inflation. So I think the picture is very much don't bet against the United States, but understanding that it's quite concentrated, it's quite skewed, and thinking about how to play that is, is obviously top of mind.

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  How do you, how do you wrestle with international efforts in AI? So when, when the whole sovereign AI theme started, maybe last year, really getting talked about, I was deeply skeptical because I said, well, you know, England doesn't need their own Google. They can just use Google and it can, and it can be localized into Spanish and French, and it's pretty easy for the core technology to live in one country. And it's hard to compete with something that's compounded like a Facebook or an Instagram or consumer app, or even in the enterprise, you know, Salesforce, like, I don't know that Salesforce has a, has a native French competitor that's really eating their lunch there. But as I've gone deeper into the supply chain, I'm starting to see a lot of opportunity for, like, France generates a ton of nuclear power.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  That's clean energy. They, if they have the right permitting and the right place for it and the right community, they could potentially build something that they sell to American AI companies that winds up generating a ton of return. And you sort of have a new, a new energy story about, let's go around and find all the cheap wind energy, cheap solar energy. Where can nuclear be built? Because the nature of AI is that it doesn't need to be on premise because you're waiting 20 minutes for something to come back. It doesn't need to be down the street. It can be halfway across the world.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the story doesn't need to be my conflict with Macron.

• 1:20:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Jordi Hays?

  We went back and forth.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Well, we're potentially under investing. We want them to go full.

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  Well, SoftBank, I was just with Alex last week and he was talking about the new data center that they're thinking about building there precisely because of some of these costs advantages on the energy side. Look, I would say as a sort of shorthand, Europe generally thinks about things as glass half empty. The United States tends to think about things as glass half full.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Glass overflowing sometimes.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And you can think about a whole range.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's gamble on this.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you can think about whether it's energy or AI, climate transition. Like, there's many different themes that have occurred where Europe's, again, shorthanding it. The response has always been, oh, my gosh, you know, we need to regulate this thing.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, slow down.

• 1:21:45Speaker 04

  We need to curb emissions. And I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm just saying that they tend to err on the side of risk mitigation as opposed to investing through to figure out, well, we don't like X, so why don't we try and think about how to do that better? And I think that's part of the culture. I will say, you know, since 2008, the United States and Europe were about the same GDP, as you know, and now, you know, the United States has just run with it. And so I would hope that a lot of the, I wouldn't count Europe out. I mean, the United Kingdom is the home of the Industrial Revolution. There's some kernels of goodness that remain in terms of rule of law, the stuff that everybody talks about. But if you do look at the top, sort of, top FTSE companies, the stock market, they tend to be pretty old and stodgy.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it may not be a Europe story, maybe more of a global story. I'm just thinking about, you know, a certain region in India or Japan or Greece or Egypt might have some piece of the puzzle that they can now bring to bear because there is more demand for that. Like, you could imagine a French company that's an expert in nuclear. Maybe they don't build another data center, nuclear power plant there, but they expand, they build the nuclear power plant somewhere else. There's another place that has a lot of land, a lot of solar.

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's comparative advantage, what you're alluding to.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:01Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, in principle, yes, but, you know, we're in a world of de-globalization, broadly speaking, so we can't, you know, we can't dismiss the fact that the policy world has.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  Is there, are there, is there, is there a bullish narrative outside of AI and robotics? I've been trying to, I've been trying to.

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  Well, it depends on de-globalization.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  Are you talking about Europe or the world?

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, just, just, just, just generally in the world, because you see, like, you know, lots of, lots of debt, inflation, low growth, population decline.

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  On the inflation side, yeah.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  You know, employment, there's so many, you know, ongoing conflicts, there's so many bearish and negative stories, and it feels like AI is, is, you know, the only, the only thing really happening in basically almost every country in the world saying, like, like, we got, we basically have.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  The $1 trillion GLP-1 market would like a word, Jordan, okay?

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, no, no, biotech is, biotech is another one. So much so that, so much so that, that people on X, I think last week, were saying, we're going to see the first $100 trillion biotech company.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  It's possible.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  So, so very American to see, to see something working and assume.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  And if the, and if the replacement rate, fertility rate declines, you got to live longer. That's where biotech comes in, solves that problem.

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  The other thing I would say is that, what, what does history tell us about this? Is that kind of things just repeat themselves? So, you know, if you think about us being in a period post-World War I, post the pandemic, 1918 to 1920, and post-1929 crash, you could argue we're kind of in this period of, of, you know, Smoot-Hawley, larger government, more tariffs, you know, protectionism. And so the question is, will there be this new era that came, you know, post-World War II, which is where you get more. Globalization, you know, governments start to work more, more cooperation. And I think we have to be optimistic. I mean, you know, there are a lot of good things that are happening. I was just in India.

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  I had been in India 15 years prior to that. It's a changed society and people are, yeah, it's not, is it, is it rich? No, but is it on a path of, of growth that's quite diversified and it's got an intriguing story of being part of the service sector, but also technology? Yes, absolutely. As I said, I was just in Peru. There are plenty of places and I was just in Silicon Valley. It's hard to sort of be negative about the world. And I think it is.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I never, I never get, I, I, we have the, the blessing of having a job where we talk to people all day long about what they're building for the future. And so it's, it's hard to ever get, uh, I never get completely blackpilled, even though there's so many different sort of negative, negative stories.

• 1:25:51Speaker 04

  So negative.

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Because I do believe that a small, you know, small, relatively small number of people can, can have, you know, massive outside impact on, on the fate of, you know, humanity and economies and all these things.

• 1:26:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Well, that's a great place to leave it.

• 1:26:05Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  A message of optimism, I completely agree.

• 1:26:07Speaker 04

  Thank you and go Knicks.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Go Knicks.

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. Thanks.

• 1:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I was, uh, I was just, I was in New York. I was in New York over the weekend and, uh, there were some enterprising young kids that were doing a lemonade stand.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  But, and they were giving discounts to Knicks fans.

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  How do you prove that?

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I was like, it'd be kind of crazy to be.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Name the whole line out.

• 1:26:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:32Speaker 04

  Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you so much.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Uh, our next guest is Samuel Hoom, who's going to completely debunk Jordy's blackpilling about biotech because we got him on to talk about all.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, I'm not, I'm not blackpilling on biotech.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, oh, there's nothing else going on outside of AI. This is what you said. Don't deny it. We can roll the tape.

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, is he not applying AI?

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's a little bit of technology. No, no, he actually uses just a pencil and paper. Pencil, pencil and paper, no computers at all. Anyway, first I'm going to tell you about Shopify. 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, and now with AI agents. And now we have Samuel from Somatic Labs. He's a co-founder and I'm very excited to have him join the show. How are you doing?

• 1:27:24Speaker 05

  Hello, good. How are you guys? Good to see you.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  We're good. So Jordy was making the claim that there is nothing good happening anywhere outside of artificial intelligence. And I said, we have the perfect guest to debunk that. So could you please introduce yourself first and then maybe take us through some of the exciting things that are happening.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  When there's a protein shortage, John, it's hard to be optimistic. It's hard to be optimistic.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  I'm gonna blast you with the air horn. Anyway, thank you so much for joining.

• 1:27:51Speaker 05

  No problem. Good to see you. Good to hear you talk about biotech as well. So yeah, I'm a medical doctor, a scientist, and yeah, co-founder at Somatic Labs, and just fascinated really by the trying to figure out what's going on at the frontier of medicine, frontier of science, which is what I use Twitter for, what I use X for, and also what brought me to the conference the other day to Chicago, to ASCO, to the big cancer conference, where I was lucky enough to see the Draxx and Rassiv study.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Standing ovation.

• 1:28:24Speaker 05

  Presented by.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  Standing ovation.

• 1:28:26Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's get right to it, though. What does it take for a $100 trillion? Since you brought up X, there was some discussion among investors around, we'll see the first $10 trillion biotech company, and then 100 trillion. So they're already, I mean, I mean, it's, I mean.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  I mean, hyperinflation.

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm never, I'm never a guy to say that a 100-bagger is impossible.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  It's always possible. How do we get there? And what is the ticker?

• 1:28:56Speaker 05

  Lily today is, Lily today is a $1 trillion company, right? Or just about. But I think the issue really in biotech with getting to 100 trillion would be the patent cliff.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:29:09Speaker 05

  Right? So in like, in big tech, Apple and so on, these guys don't have to deal with patent cliffs, but Big Pharma certainly do. So the other day, for example, you guys had a guest on the show talking about AI versus biotech, and it's perfectly true.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  But, but just to be clear, that like, if, if companies could actually enforce patents, where it's like, no one else can create a login button. You cannot log into an account

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  of a software product.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  Hold to refresh is technically patented, but unenforced.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so there is patents, but yeah, they just don't get, don't get enforced. And there's an argument that that's probably a great thing.

• 1:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I guess in pharmaceuticals, the drugs can only be sold for a big price for about 20 years, at which point they go off patent and then the price drops by 90, 95 percent. So if you have like, so the biggest drug in the world today is tis appetite, which did about $51 billion of sales already this year, which is insane, right? More than the big AI labs. But as it goes off patent, then the generics come through and it will dwindle those revenues away for Lilly and I think 100 trillion in pharma is going to be very difficult.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  Is there any world where the capex required to actually compete with a $50 billion drug becomes a market dynamic, like cost prohibitive? Any analogy there? Or will you just get a ton of small compounding firms and a ton of generics companies that underwrite smaller investments and just sort of like eat away? Because I've always heard about the patent cliff and you lose 95% of your gross profit on day two. But I've also heard that Eli Lilly and other Novo are actually struggling to stand up just the manufacturing equipment required because at a certain point when you're shipping $50 billion worth of a drug, you're talking about, you know, not just a little lab that's

• 1:31:11John Coogan?

  making like one rare cancer drug.

• 1:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't that already exist? Just getting a drug actually through trials?

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I guess like Tylenol sold in by the billions of pills, probably. I don't know. Is there anything there?

• 1:31:25Speaker 05

  I, I, I mean, so the trials themselves are very expensive, right? So to run a clinical trial, each patient in the trial costs about $50,000. And so the big trials cost over $100 million. So it's, that is kind of a moat in itself, but yeah, I'm not too sure about that.

• 1:31:48John Coogan?

  Is that speeding up or slowing down? Like, we generally have like the ossification of governments, governments are getting bigger. It feels like it takes longer to get things at the DMV and whatever. It feels like things are slowing down. We're certainly building less houses. Permitting reform is top of mind on the right and the left. And I'm wondering, but at the same time, you have AI, you have all these tools that should speed up review. Do you have a feel for where we're going over the next couple of years?

• 1:32:17Speaker 05

  I think it's still very slow, right? So, so, so from target identification to, to phase three takes, takes about nine, 10 years. And then even after phase three, it takes a long time for it to get kind of adopt, get like adopted in the clinic, right? But can AI speed these things up? Yeah, absolutely. From, from kind of every step, I think AI can speed it up. Even like the, some of the paperwork is very slow, right?

• 1:32:48Jordi Hays?

  What has, what has China done on this, this front? The chat is.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Steal everything.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I mean, like a lot of the, a lot of trials are, are, are happening there now and just overall development because of the cost advantage. But I don't know about the speed advantage.

• 1:33:09Speaker 05

  Yes, it's definitely, it's definitely cheaper in China. So I, I spent the last week, I was in this big conference, ASCO, the cancer conference. And lots, it's very interesting, lots of the most innovative stuff is actually happening out of China. So they've got, for example, some fascinating bispecific antibodies, which is the kind of new cancer drug or new modes of action for these different cancer drugs. So they're doing, not only are they doing fast following, which they certainly are, but they're also doing some very innovative stuff as well. What people are kind of worried a little bit about in US biotech is the big farmers doing deals with Chinese biotech. But I, I think if we have China and the US kind of competing with each, with each other,

• 1:33:52Speaker 05

  if you're on the side of medicines, if you're on the side of patients, I would say more competition is better.

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  Tell us about your company. Tell us about what you're working on.

• 1:34:03Speaker 05

  So I'm, yeah, so I'm a medical doctor, but so we, we started a company called Systematic Labs, which is actually aiming to speed up this process of, of drug development, getting drugs to, to patients faster. So one of the reasons that drug development is so slow is because of, so one of the essential steps in the regulatory process is something called a systematic review, which is basically a big, boring literature review. It takes years currently, it's done manually. We used AI, we have a little team, we used AI to automate many of the steps and do it in more like four hours rather than like two years.

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  I know a guy who does something similar. He gets around the whole systematic review, you just like, you text him on like Signal or Telegram, and he doesn't interface with the FDA at all. He'll just send you exactly the drug, like whether or not it's approved. Works perfectly. I'm kidding.

• 1:35:00Speaker 06

  Joking, joking, fortunately.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  What has progress been like? How far are you in like the R and D phase? How are you scaling up? Like, have you raised money? Give us the flavor of the business at this point.

• 1:35:09Speaker 05

  So, it's early, it's early. So, pre-seed. And so we have a product, it's on the market, and it's being used by thousands of people. And working on raising a pre-seed round. We have some customers in big pharma, in academia, in biotech as well. But it's early, it's early. We're still just kind of rolling it out and ramping it up.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  How, like, is there a market to sell software to the FDA? Like, because my dream might be, like, I'm excited about speeding up things for biotech and biopharma. Like, I feel like they will figure that out and you'll be a piece of that. But what I really want is like an API from the FDA where you can submit something and then it like programmatically runs or automatically runs, like, as many of the tests that it can possibly delegate to just tell you, okay, this is going to get flagged, or like, you have a typo here, or you forgot to attach this document. And so you're getting like this red, yellow, green response from a robot.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  And then at a certain point, you say, okay, I'm passing all of the programmatic, like, computer-based checks. Let's actually call in a scientist from the FDA who's in short supply and have them review it. But I have no idea how you would actually go about getting that into the FDA.

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  Uh, not as you might, yes, good idea. One thing, one thing the, one thing the FDA has said recently, they're doing, they could run these things called real time trials. So at the moment, what we do when we run clinical trials, um, the data are kind of blinded and locked until the end and then they open it up and have a look. But if you could run a real time trial, you can see if there's an efficacy signal or a safety signal early. And then, um, stop the trial if it's working or not, and then get the drug either stopped or moved into patients faster.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Speaker 05

  Um, so that's one of the kind of things that the FDA is doing. As for selling into the FDA, I'm not sure.

• 1:37:15John Coogan?

  Good luck. Hopefully you get there. I don't know. I feel like you should be speeding up both sides of the equation eventually. But obviously it's early. Amazing traction though. Thank you so much for coming.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Wait, did we, we didn't get to talk about the pancreatic drugs? Was that, was that part of the impetus?

• 1:37:32John Coogan?

  Is it fair to say that pancreatic cancer is cured? Like, like, is that how far we can go? Or is this just, because standing ovation, I have high expectations. I'm like, okay, it's cured.

• 1:37:45Speaker 05

  So standing ovation, definitely high expectations. It's not cured.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:48Speaker 05

  So the, the reason it's such a big deal and the reason everyone was so, quite so excited the other day, and you know, it's, it's not an easy crowd to excite because everyone's kind of oncologists and scientists and so on.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  That is a good point.

• 1:37:59Speaker 05

  So the reason it's quite so important is, is really two reasons. So pancreatic cancer is a cancer with miserable survival rates. So five year survival is.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  Steve Jobs famously.

• 1:38:11Speaker 05

  Yes. It's about three percent for, for metastatic disease and most diseases metastatic at diagnosis. And that number hasn't progressed in, in decades. That's the, the first reason. The second reason is because mainly this disease, pancreatic cancer, is driven by this one protein called RAS. And forever, really, this protein was considered undrogable, totally undrogable. Because it's this kind of small, little, compact protein, you can't get a drug into, you can't design a drug to kind of fit in there, slot into a pocket. So what this company Revolution Medicines did is they used a very kind of innovative, creative approach to drug the molecule using a molecular glue. And if you do that and you

• 1:38:53Speaker 05

  put it in pancreatic cancer patients, they were able to double the median overall survival versus the standard of care chemotherapy, as well as improve quality of life, as well as so that the new drug has actually fewer serious adverse events than chemotherapy. So it's kind of creating a totally new

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  But double it, that's taking taking the survival rate from 3% to 6%?

• 1:39:17Speaker 05

  So, yes, so in the trial, it is so it's the details are it's second line metastatic pancreatic cancer and the overall survival with the chemotherapy is about seven months and with the drug is about 13 months.

• 1:39:33Jordi Hays?

  Significant.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  I'll take those odds anyway.

• 1:39:35Jordi Hays?

  But not, not cured.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  Not cured, unfortunately. But it unlocks a path to a cure that it's like the door was open to the mountain, to the hike, and now we're going on the hike. And that's amazing because before we weren't even on the trail.

• 1:39:51Speaker 05

  Right. And there was it's a good day to talk about this as well because there was a new kind of update breakthrough today. So this new drug is called Daraxum acid.

• 1:39:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:59Speaker 05

  It's going to kind of lay, I think it's going to lay the kind of baseline of therapy in pancreatic cancer. And we're now going to be able to add new drugs on top of it in order to improve its benefit. And we saw exactly that today. So there's a new drug from a company called Tango Therapeutics. And they they added their drug on top of Daraxum Daraxumrazib and even improve the survival even further.

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:40:23Speaker 05

  So I think exactly, we're going to see that.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  Very, very cool. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Sam.

• 1:40:28John Coogan?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:40:29Jordi Hays?

  Good luck with the round.

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Go bye.

• 1:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:40:33John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Sigma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Sigma files with design system context. I'm pulling for a cure for liver psoriasis because I'm trying to go hard this summer. Just kidding. That's your, that's your favorite. Yeah. We were in the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about TBPN reacting to Leopold's 13F. They said, they put a screenshot of me and Jordy and a meme from The Truman Show and LeapTrader. If you're LeapTrader underscore on X, you're in the Wall Street Journal today. Now, as, they needed to come up with some sort of excuse for putting us in the Journal.

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  So they wrapped it in a profile of Leopold Ochenbrenner, I guess, but, uh, no, it's a, it's an interesting article. The 24-year-old AI whiz who counts Jane Street as an investor. You probably saw the highlight stats showing up on the timeline. 24 years old, 20 billion under management now, up 270% after fees. We need to stand and go for this. This year. Standing ovation, or at least a gong hit.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  One of the best to ever do it. Investors now include Jane Street. Jane Street is an investment, investment in situational awareness is particularly notable because the firm rarely allocates capital to outside money managers. And so. Game recognizes game. They put a, a quote from me in the Journal. I said, "We have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund's filings in a very long time." And I agree with that. It was a fun, fun thing. A little bit of backstory on the fund. Later that year, Ochenbrenner launched his hedge fund firm, which he described as a brain trust on AI with Carl Schulman, another AI intellectual, who once worked at Peter Thiel's Macro Hedge Fund, Thiel Macro. Early backers included Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  Good to see them getting a win, as well as Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. Good to seeing them getting a win. Uh, Dwar Kesh also. Dwar Kesh. Early backer. Uh, who are both currently helping lead Meta's AI platform efforts. And so. Situational awareness. They actually lost money once in early 2025 after DeepSeek, but they've been on absolute run. They ended 2025 up about 200% when most hedge funds are like, we'd like to do 13%, 15%, 20% would be amazing.

• 1:43:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  200% absolutely legendary.

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Impressive. Call this shot.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Very impressive. Yes. Well, we have our next guest here in the waiting room. Let's bring in

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  Gold Rock says Jane Street should do a mafia episode.

• 1:43:19John Coogan?

  They should. That would be a lot of fun. Or poker match. They should do a World Series of poker because poker is very popular over there. Anyway, we have David Kirtley from Helion Energy. He's the founder and CEO. David, how are you doing?

• 1:43:32Speaker 07

  What's going on? Hi there. Thank you for having me today.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. First time on the show, long overdue. I think most people will be familiar, but how are you describing the the shape of the business these days? How you got here? How long it's taken? What the current milestones are? Take us through the intro.

• 1:43:51Speaker 07

  Awesome. Thank you. So I am David Curley, CEO of Helion Energy, and we build Fusion. So what we're announcing actually last week was that we raised a Series G, a $465 million round.

• 1:44:06Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt.

• 1:44:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:44:13Speaker 07

  Awesome. Yeah. And that's the key building. So we've built now our seventh generation system called Polaris that does Fusion here in Washington State. And then this allows us to keep moving, beginning construction of our eighth generation system. This is for a power plant for Microsoft that uses Fusion Energy and then expand manufacturing. We want to, the key to how do you build Fusion fast is you got to build the hardware. And so we spend a lot of time focusing on manufacturing and investing in that. And so we're 60x-ing our manufacturing line that produces the electronics and the capacitors and the modules for Fusion right now.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Give us the Fusion 101, the different paths that you could have gone down, and then the technology that you chose, because it is different than I think what some people have seen other Fusion companies working on. You have particular strategies. So walk us

• 1:45:06Speaker 07

  For sure. So fusion energy is what powers the universe. That's what happens in stars and supernova. And but we don't really use it here on Earth except more really in academic and national lab settings for the most part. So our goal at Helion and my personal goal is I wanted to solve the energy crisis and bring that universe power to Earth. And in fusion, what you're doing is you're taking lightweight isotopes, hydrogen and helium, things that are found everywhere. And then at pretty extreme conditions, literally thousands of atmospheres and hundreds of millions of degrees. You force those together, they fuse, form heavier elements and electricity. The problem is is that what we see most folks in fusion, in fact, early in my career do is do all that to generate heat,

• 1:45:49Speaker 07

  to run steam turbines, to run cooling cycles and all the other things that we we normally do for power. And at Helion, our goal was can we do something a little bit different? Can we directly harness the magnetic and electric energy from that reaction at really high efficiencies to to get and extract electricity and then sell it? And so that's what we set out to do. We built now seven generation of machines that do that direct electricity extraction and then show that you can do fusion.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  So talk about the road to Q greater than one, Q engineering greater than one, all the all the different milestones that it's interesting, you have a you have such a in fusion, you have such a solid like ground truth for your KPI. But it is very different from other businesses. It really is like there's there's scientific milestones and it's very measurable. The energy that goes into the system must be less than the energy that comes out. But talk about that path, where you are today, where you need to be in 2030 to meet your goals.

• 1:46:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think that that there is actually some room to to talk about that ground truth in terms of what it what you need for the business because our goal in at Helion anyway is not to focus only on those scientific milestones, but to do it in a way that makes electricity. And so that's actually something we sent out that's different about Helion from the beginning is extracting electricity directly, getting that out to the grid and then showing that you could do that at really high efficiency. If you can extract electricity. At ninety-five percent electricity, now the fusion just has to do that little bit.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:20Speaker 07

  And so the systems can be smaller, faster and easier. And so that's what we proved to do, what we've we've set out to do. So we built now seven generations of system of systems, set world records for plasma temperatures, plasma, plasma, plasma pressure, plasma energy. And then and then also showed we could do some of the electricity piece of extracting electricity from it. So we're running our seventh generation system Polaris right now. Its goal is to show you can make that electricity and make electricity from fusion. So you can go out and build those power plants with it.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  How big is the system?

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask you about size, yeah. I mean, we've seen small fusion reactor companies that are making effectively like a battery that could go in a vehicle or spacecraft. Obviously, there's, you know, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that everyone knows. But where do you sit? Why did you wind up in that particular position? And then what's the strategy? If if demand winds up being, you know, one megawatt, I want, I come to you and I say, I want ten megawatts in one facility. How do you, how do you meet that demand or do you just sit it out?

• 1:48:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, so our goal for Microsoft, the PPA, the Power Purchase Agreement we have with them, is to build a fifty megawatt facility. So that's industrial scale power. It's not your house.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:31Speaker 07

  But it is not large scale data center.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  It's actually my house. I I I need fifty megawatts personally, but speak for yourself. No.

• 1:48:38Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing?

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  I'm training, I'm training models for myself. I gotta do it.

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  Sovereign, household, sovereign AI was very, you know, twenty twenty-five, twenty twenty-six. Household AI is the new wave.

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  So fifty megawatts at one.

• 1:48:54Speaker 07

  You're gonna need juice to do that.

• 1:48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're gonna need some helium. So, uh, so is it one system, a series of systems, racks? Like, how do you, how do you think about industrializing that capacity?

• 1:49:06Speaker 07

  It gets to the thesis of the business. What I tell the team is that if we're the first to build a fusion power plant, and that's all we do, then we've totally failed as a business.

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:16Speaker 07

  That our goal is to build systems that are deployed globally at scale. Fusion can do it and we need to make that happen. And so part of that is building systems that are modular and scalable and deployable. And so the vision is that you're building a 50-megawatt scale generator, each one on that scale, at our facility. Gigafactory is a fusion production that then can be put on a truck, delivered to the site, plugged in and run. And if you need 500 megawatts, you put in 10 of them or 12 of them so you have some redundancy. And then you can scale from there. And so you think about that in that modular building piece, a lot like how we think about data centers and breaking those into those modular pieces that you can then mass produce and then deploy at scale and deploy them quickly.

• 1:49:58Speaker 07

  And so that's what we focused on doing, even to the point of being annoying where even for our seventh generation system, we built it at our parts in our factory, put them on a truck, drove them down the street and well, really in the parking lot and then plugged them in to go get Polaris assembled. And so keeping that same philosophy of mass production and reliability and scale so you can lower costs and timelines is really important.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  So what is the, what is the capacity of a single system these days?

• 1:50:26Speaker 07

  50 megawatts.

• 1:50:27John Coogan?

  50 megawatts and then you, and then you, we'll chain them together to get to bigger numbers for particular projects, got it?

• 1:50:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:50:37John Coogan?

  You're sorry, please.

• 1:50:39Speaker 07

  I was gonna say with the technology we have now, there's some fundamental physics limitations for fusion of trying to scale it down and scale.

• 1:50:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:46Speaker 07

  And so our goal is smaller scale if we can get there, but fusion scales to the big scale easy.

• 1:50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:50:53Jordi Hays?

  What are your timelines around the number eight, the PPA with Microsoft, all that, all that kind of thing? Cause we, a lot of the, you know, the nuclear founders that we've had on, everything's really exciting, it feels like it's happening and then you ask about the timeline and it's 20, you know, 2034. And you guys have been making, you know, very incremental progress and, but I'm curious how you think about it.

• 1:51:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, so our goal for the Microsoft program is to have our power plant out there built in 2028 and start in early operations and then scale that up from there. The key to that is a couple of key things is getting started early. It's been now a couple of years that we've been working on that that power plant facility. And I think you point to some of the challenges in the nuclear industry around regulatory and permitting. And so that's one thing that Fusion shines is that we've been able to get up, go out and actually get all the permits. The environmental permits were granted last year. We broke ground on the actual power plant last year. And now built two buildings on the site and are building the third and starting this year on that that power infrastructure.

• 1:52:10Speaker 07

  And so that's really exciting to be able to go get that hardware in the ground, get built, and then and then here in Everett, behind me, actually, in the factory, start building some of those early prototypes and components for Orion itself. And so that's what we're working on, all of that in parallel. It's a little crazy, but the world needs it and we got to get it out there quick.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  What's happening? What's the regulatory side of the business look like? Do you need to go NRC tested a dome? Like, we were more familiar with like the the the fission side of the business, which makes a ton of sense when someone's creating a new nuclear reactor. I'd like them to test it in a remote location under a dome in case it explodes, but there's a very different set of risks here. I don't know that there's anywhere near as many, but there's still probably some oversight. So what does that look like?

• 1:52:57Speaker 07

  So when we founded Heliana, it was something I was really worried about because there wasn't a really a clear regulatory framework. And white space is is good in a lot of engineering and science, but it's not great in regulatory and policy. And so we spent a lot of work on that. But the good news is a year and a half ago, we got a law passed called the Advance Act, which very solidly, by going through the real technical rigor of what are the risks of fusion, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency made the determination and then and then we got a law passed to support that, that the Nuclear Regulatory Agency does not need to regulate fusion. In fact, it's regulated by the states by the Department of Health. So we're regulated like a particle accelerator in a hospital.

• 1:53:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:39Speaker 07

  It's still, it's still serious and it's still industrial scale with, with lots of licensing and regulatory work, but the timeline is now on the order of a year or less rather than a decade. And so that's, that's the big difference. And it comes to a lot of the safety cases of why fusion is just fundamentally different.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  And in general, if I tour Helion's facilities, there's probably no radioactive material anywhere on site. Is that roughly correct? Because you're not using plutonium or uranium?

• 1:54:10Speaker 07

  So we're definitely not using plutonium or uranium. The systems can't melt down, go critical or any of those kinds of things. But it is still an atomic process, what happens in the sun and what, what we build here on earth. And so we do have to consider, just like in a hospital and a particle accelerator in a hospital, the radioactive materials. And there are some created and we spend a lot of work making sure we can handle those. And so we've been licensed and regulated by the state to be able to handle those in that similar, similar way for a number of years now. And so we spend a lot of time and have a big team that does it to make sure that we're handling this safely in a way that, that, you know, the public can, can believe in and trust. And it's, it's really important that you do that and you talk about those things.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  I'm glad you have more funding to work on it and.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  I'm very, I'm very.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  And the timeline is very exciting.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:57Jordi Hays?

  There, I'm now thinking about the opportunity to do the first fusion powered podcast on, on site, on site. When you, when you guys, when you're in Microsoft, we might have to call in a favor with Satya and say, hey, can we siphon off?

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Borrow it.

• 1:55:11Jordi Hays?

  Can we borrow a little, a little juice? But now really impressive progress and, and excited to follow along.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:55:19Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 1:55:21Speaker 07

  Thank you very much.

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Let's go over to the retail corner presented by public, of course. Matthew Zeitlin says, the idea that SpaceX is being quote dumped on retail is a little silly. Retail almost certainly wants to buy like 10x of whatever's possible. He said, I'm just not moved by the index fund stuff. The index funds own the stock markets. SpaceX is part of the stock market. What are you going to do? Go find a way to neutralize your exposure if you're so mad about it? That's a good point. With public, you could create the S and P 499 if you want, but.

• 1:56:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, SpaceX isn't. Going to be in the S and P.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  I think it will be.

• 1:56:05Jordi Hays?

  No, they're the one, uh, they're the one index that pushed back.

• 1:56:09John Coogan?

  I think that, uh, that the profitability hurdle has been, uh, has been met because of the new Google deal. I think that SpaceX, when they go public, will be, I think this is new. And I think that Google is now buying about a billion dollars a month of compute from SpaceX. And between that, between the Google deal and the Anthropic deal, um, and probably lower burn from just things generally. Cause you're going out and you want to make sure that you're in the fighting, in fighting form. Uh, I would expect to see a profitable quarter very quickly to, that will lead to.

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but still not like five days.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably not five days, but I would probably say within the first year it's possible. And S and P four 99 is just, is just an idea. There's other indices that it matters.

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Can't, can't the S and P just look at Goldman's estimate that they're going to have 470 billion in 2030?

• 1:57:04John Coogan?

  Good point.

• 1:57:05Jordi Hays?

  Can't they just lean on that?

• 1:57:06John Coogan?

  They could. No, they actually can't because it's in their rules that you have to be actually GAAP profitable. But Elon is marshaling the profits from a variety of companies that have money to pay. But I, but I take issue with this, this question of, uh, retail almost certainly wants to buy like 10x or whatever's available. There's so much available. It's not some low float. Oh, it's GameStop and like a bunch of meme traders can fire it up. Like this is $60 billion. Like I don't know that retail can deploy, what 10x that? $600 billion is coming out of retail, like Robinhood accounts. Are you kidding me?

• 1:57:46John Coogan?

  Like, no, I like, like, I don't know that that's the, I don't think that the, like, maybe, maybe what happens is the indexes come in. And they anchor and then there's employee lockups and then Elon's not selling. So the effective float is low enough that retail is actually fighting for shares and moving the price and they are the marginal trader, which would be the biggest win ever because then you can move the retail army off of talking about the moon and Mars and all the long-term stuff as opposed to having a bunch of financial investors that are like, what have you done for me lately? What's going on this quarter? Which is not where that business wants to be. So I don't know. Chat's predicting a bloodbath for retail. We'll see.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah. Subtract my $135 from 60 billion. It's a lot. I still don't, I'm not putting in the dumping on retail. I'm just saying that like, I think that Matthew, friend of the show, love him, but I don't fully buy that if the retail allocation is 10 billion, that there's 100 billion of demand just because it's such a big number.

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  One thing I will say.

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  I don't know. We'll see.

• 1:58:55Jordi Hays?

  Hard to find a bear that's actually willing to short it.

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  That's a great point. That is a fantastic point. It is, it is a very, very dangerous proposition. Wait, is this true? No, this is a joke. Morgan Barrett is joking around, has a screenshot of Arowan advertising the SpaceX IPO, SpaceX IPO accesses in the Arowan rewards. I know this is a joke because Jordy would have told me if it was real because he's in that app five times a day. His screen time, it's like Arowan and then X and then text messages. Yeah. But Arowan's at the top. No.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this post from Cosmos and then we'll go to our next guest.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:39Jordi Hays?

  Cosmos is saying, hey Siri, find me a trademark lawyer. And this is Andy McKeon's company. If you zoom in, you can see that it's the exact same logo. And I do know that Andy does in fact have trademark on this design.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Interesting. Wait, so, so that is the new Siri loading icon? Or is that just this app is loading actively? I don't know. This is, this is an odd, odd demo. At the same time, it's six dots. I don't know. It's six dots, like it's

• 2:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Your Honor, it's six dots.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  It's six dots. Like, can you just, can you just

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  It's also potentially

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Trademark a square?

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Is it potentially?

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  I can, I'm the only one that can use a circle.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Cosmos is like a more, more, from my understanding, more like a Pinterest competitor. It could be a different enough category that

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Well, Apple also used a Pinterest-style dual-feed layout in one of their app designs. So, you know, maybe they're ruffling feathers all over the tech industry today, but probably giving consumers what they want. So, we'll see. Juror comes on, says, "I like the six dots on my Siri. I'm happy. I was upset about Apple Intelligence. I thought they under-delivered, but now they're back, so I'm voting Apple." You know, the most biased jury in the world, I imagine. Well, we have Pete Florence from Generalist. He's the co-founder and CEO. Pete, how you doing?

• 2:01:01Speaker 08

  Hey, John. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. First time on the show. Introduce yourself. Tell us about the company.

• 2:01:08Speaker 08

  Awesome. So, really, the backstory of the company is, you know, goes back to kind of the story of the founders. And so for myself, I've been working on robotics and AI for over a decade now. I started my PhD at MIT

• 2:01:25Speaker 08

  in 2014. And it was in grad school at MIT, I met one of my co-founders, Andy Barry, just an amazing overall roboticist. He was at Boston Dynamics for five and a half years. Then after grad school for me, I was at Google DeepMind. And there I worked super closely with another Andy, Andy Zhang. We published a ton of research papers together. And, you know, eventually, it just kind of, there was this overwhelming sensation that to like really match the, the shape of this challenge to just go build general intelligence for the physical world, that we just needed like, you know, to get the, get the dream team together, get all the right folks, and, and have like a really focused plan on, on how we actually build and scale this whole thing. And that's what we've been doing for the last couple of years.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Why haven't you said the word humanoid yet? What's going on?

• 2:02:11Speaker 08

  Great question.

• 2:02:13Speaker 08

  I, you know, we, we think humanoids are, are awesome. A lot of people on the team have been working on humanoids for, for over a decade. Like back when I, when I mentioned when I started grad school, that was the era of the DARPA grand challenge, you know, back like one of the first sort of big humanoid things.

• 2:02:26John Coogan?

  This is Rocco's basketball. He doesn't want to say anything bad about humanoids.

• 2:02:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:29John Coogan?

  He's like, they're great. They're great. I'm not really working on them right now. But they're great. I don't want to say anything bad.

• 2:02:35Jordi Hays?

  There was those two kids.

• 2:02:36John Coogan?

  Cause when they rise up, you don't want to be on the record saying.

• 2:02:38Jordi Hays?

  You saw those two kids in China.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:40Jordi Hays?

  That got kicked by humanoids. You know what those kids were doing right before the performance?

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Talking trash.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  They were talking some smack.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Probably talking smack, saying that there's a different path to robotic, to our robotic future. But take us through it. Like what is the future? How do you see this all rolling out? Because I think, I think everyone agrees with you.

• 2:02:55Speaker 08

  Uh, I don't, I don't know if everyone agrees. I mean, otherwise people wouldn't be spending billions of dollars building only humanoids. But I, I do think that humanoids are, are really of course like a, a form factor that makes a lot of sense for a lot of things. But we, we just think the, the future is, is much bigger than, than only humanoids. And, uh, you know, there'll be billions of robots and, and some of them will be humanoids, but yeah, there'll, there'll be a lot of other form factors too.

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Humanoids are the cars and you're building the motorcycle. I like it.

• 2:03:23Speaker 08

  Um, I, I would say we're, we're more like building like in that analogy, more, more like building fundamental like engine technology that could be used in motors or could be used in cars or could be used in planes or, you know, whatever you want.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  So, I mean, that, that feels like it gives you potentially a larger TAM in the near term. Because like as much as everyone says like, oh, it's humanoid, what is the, what is the ramp for humanoid robots to actually get into the home? There's so many edge cases i- in the factory, you have polished floors. Why don't you just have wheels? Like there's all these reasons why humanoid is the supply chain. It could take five years. It could take 10 years. But at the same time, like Amazon actively has a million robots. Like they just do their Kiva systems. They're rolling around. You don't, they're nowhere near humanoid, but they're incredibly economically valuable. And if you could be a part of that supply chain, you probably have a great business. But what supply chains that we would broadly

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  define as robotic, do you see as being like the most near term consequential to your business?

• 2:04:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, great question. So, you know, overall, there's like robotics and automation has been deployed in a ton of different industries, doing a lot of different things. And, you know, we, this has been kind of obvious over time to learn for me, but like, we don't want to be doing anything that previous robotics and automation has already solved. We really want to be focused on the things that haven't been solved so far today. So in a lot of cases, this is like industries that already have a lot of robots, but there's a lot of different types of applications in these that just, you know, have not been possible to address with with robots before. So, things like logistics, manufacturing, the supply chains for those, or the, you know, really just like the rollout of, you know, operations of those at scale, those are really two really obvious areas. But then, you know, the name

• 2:05:07Speaker 08

  of the company is Generalist, and, you know, very much like having these models power robots in a ton of different industries, ton of different applications, that's really what what we're doing.

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  Okay, so, I have a calculator app. It's written in Python on the backend, it works fine. I could replace that with an LLM and just ask the LLM to guess the answer to every math question I give it. That would be inefficient, not really an upgrade. It's possible. My question is, let's say I have a factory, and I have a bunch of CNC machines with robotic arms that are on deterministic paths. I have some KUKA robotic arms that are all pre-programmed. They take the glass and they put it on the windshield of the car as it rolls along. I have a bunch of robots that are programmed, that, and they're doing their job. They break down, there's all the usual things, but why do I want to go from deterministic control

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  and operation of my robotic fleet to something that's stochastic AI-driven?

• 2:06:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a great question. So, some, some things, John, like, yes, and those types of applications that you mentioned, those are, those are already solved by robots today. Like, we already have welding robots, right? But there's a lot of stuff that, even in like very structured roboticized environments, like, it's still very challenging for a previous generation, like, programmed robots to solve. The easiest example in like auto manufacturing is like wire harnessing. The reality is- Like things like wires or lots of different like finicky, like easy for people to deal with types of objects and applications. These are just out of scope for like traditional, you program the robot to do those things. But that's just, that's just auto, like really like the, the variety of different like industries that are set to benefit from

• 2:06:52Speaker 08

  these models that can just, you know, really pick up anything you want them to do in terms of, especially what we focus on is, is dexterity is we really think is like the holy grail. And this is, I think, not even that hot of a take within robotics. Everybody in robotics knows that like dexterity has really been the bottleneck. And that's the one where we are just like really focused on pushing is making it so robots can use their hands to do, you know, really a massive variety of different applications.

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  So is the biggest opportunity, taking something that doesn't have a robot in the loop at all and creating a new robot or a system that can, you know, use existing robots to do that task? Or is there still opportunity in, look, I have a Kuka robot arm and 80% of the time it does it right, but we have someone there that's taking over and getting on the Xbox controller or something like once or twice a day. And that's where we want to bring AI to bear to deal with those edge cases? Or is it more of the wire harnessing, like you're not, you're not doing that with a Kuka robot arm at all? And so we're going to unlock that for the first time.

• 2:08:02Speaker 08

  It's much more of the latter, much, much more of the unlock, right? And I think even from what we've seen so far and just like, you know, starting to announce these, these models that, that we've been announcing and starting to see people that have been coming us, coming to us for what they want them to use them for. Like we just have this like, you know, there's this general sensation of like this explosion of interest of like, oh, I've never thought about using a robot at all for this entire application. And now, okay, I see, we can start to get these robots to very quickly and very reliably and with good speed and all these other things that are needed to really deploy these things. That this is, this is coming online. And yeah, it's really much more of this unlock for all these different things that we haven't really been able to use robots for before.

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  It feels like the way that robotics are naturally diffusing, which is, you know, kind of behind the scenes.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  I didn't see the video of this. This robot slapping a kid is so bad.

• 2:09:02Jordi Hays?

  So bad. We'll play them after you jump off.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  You can stay on.

• 2:09:09Jordi Hays?

  So, so the way that robotics are diffusing is naturally in industrial settings, behind the scenes, and it feels like there could be massive amounts of progress being made and like relatively little hype around it because the people that are experiencing these products in real time aren't necessarily on X, just being like, this model changes everything. I no longer write, you know, I no longer write code. I just prompt, et cetera, et cetera. Does that feel at all accurate?

• 2:09:42Speaker 08

  I, I, I think, you know, what I think about there is that the industrial applications, we think are likely to be the ones that really start to ramp even more quickly than more like consumer type, or you know, like home type applications. You know, of course there'll be like more and more robots in people's homes, but in terms of these things like really starting to scale, we do think that, you know, industrial is more likely to take off there. But we're also like super excited about everything that will be happening in more like consumer and home type applications. So, you know, that's, you know, one of the, you know, just fundamental strategies of focusing on the model intelligence and it can be used in all

• 2:10:25Speaker 08

  these different cases is we do think industrial is more likely to take off soon, but yeah, we're, we're super excited about supporting, you know, more consumer and home type things as well.

• 2:10:34John Coogan?

  Data, benchmarks, evals, what's the current thinking, the sim to real gap, puppetry? I mean, there's so many different pieces of, but, but I want to get up to speed on like your philosophy on each of these like trade offs. Like how much do you believe that, that, you know, the scaling laws apply versus just, you know? We've seen all these crazy companies of doing like you'll wear a camera to collect training data for humanoid robots like

• 2:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a company offering like free house cleaning.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What's your data collection thesis? What's your eval benchmarking thesis? Like, how do you know you're getting better? How much of it is qualitative versus quantitative? Like, take me through that side of the business.

• 2:11:22Speaker 08

  Totally. These are all, you know, very, very good and very core questions.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. It's like five questions that we could spend an hour on each of them.

• 2:11:29Speaker 08

  Exactly. Tell me everything.

• 2:11:34Speaker 08

  You know, we think, what I would point to here, right, is like, we've started to share a fair bit on like what we kind of think is really core and what drives like all the decisions that we put into our models. So, you know, going back to, you know, you mentioned scaling laws. We announced our Gen Zero model back in November. And I think, you know, it really was the first time in robotics that anybody had shown like general scaling laws, right, where we can predictably advance performance with more and more compute and data. And of course, this is something that for all the AI researchers that have known what has been happening in all the other domains, like this is of course something that we were expecting to happen. And Gen Zero back in November, it really

• 2:12:17Speaker 08

  was the first time that anybody had shown this. That was back in November. You know, fast forward just five months, April, pretty recently, we announced the Gen One model. And it's quite a bit better model. And like, you know, the biggest point, nice, you're just showing some videos here, which I can give some color on, but it's really quite a good model.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  We have a whiteboard and this is a job in our studio. So Tyler, I'm sorry.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  And it needs to be erased, honestly.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  It actually needs to be erased.

• 2:12:49Jordi Hays?

  Everything on the board is irrelevant now.

• 2:12:51Speaker 08

  We'll see if we can get a robot to the studio before too long.

• 2:12:56Speaker 08

  That, you know, the, the Gen one model, like, it, it really is starting to cross into like these levels of performance that, that we think for certain types of applications. And we, we tried, you know, to always under promise and over deliver. So there's plenty that, that we, we still have more to go. We feel very early overall in like the general journey of general intelligence for the physical world, but starting to cross over into levels of performance where these things are, are commercially viable for, for a good number of applications. And we think that this is really like a crossover point where we have like a general model, starting to be able to hit levels of reliability and speed and improvisational intelligence where we can start to get these things out there. Very much like, you know, I think the kind of like, you take a GPT two level

• 2:13:37Speaker 08

  model, you scale it to a GPT three level model, and you start to tick over into certain types of applications become commercially viable, right? If you remember, GPT three started with like, copy AI and Jasper AI, you know, copywriting for ads. That was kind of the first thing to take off, few others. And we, we feel like that's starting to be where we're at with these models for the physical world.

• 2:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay, question. Is it possible that for certain robotic form factors, let's say, humanoids, they get to the point where they can do economically valuable work, as in, the robot can make something, but the process overall is not commercially viable because of the, the, the capex needed to, or to say, purchase the robot. So like, I've been looking at, humanoids do some work, and they're able to do some type of process, let's say. And I can say like, okay, maybe right now, there's a bunch of humans out there that do that kind of work, and you could put a humanoid there. Problem is like, a humanoid has all of these different, you know, actuators and motors

• 2:14:40Jordi Hays?

  and batteries and all these different things. And I'm looking at it and thinking, okay, is it possible that the robot sort of just starts like breaking down, where, let's say, you spend fifty thousand dollars on a robot, and it replaces a human, but it starts degrading over time, and, you know, many of the parts need to be replaced frequently enough that you're effectively having to just buy, replace parts or buy a new robot so frequently that you're better off just having a human in that, in that role?

• 2:15:10John Coogan?

  Well, I, I actually hired a Quinn Emanuel lawyer to do my dishes. And so like, even if it's six hundred dollars an hour, I'm gonna be saving money.

• 2:15:19Speaker 08

  Nice. Yeah, whether it's the things, whether it's the things breaking down or whatever it is like, yeah, any factor that makes it so that, you know, like what you need to get done is not getting done and you need to like have somebody looking over their shoulder the whole time like yeah, that that makes it, you know, not really at the level of viability that that I think is really needed for for these things to really scale and be useful. But um,

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  We're running long. Do you have another minute?

• 2:15:46Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah, I'm good.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  Perfect. Uh, tier list of data sources. I want you, you know, tier list S tier is the best, A, B, C, D, F.

• 2:15:56Speaker 08

  I love tier list, yeah.

• 2:15:57John Coogan?

  Uh, I want, I want to throw some, some data sources at you and you can sort of rank them. So the first one would be YouTube videos or like internet video, like transfer learning from there's a video of somebody skateboarding or walking around. Is that a valuable data source? Put aside the cost to license it. Just think about the quality.

• 2:16:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, this is great. Yeah. With, I don't know the whole set yet, so I have to.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's tough. This is also live, so it's tough.

• 2:16:26Speaker 08

  Give them the whole, give them the whole list. Good. I'll give you an answer, but it's, it's not S tier.

• 2:16:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:31Speaker 08

  It's not A tier.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:33Speaker 08

  I, maybe I give it a B.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  B, okay. Uh, next one.

• 2:16:37Speaker 08

  I don't know what else is coming.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  Uh, world models. World models. I've heard a lot of hype about transfer learning from world models. Seems a little bit early, but where's that?

• 2:16:45Speaker 08

  Um, so world models as a, right, your question upfront was as a data source.

• 2:16:51John Coogan?

  Data source specifically.

• 2:16:53Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  So, so you can generate infinite worlds. You can generate a world of that whiteboard and use that as training data, even though it's synthetic?

• 2:17:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think synthetic data in general in robotics is still a very kind of, um, uh, you know, open frontier and there's not like, there's not a huge amount of proof points here in terms of it really enabling. Uh, it's an area I would think is promising, but there hasn't been a ton of proof points here. So I would just like,

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  C tier.

• 2:17:19Speaker 08

  I would put world, world models like not as a source of data.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  F tier.

• 2:17:22Speaker 08

  No, no, no, I would just, I would just not have it on the list.

• 2:17:26John Coogan?

  I'm gonna, wait, is Radical Ventures in any, in any world model companies? I'm gonna give Rob Taves a call and tell him that you're talking, and Rocco's Vassal is not gonna like this when Fei-Fei Lee achieves ASI and has a bone to pick with you.

• 2:17:40Speaker 08

  It's a complicated question. I think that.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  It's okay, we can move on.

• 2:17:45Speaker 08

  The data that is behind these world models, that's more like the source of data, I would say.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Okay, third data source, mocap data. You got a bunch of people in mocap suits, you got them doing things. It's a 3D representation, maybe a point cloud, something like that.

• 2:18:02Speaker 08

  This is a good list of questions. So for me, it's not a data source I'm super excited about because.

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  Another F tier?

• 2:18:10Speaker 08

  No, well, let me explain.

• 2:18:14Speaker 08

  We really care especially about dexterity, right? And mocap suits of people running around, you know, studio is not the main place where you get dexterity. It is good for like, you know, full body, you know, whole body motions.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  That's your first issue is you're caring about dexterity.

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  C tier, C tier. Next, I get a lot of Instagram reels from this community. It's the gloving community. I don't know if you've heard of the glovers.

• 2:18:40Speaker 08

  I don't know that one though.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  Okay, so they put up LEDs on the end of their fingers. They wear gloves and they do light shows for each other. It's like a Burning Man Coachella type thing. Anyway, they exemplify remarkable dexterity. Is that going to be an important source of data?

• 2:18:55Speaker 08

  We love remarkable dexterity data. I don't know how much of this source of data exists. It depends on what type of data, not just like what people are doing, but what type of data can you extract when people are doing it. So I don't know what sensors the gloves have, but in general, the more dexterous the data, the more valuable. So without knowing more about it, maybe we'll put it B or A.

• 2:19:13Jordi Hays?

  John will start a gloving data labeling company.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  Next one, just the general like open crawl internet data. I talked to a very thought provoking AI thinker at one point. He said that like, like with enough scale, you could like learn to walk as a humanoid robot just from reading the books.

• 2:19:36Jordi Hays?

  By the way, a pretty heavy hitter robotics founder texted me live and says, Pete is trying to figure out how to not say world models suck. And he says, there it is.

• 2:19:50Speaker 08

  Blog posts on this.

• 2:19:51John Coogan?

  We'll come back in five years and it'll be great. But but specifically just this idea that like to start your foundation model to do like the earliest pre-training, it might be it might be helpful to just start with like general understanding of the world. So you bake in like all the Reddit data or all the internet common crawl, like all of that stuff. Where does that rank on the on the on the tier list?

• 2:20:11Speaker 08

  So here, let me say on this, right? So like exactly this, like, you know, idea of like, oh, let's use all the data from the internet we possibly can and bake that into the robot brain. And then and then that's like a source of knowledge that the robot brain has. And then we also have the robot learn all the other things. Like that is exactly like a core that was like really the core of my work back when I was at at Google D mine like like, and you know, a lot of the research in there was like things that myself and my co-founder Andy Zhang, you know, that's what we did.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  I'm here in S tier.

• 2:20:39Speaker 08

  I'm very passionate about it. Well.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  Talk me off S tier.

• 2:20:43Speaker 08

  Not S tier.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:20:45Speaker 08

  It's great. It's it's very, it's very helpful. I would like it's it's what it's something you definitely want, right? But then I would just think of it this way, like, what's the best way to learn how to ski? Is it read a book on skiing?

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:20:57Speaker 08

  It's to read r slash skiing. It's to read r slash skiing. That's right.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  No, it's to watch a bunch of Instagram hype reels edited to SD kid. That's what you gotta watch. You gotta get the video training data, not the r slash ski. r slash skiing. I did another one. I think I had another one. Okay, okay, the last.

• 2:21:18Speaker 08

  The point is you want to go skiing, right? That's the point.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  The last one is is simulation. I give you, let's call it Unreal Engine, and I have a one to one representation of a particular robot, and I can vary the terrain, and I can vary the motions, and it can sort of goal seek over a inverse kinematics model, and you can use that to train off of. Where does that fit in?

• 2:21:40Speaker 08

  I'd say C.

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  C tier. Okay, is there anything that's S tier or A tier? Like, what way am I missing something? Or is this the secret sauce? Is this why I gotta give you $400 million?

• 2:21:50Speaker 08

  I mean, you can take a look at some of the data that we have and we've shared a little bit about what we have. You know, I certainly think that our data is very, very good. But it's the things that create S tier data is not just like, oh, what's the overall like,

• 2:22:05Speaker 08

  you know, data capture methodology, but it's also about like, what, you know, what are people actually doing? Like, what's the quality of the data? And that's the type of thing that's like, very hard to, in a short conversation, to put your finger on. But as you sort of like, live and experience this stuff all the time, you really, you know, you develop this appreciation for what really drives quality. And this is one of the things that really drives, you know, like, you know, what makes the best language models, the best language models, quality of data is an incredibly important part.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  So lived experience is S tier?

• 2:22:34Speaker 08

  Lived experience of the physical world is S tier.

• 2:22:36Jordi Hays?

  Me wearing a full ski outfit with ski boots and skis, but sitting at my desk, reading R slash C.

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  Okay, well.

• 2:22:47Speaker 08

  You said it right, though. Lived experience of the physical world is S tier. That is exactly what it is.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  Just getting the reps in. I love it. That's a great, that's a great philosophy. Well, we got to hit the gong. $400 million, $2 billion valuation.

• 2:23:00John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:23:02Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  Thanks for hanging out. This is fantastic.

• 2:23:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it again soon. I appreciate the live, like, the proof of work in the background, too.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  We've got some robots in the background.

• 2:23:11Jordi Hays?

  They've been cooking.

• 2:23:12Speaker 08

  It's just every day here. Thanks for having me on, you guys.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web, app, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is here with us live in the TBP in UltraDome. How you doing?

• 2:23:32Speaker 08

  Doing well.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:23:33Jordi Hays?

  And the UltraDome.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself.

• 2:23:36Speaker 08

  Jordan Bramble, CEO and founder of Antares.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Welcome back.

• 2:23:39Speaker 08

  Got some gifts for you guys.

• 2:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  Hats. Fantastic. I went golfing yesterday.

• 2:23:43Jordi Hays?

  These are good-looking hats. I like, you take any hat and you put this flag on it.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  It gets better automatically.

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  This is good. What's the occasion for the hat?

• 2:23:53Speaker 08

  Well, you see, it's got a 53 on the side of your hat. So that's Idaho National Labs 53rd reactor.

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:00Speaker 08

  We just built it, turned it on last week.

• 2:24:01John Coogan?

  Fantastic. How'd it go?

• 2:24:03Speaker 08

  Incredible. Did everything we set out to do. So.

• 2:24:07Speaker 06

  About a year ago, you guys probably remember this, the president signed a series of executive orders.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Trying to speed up nuclear.

• 2:24:12Speaker 06

  Trying to speed up nuclear.

• 2:24:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:14Speaker 06

  One of the provisions in those orders called for three reactors to be turned on on American soil by America's 250th birthday, July 4th. We just turned on the first, a month ahead of schedule.

• 2:24:24Jordi Hays?

  First.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:25John Coogan?

  So you took your reactor to I N L and you turn it on. What is that process? Like, how long did you turn it on for? What were you monitoring for? Were there any, oh, we're going supercritical, it's melting down. Were there any, oh, S H I T moments?

• 2:24:40Jordi Hays?

  Did any, you had some, I think, one of your investors, or at least multiple, were out there?

• 2:24:45Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Like Jamie was.

• 2:24:47Speaker 06

  Jamie Quinn was there, close friend.

• 2:24:49Jordi Hays?

  Did he fall asleep?

• 2:24:50Speaker 06

  No.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Because there's a lot of debate on VCs falling asleep, falling asleep. But I feel like turning on a nuclear reactor, having a nuclear reactor go critical, sounds really, it sounds really exciting, but I feel like in practice, you might be sitting there for like, you know, hours and hours and hours.

• 2:25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it sounds really thrilling, but it's like inside of a box and you can't really see anything.

• 2:25:10Jordi Hays?

  You might start.

• 2:25:11Speaker 06

  It's not a rocket launch, right? It's not a, exactly. You're streaming, you know, with the same thing the control room operators are saying. So you, you watch your approach to critical every step of the way. It's intentionally kind of a slow, dull moment to get there.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  It's kind of just a number on a screen.

• 2:25:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, but the exciting thing is, I mean, this is something that, you know, we as a country have not done with a, with a, with a new design, with a non-light water cooled reactor in, I think, like 40 years, right? This is, this is the first privately developed.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  What do you have against light water? What do you have against light water?

• 2:25:38Speaker 06

  I have nothing against them. I think we should build a lot more light water reactors as well.

• 2:25:41John Coogan?

  But what are you doing?

• 2:25:42Speaker 06

  So we're focused on microreactors, right? So very, very small scale systems, kind of one megawatt and below. And the idea is you put multiple of these systems together.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  What about a micro amount of water?

• 2:25:51Speaker 06

  Well, what about, what about if you want to put a reactor in places where you don't have access to water, right? So like you're not near.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  Bottled water? Bring some water with you. Wait, do they really go through a lot of water?

• 2:26:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:03John Coogan?

  Oh, light water reactors go through a lot of water? Interesting.

• 2:26:05Speaker 06

  If you look at where light water reactors typically are, they're.

• 2:26:08Jordi Hays?

  By the rivers.

• 2:26:08Speaker 06

  The notable, the notable example, the notable exception of this is.

• 2:26:14Speaker 06

  I think it's Palo Verde in Arizona. So they actually use the wastewater stream from the city of Phoenix.

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:26:21Speaker 06

  As a cooling source for the reactor.

• 2:26:22John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. So, obviously, there's lots of applications where you're in the desert, you're in space, you're somewhere on the moon or something, and a bunch of other places where you don't have access to water. That's an advantage.

• 2:26:33Jordi Hays?

  And you gotta save the water for the almonds.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Like, if he's using a bunch of water to make energy, what are the almonds gonna drink?

• 2:26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:42Speaker 06

  But there's other benefits, too, right? So, you know, very, very small-scale reactors, what you wanna do is you wanna be able to shrink the plant size. For thermal efficiency reasons, you typically wanna operate at very high temperatures.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:53Speaker 06

  In order to keep water from boiling at very high temperatures, you have to go to higher and higher pressures.

• 2:26:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:26:58Speaker 06

  Which that creates materials issues and other challenges. And so, you know, in our specific design, we're relying on liquid metal heat pipes as the primary coolant.

• 2:27:07John Coogan?

  Liquid metal heat pipes.

• 2:27:08Speaker 06

  So, small amounts of sodium that vaporize inside of a pipe.

• 2:27:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:12Speaker 06

  When they condense on the coolant of the pipe, they condense into a metal, like a WIC structure, think like wire mesh.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:18Speaker 06

  That, through surface tension, pulls the fluid back. And so you have this totally passive process of cooling the reactor that just relies on phase change in a very small amount of metal. But the other advantage of that is we operate at near atmospheric pressure, right? So, there's low-pressure systems. From a safety perspective, if something were to happen to the reactor, you don't have a coolant that's going to vaporize and travel over large distances.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:40Speaker 06

  When you have pressurized water, if you lose that coolant, you run the risk of it traveling.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  Radiative steam everywhere.

• 2:27:45Speaker 06

  Exactly. Transporting fission products, right?

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:48Speaker 06

  So, this is a way to.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  How do you actually generate electricity once you get the heat?

• 2:27:51Speaker 06

  So, it's called a nitrogen-closed brad cycle. So, there's a heat exchanger, think a tube and fin on the condenser section of the pipe. And gaseous nitrogen is removing heat. And then it turns a turbo machine. Think like an automotive-style turbocharger.

• 2:28:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:05Speaker 06

  That turns an alternator, and that's ultimately how you're making electricity.

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:28:08Speaker 06

  So, this test does not produce electricity.

• 2:28:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:12Speaker 06

  Our goal is to be there in 2027, and then on customer sites in 2028. So, you know, I like to say neutrons 26, electrons 27, dollars 28.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 2:28:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Are you standing on the shoulders of giants? Like, is this more of a... Like, how much of this is... Obviously, you're innovating in a bunch of different ways along the way. But had somebody said 30 years ago, "Hey, this is possible," and then just nobody did it? Or like, what is, what is kind of the balance between like execution?

• 2:28:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:28:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:48Speaker 06

  I think the 1980s was really the last, you know, roughly the 1980s into maybe the early 90s when the Cold War ended was kind of the last time we had the capability to do this as a country. And, you know, I love this question, you know, do we stand on the shoulder of giants? Because the answer to that's absolutely. So, the regulatory process that we used for this was DOE authorization. And, you know, even that was informed by a program that was started roughly eight years ago called Project Paley in the Department of Defense. A lot of the lessons learned from that informed this regulatory streamlining. When the President signed these executive orders, I think one of the reasons why ourselves and others were able to jump, you kind of jump to action so quickly and be successful

• 2:29:33Speaker 06

  on this was, you know, we as industry were ready to do this. The infrastructure had been built, developed, really the people had been developed at the national labs and in the DOE to support this over the course of eight years. They were already thinking about microreactors. Exactly. Usually one megawatt, right? You know, anywhere, I mean, tens of kilowatts up to multiple megawatts. So, you know, I think some of the military solicitations, they just say 20 megawatts and below. So, all the way down to tens of kilowatts even. Ten kilowatts, wow. But, you know, our sweet spot is anywhere 100 kilowatts to like a megawatt. Sure. Potentially even a little more than that. And then you string them together if you need a big application. Exactly. Yep. And so, most of the military's critical infrastructure, you know, those assets are hundreds of kilowatts

• 2:30:18Speaker 06

  to low numbers of megawatts. And so, you want that flexibility. And ultimately, that's what's going to get you the highest capacity factor energy anyways is to have some redundancies built for the model. But, um, yeah, I mean, so for example, the fuel that we used, it's called Trisofuel. The exact specification that we used, the supply chain for it was developed and funded by the Department of Defense under Project Paley. So, that, that production line already existed. B W F T made the fuel. But even that was built upon 20 years' worth of funded work by the DOE called the AGR Program, Advanced Gas Reactor Program. And that's really what developed that fuel. So, you know, what it meant was... So much of our safety basis, you know, the reason we know that fission products will be retained even at high temperatures is because of how much qualification work had

• 2:31:02Speaker 06

  been done on this fuel. We could point to that in our regulatory engagement and that really speeds things up a lot, right?

• 2:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:07Speaker 06

  You get to delete some of the extra safety systems. It actually saves you a lot of analysis work because you're relying on the fuel fundamentals itself. So, you know, that's one thing, right? If we tried to do this 10 years ago, I don't know if it would be possible because, you know, that data just didn't exist to the degree that it does now. You know, the regulator in DOE Idaho, you know, gentleman came out of retirement to do this.

• 2:31:33Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:31:33Speaker 06

  This is something he'd been waiting his entire career to do. And on our joint test group, so there's this thing called a joint test group, that's representatives from Nteri's, Idaho National Lab, Department of Energy, all in one room, driving decisions. The person representing I N L's operations in that had known the DOE regulators since 1979. I just found out that last week.

• 2:31:54Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:31:54Speaker 06

  And they've been, and this is the first reactor they've done together since before 1979.

• 2:31:58Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:31:58Speaker 06

  So.

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  Came out of retirement.

• 2:32:01Speaker 06

  Absolutely stand on the shoulder of.

• 2:32:02Jordi Hays?

  One last tour.

• 2:32:03John Coogan?

  The whole narrative around no new nuclear reactor since 1979 is somewhat of a good rallying cry for the nuclear industry. But I wonder if there's actually a benefit to sort of reframing messaging around nuclear to acknowledge the fact that I believe the United States generates more nuclear power than any other country, including China and France.

• 2:32:30Speaker 06

  It's about 20% of our baseload power.

• 2:32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so France has a higher percentage of their baseload power.

• 2:32:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:32:36John Coogan?

  But they produce way less electricity, just generally.

• 2:32:39Speaker 06

  Smaller country.

• 2:32:40John Coogan?

  Smaller country.

• 2:32:41Speaker 06

  Lower population.

• 2:32:42John Coogan?

  Less industrial. And so there's a different take right now that the whole messaging path for nuclear is like, we're so behind, we can't make anything. And I feel like there's a more inspirational tone, which is like, no, we're literally number one, let's not lose it. Like, we actually make the most nuclear power of anyone. So let's just continue doing what we're great at. Sure, we have some problems with approving new stuff. Yes, we need to modernize, but this, we already have the crown. Let's just defend it.

• 2:33:11Speaker 06

  Well, that's, that's again, what I think is the beauty of this program that the DOE developed in response to the President's executive orders, the reactor pilot program, is on a very tight schedule, we just got to show the world like we can continue to do these things. And. You know, I kind of retroactively look at it. I would say, you know, the design work is difficult. Regulatory work, actually, you know, comparatively easy. My take on this is if you integrate safety into the design process itself, if you lead with engineering rigor, the regulatory stuff can kind of take care of itself, especially when you have a bought-in regulator like this. The hardest part of all was, you know, when we actually got through operational readiness with the DOE and started operating a nuclear facility, right?

• 2:33:54Speaker 06

  So like, really, the last two weeks of getting this thing turned on was the hardest part of all. The, you know, you ask kind of about oh shit moments. Definitely no oh shit moments when it comes to safety. You design up front to ensure that that's not the case. Yeah. But from the build and integration side and actually operating this facility and this reactor, huge learning opportunities, right? So one of the first things, this was the first time that we had set up our control system, all of our nuclear instrumentation with neutron detectors, with a startup source, right? Because it's a nuclear facility, you don't just do this in a warehouse in California, right?

• 2:34:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:31Speaker 06

  And so, you know, we started seeing-

• 2:34:32Jordi Hays?

  I do worry sometimes that there's a warehouse in El Segundo that's, you know, stretching the limits of-

• 2:34:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, yeah, I'm glad.

• 2:34:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34:42Jordi Hays?

  Glad you're going about it this way.

• 2:34:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, we don't, you know, we comply with our regulator. But, um, you know, we, our reactivity control system, we rely on rotating drums with a boron carbide insert layer to absorb neutrons. So we can close those shut or rotate them out to modulate reactivity. And when the actuator motors themselves are operating, we were seeing electromagnetic interference with our neutron detectors. And so we went through this like five, six day process to go figure that out and troubleshoot it. And it's really these kind of like integration activities, being incremental, being iterative. That's how you ultimately mature the technology quickly so that you can get to a true commercial product.

• 2:35:23Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what's the next step?

• 2:35:25Speaker 06

  So-

• 2:35:26Jordi Hays?

  Hitting the gong. Hitting the gong.

• 2:35:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do I hit it? Go for it.

• 2:35:36Speaker 06

  So, you know, we put a couple million dollars into this facility, getting it ready to be a nuclear reactor test bed. We're going to take the same fuel, same facility, scale up to produce electricity there. And what that means for our customers, right? So we've announced an agreement with the Air Force to do several megawatts of power for Joint Base San Antonio in Texas. We expect to announce more military installations by end of this year. What that means for them is the first reactors that are going to their sites have operational heritage. They're not true first of a kind systems, right? Because we spent our own capital in testing these. So that's really next for us is, and in the lead up to that, we're actually going to test the power conversion system itself

• 2:36:17Speaker 06

  in our own facility. So, you know, generally, our approach to technology development is we start with the subsystems. So we rigorously qualify those. We've got 322,000 square feet of manufacturing space in Torrance. Then we do integrated, what we call electrically heated tests. So instead of having to go through the regulatory process and do a nuclear test, we replace the nuclear fuel with cartridge heaters and can test the system, some snapshot of the system with electrical heat. Which also, that means you can take it, take it apart afterwards, see what some of the thermal effects are. So we've already tested our system at full thermal power for, for six months. And we're going to repeat that test again this year with some design iterations. Then we'll test the power conversion system. Then we're going to put it all together and do it in a nuclear reactor.

• 2:36:58John Coogan?

  So $140 million raised. Congratulations.

• 2:37:01Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  I don't know what you spent last year, but I want to know a little bit about like, where the uses of funds goes.

• 2:37:10Speaker 06

  Have gone so far.

• 2:37:11John Coogan?

  Is it all like?

• 2:37:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's kind of a white pill that you took. I mean, obviously, there's more cost, but something like $2 million to set up this, this test facility and...

• 2:37:21John Coogan?

  But is there, is there like an ingredient or a piece in the supply chain that's really expensive and you need millions of dollars for? Or is it like, nuclear scientists are really expensive, like AI researchers? Because a lot of these folks, like, there aren't a ton of jobs because the industry's contracted. So I imagine it's not like this crazy bidding war. But like, what is, what is the binding constraint on the financial side?

• 2:37:44Speaker 06

  You know, to me, that's another reason why these tests are so important because, you know, not only are we validating some of the reactor physics, but we just exercised our entire supply chain. And so we walked out of this test knowing, you know, the lead times we were quoted, the costs we were quoted, you know, tolerances, quality expectations, does that actually match up with what we see in reality?

• 2:38:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:07Speaker 06

  In some cases, the answer is no, right? And, and, you know, we're going to iterate and improve on that. That informs some of the things that we're going to vertically integrate in-house versus areas where we're going to continue to double down with some of the same suppliers. Fuel is by far the most expensive thing in a micro reactor, the total life cycle of the fuel itself. But the other thing, a lot of people have talked about that-

• 2:38:27John Coogan?

  But are you spending like millions of dollars on fuel?

• 2:38:29Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:38:29John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:38:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 2:38:31John Coogan?

  So it is like a significant cost.

• 2:38:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's the largest single line item in the bomb-

• 2:38:37John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 2:38:38Speaker 06

  -of the reactor itself. Not a big surprise, but-

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Not B O M B, B O M.

• 2:38:41Speaker 06

  B O M, bill of materials, yeah.

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Nuclear energy.

• 2:38:44Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, you gotta figure out the new, new term for that one.

• 2:38:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'll just, no acronyms, I just say bill of materials.

• 2:38:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that'd be great, that'd be great. I was like, the what now?

• 2:38:54John Coogan?

  The what now? What are you, you have a secret project going on?

• 2:38:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, but what I think you'd be surprised by, that's also really expensive, is all the nuclear instrumentation. So how do you count neutrons?

• 2:39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:39:05Speaker 06

  So, you know, things that if you really break them down into their constituents are probably like $50,000 worth of hardware.

• 2:39:11John Coogan?

  But it's only made by one company, very expensive.

• 2:39:13Speaker 06

  And because we don't build a lot of reactors, you do it so infrequently, it ends up being, being just, you know, to keep the lights on, you have to charge a really high price, right?

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. That makes a ton of sense.

• 2:39:22Speaker 06

  You know, those are things that you learn from these tests. What is this stuff really, I mean, a lot of times in these industries, pricing is proprietary, right?

• 2:39:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:39:28Speaker 06

  So you, you learn that from doing these things. And that informs where you're going to next-

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  I'm hearing this for the first time, that I'm gonna have to spend a million dollars on this thing.

• 2:39:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  Because you can't, yeah, it's gotta be hard when you're pitching too, to sort of forecast out, like, okay, what's every anything gonna cost? But if you hire the right people, I'm sure they have like-

• 2:39:43Speaker 06

  We've been able to refine a lot of that at this point, and just from, from doing and testing.

• 2:39:47John Coogan?

  And now you know.

• 2:39:48Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we know exactly what our fuel's gonna cost, we know how long it takes to transport it, you know, we know what our, all of our nuclear instrumentation costs. And that's what really drives most of the cost of these systems at the end of the day.

• 2:40:01John Coogan?

  And also, I mean, like, there's, uh, there's, like, I don't know, like, I can probably name, like, four or five promising nuclear projects at the early stage. Obviously, there is some competition, but it feels like such a, such a, uh, like, everyone can win market.

• 2:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Competing, competing for infinite demand.

• 2:40:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, infinite demand, and then, and then also that, that has the benefit of, like, deeper in the supply chain, you can justify a company like General Matter, because there's three startups that are growing, and five scale-ups, and ten public companies or governments that might buy. And so, all of a sudden, you get another company deeper in the supply chain, creating more competition, creating more supply.

• 2:40:42Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:40:42John Coogan?

  And so more problems are getting solved. It's exciting.

• 2:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, why military bases? I'm gonna guess that, uh, secure setting, uh, strong willingness to pay for, like, a secondary source of power.

• 2:40:56John Coogan?

  You don't need to truck all the diesel fuel.

• 2:40:57Speaker 06

  So, I mean, we believe, and this was, this is, I think, obvious at this point, but this was really foundational to us back in 2023. Um, the military is the best first customer for advanced nuclear. And so, um, you know, I think first piece of evidence for that is, um, the Army alone has a $2 billion budget for its Janus program to buy microreactors for military installations. Um, that's money that's gonna be committed to buy and deliver reactors between now and 29, 2030. Um, so, huge market for data centers and hyperscalers, but what they're signaling is, you know, they're willing to make small equity investments, MOUs, LOIs, but, um, until this technology is mature and proven, um, you know, they're not really spending the big dollars yet. Whereas, the military

• 2:41:41Speaker 06

  is saying, "We need this technology. We're gonna invest alongside a venture-backed companies"

• 2:41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:45Speaker 06

  "through programs like Janus and ANPI." Um, sorry for the acronyms, but, uh, that's the approach that they're taking. The other thing is regulatory expertise. So, between the Navy and the Army, you have regulatory licensing authorities that already exist, and they're leveraging The DOE licensing pathway alongside of the DOE and an interagency process. So this reactor that we just built, we had Army reactors, regulators in the room for that every step of the way, getting to, in partnership with the Army.

• 2:42:16John Coogan?

  Watch the numbers as well.

• 2:42:19Speaker 06

  Getting familiarity with our design, they're going to take all of that back into their next licensing activities for their programs as they try to put this technology on their basis, right? We had Naval reactors in the room, we had the NRC in the room.

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Navy was really the best place for a long time, for decades, if you want to be in nuclear engineering, like some of the best people come out of there.

• 2:42:38Speaker 06

  Totally. So, I mean, the Navy builds multiple reactors a year, they've built four and a half times the number of reactors as the entire civilian sector.

• 2:42:44John Coogan?

  And they operate a ton of them in extreme conditions on aircraft carriers.

• 2:42:48Speaker 06

  Most extreme of all, and they never stagnated in the 70s the way that the civilian sector did in nuclear.

• 2:42:52John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:42:53Speaker 06

  So, the last thing I would say is there's a mission capability need here with the military, right? So it's about resilient power. You know, over the last decade, more and more of, let's call it, warfighting effects are generated from assets that exist on our installations here inside of the US. So whether that's command and control, satcom, cyber warfare, our strategic deterrents, like our nuclear weapons assets, space superiority, how do you affect other people's assets in space, much more of that is generated from here inside of the continental US.

• 2:43:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:25Speaker 06

  And you contrast that with the old world of warfighting where you just ship troops across the world and go invade other countries.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  And fuel, yeah.

• 2:43:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, and fuel. And at the same time, we've got adversaries that are capable of disrupting the civilian grid.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:38Speaker 06

  And so how do we sustain these assets? How do we continue to operate them without access to a liquid fuel supply chain, without access to a commercial grid? Nuclear fission is the highest uptime, highest capacity factor form of energy we have that's available to us today.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:52Speaker 06

  And that's what drives that willingness to pay.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:55Speaker 06

  So, we believe, you know, long-term, we'll go after data centers, you know, we'll do like remote industrials, we want to do everything in nuclear, but the companies that win those... Are going to emerge from military work first, right? Because our work with the military, we're going to come out of this with more reps for our operators, more reps, regulatory reps, more operational proof points of the technology at scale.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  More logos on the landing page.

• 2:44:17Speaker 06

  This is a customer that will, yes, this is a customer that will invest equity and debt in your supply chain to lower your input.

• 2:44:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the private market is, or sorry, like a hyperscaler is going to be much more commercial, much more short term.

• 2:44:31Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:44:32Jordi Hays?

  What can you do for me tomorrow?

• 2:44:33Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Because otherwise I'm going to allocate these dollars to gas turbines or something.

• 2:44:38Speaker 06

  Exactly. And many complex technologies work this way. GPS, right? You know, if we didn't have nuclear weapons driving the need for GPS, when would we have gotten DoorDash, right?

• 2:44:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Or yeah, when would we have gotten the internet, right?

• 2:44:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. The internet, rocket propulsion, another great example, like born from the military first and then scale commercially.

• 2:44:59Jordi Hays?

  Prediction markets.

• 2:45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe. No, Tyler knows the truth about the prediction market genesis.

• 2:45:05Speaker 06

  You know, there was a big prediction market around this.

• 2:45:08John Coogan?

  Robin Hanson?

• 2:45:09Jordi Hays?

  Really, really, around the July 4th deadline?

• 2:45:13Speaker 06

  Which reactors would turn on by August or July 4th?

• 2:45:15John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:45:16Speaker 06

  So.

• 2:45:17John Coogan?

  Wild. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:45:19Speaker 06

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 2:45:20John Coogan?

  This was fantastic. Congratulations.

• 2:45:22Jordi Hays?

  Last question, are you, any buzzer beaters, we got less than a month, you think there'll be others?

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Are you trying to make a bet right now?

• 2:45:30Jordi Hays?

  Actually, don't even comment because I don't want.

• 2:45:32John Coogan?

  People are going to, you're going to move the market, so just say I wish them all well.

• 2:45:36Speaker 06

  I wish all of them luck.

• 2:45:37John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:45:38Speaker 06

  I mean, like you said, like you said, the country needs a lot more nuclear energy. We're all going to be production, yeah, we're all going to be production constrained before it's competitive constrained.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 2:45:50Speaker 06

  You know, I think the advice I would offer to anybody working at it is start operating a nuclear facility as quickly as you can because that's when all your challenges start.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  Just do it.

• 2:46:01Speaker 06

  And we've got, yeah, we've got just under a month left on the clock.

• 2:46:03John Coogan?

  Stop making excuses.

• 2:46:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:46:06John Coogan?

  Start operating a nuclear facility.

• 2:46:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:46:08John Coogan?

  It's good advice.

• 2:46:09Jordi Hays?

  Good advice.

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 2:46:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:46:13Speaker 06

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:46:14John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:46:15Speaker 06

  Appreciate it.

• 2:46:16Jordi Hays?

  Awesome stuff. Well, we'll talk soon.

• 2:46:18John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. I got an idea. A lot of people are trying to, we're closing out on the nuclear thing. A lot of people are trying to unblock the nuclear regulatory thing. You got to deal with lobbying, you got to deal with getting approvals. MLM for regulatory. So you employ a ton of people, you promise them financial freedom, get them on Facebook, and they're all of a sudden they're DMing their high school friends. Hey, man, trying to catch up. Turns out I'm a lobbyist for the nuclear industry now. Would love to get a beer, you know?

• 2:46:53Jordi Hays?

  Actually hosting an event.

• 2:46:55John Coogan?

  And look, oh, you don't actually work at the Idaho National Lab? Well, you should join me, be under me. And then you go find someone from I N L, start lobbying them, create multiple layers, become sort of a pyramid structure. And this is the way we bring abundant energy to America.

• 2:47:15Jordi Hays?

  Could be powerful.

• 2:47:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, we got to watch these videos.

• 2:47:16Jordi Hays?

  We got to pull up these videos.

• 2:47:17John Coogan?

  We have to watch these videos. Extremely important. I knew you were going there. I'm ready.

• 2:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull this up.

• 2:47:21John Coogan?

  Pull up the latest and greatest in humanoid robots. You asked if we were ready, we're ready. Look at this. Boom.

• 2:47:28Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  That is brutal. It is such a crazy hit. It's really spinning around and he sees it coming.

• 2:47:36John Coogan?

  It's bad to laugh.

• 2:47:38Jordi Hays?

  No, that's terrible.

• 2:47:39John Coogan?

  This is America's Funniest Home Videos.

• 2:47:41Jordi Hays?

  What was the parent doing?

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  What was the parent doing? What was the robotics company doing? And what is that scarf?

• 2:47:47Jordi Hays?

  That looks so...

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Is the scarf part of the problem?

• 2:47:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry, that's intentional.

• 2:47:51John Coogan?

  You think this is intentional? You think this is viral marketing?

• 2:47:53Jordi Hays?

  That's a foul.

• 2:47:53John Coogan?

  You think this is...

• 2:47:54Jordi Hays?

  That's a foul.

• 2:47:54John Coogan?

  Wait, but do you actually think this is a stunt? Like, how can we go viral for our company?

• 2:47:58Jordi Hays?

  Can we tell what brand it is? You can kind of see the logo on it.

• 2:48:02John Coogan?

  Well, if you're pulling...

• 2:48:03Jordi Hays?

  It's definitely Unitree, right?

• 2:48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, you think so?

• 2:48:04Jordi Hays?

  No, it's not definitely. There's...

• 2:48:06John Coogan?

  This is why, this is why in America, we keep the humanoid robots in the cages for cage matches for that robot fighting league that Tyler went to.

• 2:48:15Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that, we need to... That's a G1. Do we know if there was a human pilot? Or is this, is this a?

• 2:48:21John Coogan?

  How much of this is AI versus just random? Uh, wow. Well, there's another crazy, crazy humanoid robot video. We can pull up this one next. Uh, a robot wearing a clown head. Stop putting accessories. Oh my God.

• 2:48:38Jordi Hays?

  This one is just, this one I would act like.

• 2:48:42John Coogan?

  I'd press charges.

• 2:48:43Jordi Hays?

  I hope the, I hope.

• 2:48:44John Coogan?

  Legal liability.

• 2:48:46Jordi Hays?

  I hope the child is okay because that looks like, like.

• 2:48:50John Coogan?

  It's a really crazy kick.

• 2:48:51Jordi Hays?

  Serious internal damage.

• 2:48:52John Coogan?

  It's not a soft leather shoe. It's not a foot. Like this is a steel metal bar that's hitting you with a lot of energy. This is, why is this happening so often? Like, once is not, is too much. Once is too much. Stop. We need a pause. We need to pause.

• 2:49:13Jordi Hays?

  Some type of barrier between the children and the robots?

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  Have we not invented fences? Have we not invented?

• 2:49:20Jordi Hays?

  And watch it like, sort of like stagger back.

• 2:49:22John Coogan?

  It realizes, it knows it did something wrong.

• 2:49:24Jordi Hays?

  All right, but pull up this picture. I mean, this is starting to make sense.

• 2:49:27John Coogan?

  Okay, explain.

• 2:49:27Jordi Hays?

  The, um, it looks like, uh, have you seen the, the picture of the robot's face close up?

• 2:49:35John Coogan?

  Average mosh pit experience. This is wild.

• 2:49:39Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  This is absolutely.

• 2:49:41Jordi Hays?

  Sending.

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, if you, if a robot comes at you swinging like this, you have full.

• 2:49:47Jordi Hays?

  Did you see its face, John?

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  That does not look good. I don't like that at all.

• 2:49:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, no surprise.

• 2:49:52John Coogan?

  No surprise.

• 2:49:53Jordi Hays?

  No surprise.

• 2:49:54John Coogan?

  This is not, this is not helping the Terminator narrative. Um, yeah, if a, if a humanoid is swinging at you like this, you have full.

• 2:50:01Jordi Hays?

  Child? I'm shocked. I'm shocked.

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  You have full, uh, your full approval to just drop kick it back. Like, i- i- it's war at this point. If you come out swinging, you gotta put your foot in its chest.

• 2:50:15Jordi Hays?

  There to put that robot in a headlock, take it down.

• 2:50:18John Coogan?

  Try that thing in America. Good luck. A dad is gonna. You, you've seen those videos of like the dad saves? Have you ever seen these hype reels? It's like a dad and like the kid is about to fall off the swing and the dad like. and like catches the kid with one hand or the famous one where a baseball's coming in. Uh, he's at a baseball game. The dad has the kid, drops the kid, has a beer, catches the ball and then catches the kid. We gotta find this video. It's one of the best. Uh, anyway, someone can, someone can hunt around.

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

  We can close out here.

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  Air Horse One.

• 2:50:50Jordi Hays?

  Air Horse One.

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Air Horse One.

• 2:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Tell if these are AI generated.

• 2:50:54John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Horses fly and when they fly, they fly in stables on planes and it looks like this. And they call it Air Horse One and they're, and this is because horses from all over the world are going to the Olympics for equestrian events. Uh, and the event is called Air Horse One, but, uh, this is from 2024 and this image is older from previous Olympics or from a previous equestrian event. It's one of the most expensive parts of being into equestrianism is that you, you rise the ranks, you become a great, uh, show jumper. And then you have to pay to fly your horse on a plane around the world to compete. It's absolutely crazy. Anyway. Thank you so much for tuning in. You don't want to go through cars? There's, there's so much news in the car world. This is a crazy one.

• 2:51:39John Coogan?

  So both the Jaguar double O and the Audi Nuvalari, which we talked about at Palantir AIP Con on Thursday. Both of these cars were designed under the same design director, Massimo Freschella, Freschella, Freschella. I don't know. Massimo, Massimo designed both of these and they look sort of similar. And I think a lot of people are coming around to this design style and I think this design style might be so widely adopted. Sort of like, like Cybertruck might've been a little bit too aggressive, had some baggage with the Elon thing. I think when you start seeing the Jaguars, if they make this in different colors, obviously pink and light blue are very bold colors. Not everyone wants this. I think the reception to the Audi was much better purely because it's gray.

• 2:52:24John Coogan?

  But I think if you see a Jag in black, matte black, even white or gray or dark green, like you're gonna like that vehicle.

• 2:52:33Jordi Hays?

  Producer Ben here is like an R8 purist says, looks like a. Minecraft R8. I like it. I think it's cool. I think that it, you know, it just, it screams, uh, you know, supercar version of the Cybertruck.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:48Jordi Hays?

  To me.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  Which I think people have been waiting for. People want a Roadster and it's been delayed for a decade.

• 2:52:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I think with the Roadster, we're going to get something that looks more like a Model S. Like I would have said, all the cars kind of just like morphed together.

• 2:52:59John Coogan?

  Do you remember the original pitch for the Roadster?

• 2:53:02Jordi Hays?

  It was.

• 2:53:03John Coogan?

  So, zero to sixty under two seconds, doable. Uh, the price was crazy.

• 2:53:09Jordi Hays?

  Flying?

• 2:53:10John Coogan?

  Flying potentially, but the really crazy one is that the range was like six hundred plus miles of range. So you just have this tension of like, how do you make a lightweight car with that big of a battery? That can deliver zero to sixty in under two while also doing so. Usually there's a trade off there. And so the whole, the whole thing that broke everyone's minds was that it was just, it was just, uh, trade off defying in so many ways on price, range and.

• 2:53:37Jordi Hays?

  Aren't they adding some type of like SpaceX jet engine to try to overcome that?

• 2:53:43John Coogan?

  I think, I think.

• 2:53:44Jordi Hays?

  I think that's, I think, I think it's starting to leak out that that's maybe this, the secret is like, there's an additional propulsion.

• 2:53:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, like a, like a natural gas turbine that then acts as a range extender. Like if they put a V12, like a naturally aspirated V12 range extender, that just gets you all a little, so then you have six hundred miles of range because you fill it up with like forty gallons of gas. And if you put forty gallons of gas in there.

• 2:54:05Jordi Hays?

  Just for launch, just for launch.

• 2:54:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:08Jordi Hays?

  A little, little boost.

• 2:54:10John Coogan?

  That'd be crazy.

• 2:54:10Jordi Hays?

  From a jet engine.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  I mean, there are very interesting other techniques. The fan car apparently works. Did you know this? So there are cars.

• 2:54:20Jordi Hays?

  The fan on the bottom?

• 2:54:21John Coogan?

  Fan on the bottom that creates more downforce and I believe that it's been tried a few times. It's very cumbersome to build, very expensive, but it, but that technology was banned in F1. And I believe that the fan car actually does create more downforce and the trade off between the extra weight from the fans and all of that is actually outweighed by the downforce that you get. So you do, if you were to build around that philosophy, and so you could do something like that. There's a whole bunch of interesting things that you could do. I'm optimistic. I, I.

• 2:54:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, going back to Massimo.

• 2:54:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:52Jordi Hays?

  The designer of the new Jaguar and the new Audi.

• 2:54:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so Audi's rebrand, I was just looking it up, was in late November or mid-November in 2024.

• 2:55:04Jordi Hays?

  Massimo left in 2024, but he left it right at the beginning in January.

• 2:55:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:08Jordi Hays?

  And so he basically was like, all right, my work.

• 2:55:10John Coogan?

  I designed it. Just put a normal color on the car. We'll be good.

• 2:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Just kind of a normal launch campaign.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  James Bond, dark green. You're good to go. I've done all the hard work for you. All the CAD files I sent over.

• 2:55:21Jordi Hays?

  This is a billion dollar car.

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  This is a billion dollar car.

• 2:55:23Jordi Hays?

  Can't mess it up. You're not going to be able to mess it up.

• 2:55:25John Coogan?

  Just put a George Clooney in it, looking dapper. Instead, they went crazy with it.

• 2:55:31Jordi Hays?

  No, but I'm glad. I'm glad he's a.

• 2:55:34John Coogan?

  I think he's doing good work. I like it.

• 2:55:35Jordi Hays?

  Someone in the chat said that the future should look like the future. I agree.

• 2:55:39John Coogan?

  This is a good example of that. And I still think the Cybertruck, it looks like the future. It is very opinionated cars.

• 2:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's the Temerario.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  But yes, so Nick Cruz-Patane says all the VW group does is re-badge their cars, Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, and upsell them to double the price or more. It's so obvious. So it does look a lot like a Temerario. That's cool.

• 2:56:00Jordi Hays?

  But that's.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  Temerario is a great car, and the new design looks very different, and it looks like an Audi. It looks like where Audi is going, and the Temerario looks like where Lamborghini is going. So I think that's cool. The crazy thing is $686,000 for an Audi. That is well above where the R8 priced when it came in as the halo car. Like, the R8 was, what, $130,000, $150,000? And a nice Audi at that time was maybe $60,000, $70,000. And so you're looking at like a 2 to 3X bump.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  No one's buying $200,000 Audis right now.

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  The good news is people with, you know, $600,000 burning a hole in their pocket, they'll have the option of choosing between a Luce or this new Audi.

• 2:56:41John Coogan?

  What do you think of my anti-halo car take? So everyone knows a halo car, classically, the Audi R8 is a halo car. Expensive, supercar, V10, $150,000 as we mentioned. But it creates a halo effect around the brand. Everyone sees the R8. Oh, it's so cool. Maybe I'll get an A4. Maybe I'll get a Q5, a Q7, something like that, because it has the aura of the R8 on it. Some of the design language comes over, and you know, the RS6 Savant, it's not an R8. I need something more practical, but it has the aura of the R8. That's the way the halo car works. The same thing happens in Ferrari with the SB3 Daytona, the F80.

• 2:57:22John Coogan?

  Even if you get a 296, you're wearing the badge that's worn by the most elite, the F40, right? Luce, potentially anti-Halo car, because as soon as, as soon as everyone started dunking on the Luce, I noticed that people started feeling way more positively around the SF90 and the Pro Sanguine.

• 2:57:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:43John Coogan?

  Which, for a long time, people have been saying, "The SF90 is too expensive, the price is dropping, I don't even like it, I can't tell the difference between it and the 296." Now people can. Now people have opinions. Same thing with the Pro Sanguine. "Oh, it's, oh, they shouldn't be doing an SUV at all, I don't care that it has naturally aspirated V12." Now people are like, "Oh, it has a V12, that's amazing, the Pro Sanguine is a steal, this is great." And so, it feels like you could have this effect that by, by diversifying the portfolio, you wind up with way more people saying, "Yeah, I will get a Pro Sanguine, yeah, I will get an SF90." Because it is true, no one's complaining about SF90's hybrid system anymore. Because at least it's not full-electric, right?

• 2:58:22Jordi Hays?

  This is the new meta, horn cars. You got Halo cars.

• 2:58:25John Coogan?

  Devil horn cars.

• 2:58:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just horn cars.

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  Put the devil, put the horns on another car, and then you will sell the rest of the portfolio, potentially. Everyone's, everyone's projecting that like, this is the way Ferrari's gonna go, and it's gonna be all Luches, and everyone's gonna be buying Luches, and like, I don't know how fast that can happen. I think, I think there's gonna be a lot of demand for the, for the classic Ferraris for a long time. Anyway, anything else you want to talk about today?

• 2:58:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's always more stuff to talk about. It is crazy, you can get a 2023 R8, has a V10, for $309,000.

• 2:59:01John Coogan?

  They're 300 now? No way. That's not right.

• 2:59:05Jordi Hays?

  This is a, yeah, I think this is a low mileage.

• 2:59:09John Coogan?

  Audi R8 prices range from 60K to 250.

• 2:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but this is a low mileage V10, with a lot of options.

• 2:59:19John Coogan?

  I'm going with the beater. I'm going with the one with three accidents, no, no Carfax.

• 2:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Three accidents.

• 2:59:27John Coogan?

  Three accidents, Florida-owned aftermarket wheels.

• 2:59:30Jordi Hays?

  Florida with three accidents is crazy.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  V8? Uh, yeah, wrapped. Sign me up. I'm ready to spend 60K. Look, here we go. Use 2011, use 2011 R8. $80,000, 32,000 miles, minor to moderate damage. Yes, it is currently damaged, but it's an $80,000 supercar. What's not to like? It has a 10 cylinder, so that's good.

• 2:59:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just thought it was notable because you get top of the line spec from 2023 for 300 with a V10, or they're now, they now want 600. And I do think, I do think there's enough, enough fans of the R8 from, from, from the past that I do think this, this car quickly trades probably at least 700, maybe beyond that.

• 3:00:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, if you're a true fan, you'll go for the one with a little bit of damage because you don't care. Ooh, this is a crazy one. Okay, now we're just shopping for R8s. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching TBPN today. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. Hit us five stars on our podcast on Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter.