Airbnb 2.0, Warren Buffett Exclusive in WSJ, Apple to Support Brain-Implant Control | Alex Blania, Eugenia Kuyda, Josh Wolfe, Jason Fried, Delian Asparouhov

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.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://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (02:26) - Warren Buffett Exclusive in WSJ (07:22) - Airbnb 2.0 (32:30) - U. S. Scraps 'AI Diffusion' Rule (40:25) - Apple to Support Brain-Implant Control (47:11) - Delian Asparouhov. Delian is a partner at Founders Fund and the co-founder of Varda Space Industries, which is building the world’s first space factories. He previously led growth at Teespring and founded Nightingale, a healthcare startup. (01:02:12) - Alex Blania. Alex is the CEO and co-founder of Tools for Humanity, the company behind Worldcoin. He co-founded the project with Sam Altman to create a global digital identity and financial network. (01:31:13) - Josh Wolfe. Josh is the co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, where he invests in frontier technologies across science and defense. He has backed companies like Anduril, Planet, and Kymeta, and serves on multiple company boards. (02:03:44) - Jason Fried. Jason is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. He’s also the co-author of best-selling business books like Rework and Remote. (02:36:35) - Eugenia Kuyda. Eugenia is the co-founder and CEO of Replika, an AI chatbot designed to offer emotional companionship and support. She launched Replika to help people process grief and connect through AI-driven conversation.

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, May 15, 2025. It never gets old.

• 0:04Jordi Hays?

  It never gets old.

• 0:05John Coogan?

  From the temple of technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  We're a little bit brighter today. We're warming things up.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Look at us.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  More welcoming to the, to the guests, more welcoming to the fans, more welcoming to the viewers. We got a great show for you today, folks. Let's pull up the graphic to show you who's coming on. We got Delian from Founders Fund, Alex from WorldCoin, Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital, Jason Fried from 37Signals and Eugenia from Replica.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Quite the eclectic group.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we really put together.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  Not the five people you would normally see on a single show.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Crypto in there, there's some venture capital in there, there's some AI in there. There's some, 37Signals is just like a legendary tech company, but has built outside of the venture capital world, going back to back with the venture capitalist.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Kind of sworn enemies in some ways.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Very true, very true.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  It should be fun.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to ask Jason, what do you love about the current state of startups?

• 1:00John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if he'll have an answer.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  But I'm sure.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  I mean, we were talking about this earlier, just this idea of like, you know, there are startups out there right now. Everyone knows that they're good businesses, but they shouldn't raise venture capital. He's kind of the king of the company that didn't need to raise venture capital. And I feel like that message needs to be out there for entrepreneurs, not for VCs, because they're going to earn their fees no matter what, even if they pump it into a company that.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, they need to deploy.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they should, and they should avoid backing companies that don't need venture capital and just stuffing the goose like it's foie gras.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  But.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see a scaled platform VC, you know, make Basecamp an offer they can't refuse and then invest $500 million into the company. And then try to IPO it.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  It just becomes the most, uh, most.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Overcapitalized company of all time.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  SoftBank comes in, puts in two billion.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  There's always a number, you know, they've been offered a bunch over the years and, and always turned it down, but everybody's got a number.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  For, for 37Signals, it's not a matter of the numbers, it's the matter of there needs to be a car above the Aston Martin Valkyrie. So as long as they, as long as the founders can afford Valkyries, they don't need to do the deal.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  There's no incentive.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  But if some, if Aston Martin were to drop a car, maybe at the $300 million mark. All of a sudden, it's conversation.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  It would definitely start a conversation.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  It would definitely start a conversation. Anyway, we have an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal from Warren Buffett. He has.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in many ways, it's our exclusive now. We have the only copy of this newspaper.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  We do, we do. It's not breaking news until it's on TBPN. That's what we like to say.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  This edition of the Journal is almost like an NFT. They're only making.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  They're only making one of this exact physical copy.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Anyway, Warren Buffett has given an exclusive interview to the Wall Street Journal, and I thought it was just a fantastic, the way that they quoted him was particularly interesting. So basically, they're trying to dive into why did Warren Buffett retire? Why did he hand the reins to Greg Abel? The answer should be kind of obvious, but Buffett is revealing that it was because of his age. He's starting to feel old for the first time. And so he's 94, and he gave the top job to Greg Abel. And he says, in recent years, Buffett has finally observed how much energy his appointed successor brought to each working day, and how he had his own days had slowed. The two men were operating at different speeds, increasingly slow. I see you over the.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  I was hovering over the golden retriever mode.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  But I'm not going to hit it.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  There was no magic moment. Buffett, now 94, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, how do you know when, how do you know the day when you become old? Berkshire shareholders and onlookers have long wondered how anyone could replace Buffett. For decades, a towering figure in American business and finance, but as he passed his 90th birthday, Buffett began to experience some people, something most people come to accept much earlier in life, his age.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  And this quote really stood out. He says, "I didn't really start getting old for some strange reason until I was about 90," he said by phone from his office in Omaha. He's not using Zoom, to be clear here, but when you start getting old, it does become. It's irreversible.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Use of the M dash, which has been controversial because chat GPT loves to throw an M dash around.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  But he was on the phone.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he prompted this response.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe they were talking to 11 laps.

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  Verbally said, M dash, it's irreversible.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  No, but the M dash is interesting here because they're quoting him so directly, it would have been very easy for them to rewrite that quote as, but when you start getting old, it's irreversible, right? Just take out the little misstep in the sentence. But they didn't do that. They quoted him directly and they said, but when you start to get, when you start getting old, it does become, it's irreversible. And so they're recreating exactly what happened on that phone call. And I thought it was, it was almost like an emotional moment because it's,

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  It's, it's, it's the quote, he's, he's saying that he's aging, but the quote is so direct, it's showing that he's aging.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  So that was very interesting.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  They give some more context here. He began to lose his balance occasionally and sometimes had trouble recalling a person's name. Suddenly the newspapers he read looked like they were printed with too little ink.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  Brutal. In the past year, those.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  Sad, but it's also natural.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  I mean, he's 94.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  He's been on a generational run. On May 3rd, at the Berkshire Annual Meeting, Buffett stunned in the investing world when he revealed in the final minutes of his question and answer session, his plan to step down as CEO in December and make way for Abel.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Those filling the arena in Omaha fell silent as Buffett spoke.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Abel, who's in his 60s.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Which means that he.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  62.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  Could potentially go on a three decade run just to get where Buffett is today.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so there's a whole bunch of backstory that we've already covered here, but he says, the difference in energy level and just how much he could accomplish in a 10 hour day compared to what he could accomplish in a 10 hour day. Compared to what I could accomplish in a 10 hour day, the difference became more and more dramatic. So Buffett's just seeing that Abel is more capable of running the business for these long days. He was just so much more effective at getting things done, making changes in management where they were needed, helping people that needed help someplace, but just all kinds of ways. It was unfair really not to put Greg in the job. The more years that Berkshire gets out of Greg, the better.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this wasn't fully priced in. You saw this in the market. The stock dropped. A lot of people said, why weren't people expecting this, right? He's 94. And overall, I think the execution on the news was smooth, right? He didn't say, I'm stepping down on Monday. This is clearly, you know, I imagine he would want to keep going, but he understands that it's the best for the shareholders, which he has devoted his entire life to.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Well, if Greg Abel wants to cut those 10-hour days to just eight-hour days, he should get on Ramp, save time and money. You gonna play the Ramp song?

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  Keep doing the read.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com and start saving time and money.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Ramp for sponsoring the show.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, Brian Chesky is in the news with Airbnb. Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode. He announced Airbnb 2.0 and did a piece with Stephen Levy in Wired, kind of breaking it all down. And Ben Thompson dropped a great analysis. And so can we play the clip of Brian Chesky giving his keynote address? Brian Chesky last year came out with kind of the inspiration for founder mode, which Paul Graham catalyzed into an essay. But Brian Chesky really said that if you're running a company, even if you're not a product company that's releasing a new iPhone every year, you should drive your software company to annual releases and start thinking in annual cycles. We've seen Flexport pick that up. We saw Figma do that.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  And he did that to sabotage upstarts that want to compete with Airbnb by saying, hey, just ship once a year.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Just ship once a year instead of every week.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  Don't ship weekly. Don't ship daily. Just get on my program.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  This is good. Yeah.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  No, it's good. It's good. He's an absolute dog.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's hear from him about his plan for Airbnb 2.0.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  What we're building is much more than a travel app. It's a global community in the real world where you can travel anywhere, live anywhere, and belong anywhere.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  This is what we're building and to think it all started with an air bed.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Pretty good presentation style. It's a little slow for my taste. I prefer him when he's off script and just riffing and high energy. But I get that the audience is different.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  Riffing, high energy?

• 8:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Plenty of allegations.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  Plenty of allegations, which we won't discuss.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  But I think he's, I think he's, uh, you know, clearly presenting, I mean, it's a big moment, right? He's transforming Airbnb into something new and it's risky. And so he needs to send the message to the investing community. It's a public company. He needs to send the message that he's a steady hand on the tiller through this, uh, you know, new version.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And he's just very clearly a student of Steve Jobs. Like this feels like an Apple keynote from 15 years ago.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  And that's okay. It's not the most original, but it, it, it.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  It's an effective communication style.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  It's effective and it comes off as, as, uh, as serious of a company as they are.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, so the Wired piece starts, uh, by telling anecdote about Brian Chesky. Says the reinvention of Airbnb started with the coup of at OpenAI. On November 17th, 2023, the board of OpenAI fired seat company CEO Sam Altman. His friend Chesky left into action, publicly defending his pal on X, getting on the phone with Microsoft CEO and throwing himself into the thick of Altman's battle to retake OpenAI.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  Uh, five days later, Altman prevailed and Chesky, "I was so jacked up," he says, "turning his buzzing mind to his own company, Airbnb." Thanksgiving weekend was beginning. Uh, the Chesky extended family had already held their Turkey get together a week earlier. Interesting. He celebrates it early. Uh, and the Airbnb CEO had no holiday plan.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  Did it give any context there?

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  He was just like, I want to be grinding while my enemies are, are, you know, enjoying their turkey dinner?

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Is this like some contrarian alpha that we're finding right now? Just have Thanksgiving a week early? So he has no holiday plans. So everyone else is off, so he can just work, I guess.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  I mean, I guess, you know, it isn't Thursday. And so if you just have Thanksgiving on the Saturday previously.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  The alternative is that Airbnb gets so hectic around holidays.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  True, true, true.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  He wants to just be very online.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  In the office.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's like, it's like Black Friday, or, you know, a lot of D to C entrepreneurs are working over Black Fridays, every Monday. The holiday rush is certainly busy at most consumer companies, anything that's being gifted. So, yeah, maybe he's just learned that he's got to be online then. Anyway, he completely, he was completely alone in his sprawling San Francisco apartment, except for Sophie, his golden retriever. Let's hear for golden retriever mode. I love golden retrievers. We saw some at the JetSuite X terminal in Oakland.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  A couple.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  A couple. Beautiful dogs. Look at that dog.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  John was basically having a full on conversation with these two golden retrievers, and the owners were not having it.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  They're like, leave us alone.

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing?

• 11:31John Coogan?

  I feel like if you bring dogs to the airport, it's open season.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  People can pet your dog if you're in a public place like that. Anyway, still wired out of his mind from the cathartic corporate rescue, Chesky began to write. He wanted to bust the company he'd co-founded out of its pigeonhole of short-term home rentals. Amazon, he was fond of pointing out, was first an online bookstore before it became the everything store. Chesky had long believed that Airbnb should expand in a similar way. So what is Airbnb's market cap right now? Can you look that up?

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  So this is what's really interesting. So they are an $84 billion company right now, but they are down across the lifetime of the company.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, they've kind of been, I mean, there was the COVID up and down.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  They're all time, they're down 1.6%. So if you bought Airbnb shares five years ago, you would be.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  This is the story of Snapchat. This is the story of a lot of the non-hyper scaler tech companies that got out and they're fantastic companies. I mean, nothing to, you know, be upset about if you're running an $85 billion company, but you got, you, growth is addictive and growth is what everyone wants. And if you're not growing, you're stagnant and.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  As a former bodybuilder, this is like him sitting at, you know, 255.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, benching four plates. For reps.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  But not able to break that, you know, ceiling.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Never get the, the.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  But the chart looks like a kangaroo.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  It does.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  It just looks like a kangaroo. Up and down, up and down, up and down. Never really built massive momentum.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, and not, not compounding anymore in the way you want. So he needs to find a second act.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  And so Chesky had long believed that Airbnb should expand in a similar way, but things kept getting in the way, dealing with safety issues, fighting regulation, coping with the existential crisis of a global pandemic. The company was in danger of being tagged with the word that ambitious entrepreneurs dread like the plague, mature. Now Chesky was emboldened to lay out his vision. Home rentals are simply a service. Why, so why stop there? Airbnb could be the platform for booking all sorts of services while other apps cover specific sectors, food delivery, home maintenance, car rides. Chesky figured that Airbnb's experience in attractively displaying homes, vetting hosts and responding to crises could make it more trustworthy than competitors and therefore the go to option for virtually anything.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  In a frantic typing spree at the dining table, dining room table, on the couch, the bed, and at times his office, Chesky specked out what, how he would redesign the Airbnb app. Its users now at 2 billion. Wow, that's a lot of users. I had no idea. Would open up the app not only at vacation time, but whenever they needed to find a portrait photographer, a personal trainer, or someone to cook their meals. Chesky reasoned that Airbnb would need to significantly strengthen its identity verification. He even thought he could get people to use the app as a credential, something he's as respected as a government issued ID. If he could transform Airbnb into a storefront for real world services.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing because I feel like seed stage founders go through this type of brainstorm.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  In a very equally frantic way.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  But usually they don't have an $85 billion company yet. Usually it's more like they're thinking through their, you know, fundraising pitch deck. And they're like, oh, we could do this. We could do that. We could do this.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  He actually now has earned the right to think at this scale.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  Right. Being already, you know, 2 billion users.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  You know. Global company, I think he's in a great position to think a lot bigger.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, so let's go over to the Ben Thompson analysis and see what he has to say and his analysis, because there's some good, there's some good stuff, there's some green shoots, but there's some, obviously, some economic issues that Brian will have to work through if he really wants to pull this off. So Ben Thompson is reviewing the overview of what Chesky is pitching and says. It's a beautiful vision that unsurprisingly is a lot like Airbnb itself. The problem is that I'm not sure that it's a compliment. While Chesky romanticizes Airbnb's founding story and the idea of making friends with strangers anywhere in the world, the reality of Airbnb is often much different. Professionalized hosts you never see giving you codes to nondescript condos or houses

• 15:37John Coogan?

  with endless rules and fees, all governed by fake courtesy and the fear of a bad review. More broadly, setting up Airbnb as a counter to everything that has allegedly gone wrong with tech is an interesting choice when Airbnb is arguably more emblematic of tech's recent impact than any other company. On one hand, Airbnb has created new markets that didn't exist previously, transforming real estate from static assets to much more dynamic ones, and providing a dizzying array of new choices to travelers. On the other hand, the cost of the former has been the transformation of residential neighborhoods into awkward hotel districts, and the latter has entangled, has entailed creating a massive market and making everything into a transaction. Those marketplace dynamics govern everything. Airbnb hosts have a fixed asset that needs to maximize utilization to earn money.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  That means that they are beholden to a service that brings huge amounts of demand consistently, minimizing the number of vacant nights. Travelers, for their part, want something other than a hotel, for whatever reason, families with kids, for example, but still want a mechanism to establish trust. Airbnb succeeds by bringing these parties together at scale. Or to put it another way, the route to connecting real people with real assets necessarily first entails atomizing both sides of the market such that only Airbnb can bring them together. Sure, real people in real houses is different than looking at a screen, but it's arguably less enduring and meaningful precisely because of how impersonal and fleeting the transaction is. And so, the dynamics of Airbnb, this is kind of the key question, is can Airbnb move into other services? And there's a big question about disintermediation here.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  And so, the, the interesting thing here, yeah, Jordy.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  The disintermediation issue I don't think is that significant.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Really?

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  And the reason, the reason for this is that experiences... At least in a travel setting or the kind of things, how many times a year are you going to get, you know, go rafting in Mexico, right? You're going to go once, you're going to go once, call it every few years when you go to vacation in Mexico, right? You're not like building some intense relationship with the service provider so that you're going to say at some point, hey, I know we're both paying a bunch of fees. Why don't we go around? The difference is one of the services that they're offering through the new app is massages.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Personal training.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  Personal training. These are, these are things where you see this person on a frequent basis. You develop a, you know, some type of friendship and ultimately there's going to be a conversation at some point where the service provider says.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Paying 15%.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And that's why a lot of the marketplaces that have operated in these spaces like dog walking are much more, much closer to lead generation services in that the company, you know, the, the platform over time really struggles to retain its top customers and top talent or, or top providers.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Yep. Yep. I mean, I think the good take is this idea of like Airbnb 1.0 was let's disaggregate Craigslist into a bunch of different software companies. But now Airbnb is saying like, let's re-aggregate it. And there are a lot, and there are a lot of long tail services that are just one-off things. Like you only get your house painted every once in a while. You only need, you know, a specific type of gardener to go look for a specific plant every once in a while. There's specific thing, tree trimming might not be something where you have someone on a monthly retainer and you can have that relationship. But for something like dog walking, it's going to be every day or every week. Pretty quickly, there's going to be, there's going to be risk there. And so Ben Thompson continues saying, consider experiences, which Airbnb already tried to get off the ground eight years ago. I didn't

• 19:05John Coogan?

  realize it was so long ago, but it made sense as like a compliment. You're, you know, On a trip with a bunch of friends and you want to add river rafting in Mexico, which I think was what your example was, which I don't even know if there's that much river rafting in Mexico.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure there is, John.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Somewhere.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  You want to bet?

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  If I'm right, you have to go river rafting in Mexico. Tonight.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, tonight. In the presentation, Chesky derides traditional tourist traps like sightseeing buses or famous landmarks, and promises that bespoke tours or classes from locals will be much more meaningful. The problem is that bespoke means marginal costs, which are only manageable with very high prices. Very high prices, however, much mean much lower demand. Thus, what you actually, what you actually get, end up getting are cookie cutter experiences that can be delivered with relatively low marginal costs, which are exactly the experiences Chesky derides. Notice that this, that this is in fact exactly what happened with the traditional Airbnb rental. While there are incredible houses that you can rent for very high prices, the bog standard Airbnb experience is depersonalized and automated to the greatest extent possible.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  At the same time, it is precisely because real estate is a fixed cost that hosts are motivated to make it all work. Experience providers, on the other hand, don't have, either don't have fixed costs and thus lack the necessary, the necessary motivation to make scaled experiences work.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  The other, the other thing here that I think is interesting to note, you know, the reason that Airbnb, or one reason it's been so successful is you can have a bunch of random strangers staying in a property that you own all year long.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  And the property will generally still appreciate, right? There's going to be wear and tear on the house.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  The reason that Turo and other platforms haven't had the same potential scale, right? They're big companies, is because you're taking an asset as, if you're on the asset side, and that's a depreciating asset, you're letting 100 strangers drive your car for a year. That, that, that asset is going to drop tremendously in value. And so can you kind of recapture that through revenue? Yes, but you know, it oftentimes isn't as good of a trade as just having somebody stay in an old home or vacation home that you're only using a few times a year.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think like 90% of the Turo economy is built on podcasters filming stunt vibreals and marketing stunts, basically.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  That, that's.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  And fake Instagram.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the gurus, the gurus.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  The guru market is massive.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  The guru, I wonder what percentage of.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  I actually think Turo is doing pretty well. And I think the tour experience for me, I flew to New Mexico for a birthday party and, and you know, there was an F-150 waiting for me in the parking lot. It was great. It was much easier than going to the rental car counter and getting some, you know, some, some subcompact or something like that. So, let's see, from the Wired profile that we were covering earlier, Chesky explains that historically people used Airbnb only once or twice a year, so its design had to be exceptionally simple. Now the company is retooling for more frequent access. Open the app and you see a trio of icons that act as gateways to the expanded functions eventually. Chesky says Airbnb will offer hundreds of services, perhaps as far ranging as plumbing, cleaning, car

• 22:12John Coogan?

  repair, guitar lessons, and tutoring, then take its 15% fee. So, I mean, even if that does work out as lead gen, there's probably a business there. The question is just, is that the business that produces an incremental $85 billion in market cap, right? Like, could they, could they build?

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  Double the company.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  A front end to plumbing, cleaning, repair, kind of an Angie's List style business? I don't know what Angie's List trades for. Could they take that market? Maybe. But is that an incremental $5 billion in market cap? $10 billion in market cap?

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Thumbtack is another comp here. They'd be entering that space. I don't, trying to, Thumbtack is private. Last round was done at 3.2 billion.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  And so it's hard to say.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  Hard to move the needle at an $85 billion market cap for Airbnb. The fact that end users only use Airbnb once or twice a year is precisely what makes the entire service work. Again, Airbnb matches up hosts who need their properties occupied as often as possible with travelers who only need a property once or twice a year. Solving that mismatch is the foundation of the entire business and it's well worth Airbnb's fee. The need fundamentally changes when it comes to day-to-day life in your hometown. Yes, users need help in finding service providers and yes, service providers need help in finding customers, but the goal... For both, however, is to establish long-term relationships. Once you have a hairdresser, you want to visit the same hairdresser repeatedly, not find a new one every time. And by extension, neither you nor the hairdresser has any interest in,

• 23:39John Coogan?

  has any interest in including Airbnb in every transaction forevermore. In other words, what Airbnb is proposing may end up being valuable, but it will be very hard for Airbnb to capture that value in a meaningful way. So yeah, maybe there's a lead gen component and then it does drop to more of a payment processor because that 5% transaction fee, you might stay on the Airbnb platform because of the reputation and, and, and building up your profile there. But you're probably going to be closer to credit card processing fees than the current Airbnb fee. Again, contrast.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the, the challenge here is there are so many vertical SaaS or, or SaaS plus marketplace businesses for all of these subcategories. Right? So Airbnb is competing with companies that are heavily funded, that can afford to build really specialized tools for the service providers. Right? So there's vertical SaaS if you're running a barber shop. And like, I think that there's a billion dollar company in that space.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Right? I don't know if, if that market could support a $10 billion company, but it can support a billion dollar company that, that barbers really love and want to be on. Right? So again.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Uh, well, uh, Ben Thompson goes over to Paul Graham talking about Founder Mode. The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that, that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could optimistically be summarized as hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he decided, so he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. You identified that correctly. Uh, so far it seems to be working. Airbnb's free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley. And so Ben Thompson says, I think there is a lot of truth to the idea that the most innovative companies are best understood as mechanisms to manifest a founder's vision and that founders

• 25:31John Coogan?

  can err by giving up too much control and not getting deep into every aspect of the company. You certainly get a sense for Chesky's desire to control every aspect of the product, both in his presentation in that Wired profile and in another profile in the Wall Street Journal where Chesky explicitly invokes Jobs.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  So he says, "When I asked him for names that personify founder mode, the first he mentioned were Steve Jobs and Walt Disney. I don't want to ever put myself on the same level," he said. "I'm more like a disciple. I'm more like a painter who studies Michelangelo. I'm not ever saying I'm going to be Michelangelo, but I believe in that school of thought." Smart. He goes on to say that he admires Jobs and Disney as creatives who sat at the intersection of art and technology.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  No way.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  That's the meme.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  That's a huge meme.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  That's the meme. I've listened. We, in many ways, create this show at the intersection of art and technology. And that he doesn't identify as an entrepreneur or a businessperson. "I think of myself as a designer," he says. "I'm a designer who has been afforded one of the biggest canvases in the world."

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. To that end, Chesky spent a lot of time focused on app details, like the icons and the animation, and everything looks great. The problem, however, is that Jobs was creating products and Disney was creating experiences. In both cases, the attention to detail was critical to how many people wanted to buy iPhones or visit Disney World. Chesky, on the other hand, has created a marketplace, and the success or failure of marketplaces is not governed by the details of icons or the layouts of apps, but rather by how much blunt, how much more blunt instruments like incentive structures and take rates. Yeah, it's very, very interesting. There was one criticism of the-

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Spicy from Ben. A little spice.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  A little spice, yeah.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  A little spice.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was some, I saw some like, kind of, negative feedback on X to the Airbnb launch. They were quote tweeting the video and they were saying that like, they should have used more B-roll and made this more human. Instead, they're showing us a lot of UI. And I just think about the Airbnb UI as being like, fees and charts and-

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the beauty of Airbnb is that in a- Simple way you can get access to incredible spaces and experiences.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's what's.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  And you don't want to be thinking every time I'm in the Airbnb app.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  It's money, it's cost, it's headache. I'm there because there's a problem, right? And so that they actually need to minimize that and focus on the actual experience for sure.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  This doesn't look anything like what the pictures, the pictures you had.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Which has created, obviously, an opportunity for Wander.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  So, uh, sponsor of the show, by the way. So Ben closes it out by saying that there, these are the dynamics that undergird my skepticism of Airbnb's new offerings. The impression I get from the presentation and profiles is that Chesky seems to think that the first version of experiences failed because the app wasn't good enough. I think it failed because the economics don't work. There was, of course, similar skepticism about Airbnb's core offering from the beginning. It's one thing to look backwards and describe the arbitrage opportunity that was available in short term rentals. And another to have understood that opportunity when Chesky rented out that first airbed in 2007. What a fantastic story. Moreover, one way to think about the impact of AI is that it will create the conditions for massive market expansion in real world experiences and services. That can be done by, that can't be done by computers.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  It's plausible that Airbnb can leverage its huge user base, which is massive, two billion, remember? Into riding a wave that may now be forming. So that's, that's kind of the bull case that he's laying out there.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Everybody becomes post economic after ASI. And everybody just does Airbnb experiences all day long.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  And a personal trainer, maybe, or just somebody to hang out with.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  You know, I think in many ways Airbnb is safe from some amount of disruption to the core business, which is a, a hyper scaled. You know, vacation rental platform. But at the same time, uh, you know, it's hard to undersee where, you know, at, once they're at two billion users, right? Where's the growth going to come from?

• 29:22John Coogan?

  That's tough.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Especially when you have, you know, new providers like Wander, which are coming in and. Potentially, you know, and we're seeing this already, just eating away at some of the highest value users.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also, I mean, just for, just for a comp, Hilton Hotels is a $60 billion company. So it's like, even if they were

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Marriott is like 77 billion.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Marriott, yeah. So even, yeah, 75 today, 74 today. So even if they were to go build like a whole hotel chain and enter that market, like again, that's still not a 10x, that's still not putting them in like the trillion dollar conversation of like hyperscale, which is like probably where you want to go.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  He wants to be in that conversation.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  I think so. That, that separates the Michelangelos from the, from merely the disciples. But I mean, it's been, been a fantastic run. It's fantastic.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is, is, is an interesting dynamic. Do you want to own Marriott at 77 billion?

• 30:20John Coogan?

  For Airbnb?

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  CEO who I can't

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Yep, I agree.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  Name versus Airbnb at just slightly above it.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  He's going to try something. He's going to try a couple of things, you know? He's going to be doing a different release in a year and maybe there's an entirely new idea.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Think if he did the Chesky method, a bodybuilding course, he could probably add a hundred million to the, to the bottom line.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  100%.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Just pure, you know, even better margins than, than software.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  He's still looking extremely strong.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  You know, there's like those old photos of him as a bodybuilder, but he's still looking jacked.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Still got it.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  Still got it.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  At the same time, so Ben Thompson closes with, "At the same time, I can't help but wonder if many of the frustrations that Chesky chalked up to management mode, manager mode, are in fact for him personally downstream from building a service where one can only guide the outcomes you want, not dictate them. The fact that the romantic story he tells about what Airbnb symbolizes doesn't seem to match up with the reality of what Airbnb is, may itself be an analogy for Chesky's desire for control in arenas where he has very little." Interesting. So yeah, I mean, you're building a marketplace, there's only so much control you have, as opposed to building a product where you can say, "I'm going to go build a virtual reality headset now or an Apple Watch and it's going to look like this and I'm going to, you know, mold the, the screen and make all these products."

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  If he really just wanted to do product design, what's the, the classic, you know, founder has an exit and then builds an app that allows you to meet friends in your area?

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, "I just want to build an app to meet friends." And then you're just like, "No, you're, you're building a dating app." Like, that's who's going to use this.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, understanding like the base reality of

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  But I have like multiple

• 32:00John Coogan?

  economic forces.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  Multiple buddies who had great exits and then built like that app and then eventually realized what they were building and

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  And had to

• 32:06John Coogan?

  It's the same thing with the personal CRM. I want a personal CRM. It's like, no, you just want a CRM. Like if you're thinking about your personal relationships in that transactional of a way, you should just think of it as business associates that you're pitching and just use an actual

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Salesforce.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, just use a real CRM.

• 32:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, uh, some news in the chip world. The US has scrapped the AI diffusion rule in a revamp of Biden era chip curbs. This was tearing up the internet. We were trying to get Dylan Patel on a little bit earlier. He's booked in a week or two. He's traveling a lot. We'll get him on to break it down. There's a few other people. Jordan Schneider over at China Talk is on vacation. Disaster. Uh, so there aren't as many people to comment on this as I was hoping, but, uh, fortunately the Wall Street Journal has a write up. And so Microsoft and Oracle have spoken out against the rule that again, the, uh, the, the AI diffusion rule, uh, the US Department of Commerce said that it's rescinding the diffusion rule on the grounds that it would have stifled

• 33:06John Coogan?

  American innovation, saddled companies with onerous regulations and undermined diplomatic relations with a dozen countries, dozens of countries. Nvidia said that it welcomed the Trump administration's leadership and new direction in AI policy. With the diffusion rule revoked, America will have a once in a generation opportunity to lead the next industrial revolution and create high paying US jobs, build new US supplied infrastructure and alleviate the trade deficit. A company spokesperson told the, told the Wall Street Journal.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Tech companies, including Microsoft and Oracle, had spoken out against the rule, which imposed caps on how many chips countries such as India and Switzerland can buy, saying the move would limit US firms' opportunities abroad without doing much to hamper China, the main target of the Titan controls. It was a little wild that we were Limiting places like India, Switzerland, which we have strong relationships with.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  I mean, this all started with like the Singapore loophole and the chips going to Malaysia. And it really seems like, you know, this is the sledgehammer versus the scalpel, right? Everyone's okay with the scalpel. People don't like sledgehammers.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Jeffrey Kessler, who's the US Secretary, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, says the Trump administration will pursue a bold, inclusive strategy to American AI technology with trusted foreign countries around the world while keeping the technology out of the hands of our adversaries. So anyways.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Jensen is over in, we gotta pull this video up.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  They made.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  I mean, we're talking about this with Aaron Gin about how it's, it's nice to think that, oh, if we don't sell Nvidia chips to, what was the company that you, or what was the country that you, India or Switzerland, like, oh yeah, like America will just have control and they'll have to use OpenAI and ChatGPT remotely via API. And it's like, no, actually they will just buy Huawei Ascend chips and run DeepSeek and Manus on top of it. Like they're, like they're going to want to run their own hardware. They want their AI super factories.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it funny how the name Manus?

• 35:05John Coogan?

  Manus is a wild name.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  It makes you sound like, like you're from Texas.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  It's so Texas. Manus. Manus.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  Manus.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's pull up the video if we have a second.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  We don't run Manus on our.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  We don't take kindly to Manus in these parts.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  We don't take kindly to Manus.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  We only like llama.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  So, so Jensen has been in the UAE, I think Abu Dhabi.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  And they built what looks to be.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Wow. Oh, it's elevating? This is awesome.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  It's not a hologram, is it?

• 35:36John Coogan?

  This looks like a hologram.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  Either way, it's awesome.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  What a squad, too.

• 35:51John Coogan?

  Insane showmanship.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  Another hundred billion to Jensen and he is, we gotta pull this up all.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's been on absolute tear. So the announcement also took aim at Chinese tech giant Huawei, stating that using Huawei Ascend chips anywhere in the world violates US export controls, of course, because Huawei Ascend chips are potentially built on top of American-owned IP in the lithography stack and therefore can be subject to US export controls. The Bureau of Industry and Security Commerce Department Agency said it will warn the public about potential consequences of allowing American chips to be used for Chinese AI models. Rick Su noted that the Chinese company's advanced AI chips are only sold locally and that demand for them far outweighs supply. So Huawei should be able to continue doing business there with or without any changes in the export controls. Of course, China has

• 36:44John Coogan?

  immense demand for large GPU clusters. They want to train the next version of DeepSeek. They think that DeepSeek is probably going to move entirely to the next training run to Huawei Ascend chips. And although the Huawei Ascend rack-mounted unit is not directly competitive with, I mean, is directly competitive, but it's not, it's not at power-dollar parity with Nvidia's DGX.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, on efficiency. It can train the models. It's just more expensive, but China has a lot of cheap power and is willing to invest. And so, yeah, it might cost 30% more to train a massive model, but we're not talking about orders of magnitude and everything in AI is defined by orders of magnitude.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  Anyway, do you have another?

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, I have another screenshot to pull up, which is just a funny chart to look at because you can see the exact moment that Jensen really started cooking.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  So this is the largest company end of May, which we've been tracking.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Neck and neck.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  And Microsoft was at some, it's hard for me to see, but I think about 80%.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. And this is just for the end of May. So.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  We're halfway through May. Everyone's.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  So last Monday.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft was sitting at over 80% and then Jensen said. One second. So right now.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  Jevon's paradox undefeated. There will never be enough venture capital.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you said they're gonna study, they're gonna put Jevon's paradox into preschool curriculum.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  After this.

• 38:09Jordi Hays?

  Really getting people to understand.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  So bearish on Nvidia. It's like, look at what happened.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  The more dinosaur toys you get, as dinosaur toys get cheaper, you're gonna want more.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  You will.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  And you're gonna buy more.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  That's true. It violates traditional laws of supply and demand, but.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so right now Nvidia is sitting at 3.3 trillion dollar market cap. Tiger actually just rotated out of ARM.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, they, they, yeah, they rotated out completely and increased their position in Nvidia.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 38:41Jordi Hays?

  When Tiger's long, sometimes, sometimes they get it very right.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  We need a soundboard queue for Tiger. There we go.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Fantastic. The change is a big win for countries previously limited from buying chips, notably Saudi Arabia, United States, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Israel. Morningstar said the, it is also set to benefit US AI players like Nvidia, AMD and Intel, of course, because they'll be able to sell to more countries and we're already seeing that happen. For China chipmakers and AI companies, the changes are likely to have only a limited impact since they are already banned from accessing, from accessing US tech and equipment. The news comes as President Trump's, Trump tours the Middle East and a number of US tech companies announced AI deals in the region.

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  Only Intel could be down 30% in the last year during an AI super cycle.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  So brutal.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  Bet on the CPU, folks, instead of the GPU.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  Pick the wrong horse.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Generational miss. David Sacks is quoted.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  The right race, the wrong horse.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Right race, wrong horse.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  David Sacks says, "The diffusion rule literally restricted the diffusion and/or proliferation of American technology all over the world." David Sacks, Trump's AI and crypto czar, said at the US Saudi Investment Forum, adding that there is no risk with a friend like Saudi Arabia. There's friends. The original reason for this diffusion rule is that we have a policy of not wanting our advanced semiconductors to go to what are known as countries of concern. But that's not big of, as big of a problem now, especially when it's a global competition. Anyway, we should move on to Apple. They're getting in the Neuralink game. They're competing with Elon, going head to head, literally, putting brains, putting chips in your head.

• 40:17Jordi Hays?

  So they're working with a startup, Synchron, on a new brain-computer interface.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  I've never heard of this company before.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  To assist people with disabilities. And we'll just start going through here. So, "Apple is embracing the world of brain-computer interfaces, unveiling a new technology that one day could revolutionize how humans interact with their devices. The company is taking early steps to enable people to control their iPhones with neural signals captured by a new generation of brain implants."

• 40:41John Coogan?

  It's gonna be huge for people that use AirPods instead of wired headphones.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  I was joking earlier, there's this company, Believe, that's going viral on X.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  I haven't seen this.

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  For, you know, Luke Metro was doing this, right? He, basically tagging the account.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  Oh, this is the crypto thing?

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  And it, you know, all he had to do was just make a single post. It created a meme coin.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yes.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  That he's generating.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Walk me through this future. This is really white mirror stuff.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  And, and so there's a world in the future where somebody could just think and a meme coin would be generated based on a thought.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  And that would just be very American.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of the, a lot of the gambling apps are using haptic feedback to vibrate the phone when you win. Turn the flashlight on and off, really flash colors and sound all over to stimulate you while you're gambling. Imagine if they could stimulate your neurons directly.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Retention would go through the roof.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  I want haptics in my brain.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Haptics in your brain, just massaging your neurons, just releasing dopamine directly. As soon as you open the mobile game app, the pick three, the match three, isn't that what they call it?

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  So dark.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  I mean, the bulk, the bulk case here is, of course, that like Neuralink right now is an incredible technology for people who are paraplegic, right?

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  So the earliest adopters are people who are...

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  For these companies to focus on that.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Totally, because that's just such a more optimistic scenario. And, and then, and then, you know, over time, allow people to bring things in. I mean, they're talking about curing blindness, curing deafness. There's so many amazing, amazing potential uses of this technology. Like any technology can go good or bad. It's up to us how we use it. And so.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the interesting thing here is that Apple seems to be letting other companies do the hardcore R and D and go through the FDA process to actually get approval for these devices.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  But they've been doing that more because AirPods are now approved as a hearing aid. Because they have the same technology that enables noise cancelling, which is basically there's a microphone that's pointed outwards and then they play the opposite of that sound inwards. Are you familiar with how noise cancelling works?

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  So you're hearing both the outside world and then the opposite of the outside world. And so that creates the noise cancellation. That can also be used to amplify the outside world. And that's what happens when you have transparency mode on. But if you take transparency mode, which records the outside of the world and then plays it back over the speaker, if you take that to its kind of logical extreme, all of a sudden you have something that can amplify something, like just anything you're hearing to the point of actually helping someone who has a heart of hearing, which is very, very cool. So historically, humans have interacted with their computers mechanically using mice and keyboards. Smartphones introduce touch.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the humans.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Oh, I was gonna give it up for the keyboards and mice.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  And the keyboards, too. They don't get enough credit.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Peripherals are underrated, for sure.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Smartphones introduce touch, a behavioral input, but still an observable physical movement. A new capability means Apple devices won't need to see the user make specific movements. The devices can detect user intentions from decoded brain signals. Apple has worked on the new standard with Synchro, which makes a stent-like device that is implanted in a vein atop the brain's motor cortex. So I think this is less invasive than what Neuralink does. Neuralink, they actually have to drill a hole in your skull roughly the size of a quarter. And then the device fills in that hole.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  Just a quarter.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Fills in that hole that's left from the skull that's gone. And so, and then the electrodes are placed inside the brain. And then they place the skin flap back over and it charges wirelessly, which is a pretty crazy implementation. They needed to invent a robot just to do the surgery because it's so precise and no human hand can place the electrodes or the neurons appropriately. But this, I think, would be less invasive because it just goes into a vein. And so it's as easy as taking some blood, basically.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep. And the tinfoil hat enjoyers will appreciate that Synchro, DARPA, was in the Series A. So.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  That's gonna go over great on X.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  I'm sure people are gonna be really, really happy about that.

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  Alex Jones will be all over this.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Not the founder of Hollow.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  No, not the founder of Hollow.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  He's also named Alex.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Yes, the founder of Infowars.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna love that DARPA is funding, you know, brain computer interfaces in partnership with Apple.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  He's gonna be front of the line, front of the line.

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Famously loves technology, that guy.

• 45:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:21John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have Delian Asparouhov from Founders Fund and Varda coming in the studio next. Varda just released their third, or they just brought back the third capsule.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  Three for three.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  That three for three, they said on X, is this boring yet? Are you getting sick of us? Until Delian comes in, we'll do some ad reads. We'll talk about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  And their new feature generated assets is just wild.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go around and play around with it. It's just generatedassets.com.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  We are gonna take 10 different, basically you can create indexes with chat.

• 46:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  And then you can back test them so you can see how they performed against the market more broadly. So tomorrow, I'm gonna get like 10 or so different screenshots of different indexes that are interesting. But it's interesting, you can look at, for example, since we had Andreessen on yesterday, you can see, you can look at A16Z alumni companies, how they've performed in the public markets. And the results are astonishing. It actually makes me even more bullish on these sort of founder led public companies. So excited to get into that.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  Well, as we wait for Delian, let's talk about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  And when they say the standard, they're not joking. It actually, I think, I don't know how much of these figures are public, but if, if there's a tech company that you love in the private markets or in the public markets, they're probably already using Linear. So go check them out.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm texting Delian and we got him in the studio. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Delian?

• 47:11Delian Asparouhov?

  Sorry, I promise normally get it right on the dot.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  You're all good.

• 47:16Jordi Hays?

  What's up?

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Three for three.

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  Three for three.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  Announcing it here exclusively on TBPN. Tell us what happened with the capsule. No one knows. So you're hearing it here first.

• 47:27Delian Asparouhov?

  At 6:13 PM PST on Wednesday, you know, early evening, we executed a de-orbit burn, which, you know, happened sort of on the opposite side roughly of the globe from Australia. And we came in ripping through the atmosphere, 17,000 miles an hour. Capsule has used GPS all throughout, so we're tracking it. I actually got a good photo of me, my, you know, co-founder and our CTO and me holding a little baby, watching that GPS track, you know, sort of coming in. It's sometimes a little anticlimactic because, you know, unlike a rocket launch where you can kind of do the live stream, you watch it from the ground, move up, a re-entry capsule is like moving very, very fast, kind of hard to track, kind of hard to do a live stream. And literally the way that we call things out is just like,

• 48:12Delian Asparouhov?

  it's got this GPS thing and we know that the parachutes have opened successfully, only we just see that the GPS like vertical slows down.

• 48:21John Coogan?

  This is super bullish for the conspiracy theories. Like, oh, there's no live stream. Did it even go to space? Who knows? Maybe he's making it up.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  I just think you're doing it.

• 48:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Out into the desert, you know?

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  You need to create some type of way for Americans to bet on re-entry.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Ooh, yeah.

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  That is, that is just un-American. I mean, I know you're bringing it down in Australia, but it's frankly un-American that you're not letting us all, you know, place our, place our bets. But, um.

• 48:49Delian Asparouhov?

  The poly market was pushing me on, you know, you should figure out how to make more gambling in aerospace. And I was like, look, Ben, the easiest way is just like gamble on, you know, sort of mission outcomes. And so this is how we know we're not at peak gambling yet is there's not enough gambling on all these hyper-specific technical outcomes. People will gamble on like, you know, will Starship land? But I want it like down to like the individual, you know, sort of like, you know, meter of just like, is it going to take five seconds to land, six seconds to land? Like, is it going to come into this trajectory?

• 49:15John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, well, speaking of betting and, and.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Instead of P Doom, what's your P Dome? I want your take on the Golden Dome. What's the probability that we, America, gets a Golden Dome in the next few years? And we do have missile defense, right? Like missile defense is a thing. We're not domeless right now. But like, we're talking about just improving what we have, right? We're not flying blind here, hopefully.

• 49:42Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, let me give the, you know, sort of bull versus bear case.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 49:46Delian Asparouhov?

  This stuff is, you know, somewhat predicated on obviously what Israel has been able to show. And especially over the past, you know, sort of, you know, a couple of years, you know, especially countering some of the Iranian attacks that have happened. If you were to like, take the Israeli system and then extrapolate it to like, the scale of the United States, it just doesn't really work, right? They're a really small geography, very dense. You know, it is actually possible to set up basically like, you know, missile defense batteries across their entire border. If you were to do that across like, the entire United States, you know, sort of border around the continental US, and you extrapolate the cost of it, it's something on the order of like, a $10 trillion program.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Wow. And we're not fighting with Canada or Mexico or like, even like, even smaller like, states. Like, these are low-flying projectiles. They're just wildly different, right?

• 50:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, the threat vectors are also, yeah, totally different. You're looking at like, yeah, Russia, North Korea, Iran, et cetera. And so, that solution set, you know, sort of looks very different. And so, that's, you know, the premise of Golden Dome. And it's the first time that they've opened the Overton window on considering things that aren't just like, ground, air, or sea-based for the first time in the Golden Dome language. They talk about a lot of, you know, sort of space-based applications, in particular, space-based intercept. So the idea there is like, if Russia and North Korea basically launches a missile towards the United States, right now, we do have, like you said, we're not domeless. We do have some systems. They're basically scattered from like, you know, Guam to Hawaii to Alaska, et cetera. Basically, like, all of our furthest out areas, and for sure along the, you know, sort of border as well, but furthest out areas that are closer to those adversaries to take them

• 51:14Delian Asparouhov?

  out, you know, before they get anywhere close to the United States. The idea is now, you can just have a constellation of satellites that are orbiting above North Korea, Russia, et cetera, regularly. So you can take this stuff out before it even gets up into like, the upper end of its, you know, sort of trajectory. Now, that type of system is also not trivially, you know, sort of cheap. So here's, you know, my bull versus bear case. You're asking, is it, you know, sort of going to happen? We proposed a system like this in the early nineteen eighties, right? Star Wars, right? Yeah, Star Wars days, the, uh, you know, Space Development Initiative, I think it was called, or Space Defense Initiative. Um. SDI. They ran some early trade studies. It had a lot of enthusiasm in Congress, et cetera. And then ultimately it fell apart, partially because the like scale of the economics of it relative to the like, the, you know, sort of benefits, the defense, you know, sort of

• 51:58Delian Asparouhov?

  of the nation just didn't really, you know, entirely pencil out. And so the sort of bear case for, you know, sort of Golden Dome would be maybe we end up in that same world where we like start to run these analyses, we do these things, and then all we do is really just like buy a couple of traditional terrestrial basically missile, you know, defense battery systems that already exist and we make those sensors a little better, like the current, you know, uh, one is this thing called, you know, sort of THAAD is basically like the largest, you know, sort of, uh, system. Um, it actually doesn't have a particularly high hit rate of being able to take out the missiles on the way in. And so, you know, you right now, I think we have like forty THAAD missiles and I think they have like something like a twenty-five percent, you know, sort of hit rate. So it's like we can take out like ten ICBMs, Russia has like a thousand. And so, you know, we're like a little off on order of magnitude.

• 52:39Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, so maybe it's like make that one a little more accurate, et cetera. So that's sort of like, I would say the like maybe not default case, but that is like the downside case of like, you know, we announce this stuff, we talk about it. When it comes down to like the economics and actually implementing this, it becomes too tricky. Congress flips from, you know, sort of Republican to Democrat, you know, in the next election cycle. They don't want to give, you know, sort of President Trump a win, and so they decide to shut it down. The bull case is, okay, well, relative to the nineteen eighties, there's a lot of people that can actually do pretty near-term demonstrations of this, right? You know, obviously orbital rockets this year are launching and landing every single day. There's a lot of companies that, you know, are looking to pitch in on this that aren't just people that are going to throw out white papers, but are actually like very hardware-rich, right?

• 53:22Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, you know, there may be a lot of, um, over enthusiasm in the defense tech, you know, funding space and ecosystem. But like, look, you know, uh, we were talking about this earlier this week, like, look at what Venus Aerospace, you know, sort of just demonstrated, right? Like, while there is maybe over enthusiasm and, you know, lots of funding, at least people are translating into like real hardware demonstrations of like next generation technologies. And so if there's a set of companies that before Congress flips is actually able to go and do some real world demonstrations, show that this is practical capability, get some defense funding, you know, sort of flowing into actually operationalizing those initiatives that by the time it flips, there's already something that's sort of pseudo operational or very close. Now it becomes a little harder to justify. It's like, yeah, there's some political win if you're a Democrat to not give, you know, sort of Trump a win.

• 54:05Delian Asparouhov?

  But like, yeah, the defense budget has always been, you know, sort of very bipartisan as well. So that's my sort of like bull versus, you know, sort of bear. It's like, you know, for the first time in history, we can probably demonstrate this really quickly and we've got a two-year window and it's a, you know, sort of national priority. Bear is, uh, it's pretty easy for us to just, you know, sort of flip back to just doing what we, you know, have always done.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Uh, you mentioned Venus Aerospace. They put up a post yesterday. They said, today Venus Aerospace made history. We completed the first ever US flight of a rotating detonation rocket engine, proving runway-based, high-speed flight is possible. I don't really understand what a rotating detonation rocket engine is. Do you understand the applications of this? Is this defense tech or space tech? Is this commercial? Is this DOD program? Like, what, what is the story here with Venus?

• 54:52Delian Asparouhov?

  It's been a minute since that, you know, so I've met up with the Venus team, but the last time that I chatted with them, the intention of what they were building was to create these, you know, sort of space planes that would basically take off from a runway, get out of the atmosphere, cross across the globe and go land back on a runway. And so that was sort of a, you know, sort of commercial case. It'd obviously be, you know, sort of very expensive on a per seat, you know, basis. But there's obviously, you know, sort of plenty of people in the world that would pay significant in order to be able to like, you know, get from LA to Tokyo. But do that in like, you know, in theory, you could do that in under an hour, basically. Like, if you think about how quickly it takes you to orbit between those two, it's roughly 45 minutes.

• 55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like SpaceX point-to-point.

• 55:28Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, exactly. But using, you know, sort of traditional runways rather than having to build out, you know, all of the like SpaceX, basically like landing infrastructure, like, you know, their planes can actually take off and land on, you know, sort of normal, normal runways.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Delian Asparouhov?

  And so their engine definitely, you know, um, uh, you know, demonstration, you know, is a, the, obviously the very key first step of being able to, um, um, and then, you know, apologies at home today. So.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  Hey, welcome to the stream.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  We should just spend the next few minutes, just turn this into a kid's show.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  At least, at least one of our kids are probably watching at home.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Let's break it down. Uh, Batman or Superman?

• 56:04Jordi Hays?

  Dinosaurs.

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, T-Rex or Velociraptor?

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, fire trucks.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Fire trucks.

• 56:10Delian Asparouhov?

  Fire trucks. I like it. I like it.

• 56:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:13Delian Asparouhov?

  What about rockets though? Rockets versus space planes?

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  Ooh. Rockets?

• 56:16John Coogan?

  I think we ought to go to our child correspondent. Is it rockets or airplanes?

• 56:20Delian Asparouhov?

  Rockets or space planes? I think enthusiastic about both.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, my gosh. I can't. I can't wait to. I can't wait till he's co-hosting the show with with our children.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we could only get Delian for 15 minutes today. It'd be so much easier if you could just delegate this whole this whole call in thing to your son. Be fantastic.

• 56:38Delian Asparouhov?

  Be a much more entertaining guest. Okay, I know we didn't quite make it to the top of the hour, but maybe I'll, you know, go go take care of this bad.

• 56:43Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great. It's great having both you guys on.

• 56:45Delian Asparouhov?

  Great Delta V today.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Talk soon. Have fun, guys.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  See, that is pronatalism in action, in reality.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  He's not just threading about it.

• 56:58John Coogan?

  It's great. Well, let's tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com. My company's on it. Jordy's company's on it. Lots of companies are on it. Benchmark Series A.

• 57:11Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark Series A. Thank you to numeral.

• 57:12John Coogan?

  And let's also tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, let's do some timeline and then we will bring in our next guest. Nvidia, we talked about.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  Covered this already. This next post is great.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Bryce.

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  Bryce. That SBF built one of the most legendary private investment portfolios of all time tells you more about the business of venture than 1,000 podcasts on the subject ever will. Well, what about this podcast, Bryce? Because we're we're saying, we're saying what you're saying. He did. He did make some good bets.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Anthropic.

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  Can take that away from Cursor.

• 57:57John Coogan?

  Cursor and Anthropic very, very early.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  Even though David Tish.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show was also in the original Cursor round.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  And said that he didn't get it at that right price.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  Like 200K to 500 million dollars, which was the number circulating around. He said, there's no way. That that would math out.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Can you imagine if SBF has like secretly got like co-founder shares or something or like got like like an incubation type deal? So he did get that massive stake in 200K.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  Who knows?

• 58:23John Coogan?

  I don't know, but now someone else owns it, financial investor.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody was able to buy out that cursor position and I wouldn't be surprised if we had him on the show at one point.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  Future guest.

• 58:33John Coogan?

  Maybe it might have been in the audience. They might be listening right now.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  They're probably listening right now.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  From their yacht in the Amalfi Coast.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Stop that one bet.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Basically, I mean, it's enough, right?

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, we already covered the Airbnb news.

• 58:47Jordi Hays?

  We should cover the Brian Armstrong news.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happened here?

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Coinbase, basically cyber criminals bribed and recruited rogue overseas support agents to pull personal data on 1% of Coinbase Coinbase's MTUs. No password, private keys or funds were exposed. Prime accounts were untouched and Coinbase has committed to reimbursing users that were basically you had to be impacted by a social engineering attack. So people weren't getting support agents to move funds around, funds weren't stolen like that. But it would be, let's say, somebody gets your personal information, you get a random call and they say, hey.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  We were talking about this, how the spam around Coinbase was getting crazy, right? You'd get spam texts saying like, you know, click here to log in or something.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  No, it's truly, it's truly, it felt like it 100 acts like two months ago or something like that.

• 59:39John Coogan?

  It's a great business for these scammers, right? Like the scammers are, it's just whatever money they make is pure profit.

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder how much of those phone, social engineering phone calls now are happening with AI.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  It has to be a good percentage because.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  The spam calls I would get when I pick up were ridiculous, just recordings with like music on them. And it just didn't sound, it didn't sound anything like an actual call that you'd get ever.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the concern here is that this data is floating around now. And people can find out where big crypto holders live and find out what they look like. There's ID information, you know. As part of this, and so it's a huge risk if if somebody was on Coinbase and they had, you know, 10 Bitcoin. Now, somebody could go to their house and say, I would like those 10 Bitcoin.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  Yep, transferring to me. Very risky.

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  So it's super unfortunate, but the response is-

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Responded very well, like with the direct to face camera.

• 1:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the response is very interesting. They asked for a $20 million bounty. He's saying, we're not paying you the bounty, but we will give, we're willing to pay $20 million to anybody who gives us information leading to the arrest. And so what's possible-

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Lot of ransom?

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you haven't seen it.

• 1:00:53Jordi Hays?

  And so, so it sounds like a movie plot, but but what happens here is that there's probably multiple criminals involved in this. And so let's watch them turn on each other. Because somebody's like, well, if they're not paying the bounty to our criminal group, why don't I turn on the big boss?

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Get him in the clink.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Get the, you know.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  That's genius.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, some interesting game theory.

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  And good founder-led comms by Brian, putting up the the video, just, you know, not overproduced, just, you know, scalding stream of consciousness. Obviously, thought about what he was gonna say, but doesn't come off as as stiff or callous or not taking it seriously. So, so good job to him.

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the information is name, address, phone, email, masked social, so the last four digits only, masked, bank accounts, government IDs, account balance. So anyways, not great, but I think this is the best response they could have, given the circumstances. And again, this is just very rough if, you know, you're, this is somebody who lives in a random apartment somewhere, and suddenly they have to be thinking about, do I have to be worried about real life?

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  You know how you're gonna authenticate your bank account in the future? World.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  It's gonna scan your eyeball. You can't social engineer that. And we got Alex from WorldCoin in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Tools for Humanity, founder of Tools for Humanity, sorry. WorldCoin is one of the coins in the world, or there's a whole ontology of technology here. But thank you for joining. How are you doing?

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Good. Thank you for having me. I'm just at the Andreessen Horowitz LP Day.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Oh, cool. Yeah.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  You just got off, you just got offstage?

• 1:02:32Speaker 04

  I literally just got offstage. So almost was a little too late, but I'm, yeah, right now in Las Vegas. First time, actually, first time in Las Vegas. So I'm really excited.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Narrative violation. Somebody building in crypto that hasn't been to a crypto conference in Vegas.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  No, it's great to have you. We've been wanting to have you on the show for a while. Glad we made it happen. And at times nicely with your guys' entrance into the US market in a big way.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe you should kick us off with kind of like an overview of where the company is, where you started. I know there was an international component. Now you're in the US. There's different products. There's different ways to interact with like the overall ecosystem. Kind of give us the State of the Union on Tools for Humanity.

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. So maybe starting right, right from the beginning, it's like a little over five years ago now, five and a half years ago. Sam, Sam Altman from OpenAI and actually had a part of the initial idea of this. And we met, I was in AI before as well. I was in theoretical physics and deep learning. And so both of us believed that AI will continue to make a lot of progress and very likely we will see AGI within our lifetime. Which back then was not like a common thing to say. And, and of course, like, both of us believe that this is mostly going to be a tremendous force for good.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  And it's going to drastically accelerate science and technology, but also that we will need global scale infrastructure to kind of really make this a great outcome for everyone. And so we started a company together called Tools for Humanity. That really had that as a mission is like build global scale infrastructure to help with that. And, and then the actual kind of coming together of the company, we derived two main ideas. One was around the fact that as AI continues to make progress, we will need some form of proof of humanity as an internet scale. Otherwise, many of the things that we care about will start breaking down because, um, obviously like

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  as a society, we form our opinions on the internet, on our social networks, we meet each other on platforms like dating apps. We entertain each other with games that we play with each other through the internet and like.

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  The moment we have not only passed the Turing test, which I think we did in the last two years, meaning now we have AI systems that we can talk to and we cannot tell anymore just by talking to them that in fact is an AI, but also that we are now about to enter, of course, like strong agentic AI systems, real-time video generation, all these kinds of things. And so we will need a proof of human internet scale. Otherwise, social networks, many of the places where you meet online, etc., will start breaking down. And so this was idea number one. It's like, how could you build such a system?

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  And once you have built such a system, you can use that to launch a digital token by giving ownership in it to eventually every human. And as a result, you would create what will turn out to be the largest real human network on the internet. And so it was a very humble vision.

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  Quite. By Sam. And so we really, kind of, we took it very seriously. We thought about it for a long time. And back then really thought about how would you need to build such a proof of human? If you assume what we did, which is that AI will become increasingly better. And then many of the initial ideas you could have on how to build such a system, like, why don't we just use our online reputation? So like our accounts that we used in the past? We build some kind of reputation graph? Or what about if we just rely on government at any systems? Or what if we just use phone cameras to get some kind of signal?

• 1:06:27Speaker 04

  All of these, we realized pretty quickly, will either just break down as a result of AI becoming more, okay, just like more powerful and better, or it just doesn't have the properties that we think such a system will need. Which is, it needs to be global and it needs to be fully anonymous and privacy preserving, all of those things. And so. Well, back then, we realized we will likely have to build a physical hardware device that we have to distribute all of the world and at some point get almost anyone that uses the internet to verify with such a hardware device and that everything else will very likely break down. And that was like a very, a very, very crazy thing to do five years ago. So like, people mocked the company for a long time. And it, yeah, it was like

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  just a crazy thing to work on for quite a while. And so essentially-

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, just going deeper there, you guys went to market internationally first. I'm sure you had a lot of temptation to really focus in San Francisco early on, right? This is an area where there's an extreme density of people that understand this broader vision that you guys have. So I'm curious, like, thinking about, you know, the decisions that went into that go-to-market and then also giving our audience a sense of the scale of the operation, because I don't think people fully process just how large the operation is.

• 1:07:51Speaker 04

  So first to the, to the first part of the question, which is why did we not launch the United States much earlier? That had the simple reason that because Sam is a co-founder, everything we do has like a lot of visibility usually. And in the last administration, there was basically no regulatory clarity around how to behave as you build these crypto networks and kind of what are the things that are allowed, which are the things that are not allowed. And SEC, of course, like, had a posture of enforcement. And so, given the large visibility of the project, we just took everything always through a very cautious

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  lens and just decided that we will only enter the US once there is a clear path to regulatory clarity, which I think is now the case. And so now we're really excited to kind of make the service available. We launched two weeks ago in the US. In the US itself, it's still a meaning, kind of pretty small operation. It's going to take us a couple of months to really ramp this up. And just to give you an overall sense- We're now at twenty, twenty-five, twenty-six million users in total in our app, world app, which is essentially the initial client to make this network useful. But you have to think about that there's going to be many clients that will use this this network. But but still, and then we have twelve million people that actually are verified,

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  really all over the world, from South Korea, Japan, to Europe, to Latin America. And so the company is now around four or five hundred people, so total humanity. And it's a pretty, it's a pretty complicated thing to manage because you have everything from on-the-ground operations that are somewhat complicated. And a lot of things can go wrong to, of course, hardware manufacturing and ramp up to a lot of software. So it's, it's been quite a, quite a journey.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  What, what is your background? Have you, have you done crypto stuff before or hardware stuff before? Or managed huge like workforces before? Because you're doing a lot of stuff and I'm wondering like.

• 1:09:55Speaker 04

  No, I, I was, um, I was, I was, I was literally a theoretical physicist. So just, I, I used to sit at a desk all day and do math and write code. I, I did like, I did decent amount of software engineering, just because like already back then clusters got larger, but yeah, I didn't, didn't do any, any of that. Yeah.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  So talk about, uh, yeah, talk about how

• 1:10:18Jordi Hays?

  basically, talk about bootstrapping the network and the user base with the token, right? And, and, um, cause that's, I don't, I think I have a good sense for why you would do that. But, you know, the, the sort of boomer pushback would be, you know, why does this need to be, you know, crypto? And I think you guys have good reasons for that.

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there's two reasons for that. Like, first of all, of course, appreciating that crypto still has like a meaningfully bad reputation, just given everything that happened. But I think there's like real technological reasons of why you need to do, or why, why I think it's best to build such a platform that way. So one is, as I just mentioned, bootstrapping where all of these networks that we use, of course, they're absolutely meaningless if they're not at scale. And then so like, that applies to social networks, also applies to financial networks. And so maybe one of the most notable.

• 1:11:12Speaker 04

  Examples of that was the launch of PayPal, where you were able to refer your friends. Your friends had some amount of US dollars in their PayPal account. And, and, and very famously PayPal spent a lot of, kind of a huge amount of the venture funding. I was, of course, not there, so I don't know how much exactly, but a huge amount of the venture funding to get this network to critical scale with that referral program. And that then led to network effects and that then led to this turning into, among many other things, of course, into a successful platform. And so the same applies here. It's just that these crypto networks are valued at billions of dollars if they're somehow working. And so I think we can do something similar, just at a much, much larger scale.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  And so we can use very likely billions of dollars to kind of really get this network to scale. And so that means that everyone that actually joins this network gets a small piece of it through the token. And so you actually receive ownership in, in, in the quite literal network. But also, of course, that is an incentive to verify early on, where maybe the utility of the network is not fully there yet, because it's subscale. And so that was, that was that idea. And then the second idea is, of course, that like, this is going to be, one, very expensive to build, but then also extremely valuable. It's going to be very valuable to many of the largest internet companies, very likely, if you succeed in our mission.

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  And so we need a business model, but not for us as a company, but for the entire network. And so that is the second piece. I think these tokens actually allow you to build a sustainable network.

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think now we're actually bridging that gap, where it's actually becoming quite useful. We, we now announced a partnership with Match, which is the, the company behind Tinder, Hinge, many of the dating apps, to actually bring proof of human to, to these dating platforms. Partnership with Razer, which is one of the largest hardware manufacturers for gaming hardware, to turn that into the standard for, for the gaming world. So I think like, we're actually getting there now pretty quickly, but of course, it's still early.

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about the scale of bot activity online? I have to imagine a lot of people are interacting with bots daily that they don't necessarily realize are bots, right? There was a high-profile issue recently with Reddit where, you know, somebody was running a scaled influence operation, experiment, you know, leveraging, you know, leveraging the power of AI. And for those that don't know, people were, the AI would effectively look back through somebody's comment history and deeply understand the person and then make arguments to them based on their sort of pre-existing beliefs, which is very powerful. And, and obviously, it seems that, you know, all the users were not aware that what was happening to them. And I just have to imagine that's happening, you know, at a, at a very wide scale.

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, so, no one really knows, of course, the actual scale of the situation, but I think the, the paper that you outlined is from the University of Zurich. So as you, as you described, the University of Zurich actually ran an experiment of changing public opinion by using AIs to respond to just like a comment in separate edits. And they actually have been quite successful in changing the opinion of these separate edits, which is kind of crazy. And so, of course, we have like a similar problem, probably at meaningful scale on X, and very likely now every other social network.

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  Maybe, so dating also already got at quite a meaningful scale. Like you have these nowadays, these accounts that like have photorealistic images and start texting with you and everything. But I think like, maybe the more interesting part is that I think we're like at 1% or something of what I think will happen over the next 24 months. I think a, a big trigger point will be once you have an open source, very competent agent. Because like, that's, yeah, that's, that's where like things will get quite exponential. And we're like, probably 90, more than 90% of almost all activity on the internet, almost

• 1:15:22Speaker 04

  all content on the internet will be AI-created sometime after. So that will lead to the fact that I think... For now, or until quite recently, by default, we trusted everything that we have seen and we assumed that it's like authentic. I think that we'll completely flip 180 degrees to by default, we don't trust what we see, we don't trust who we interact with. If there is not a way to verify the claim, so it's going to be quite a profound shift.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  What was your initial reaction to the to the Coinbase news, which was this morning, obviously very unfortunate? Potentially leak of, you know, a bunch of personally identifiable information, home addresses, addresses, balances, things like that. Is that the kind of thing that in the future could be avoided through utilizing your network? Or is that just sort of a reality of, of, you know, finance today?

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  So my first reaction was that I think it was a very, very strong reaction from Brian. Huge, huge fan of Brian's, of course, but I think very clear message, very clear next steps. And these, these things, they are unfortunate, but I think this is like, it was somewhat, at least from the outset, of course, I don't know the specifics, but it seems like a relatively sophisticated social engineering attack. I don't think what we do will be able to help with customer agent, social engineering, like I think that's a very specific problem.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  But I, but I mean more on the KYC side, is there a world 10 years from now where, where somebody is effectively able to KYC using the world network?

• 1:17:03Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I think, I think that will almost certainly happen.

• 1:17:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because the issue here was like, you know, somebody has their government ID tied to a home address, tied to a balance. And then that creates a risk vector, which is why Coinbase is taking it so seriously.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  What about kind of Centaur applications of artificial intelligence? So a situation where someone's gaming and they're verifying with the orb or their eyeballs, but they're still using AI. I mean, we've already seen this with a real person who's on a dating app, but they have a second app where they're taking the text, putting it in there, like the Riz GPT. And the, the responses are still AI generated, but there's just one person involved. Is that less of an issue, this Centaur model, because there's still a human in the loop versus there's one person controlling or puppeteering like a million accounts?

• 1:17:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that I I think by by in a couple of years, I think almost everything we do on the internet, we will do with help of an AI because it will make our writing better, we'll make our thinking clearer. And so I think that is actually not really a problem. I think in in some sense, the way we actually think about it is we think a lot about agents and agent delegation these days. And for example, I think one thing how this will be very useful is you will need to understand that behind an agent or an agent actually acts on behalf of a human or like a one human. And as you described, I think the the the the important

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  property of such a system is that you cannot deploy thousands or tens of thousands of these AIs. Not to not allow you to interact with that. And and maybe actually the gaming use case, there's a cool example here where with Razer, they they built these gaming

• 1:18:59Speaker 04

  webcams.

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  And what so when you actually verify for for world, you receive a a package of data that is not stored anywhere centrally, it's stored on your phone. And one of the things that has actually assigned face image. And so what Razer will be able to do, it actually will use that to ensure that you this is you're not a deep fake, you're actually the person you claim to be. And so you can authenticate a live video stream. And I think the same will happen on video calls.

• 1:19:27John Coogan?

  Speaking of hardware, we were just talking about Apple getting into brain computer interfaces. Neuralink is also in the game. Is there a situation where authentication via BCI is as effective, more effective, something that you're partnered with or developing? Or is that just on a different timeline from what you see the rollout of a superintelligence or AGI being?

• 1:19:58Speaker 04

  I, well, so personally, I'm very interested in BCIs, but I, I think this is very much on a different timeline. So I think like to, yeah, deployment of invasive or even non-invasive PPS, I think it's like still certainly five plus years away, probably 10, 15.

• 1:20:17Speaker 04

  So I don't, we will figure it out once it gets there, I would say.

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What about, I'm, I'm super interested in understanding how the decisions that you're making allow us to read into your AGI timeline, Sam's AGI timelines and what the future will look like. There's this interesting world where the, the, the kind of the revealing feels like you see a future where there are tons of digital AIs in the world, but maybe there's not this super intelligence that can reconstitute matter at a atomic level instantaneously, the gray goo scenario, because in that scenario, even in the good ending,

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  you would imagine that a super intelligence would be able to create a human eyeball, grow it in a lab, do something to create a, a, a fake version of the human head, right? Maybe scan me one way or another and then recreate the eyeball. And so, much like you could potentially fake a fingerprint reader with enough time and effort and detail in how you're constructing that matter, you would think that you'd be able to do that if you had unlimited resources and super intelligence and all these different things. But that doesn't seem to be the timeline that you're operating against. So can you tell me about like how your far future vision for super intelligence plays out a little bit?

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  So, well, I, I think about these things quite a bit. I think.

• 1:21:51Speaker 04

  So this this kind of also like great course while vision of like eventually we'll have AI that creates nano bots that will be able to reassemble matter etc. I think that's that is very likely to happen, but I think as a society, I think we'll like there's just gonna be a lot of other things that will happen before we get there.

• 1:22:09John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:09Speaker 04

  And so I guess my internal mental model is that we are, I think, still at least ten years away from from from that kind of uh level of intelligence, or at least from us allowing that level of intelligence to interact with the real world.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:28Speaker 04

  Um. And then actually, if you well, if you if you don't think about the fundamentals of kind of physics in such a scenario, is uh that of course what we what we do to to to measure that human us is we use we fundamentally use photons uh of different wavelengths. So near infrared, uh visible light, etc. And so I think like before you would actually uh create an artificial human, such an AI would be able to maybe just emit um multi spectral wavelengths uh to fool such a system. And so like, well, but I think then we will also use such a AI to build a countermeasure and build a more system. So I think that is in my mind, still far out in the future. I I I think like all the medical advancements and

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Speaker 04

  um scientific advancements from AGI, I think.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Is that generally your your mental model for how all of this progresses is just like good guy with AGI beats bad guy with AGI. It's kind of economic or energy warfare. Whoever has the more compute, the more and as long as the the the good people have more resources, they will be able to build stronger defenses. And so the net outcome is good.

• 1:23:41Speaker 04

  Um, maybe that's like one way to frame it, but like generally I'm uh, I think I'm way more optimistic than than kind of most people or like many people are in a tech world. I think like the default outcome is that um, these AI systems would just be incredible tools for us. And I think they will be widely accessible. And I think the the frontier labs will make these accessible to kind of a wide population for quite a long time. Um, like that at some point, you might get a kind of this true super intelligence territory where maybe the government steps in, steps in, like I definitely see that happen.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  Um, and then it becomes like a geopolitical uh, situation. Um, which is going to become like very hard to predict. Um, but I think until then, I think these AI systems will be relatively widely available and open source will not lag too much behind. Um, so yeah.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  It seems like most of your model is like general optimism about how AGI and AI progresses. But there are pitfalls that need to be avoided and there's uh, problems that will need to be solved in the interim and and uh, WorldCoin is one instantiation of that one problem to be solved. Are there other problems that you're thinking about that maybe you're not working, but other founders or other entrepreneurs or other companies might be thinking about as we progress into the AGI future?

• 1:25:07Speaker 04

  Well, uh, so first of all, maybe the framing about world, I think you can definitely do that. Uh, but I think the other framing is as a result of the technology, I think we will create one of, or if not the largest real human network on the internet, which I think will create a lot of value. So like like it's not just preventing the bad, it's also creating the good, uh, that I think uh, really matters here. Um, you know, o- other problems for other, there's like, there's like so much, it's like.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what, uh, you know, I feel like the main, you know, there's this um, the world is undoubtedly controversial, right? You have people that are super excited about the potential of the technology and understand the importance. And then there's maybe people that are excited and understand the importance, but they're still wary.

• 1:25:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then there's like the whole other side of people that are just like, no, you're never gonna scan, you know, you're never gonna get my eyeball. Don't even, you know, keep.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  I don't even have pre-check.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, those, those types. Uh, uh, but uh, but, but what do you say to the people kind of in the middle that are kind of like, um? Interested but kind of wary or maybe on the fence, you know, when you're talking to them one on one.

• 1:26:15Speaker 04

  Um, you know, I, I, I think like we have very, very high conviction around both the importance of this technology and how the technology is built. Um, like I think it has all the properties that we will need as a society for such a technology. And in that sense that it's anonymous, it is scalable, it can be inclusive, like all of those things I think will end up mattering a lot. Like maybe much more than is kind of visceral at that point in time, but I think in the next 12, 24 months, I think it will become relatively obvious. And so I think, um, it's going to be interesting. We're like, I think different parts of the world will, will end up with different trade offs. Like maybe some parts of the world will just require a government IDs on pretty much every part of the internet.

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  And I think that might end up being a really bad, a bad situation. Um, and so.

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  And that's bad because somebody would just effectively sell their ID to be rented out for.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  No, because like ultimately, uh, it will be really hard to build that as a not traceable system. Uh, by the, by the government and, and, and I think like, it's of course something we really believe in here in the US is like the freedom.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the government would track you on every single place you go on the internet.

• 1:27:30Speaker 04

  Not saying they would, and I think it really depends on which part of the world you're in.

• 1:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:27:33Speaker 04

  Uh, but I think that's just not a great outcome. And so I think if we do, like, if we do everything in the right way over the next couple of years, I, I hope that our brand will become something like the Signal Messenger. We're like, I think.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  Um, this is like the, the anonymous, high trust, uh, solution that you can use. And other people will have other solutions. I think there will be a lot of competition around that space because I think it will become a relatively big one. So yeah, uh, if, if, uh, others will want to use other options, that is, that is totally great. I think we will win by building the best product and reaching the most scale.

• 1:28:07John Coogan?

  Jordi.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Great place to end.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is fantastic.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  This is fantastic.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Very excited to see the rollout. I actually did, I'm just remembering I had one last question. Are you far, as far enough along as you would like to be? Or do you wish you could just sort of like pause time and, you know, scale the WorldCoin Network? You know, just for another year to sort of catch up? Because I, because again, when you, when you talk about these timelines around 12 months, 24 months, you guys are really racing against the clock. From what it sounds like for a world in which we have these sort of agentic reasoning systems that will really make the internet a much more wild place.

• 1:28:51Speaker 04

  Well, I think that, that is definitely one perspective in my mind is like, I think we're definitely in a race against time. And what is also, what is interesting, what really only happened in the last six months is that CEOs of many of the very large companies that you know, with large products,

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  well, either we talked to them or they reached out. And the problem is like currently we cannot serve that scale. So there's like, there's like a lot of pull for the product to be available. And we just really need to get there. We need to roll this out faster and be able to serve these big platforms. So that, I think that is like an extreme level of urgency for one. But then the other side is it's hard to describe how crazy it feels to be even here from the beginning of the company. Like for like the first two to three years, well, people basically just made fun of this. And, and so like, yeah, it's certainly personally the journey of a lifetime.

• 1:29:55Speaker 04

  And it, and like, when, when I started working this, like I gave it a very low probability of success. And I did so for the first three years as a thing is like, yeah, still very, very long to go and fast to scale. But on the other hand, it feels pretty wild to just be here right now.

• 1:30:12Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  On the social network thing, sorry, last question.

• 1:30:16Jordi Hays?

  We're like, all right, thanks, Alex. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  All right. I mean, when you say large scaled network valuable, are we talking Visa network? Or are we talking Instagram?

• 1:30:27Josh Wolfe?

  You're gonna, you're gonna see.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm interested to see the business model, the pricing model, are the big platforms going to be paying in WorldCoin? Are they going to be holding? Are we going to have a national reserve of this stuff? I don't know. We'll have to try. We'll have to have you back on when there's a big announcement.

• 1:30:42Josh Wolfe?

  Looking forward to that. Thanks for having me.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Uh, anyway, it was good. We broke because we got to talk about eight sleep. They got a five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Pod five ultra, pod five ultra. I think you beat me. I got an 88. I think you got a 92, right?

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  I think the eight team must have gone in the app and, and

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Just give me a couple boosting points.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Whatever John gets.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  Just give Jordy a couple extra points.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Four more. I got a 92.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  92. Let's hear for Jordy.

• 1:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Two hours of deep sleep.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  We got Josh Wolf in the studio. Welcome to the stream, Josh. How are you doing? Haven't seen you since Hill and Valley.

• 1:31:20Josh Wolfe?

  Yeah, with a tie. No tie.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Oh, no tie today. Oh, well, we'll get you next time.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Look at the, look at the games though.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  But he's looking great.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Josh, what's your, what's your workout routine? You're looking jacked.

• 1:31:33Josh Wolfe?

  Oh, man, we, we, we do basketball, got some jiu jitsu.

• 1:31:38Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:31:39Josh Wolfe?

  Yeah, we do it all.

• 1:31:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, got it.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  Let's talk about the latest deal. Reflect Orbital is in the news. Take us through the anatomy of the deal. Break it down for us.

• 1:31:50Josh Wolfe?

  You know, amazing entrepreneur, combination zipline SpaceX guy Ben Noack.

• 1:31:58Josh Wolfe?

  Sean McGuire, friend, partner at Sequoia was early. He and Alfred seeded them. We led the series A. It was one of these ideas where it's like, you've got the sun. It really was only available for half the day. And they had a very simple insight, which is that there's so many satellites that are launching. What if we took a giant Mylar balloon effectively and had this big planar area that we could basically redirect the sun? And everything from.

• 1:32:27Josh Wolfe?

  Solar efficiency so that people that are running solar cell farms could basically get, you know, double the output to people that were doing search and rescue or military operations. You know, where could you literally task a satellite, not for visual imagery, but for sunlight? And we thought that that was a very clever idea. So we funded them, probably a few quarters out from formal launch. And the inbound has been insane from all over the world of people saying, we want to be able to task satellites to have directed sun wherever we want it, when we want it, which is pretty cool.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  From governments or enterprises or both?

• 1:33:06Josh Wolfe?

  Oh, yeah. You can imagine folks in the Mideast, folks where there's actually money at the government level, but no way that they could possibly do infrastructure for streetlights at night.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 1:33:17Josh Wolfe?

  And so, yeah, there's a lot of applications that have been popping up that we heretofore never imagined. So it's one of those things that develop a capability, don't under promise, you know, don't over promise and under deliver, do the exact opposite.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Josh Wolfe?

  And people are coming to them. So, yeah, we're really excited and he's super smart, super, super sharp.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you think are the exciting second and third order effects of something like this, right? If you make an area that's dark for most of it, you know, not most, but, but some percentage of a 24 hour period and you light it up, I can imagine that would have positive impact. You know, I, I think there's a bunch of data on like streetlights.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  It's big for the Andrew Huberman crowd.

• 1:33:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Andrew, Andrew might be, uh, maybe like, oh, you're, you're disrupting my circadian rhythm or something like that. But no, but isn't there, there's a ton of data on like streetlights and crime, right? It's like if you light up an area, like there's a massive reduction. I'm curious if you've thought about kind of the, the potential externalities of the technology over time.

• 1:34:17Josh Wolfe?

  Well, the first one again is energy, right? So if you're able to produce electricity and solar is getting way cheaper and way better, but the efficiencies are still 50% of the day when you have sunlight. And then you're doing battery storage, but if you could extend that in certain areas, and particularly if there were sort of adjacent farms that weren't lighting up the city and screwing with people's circadian rhythms that then could be transported through electricity, through storage and electricity. Transmission, I think that that's exciting. Yeah, sporting events, late night soccer games, you know, all the kinds of things where in New York City, it's no question. You know, in Palo Alto, it's no question to be able to light up stadiums, but if you wanted to light up an area that was an entertainment zone or, you know, you can imagine things there. For sure implications on safety, again, on search and rescue. You know, there's a reason that we always say whether people are hewing towards elements of honesty.

• 1:35:02Josh Wolfe?

  That sunlight kills all. So yeah, I'm a big fan of the sun.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  This feels like one of those deals that kind of lives and dies by the like specific variables in a spreadsheet. If launch costs are a little bit higher, it could be really, you know, they could get kind of stuck if they don't fall enough or, you know, the, the, the distribution of sunlight that's not concentrated enough, all of a sudden doesn't make economics sense. Is this more of like a bet on the founder or have you dug into the spreadsheet and are you really confident on the model evolving? Or is it more like the team's just so good, they're going to go figure something out?

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, I would go and say that there's different economics for different use cases, right? If, if you're a, if you're a military and you want to light up a battlefield, you're probably willing to spend a lot more than

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  The marginal solar user who maybe just needs a little bit of

• 1:35:50Josh Wolfe?

  For sure, search and rescue, you know, or going to be these punctuated emergency kind of things where, you know, people may not spare a cost in military as well. In other cases, obviously military is going to want the cloak of darkness, right? And so they don't want to light some things up. But the honest answer is on the first part, I, I, I don't know what the pricing is going to be here. We're comfortable first and foremost with an entrepreneur who is so thoughtful about every aspect of weight, performance, the material science behind it, the launch costs, the capabilities, the cadence, the frequency. And so I think it's one of these things like build it and they will come. And there's a little bit of faith in that. But I have a lot of faith in Ben. I think he's recruiting eternally well. I think he's deeply technical. He's obsessed. I mean, truly like obsessed like,

• 1:36:31Josh Wolfe?

  you know, a lot of people do all kinds of things in their spare time. He's reading like math textbooks just for fun in spare time. So super, super space nerd. Really talented. Yeah, and Luxon Sequoia are, you know, forgive the pun, but excited for it to see the light of day.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  Nice. There we go.

• 1:36:51Josh Wolfe?

  Air horn for that.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  Let's zoom out and talk about space broadly. Launch costs have been coming down. There's been projections that they're going to come down further. Have you been pleased with the trend of falling launch costs? Are you seeing enough in the entrepreneurial burgeoning space economy? Are there going to be a new wave? Are we in the midst of a wave? Is the next generation thinking about other orbits, MEO, or very low Earth orbit? What's exciting to you in space these days?

• 1:37:24Josh Wolfe?

  I'm just going to give you a cascade of yeses. Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:37:28Josh Wolfe?

  Look, cost per kilogram to launch things up into space was the main limiting metric before. And larger vessels, better propulsion, more frequent launches, increasing demand, all of that has lowered that. When we first did Varda, it was the inverse analysis, which was instead of trying to figure out how do you get low cost per kilogram up into space? It's how do you actually develop something that is going to be high cost per kilogram to justify doing it in space and coming back down? Same thing for another, and by the way, Varda, you know, I know Delian's been on and, but I am so proud. Third launch successfully just yesterday, you know, in the past 24 hours.

• 1:38:07Josh Wolfe?

  All right, quiet down, guys.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, calm down.

• 1:38:10Josh Wolfe?

  You know, Bruey and Delian and team, truly proud of them, proud to be partnered. It is just awesome. And, you know, you're going 25 Mach, 25 times the speed of sound, you know, the hypersonic testing people have talked about the hype around hypersonics. It's real and really proud of them and their launch and reentry capabilities. A related one, which was Tom Mueller, who, you know, as you know, is Elon's right-hand guy at SpaceX for 20-plus years. We backed him in a company, Impulse Space, and this was one of those speculative things of how are you gonna invest in a company today where there's no economy and no demand yet? For the ability to transport things, you know, and move them into space once they're up there. And that's really what he's developing, the vessels and the capabilities that once assets are up in space.

• 1:38:54Josh Wolfe?

  How do you think about whether it's cargo transport or moving satellites and all these kinds of things? So, um, there is-

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  It feels like that, uh, uh, impulse could like unlock an entire new class of startups. Built on the stack of impulse plus SpaceX. You get something up to Leo and then you push it higher and you know, there's some examples of things that can happen, but I feel like if you drop the cost 10x, 100x or something, you're going to see a whole different breed of startups, right?

• 1:39:20Josh Wolfe?

  Totally. And in fact, a lot of our thinking around this was, um, you know,

• 1:39:26Josh Wolfe?

  it's such a cliche thing that history doesn't repeat a rhymes, you know, but if you go back to history and you look at one of the great build outs in this country that unlocked commerce and transport of, uh, material and populations and lives, it was the rail. And, uh, you know, so many things have happened during rail for people to compare to booms and bust cycles. But if you look at rail, you think about the tracks that were laid down horizontally and you were to flip them 90 degrees. And instead of tracks, now you've got propulsion going up to space. It's very much the same thing of how do you get transport number one and who's going to sort of own those lanes? So that's launch capabilities. Then you've got communications, you know, there's a reason that telegraph lines were laid proximate to the rail. And it's the same sort of thing now, instead of telegraph lines with actual wires, you have satellites doing KA and KU band. And you have everything from Starlink to our company, Chimed that we did with Bill Gates,

• 1:40:11Josh Wolfe?

  where it's KA and KU that are basically switching off of a solid state material with no moving parts. You know, when you're on a plane and the reason that you lose internet for two seconds or whatever is it has lost track with a, uh, geostationary, uh, satellite, you know, and, and of course it's tracking it and as the earth moves, it's tracking it. But if you're in a low earth orbit satellite, you want to be able to track it, just like when we're moving through the city and going from cell tower to cell tower. And so that capability is something that's relatively new, um, for being able to lock on and track satellites. Then you've got, uh, people that are making things in space like Varda. You've got people that are transporting or storing them. There's other companies that are doing effectively private space stations, because as you know, ISS is coming out of service. You've had geopolitical considerations.

• 1:40:54Josh Wolfe?

  Of who's partnering with Russia or China. And, and so there is, I would just say, a very robust space ecosystem driven by the fact that capital follows talent, talent follows breakthroughs and ambition. And there are so many young, smart men and women that want to work in the space. And in many of them, they were in the pressure cauldron of SpaceX, which I think is an incredible culture. You know, as you know, I'm critical about Elon about a lot of things, but I think SpaceX is an absolutely amazing business. And I think people that are attracted to it have been trained there are now spinning out are incredible.

• 1:41:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the Varda story is fascinating because they started, I remember the very first pitch was for like, we're going to make ZB land in space. Then there was pharma. Now they're doing pharma and some defense and hypersonic testing and stuff. And it's just a testament to like, you bet on the founder and they'll go figure it out. But they are riding a really, really important trend.

• 1:41:42Josh Wolfe?

  Totally. When, when, when, when, uh, Delian was first pitching that with Brewi, I was like, I have no idea if this exotic optical material is going to be the thing. But the capability of you doing this is going to be the thing. And it's really about that economic inversion, not dollar per kilogram up, but high value dollar per kilogram down. And I think even Sean, who we're now we're partnered with in Reflect made that comment of like, he was focused on the micro and he sort of got that wrong. Uh, or maybe he got that right, actually. But the macro, you know, maybe he missed and, and super honest, self reflective.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  I think, I, I think with Varda, he said the opposite. He said, he, he, he. Not the micro.

• 1:42:18Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:42:19John Coogan?

  He missed the micro. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:20Jordi Hays?

  He got the micro wrong.

• 1:42:21Josh Wolfe?

  It wasn't going to be Z, it wasn't going to be Z land, right?

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. You got hung up on that.

• 1:42:26Josh Wolfe?

  The macro was like, there's.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, he should have bet on the macro. Yeah, it was great. Um, I think an underrated, uh, just story or fact about you is that you've been in venture a long time. Can you tell us a story of like, the first fund and how you even got into venture and kind of, uh, what you've learned over the last, it's been more than 10 years? Has it been 20 years now? How long have you been doing this?

• 1:42:48Josh Wolfe?

  So, um, look, I, I'm a science nerd. I was doing HIV AIDS immunopathology research and I literally got into that because I watched an HBO movie when I was like 13 years old called, and the band played on.

• 1:42:59Jordi Hays?

  What was it? Was it HBO? It wasn't HBO Max back then. It was just HBO, right? They swap back and forth.

• 1:43:05Josh Wolfe?

  Old school HBO and, uh, It was like this ensemble cast and I had the right ambitious naivete, which everybody that we ever backed does, which is like, I'm gonna go cure AIDS. Anyway, I ended up working in a scientific lab, the scientific lab, three, four days a week after high school, finished that all the way through college, published in two different scientific journals, thought I was gonna go get an M.D., PhD. My mentor was trading futures and options. So we'd be sitting there with a centrifuge of AIDS blood spinning down, waiting to run some ninety-six well enzyme linked immunosorbin assay thing, and he's making money and I didn't know anything about the stock market. My mom was a, I was raised by a, a single mom and she was a resource room specialist at school teacher. And, and I got enamored by capital markets and my life since then has literally been the intersection of science

• 1:43:48Josh Wolfe?

  and finance. And it is partially the satisfying thing for my own ADHD of being able to constantly meet new founders and I never knew who I'm gonna meet and then coming up with certain feces and running them down and either starting companies with founders or, or finding the people that are in it. When we started, Peter A. Bear and I, who's absolutely amazing, I mean, he's like literally my dispositional opposite, very much like my actual, real-life wife. He's smiley, he's positive, he's optimistic. I am usually in all black and negative. Everybody here has been indoctrinated with this idea that failure comes from a failure to imagine failure. Pete is like, well, what if it works? You know, what if, what if, what if it actually becomes a multi-billion dollar business? And my wife Lauren, he and him are very much the same. They're smiley. I always say, you know, I've got resting bitch face. And it's

• 1:44:31Josh Wolfe?

  just, it's a, it's a great dynamic. People joke, he invented the airplane, I invented the parachute. It's a good yin and yang. When we started, we had friends and family to go out and raise money for Lux. And I joke that we had friends, we had family, none of them had any money. And we got lucky and met a guy, Bill Conway, who was one of the three founders of the Carlyle Group, which at the time had maybe six or eight or ten billion at most. Today, you know, hundreds of four hundred, five hundred billion.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  This is fun for ants back then.

• 1:44:57Josh Wolfe?

  And, and we, uh... We met with Bill and I always say, look, the counterfactual, and this is true of all of our lives, and anybody listening and any entrepreneur starting something, you just never know. And he was in the right mood that day. Maybe he had a great breakfast with his wife. Maybe he found out they just made a lot of money for a deal. Maybe he closed a big LP. Maybe, whatever it is, he got good news. And he was just in a good mood. But the counterfactual could have been, he was in a bad mood. He was pissed, he was angry, he was frustrated, he was hungry. And we came in and we pitched him on this idea that in the history of venture, every 10 or 15 years, there's some secular wave in technology. In the 70s, it was PCs. In the 80s, it was biotech. In the 90s, it was TMT, Technology, Media, Telecom. And our view was like, the next wave is going to be the physical material sciences and where they intersect with computer science and all this kind of stuff. So it was like the interstices. And it wasn't going to be just Stanford and MIT.

• 1:45:41Josh Wolfe?

  It was going to be like Cornell and Georgia Tech and University of Michigan and UT Austin, all these kinds of places. And physics and material science and chemical engineering. And so, he said, "I hope you make a billion." And he believed in us, gave us our first pledge fund. We were writing small checks. We had maybe board observer seats at best. And then, you know, a bunch of those things, we're doing pretty well. We were building a little bit of a reputation. And then, we went out to raise our first real institutional fund, which we called Lux 2. Because everybody likes a second fund, right? So our first time fund. But like, nobody would invest in a first time fund. But if we called it Lux 2...

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:46:16Josh Wolfe?

  Lux 2.

• 1:46:16John Coogan?

  This is like announcing a preempted round. We've been saying, every founder should say that every round is a preempted round. Because it just looks better.

• 1:46:25Josh Wolfe?

  So, Bill becomes an anchor investor in that. And we get this like pantheon of people. Pete Peterson, who was the founder of Blackstone. And Stan Druckenmiller, legendary global macro investor. And Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel. And it was all random connections that led to these individuals. And they were writing, you know, sort of like 5, 10 million dollar checks. And then, we got a whole bunch of family offices, some small fund to funds, a few corporates like Lockheed and Motorola. And we could not hit our 100 million dollar target. 92.1, to this day, I remember every person that said yes or no, every 100,000 dollar check. The people that have been with us for 20 years and the people that said no, that we would later on, because I got chips on my shoulder, we wouldn't let into the fund. You wouldn't let them back in. Yeah.

• 1:47:04Josh Wolfe?

  But so I'm very thoughtful about the people that we ever say no to because you never know in two or three years, they're going to be the people that you really want to back. But yeah, we started small and today we're five and a half billion and I still remember those early days.

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:47:19Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the new science funding initiative. You guys have been following a lot of the cuts, funding cuts.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked to a couple of people on the show about the importance of basic science research, funding things that don't have immediate economic impact. What's the impact of a helicopter on Mars? What's the impact of understanding DNA at some atomic level?

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, things that you can't.

• 1:47:45John Coogan?

  Stuff comes out of that, but it might be a decade, there might not be a typical venture payback. What are you thinking about that space generally?

• 1:47:51Josh Wolfe?

  Well, first of all, the roots of venture capital are really two things. It was deep science and it was defense. So defense tech itself is nothing new. It really is their early days of the venture capital.

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  Genentech, people forget, that's one of the greatest venture bets early on.

• 1:48:04Josh Wolfe?

  And Cohen and Boyer, and that spun out from the UC system. That was one of the early important proof points that helped to create the Buy Dole Act. So you had two senators, Evan By and Bob Dole, that basically said, look, all this taxpayer money that's going into universities, they're producing property, intellectual property in the form of patents. But why don't we allow the university to actually own those instead of it being like marching rights from the government? And what that did was just blew out and it happened to coincide with the ERIS Act where retirement money could start going into private equity and venture capital. That was also in the seventies, the late seventies. The virtue of both of those things was that you had now this new class of intellectual property spawned from taxpayer funded research that went from NIH or National Science Foundation,

• 1:48:49Josh Wolfe?

  National Institutes of Health, the sort of three letter agencies going into academia. They would hire post docs, they would do work, they would file some patents. And then there was this well trodden method, which we happen to be quite good at, where you would go to university, you'd go to their tech transfer office. Actually, most of the time, you really don't go to the tech transfer office, you go to the principal investigator, the scientist. And because they're employed by the university, they go to the tech transfer office and say, I want to do this. If you go to the tech transfer office, oftentimes you're dealing with adverse selection. That's an aside. You give them a royalty, you give them a license, you do equity, you strike a deal and then you're funding it. And they typically get some money back for all the work that they spent. They also have what's called diligence criteria, very simply, if you don't put up enough money or you don't advance it, then justifiably, it goes back to the university so they can take

• 1:49:33Josh Wolfe?

  another stab at it with somebody else. And so there's lots of structured deals that you can do here to make that happen. The university professor, the scientist, will typically spend 20% of their time on the company, sort of like the equivalent of what Google would adopt later on, you know, a day a week to do these kinds of things. And the benefit to these universities were royalties and licenses on some of the most important drugs in pharma, some breakthrough materials that ended up in national security. I mean, hundreds of millions, if not billions, to some endowments, a really big deal. And over time, I'd say like probably 15, 20 years ago, venture started doing, maybe late 90s, more and more just computer science-driven things, more internet, more, you know, dot coms, e-commerce, and they were going away from the universities. We've always had that as part of our knitting.

• 1:50:16Josh Wolfe?

  When we started Lux, one of the guys we invested in was this guy Larry Bach. Larry was a serial entrepreneur. He ended up joining our firm. He passed away maybe seven, eight, nine years ago. He was an incredible guy. And we learned a lot from company, about company creation from him. He started 17 companies from scratch, took 14 of them public, cumulative market cap over $80 billion. The most significant was Illumina, the gene sequencing company. And we learned how to do this and how to partner with young scientists. So we've been doing it really nearly 20 years, and we've started over 20 companies, ranging from high-tech nuclear waste cleanup, which was this company Kurion that helped with the Fukushima disaster, to 4D LiDAR, to finding real-life mutants in a company called Variant

• 1:50:58Josh Wolfe?

  Bio, where we go out like X-Men and are trying to find these outlier people in outlier parts of the world. Crazy stuff. But all of it has some breakthrough that happened in an academic lab, and you're going, and typically, it's like 90, 95% ripened and ready for commercialization. So you're not really taking that much science risk. The government took that, or the university took that, or taxpayers took that. What happened now is we saw a confluence of factors. You got politicization that's happening in universities, you know, where current administration is punishing for anti-Semitism or absence of free speech, or whatever it is, cutting funding, potentially cutting tax status, potentially increasing tax on endowments from like 1.4% to possibly up to 20%.

• 1:51:40Josh Wolfe?

  So they're facing very serious pressures to say, where, what are we going to do with our funding if we're not getting it from the federal government? Many of the scientists are innocent. They're doing nothing. They just want to do their work, whether that's finding cancer diagnostics or inventing new materials or coming up with, you know, all kinds of interesting aerospace applications. And so they're facing funding cliffs now. And some of that is from federal budget cuts. Some of it is from politicization, but it's a big issue. This is against a backdrop where to me, the biggest issue is not anything domestic. It's not about left or right. It's about past and future and specifically a future that we are competing with China for.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:15Josh Wolfe?

  China now leads in nearly forty of forty-four critical technology areas. Cultures get what they celebrate and the culture for Chinese scientists and academia is not our culture, is not the TikTok culture, is not, you know, celebrating Paris Hilton and Kardashians or whatever. It is build what we can to have an absolute utter advantage and an advantage relative to America. This is, you talk about make America great, truly what made our country not just great, but exceptional. Attracting German Jews during World War II and making sure that we were the ones that developed the atomic bomb and having the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, having these amazing academic institutions, which were research institutions, not, you know, political drama on campuses and this kind of stuff. So we need to go back to that.

• 1:52:57Josh Wolfe?

  And we saw that there's bureaucracy, funding cliff, politicization, increasing pressure against this backdrop of competition with China. We said, we already do this NUCO formation and we partner with scientists. Now we're doubling down and we will go even earlier. You lost your grant and it's potentially on the path for commercialization. Instead of it being ninety-nine percent bank, maybe it's thirty or fifty percent bank, we'll take the risk. Come, join a company, spin out into a company, license your work to one of our existing companies, but know that there's an alternative path.

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:26Josh Wolfe?

  Besides us facing a brick wall or going off the cliff.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  That's very cool. Um, not to get too political, but you mentioned China geopolitical competition. What are some countries that you're particularly long or you think are underrated as potential partners to America or potential entrepreneurial hubs? Uh, when I grew up, you know, Japan was making humanoid robots, uh, Honda's Asimo. Haven't seen a lot of startups come out of Japan, but we're seeing stuff come out of Talpo in Israel with Wiz acquisition. Uh, we're seeing, uh, what some VCs are doing in Europe and the Nordics have produced Spotify. Where are you looking across the globe? What's, what excites you, if anything?

• 1:54:06Josh Wolfe?

  Um, yes, yes, yes. And yes, again, so we've got the leading AI company in Japan, Sakana.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:54:12Josh Wolfe?

  Which is, which is amazing. And a bunch of the partners were over in Japan.

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  And is the thesis for that national AI, like Japan wants their own foundation model? Is that right?

• 1:54:21Josh Wolfe?

  Yes.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:21Josh Wolfe?

  In part, it's sovereign models.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:24Josh Wolfe?

  But it's not like Mistral in France.

• 1:54:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:26Josh Wolfe?

  It is also sort of a very different, almost complexity theory approach to the model. So they're coming out with all this new stuff. One of the founders, Leon Jones, was the original author and he named the title for the paper, Attention is All You Need, when he was, when he was at Google. So killer team, based in Japan, all the major Japanese corporates have now invested and we're very bullish on that. Israel.

• 1:54:52Jordi Hays?

  Kretzou?

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  Leon Jones does not sound like a Japanese name.

• 1:54:56Josh Wolfe?

  No, no, he's, he's not.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  But I mean, I'm sure he's having a big impact.

• 1:54:59Jordi Hays?

  Is, uh, Kretzou is the right word for it, right? Where you get these corporations that sort of build these.

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  They own, they own pieces. So the bank owns the piece of the industrial company, which owns a piece of the bank and they all kind of work together. It's a very cool model.

• 1:55:11Josh Wolfe?

  Mitsui Sumitomo.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. Hyundai Heavy Industries makes the oil rigs and the cars and everything.

• 1:55:17Josh Wolfe?

  Now, now that is changing because you are seeing the rise of startups and a startup culture because failure in Japan is very different than failure in Silicon Valley. And that's starting to change. And so we're optimistic on that. So that's, so Japan is number one, Israel, number two.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:30Josh Wolfe?

  And I really think that this young generation of Israeli entrepreneurs are going to be the greatest generation. They are literally being forged in fire. They are fighting an existential fight for their lives.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Josh Wolfe?

  And people are shifting from, you know, doing apps and ways and, and cybersecurity, still important, but they're now getting really interested in defense. We did two companies. Um, one came out publicly, uh, it's Austin Sequoia in a company called Kela. You mentioned Talpiot.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:57Josh Wolfe?

  One of the elite guys from Talpiot, who went to fight post October 7th and Hamotel Meridor, who ran Palantir in Israel. Just absolutely killer team coveted, very sought after by investors. The other one is in stealth. Us, Peter Thiel, Trey, and a partner in Israel, Michael Eisenberg, all amazing people. We all came together to fund a company focused on a capability that Israel did not really have and needs for some of its most serious foreign adversaries. So that'll come out, I think, in the next few months and we'll see some other Silicon Valley investors, I think, join in on that.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, introduce us to the founder. We'll have him on when he comes out of stealth.

• 1:56:36Jordi Hays?

  All right. Couple, couple of quick ones.

• 1:56:41Jordi Hays?

  Basic Capital, you guys were the first institutional investor, maybe the first investor ever. What, what was your personal journey to investing in the company? It was getting a lot of attention this week. It was funny because when, when a new company comes out to fund like auto loans, like nobody bats an eye, but if you want to give people the ability to, you know, you know, basically use debt to buy assets that appreciate, suddenly it's a big controversy. I think a lot of people got maybe some of the, maybe they got the calculations wrong too, I saw. So the internet was really doing its thing, but I would love to hear.

• 1:57:19Josh Wolfe?

  It is, it is controversial, but we think it's necessary. Credit due, honestly, love him, like him, hate him, never ignore him. Bill Ackman really was the C check. We came in, Henry Kravis came in and the founder is amazing. I mean, he doesn't really talk about his story, so I'm not going to go too deep into it, but he grew up, I'll just give you, in a refugee camp, Palestinian in refugee camp in Syria, basically a Hamas run camp. And the story is insane if and when it comes out on how he got out of this situation, ended up in first Europe and then the US and then Goldman Sachs and becomes an expert in fixed income and complex derivatives and is just absolutely brilliant and resilient. So we loved him and his personal story first and foremost.

• 1:58:05Josh Wolfe?

  The way we got to him, our partner, Dina Shaker, I think through some shared ethnic connections, he reached out. It wasn't an area that she had a particular expertise or interest in per se, shared with our partner, Peter, who loves a lot of stuff in finance. And they end up spending like 90 minutes together. I don't even think they talked about the business until, you know, last 10 minutes or something. But Abdul is very special. Yeah, Matt Levine, I think, has covered it for the past two, three days in sort of a positive way, which for him, and he's a friend, is a, is a, is a, is a nice thing to see. They're gonna figure out their model, but the premise was we allow people to borrow for all kinds of depreciating assets and we just accept this. We allow people to borrow for consumption. We allow people to borrow for homes and you know, the theory that homes

• 1:58:47Josh Wolfe?

  are only going up or for cars, as you noted. Why do we not allow people who are not owners of the American company, uh, American economy in particular, to own a piece of it? Because that, if you really care about inequality, the wealth gap, is because people that have the ability and the savings to invest in the American stock market and just watch it compound over time, even in low-cost index funds, are at a superior advantage. And so that's really what he's looking at and addressing. And yeah, we, we were very fond of him.

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question, humanoid timelines, bullish, bearish, humanoids. Tesla, Tesla right now is pricing in humanoids almost immediately, it feels like. But, uh, but yeah, what's your thought on?

• 1:59:33Josh Wolfe?

  I'm pretty sure Elon is curing blindness, autism, uh, you know, I mean, yeah, we will, we'll have a whole nother Elon discussion on, you know, his relationship with the truth and some of my criticisms on some of the other things outside of SpaceX. But, um, look, inside Lux, there's a dithering spectrum of people that are super bullish on humanoids and people that are super skeptical. I'm more skeptical on humanoids, even though we've made some investments, in that I don't think the form factor should be two arms and two legs.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot of motors, right?

• 1:59:59Josh Wolfe?

  Well, it is a lot of motors and that's actually a big opportunity as well for a lot of companies. Um, and it is white space because 70, 80% of the motors are coming from China. It's about 60% of the bomb for most of the motors. Average humanoid robot's gonna have at least 25 motors. You imagine them selling 10,000 or 100,000. I mean, you're talking about millions of motors. There's gonna be an opportunity for motors. Not clear whether it's gonna become standardized, special, small batch, um, but there's an opportunity in a white space there because we are so dependent on China. But I care more about the fact that Most of these things are being teleoperated, trained, even, you know, Optimus, which was sort of a performative thing because most of those things, except for when they were dancing, were being controlled by humans. So it wasn't really fully honest until they revealed that like a day or two later, but it was too late. But even two arms, two legs that they're being controlled.

• 2:00:43Josh Wolfe?

  Why am I unpacking a sink or folding something with two hands? This should be, in the Darwinian sense, endless forms most beautiful. You know, he was talking about the diversity of species. I want to see a diverse set of robots that are almost like the canteen scene out of Star Wars. Where you're like, holy shit, like, did that thing just have six arms and just did that thing like that is unhuman? That's what I think our robots should look like. More droids, so to speak, than robots. But the amount of competition that's here, you know, there's seven different companies today trying to do humanoid robots of serious scale. Talent is flowing between them and we're going to see them. The question is, where's the killer app? And everything I hear is fold laundry, undo your dishes, be a companion to somebody in your home. I haven't seen that visionary person that's like, no, no, no.

• 2:01:29Josh Wolfe?

  The way that we're going to use robots is X, Y, Z. And I get the argument why humanoid robots make sense for a human-built world with door frames and steps and buttons and all that kind of stuff. But I'm convinced that the future robot company that rules them all is going to be either something like one of our companies, Pi Physical Intelligence. Yeah. Run by Lucky Groom and. We had a great team. Incredible, right? That is all about the embodied intelligence. Yep, yep, yep. They don't care about the form factor. You want to use Chinese Unitree, you want to use one of our other companies here, Fauna. Sure. All good, but we're going to be the embodied intelligence. Sure. That I think is really interesting because one way to make money in venture is always understand what's abundant and what's scarce. And what's abundant in, say, AI is training data.

• 2:02:12Josh Wolfe?

  You can train on the open web, you can train on Reddit, you can train on Twitter, etc. What's scarce in robots is having a repository of training data. And so that's why you've got humans that are doing this teleoperation and training them through kinds of scenarios. But when they enter unstructured environments, what you want is these world models that basically help somebody navigate a situation that they've never been in.

• 2:02:31Jordi Hays?

  If a founder came to you named Darwin, would you get bullish? You, you, did you popularize nominative determinism? You have a thread, you have a thread. It's, it's now, I think, I gotta figure out how many people are on there. 106.

• 2:02:46Josh Wolfe?

  Yeah, 106 listings. You know, it started with a friend of mine. Um, I'll give a shout out, it's a guy, Russell Diamond. He's in a totally different form of business, but I think it's, I don't know. When I started posting, it's gotta be at least five, six, seven years. Um, and some of them are absolutely hilarious.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the most recent one, it's, it's Rich Fairbank is the CEO of Capital One. Just amazing.

• 2:03:07Josh Wolfe?

  With me now, like some of these names, they're just putting out there like, let's see if Josh just gets pissed off.

• 2:03:11John Coogan?

  Well, it's amazing that you've built a firm instead of being a solo capitalist, a lone wolf. But, uh, it somehow worked out anyway. It was great having you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on. Overdue for a, for a full segment.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Uh, and we don't want to keep Jason waiting any longer. So let's bring in, uh, Jason now, uh, to chat about the history of 37 signals.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Bootstrapping versus venture capital. I'm sure we're going to get a bunch of interesting takes and hopefully have him join the stream right now. Welcome to the show, Jason. How are you doing?

• 2:03:43Jason Fried?

  Hey guys, good. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:03:45Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 2:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Jason, uh, we've actually met in person once randomly at a restaurant that was one of my favorite restaurants in Malibu. We met and then the restaurant shut down like a month later. I was super bummed.

• 2:04:01Jason Fried?

  Which restaurant was that?

• 2:04:02Jordi Hays?

  It was like, was it something, uh, it was right by Whole Foods. There's a hamburger place there now.

• 2:04:08Jason Fried?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:04:09Jordi Hays?

  Like coconut, the real coconut.

• 2:04:11Jason Fried?

  Real coconut was there, that's correct.

• 2:04:12Jordi Hays?

  Tragic. It's a tra, that was, that spot was the best. I don't know what happened, but Malibu was a tough.

• 2:04:17Jason Fried?

  They had a hard time.

• 2:04:18Jordi Hays?

  It's a tough market.

• 2:04:19Jason Fried?

  It's a tough market, runs are high there for sure.

• 2:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, anyways, great to have you on. Um, we've both been looking forward to this.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I mean, I'd love to just, uh, take your temperature on your view on the current state of venture capital and startups. Are things? Getting better? Are things getting worse? It feels like people are raising more capital than ever. Potentially, there's a bubble, potentially. At the same time, companies are getting to really high run rates. What's your feeling for the health of the startup economy in the tech world generally?

• 2:04:52Jason Fried?

  Yeah, I mean, the way I look at it is I usually look at the ideas. I don't really care so much about the funding side of it because if there's cheap money, easy money, there's going to be cheap money, easy money. If it's hard money, there's not going to be as much around. There's always going to be fluctuation there. I look at the ideas. Obviously, there's a lot of people building a lot of things right now, which is very exciting. I can't remember a time when more people were building more things, truly, except maybe at the beginning of the web, late 90s kind of thing, where everyone was just, everything was new. No one knew what they were doing. And so there's making stuff, like the early, early enthusiast web was pretty spectacular. So I think that that's very, very healthy. That said, the hardest thing is not making something. The hardest thing is maintaining something.

• 2:05:34Jason Fried?

  And it's become so easy just to make stuff and kind of just like vomit out ideas. And I mean this in the, in the, in the best possible way. You know, AI makes things really fast. You can make something really quickly that's sort of decent.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  It's ephemeral.

• 2:05:47Jason Fried?

  It's ephemeral. And the thing is like, you have to prop that up. You have to keep that up. You have to support customers if you sell your product to people. Like, people are going to be using this. They're going to be depending on it. And so I'm a little bit concerned that there's too much energy right now focused on just spitting out new ideas and not as much invested in maintaining something and seeing it grow and seeing it through to fruition. So there's a lot of bragging about, look how fast I made this thing. Yeah, you made a thing, but now what? That's my big question. And, and I'm not seeing a lot of answers there yet, but I still am excited by all the things you can do today.

• 2:06:24Jason Fried?

  What's your take? I mean, do you, do you notice that? I feel like it must be other people that notice this.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we've talked about the iron law of the universe. What goes up quickly must come down quickly.

• 2:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think to me, yeah, to me, to me, there's, it's, there's a very, there's a very messy middle, right? I actually love the fact that software can be ephemeral now, right? I like, I like that an app could basically be a meme, right? How many people over the last? Couple decades have had an idea for an app that shouldn't, it's not worth spending a million dollars and a year building it, but it would be fun for it to exist. And so I like that things can come to existence quickly, right? I like that you can generate an image that I never would have paid somebody to make a 3D render of.

• 2:07:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:08Jordi Hays?

  But it's actually entertaining and fun, even, even just in, it's just a very casual format, right? Obviously it has business applications as well, but John and I will generate images.

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  Like what if I put a wing on a Cadillac Escalade?

• 2:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  With a racing livery.

• 2:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:23John Coogan?

  I can imagine that now.

• 2:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Simple stuff like that. And then.

• 2:07:26Jason Fried?

  Nick's a Porsche's a car with a Cadillac Escalade.

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  Exactly. That's exactly my prompt. And yeah, I probably could have hired a designer to do that, but it would have taken a day and cost a bunch of money.

• 2:07:36Jason Fried?

  And that is like, it's incredible that you can do that. I love that stuff. And I actually think what's going to end up happening is a lot of people are going to make software just for themselves.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45Jason Fried?

  And that's incredibly, that's how I got started. I made software for myself. I was using something called FileMaker Pro way back in the day. And FileMaker Pro is the easiest way to make like an application that kind of ran. I didn't know how it worked behind the scenes, but it ran. That is a great feeling and a wonderful place to start. So I'm all, I'm all for that.

• 2:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And where I was going is there's kind of the opposite spectrum of software that's really craft driven software. Somebody on the show, I think it was Jack Altman, was talking of this like Jiro dreams of sushi form of software where you're looking at an existing product category and there's a bunch of tools that already exist and just looking at it with a new set of eyes and just saying, I'm going to spend more time obsessing over this one product experience than anyone else and I'm going to make a great product. And I think that's great. And that's kind of like, you can still use AI to do that, but it's not just, you know, slop, right? But then there's this interesting, messy middle right now in venture where you have 20 of the same, 20 different teams approaching

• 2:08:46Jordi Hays?

  the same problem and both kind of, everybody's kind of racing at it without a lot of real vision or craft. It's just about speed and just spewing stuff out and seeing what sticks. And I think that that is sort of an unfortunate byproduct of the state of things today. And it wasn't always that way, right? It used to be. VCs weren't going to fund the eighth company attacking one problem.

• 2:09:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:14Jordi Hays?

  And at least for the last five years, it's been the case.

• 2:09:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:18Jason Fried?

  It seems a little bit more like music now, actually, in a sense where there's a lot of people making a lot of music. You open Spotify, there's like, you know, a billion artists making something. And software is now becoming that, which I think is pretty cool, actually, frankly, that there can be a lot of people. Cause there's a lot of talent out there. That's the other thing. Like you, you turn on YouTube or you watch YouTube or you, you pull up Spotify. And you're like, you know, I'm, I'm trying to learn drums and I'm trying to learn a bit more guitar and I'm trying to learn how to draw a bit better. And you find all these people online who are just extraordinarily gifted and talented at what they do, yet nobody knows who they are. Or a small audience does. They'll never make it big because it's just, it doesn't work that way. But there's just so much talent and what's cool about, I think what's happening now is that

• 2:09:58Jason Fried?

  if you have the talent and the imagination, you can actually make something today that before you had to maybe find someone else to make for you. Which would have cost money and would have been hard to do. So I think this is all ultimately a very good thing. But I can imagine, I mean, again, I'm not really in the finance world or the venture world in that way, but I can imagine how you have to put more and more faith now, maybe it's always been this way, but more and more faith in the people. And not just sort of what they quickly make because it seems like making something quickly is not the hard thing anymore. You know, it's, it's, it's like, are these people, there's their conviction there? Do they care about what they're making? Are they just trying to spin something up? I think there's a little bit more character evaluation perhaps that's going to be necessary.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Can you talk about lessons from the first wave of the internet, the dot com boom versus the rollout of AI? The bull case for AI's rollout is that, well, everyone's already on the internet. So they can just visit a URL and interact with a new product. Stripe already exists and so they can start charging money immediately. The, the, the kind of bearish case that we've been hearing is this idea that, well, there are plenty of scaled internet companies that are still in founder mode. And I don't know if you, if you believe in that, in that ideology, but this idea that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is not asleep at the wheel. He is very much aware of AI and can move very, very aggressively with huge resources

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  to stay relevant. And there are also plenty of companies in the hundred million dollar revenue, billion dollar revenue categories that are already.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  You know, moving quickly, they might be a little bit slower. But but how brittle do you think big tech is right now? How brittle do you think are the companies that are in a category they've been in for a few years? We talked to a few founders where they almost got bored pre AI. And now they feel reinvigorated, they still control their companies. How do you how are you wrestling with all of that?

• 2:11:58Jason Fried?

  It's it's interesting, it's kind of like.

• 2:12:02Jason Fried?

  Well, there aren't a lot of parallels between the early days. Because in the in the early days, there was nobody. Like, it was just like everyone literally like was just learning HTML and just making a webpage.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:15Jason Fried?

  It wasn't really, I feel like.

• 2:12:19Jason Fried?

  I felt like Amazon, when Amazon launched, that was like the first kind of thing that felt a little bit different, actually, to me. Like, someone's actually putting this together in a way where you could do something you couldn't do before. That felt, you know, buying books online, that whole thing. And the in the early days was all about like, you know, people were even afraid to put their credit card online. We couldn't even get when we first launched Basecamp back in 2004. We couldn't even get a bank. Well, we eventually did, but to give us a merchant account, which is what you needed to charge credit cards. Now, like your point with Stripe, you just like sign up and you can accept cards or Square or anything. Like, we had to provide deep financials. They didn't trust this internet thing. They wouldn't even allow us to charge annually for things. We had to charge monthly, which is actually a good thing in the end. But we're going to try to charge annually. They're like, what if you go out of business in six months?

• 2:13:04Jason Fried?

  We're on the hook for this whole thing. So you have to charge monthly, your charger customers monthly, so there's less risk. It's fascinating times, it's totally different. What's interesting today about big tech is. There's so much power. Obviously, in a handful of a handful of small, big companies, but a small group of these companies. But then again, you have something like OpenAI, right? Which kind of comes out of nowhere a few years ago, in a sense. And basically is is putting everybody on notice. I mean, you can do everything now with this command line tool, essentially. You can write software, you can generate images like you were talking about. Why would you Google anything anymore? You can do it better this way. And so there are always going to be brand new flashes that come out of nowhere that challenge big companies.

• 2:13:49Jason Fried?

  Now, the thing is, is that OpenAI is now a very large company very quickly. So I think what you're going to see is.

• 2:13:55Jordi Hays?

  One of the.

• 2:13:55Jason Fried?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:56Jordi Hays?

  I hate to cut you off, but an interesting point about the new generation of tech giants is that it seems like they're possible to build. You just need. Five billion dollars, right? If you look at like TikTok or OpenAI, it's like, what are the truly breakthrough consumer tech, consumer tech specifically?

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  There's something unique about foundation models that they are incredibly capital intensive that feels different.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the social network example is like, yeah, you can build a new social network. You just need to be able to spend billions of dollars on Meta and Snapchat acquiring the network.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  Advertising, but yeah, I don't know.

• 2:14:30Jason Fried?

  Yeah, but I think, yes, you're right. But also, we're always going to be surprised. The next newcomer is not going to be the obvious one. It's going to be someone with a new model for what social media is, or a new model for what search is, or a new model for whatever, whatever is. And they're always surprising, I think. And that's the exciting thing about it is that if we just look to the existing players, like, they're not really going to be able to innovate that much. It's just someone new had to come along, like OpenAI, and they pushed everyone else to begin to innovate. So I don't know. I think there's always going to be innovation. I think most of it ultimately comes from the shadows, which is generally a small, tight team typically. It's not a big, big companies aren't innovating in this way.

• 2:15:12Jason Fried?

  They will then jump on the bandwagon because they have the money and they can buy the incumbent, or buy the newcomers. But the new ideas come from the small, the small teams, the small guys. And I think that's still going to be true.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  I don't know if you saw the Airbnb relaunch, Airbnb 2.0, but Brian Chesky has, I mean, I'd love your take on just, it feels like we were looking at the stock. It's been an $85 billion company for five years. It's kind of languishing. It feels like there's a little bit of restlessness, like he just wants to do something new. And I'd love your take on that. But also, he has advocated for this idea of like an annual release cycle, really pushing the whole team to unify around this Steve Jobs-esque keynote. And from a product management perspective, do you like that? Do you recommend that to other startups or, or, you know, tech leaders generally?

• 2:16:04Jason Fried?

  Yeah, good questions. So this just launched, what, like two days ago?

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:10Jason Fried?

  Fully up on it, but what I know is he's basically now offering personal services and not just, you know, rooms to rent.

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, find a hairdresser, find a personal trainer, that type of thing, potentially dog walker. A lot of this, this actually launched Airbnb experiences eight years ago with you're going on a vacation and somebody can be your local tour guide or take you river rafting, for example.

• 2:16:30Jason Fried?

  Right.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  Now, he's trying to broaden out to, you know, get your, get your car washed or get your car detailed, for example.

• 2:16:36Jason Fried?

  It's so interesting. When I saw this, so I had so many different thoughts and I'll share a few of them. First of all, I think Brian's probably one of the greatest CEOs around today. So I, it's, I wouldn't, I wouldn't bet against him, first off.

• 2:16:52Jason Fried?

  I was a little, I was surprised by it. I understand the, like, there is no good place, trustworthy place to go to find these kinds of services. So it's sort of natural that you'd expect somebody to do this, but you have to come with trust and you have to come with a big platform because it's hard to start small. Yeah, two billion users.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Two billion users, yeah.

• 2:17:18Jason Fried?

  Is that right? Two billion? I mean.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 2:17:20Jason Fried?

  So, so, so what they're doing is they're lending their trust and their, their sense of, of taste and like the, the vetting of these, of these professionals who provide these services. That's a hard thing to do from scratch. Like you have to have the, the, the experience and the, and the, and the, and the history, right? So I, while I think it's sort of, it's kind of far afield, actually, I think from what they do. I like the other version of experiences just off the bat, which is more related to, to, to, you know, going to a place. This feels a bit tangential. That said, I wouldn't bet against them. I'm sure they've thought about this more than I have in a day and a half for like five minutes. But I was, I was a little bit surprised by it. It almost felt like a little bit, in some ways, too,

• 2:18:06Jason Fried?

  too easy. I don't know. That's, I know it wasn't easy, but like, or too obvious in a sense. But also then you're like, but this hasn't happened yet, really. So why not them? Why not them? Will it translate? I don't know. I looked at a bunch of them yesterday in my area and.

• 2:18:22Jason Fried?

  I'm very curious. I'm very, very curious to see how this pans out, but I think you have to find revenue somewhere if you're a public company or a big company and, you know, there's only so many rooms. There's only so many people want to rent rooms. They've done an incredible job with this and this is probably a good way to diversify the revenue stream and it is related enough, even though it feels a little bit separate still, but.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  And the business is roughly the size of Marriott and Hilton now. Like it is basically a large scaled hotel chain. And so, yeah, what is that act two? It's a good question to ask.

• 2:18:55Jason Fried?

  One way to think about it, actually, it's more like a concierge at large. So if you go to a hotel, right? You go to the concierge desk and you're like, I don't know what to do here. Or, you know, whatever. It's sort of like that without having to go anywhere. First of all, you can do it locally and you can do it where you're going. So it, to me, I think of it as like, is like the massive concierge. And in that way, it ties nicely to hospitality. So we'll see.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  And on the annual release cadence, that's going, it's coming from Apple. Chesky obviously looks towards jobs as an influence, but smaller and smaller companies are starting to adopt it. But at a certain point, you're such a small company, maybe you should be releasing every week or every six weeks or something like that. So what's your take?

• 2:19:39Jason Fried?

  Yeah, that's a great point. So I admire it, frankly. I admire it actually for the patience. And I actually think in some strange ways, it's, it is a better way to capture attention. So one of the things is like you want to really, people feel like they want to release a lot because they want to maintain a sense of presence in the market and want to get people's attention often. But I think what I've found, at least what we found is has shifted over the years is that when you release a bunch of small things, they, it's hard to grab anyone's attention with a handful of small things these days. When you have a big release, a big drop, for example, and there's a hundred new things. I saw Square just did this recently too. You're going to pay

• 2:20:21Jason Fried?

  attention to that and you're going to be able to tell a much bigger, broader story. And I think in many ways, people are like, wow, that's a lot of stuff, like an OS release or like, you know, a new phone release used to be, things like that. I think one of the reasons people don't pay attention to maybe Apple's releases as much is because they become predictable in that way. So I think you can. I like I like what they're I like what Airbnb is doing and other brands are doing where it it still feels a bit unpredictable. What's coming?

• 2:20:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:49Jason Fried?

  Apple is too predictable now. It's like it's you know, it's going to be a new iPhone and you know, it's going to be a better camera and whatever. So that's not as interesting. But I do like the model. We actually have a bit of a hybrid model. So we release these little releases every six weeks or so. And then when we do a brand new, like we're working in Basecamp five, which is our newest version of Basecamp right now, we're gonna do a bunch of these little things, hold them all back and then release them all at once. So that'll be like a big release for us. But as a model in general, I think it's a good model, but I don't think it fits a brand new company.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  On Apple, Apple Intelligence, they kind of did the big annual release, but then they wound up shipping different things at different times, a lot of frustration. Is that something that can be overcome with just better product management? Or do they need a different direction, more ambitious, more risk? I mean, generative AI is very unpredictable. You get hallucinations, very off brand for Apple. What's been your take and how have you processed the journey that Apple Intelligence has been on?

• 2:21:46Jason Fried?

  I think the mistake.

• 2:21:48Jason Fried?

  Again, like, who am I? They're a trillion, what, three trillion dollar company?

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, around there.

• 2:21:54Jason Fried?

  Since you asked. The mistake I think they made is is they made a promise and promises to customers. I think are typically very bad ideas unless you actually have something ready to go right now. Or like within a week or two or something. But there's nothing easier in business to say, yes, coming soon. Yes, later. And that's what they did. And now.

• 2:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they sold the Apple. They sold the new iPhone based on Apple.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  It was on every billboard.

• 2:22:26Jason Fried?

  Exactly. And these now, now they're behind the eight ball, simply because they promised. Had they just talked about it? We're going to be rolling this out like, you know, it the expectations would be totally different. So a promise is a very, very dangerous thing to be made far in advance. This is one of the things that Jobs is really good at. When he had a product to share, he waited, then they shared it and you could buy it today. Or going on sale on a specific date or something, but very close, right? He rarely had long-term tech demos or something. It was always about real stuff you could basically go buy. And this is also one of the things I hate about concept cars. Which is you see these amazing things and these cool ideas and you know you'll never be able to get them.

• 2:23:08Jason Fried?

  And you're like, why does this company spend all this money doing these concept cars? And it's just frustrating and that's kind of a, Apple Intelligence is a concept car. And, you know.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Great take.

• 2:23:19Jason Fried?

  And it's tied to promises. Bad idea. So that's, that's where I think they made a mistake. I think they will figure out a way to come back from this.

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:27Jason Fried?

  But I think this is going to lead to a major, major shakeup internally.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it already has. There's already been people moving around.

• 2:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Does it worry you that?

• 2:23:36Jason Fried?

  But I mean, it may be a bigger shakeup, like people.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:39Jason Fried?

  Not just moving around, because moving around is like, this is the wrong analogy. Really wrong analogy.

• 2:23:47Jason Fried?

  The Catholic Church moved priests around when they made some big mistakes, right? That's not how you solve the problem.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, and not to, not to, you know, compare, you know, some buggy software to some very damaging things.

• 2:24:01Jason Fried?

  It's not that.

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  No, it makes sense.

• 2:24:02Jason Fried?

  It's not that, but, but.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no.

• 2:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it doesn't really solve the problem.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  Some true, true new leadership in some roles.

• 2:24:07Jason Fried?

  Doesn't solve the problem, right.

• 2:24:09John Coogan?

  For sure. Jordy?

• 2:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Does it worry you that the internet is killing long-form writing? It feels like right now you actually get penalized on X, the longer the post. You can still go decently viral with a longer form post, but usually like four words, five words seems like it's the most dopamine inducing and it feels like there's a bunch of great.

• 2:24:31John Coogan?

  Why is no one talking about Steve Jobs? No one's heard about this guy. Click this thread.

• 2:24:34Jordi Hays?

  No, but it seems like there's a bunch of really smart, you know, high potential people that don't think of themselves as writers, but maybe if they joined the internet when you did. They would be.

• 2:24:46Jason Fried?

  Yeah, I mean, I think long form writing has found a new place though. Like you have Substack, which has become obviously a big deal for a lot of people. I think that these platforms, what's interesting is that X now, you know, obviously allows you to write long posts and even have articles, but they don't really, like you said, they don't really promote them as well. That, you know, that might change. I don't know. Who knows? I'm sure they have a better insight into it than we do, but, but I think long form writing is alive and well. I think, I think humanity actually craves it and wants it.

• 2:25:16Jason Fried?

  But it's not an engagement thing. So if you're measuring that, hot takes are going to be, you know, more of that. But I think, I don't, I think, I think it's alive and well. And I think it'll always be appreciated for what it is by those who are motivated to, to understand what it is that they're reading, you know? If you just want to kind of absorb it like candy, that's fine too. But like, if you really want to get into something, it needs to be long. And also like podcasts or like long podcasts are a great example. That's essentially long form writing that someone's reading out loud. And there's a lot of people who are willing to spend two, three, four hours listening to a podcast. Granted, they could do something else while that's happening. That's a little bit different than reading. But I think long form depth, let's call it just depth. Let's call it actually,

• 2:26:00Jason Fried?

  instead of long form, it's like depth versus shallowness, or shallow versus deep or whatever. I think there's a lot of interest in deep still.

• 2:26:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it says something that the platforms don't necessarily reward deep, but it's, it's all, it's again, it's somewhat of a barbell where if it's deep, but truly, you know, groundbreaking or moving, you'll still get that sort of viral pickup.

• 2:26:25John Coogan?

  Chris Pike who keeps going viral with just drops a link to a Google Doc. And it's just such an interesting post that it still breaks through, even the links are banned and no one reads long form. Every time he drops one, it's, yeah, everyone clicks it.

• 2:26:37Jason Fried?

  Well, in the end, like it is like, if it's good, it'll, it'll surface. I do think that contrast is very handy though. So with a lot of short form platforms, X, TikTok, with these kinds of things, you create a contrast now. And so now, you know, you know, we can get long, you know, we can get short. And I think each platform will, will cater to it.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  This show will be experienced as a three hour live stream, but also I'm sure we're going to share a one minute clip of this, right? And that's just kind of the nature of the internet. I want to talk about the hyperscalers and AWS. You recently moved some data on prem. My question is,

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  Is there some sort of cartel dynamic going on with the clouds? Because you would expect these are fairly commoditized products. There's Azure, AWS, GCP. Why do they have high margins? Is this some sort of like Coke and Pepsi thing where they have a tacit agreement not to be getting a price war? Because you'd think that you'd be able to just go and get to some base level cost with three hyper competitive companies in the space.

• 2:27:38Jason Fried?

  Yeah, I mean, you would think that costs would be driven down considerably and maybe they haven't been in some, in some areas.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  The airlines, the airlines are directly competitive. They make no money, right? Airlines famously bad business. You would expect the cloud to be similar, but it's not the case.

• 2:27:52Jason Fried?

  Yeah, I, I wonder if, you know, yeah, I don't know. I don't know the answer there. I mean, I, I know that data, data, well, storage is cheaper than it has been. But, but in general, I think what they're selling is convenience and convenience is always expensive. So you go down to the corner store, the bodega, whatever, you're going to pay more for whatever, for, for your, your Tide laundry detergent than you are if you buy it at Costco. Because you gotta get in the car to go to Costco, you gotta buy more. If you need something really quick, you go down there and really cloud services, what we've determined, at least what we feel are like, it's about convenience. You can spin up really quick. You're not, um, you know, you, you don't have to learn a lot of deep, deep sysadmin stuff technically, you know, you should know this stuff, but you don't have to.

• 2:28:36Jason Fried?

  And so you're paying for convenience and I think that that's always going to have a price premium. What we've realized is that for us at our stage of, of development, been around for 25 years now. It's wildly expensive to host in the cloud, to use cloud servers. And on-prem can save us a ton of money and it's not hard anymore like it used to be. It's gotten a lot easier. You still have to have the knowledge, but it's not as hard and we're not as afraid of it. We're saving millions and millions of dollars now not paying Amazon their fees. But again, if you're starting up right now from scratch, you're going to try something out. It does make sense to start in the cloud because you don't want to invest anything else anymore than you need to. And it's a good place to begin, but it's also a good place to leave.

• 2:29:16Jason Fried?

  And we do this in life all the time. We start somewhere and then we become more expert at something. And then we leave the beginner version of something. We go pro, whatever. Like to me, going pro is going back on prem. And I think you're going to see more and more companies who've developed something who have now have a steady, substantial, sustainable model revisit the cloud and probably go on.

• 2:29:38Jordi Hays?

  Big cloud. They don't want you to know this one simple trick.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  Going on prem. I mean, on back on big tech, I've been personally very disappointed with the rollout of Gemini in Gmail. It feels very bolted on, turn and long email into some bullet points. I know how to skim. Is there an opportunity for a green field AI email product? We saw this with mailbox in the mobile era, kind of creating the swipe pattern. That exited Dropbox, kind of a good outcome. They wound up shutting it down. But what are you thinking about the future of email? Obviously, you're deeply invested.

• 2:30:16Jason Fried?

  Yeah, I mean, we have a product called HEY, H E Y dot com, which is, we don't have any AI in it at all.

• 2:30:24Jason Fried?

  My feeling is that a lot of this stuff is actually going to come to the OS level. So like the idea of being able to like summarize a document or shorten some writing. It's already in, in, in, you know, Mac OS.

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:35Jason Fried?

  Probably in Windows. I don't know enough about what's going on in the Windows world, but I should. But you can select some text and like do whatever you want with it. Like you don't need to build that into your product.

• 2:30:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:43Jason Fried?

  I think the AI side of it is going to be handy for obviously search, finding things you, you know, you don't know how to describe. That's really useful. I don't, I'm not a big fan frankly of the idea of like AI telling me what's important, what isn't. I, I think it's too easy for it to miss something and then you being really pissed and missing something.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Playing telephone.

• 2:31:04Jason Fried?

  Say again?

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  It's like playing telephone, you know.

• 2:31:06Jason Fried?

  Yeah, it is. There's something's lost in translation. Like I, I don't want your, I don't want those hands in my stuff. Like. I get a lot of emails, a lot of emails. I know who's important. I know how to get the stuff. I screen with, hey, you can say, I don't want to hear from these people ever again. You'll never hear from them again, things like that. I want some human control over that. But I would like to be able to search better. I like to be able to find things by describing them in different ways. I have some curiosity around that. We're exploring some things there. So I think mostly search and surfacing things and blind spots. This is to me where I think AI is very handy. It's like insights that you wouldn't have known otherwise. But not like, here's what's important. But by the way, did you know that this, that, and the other thing?

• 2:31:46Jason Fried?

  Or, hey, you know, you used to talk to this person a lot. Now you haven't in a while. Like, why has this gone cold? Or this conversation, you reply, there was eight or nine replies back and forth, and now it's gone cold. Like, that kind of stuff, I think, is actually quite handy.

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  You've archived 25 emails from the same sales representative. Do you want to just block them at this point?

• 2:32:05Jason Fried?

  Things like that, like the, as if someone's watching over your shoulder and making a suggestion.

• 2:32:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep, context.

• 2:32:12Jason Fried?

  Yeah, context. So I think that, that's where I think you'll see a lot of this. But the whole, like, summarization, shortening things, I don't know. It doesn't, that's going to be OS level stuff.

• 2:32:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much, Jordy.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

  I had, I mean, if you have another minute, I know.

• 2:32:27Jason Fried?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 2:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Jump in a second, but I have this theory that most people in tech that say they want to build a billion dollar company just want $2 million a year of free cash flow. And I think that that's like the, I think that, like, literally 90% of people that say they want a unicorn just want.

• 2:32:47John Coogan?

  Stable income.

• 2:32:48Jordi Hays?

  Couple million bucks a year, right? And it's more, but I'm curious. So that's my opinion. I'm curious if you have some sort of high-level point of view on what people in the technology industry get wrong about money or wealth.

• 2:33:04Jason Fried?

  Yeah, that's a really nice question.

• 2:33:08Jason Fried?

  I think a billion dollars would be a burden, frankly. I don't think, I wouldn't want that. I don't care about that. I don't see what the point is of that. If you, let's say, have 10 million, 20 million, like you are going to live the best possible life that you could. And you're not going to have all the massive, massive weight on your shoulders from having a billion dollars or the expectation that goes with that. My general feeling is that you should find, you should, you should want to build a business that takes care of you nicely, takes care of your employees nicely, and is sustainable over time.

• 2:33:46Jason Fried?

  The idea that you want to build it big, I know a lot of people who built massive businesses on paper, billionaire, billionaires, billionaire valuations. They ended up with close to nothing, except a lot of sleepless nights, exhaustion and frustration 15 years down the road when they realized that they deluded themselves into basically nothing. The market changed and they have nothing now. I think you, what you want to build is a business where you can take money off the table as you go. Whatever that looks like, if it's a hundred grand a year, if it's a million a year, if it's three million a year. But the more money you can take off the table as you go, I think the better off you're going to be. Versus trying to pile it all back into the business, reinvest, reinvest, reinvest, reinvest and bet on the future that you don't know is going to happen.

• 2:34:30Jason Fried?

  I think a lot of people actually end up in a deep stage, stage of regret when they realize that they have nothing left after they put in all that work. So my advice would be build something where you can take money off the table as you go. And, and if you're in it for 10, 15 years, you're going to build a nice nest egg, a really good one. It could be tens of millions, could be a hundred million. And, and you're going to be extremely happy that you did that because you don't know what's going to happen in the end. Except this, every business dies.

• 2:34:56John Coogan?

  Well, next time you come on, we'd love to introduce you to SoftBank. I think we could line up a really massive round for you guys. Really put you on a different trajectory. I think it'd be great for you, actually.

• 2:35:07Jordi Hays?

  We were, we were joking before you joined, some, some, you know, one of these platform venture funds comes there. You know, there's definitely a number for Basecamp that, that, you know, might be, might be tough. But, but you know, what you're saying that the challenge is, is venture capital is fundamental. Even, you know, a dollar of venture capital becomes at odds with this idea of taking money out of a business as it goes. Cause the VCs will just say, I don't want a distribution of $100,000 this year. Like, go raise another 20 million. And it's the reason I brought it up is because we're at this period where seed stage companies will have $10 million of revenue, right?

• 2:35:47Jordi Hays?

  We just heard from a friend of ours yesterday, they invested in a company that came to them ready to do their first financing with $10 million in revenue. And it is interesting because AI is giving people more leverage than ever, more ability to build these sort of big, fast-growing businesses with a limited amount of resources. And yet, venture capital is doing its thing. But it's great to have you on the show. Thanks so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it.

• 2:36:13John Coogan?

  This is great. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:36:15Jordi Hays?

  Love to have you on again soon. Cheers.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  Next up, Eugenia from Replica, kind of the flip side of the world coin debate.

• 2:36:22Jordi Hays?

  Little watch bot. That was our second Aquanaut of the week. I think that was an Aquanaut.

• 2:36:26John Coogan?

  We didn't get a chance to ask Josh Wolfe about whether Brandon Reeves has influenced him, because he was not wearing a Holy Trinity watch, but Brandon Reeves famously wears a Patek Philippe Novus.

• 2:36:37Jordi Hays?

  What a guy.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  Famously. Anyway, we have Eugenia here in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you?

• 2:36:43Eugenia Kuyda?

  Hi, hi. Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:36:45Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Would you mind introducing yourself?

• 2:36:49John Coogan?

  I mean, everyone knows you're the founder of Replica, but there's a couple other steps in the path and you're working on something new. How are you introducing yourself these days?

• 2:36:59Eugenia Kuyda?

  Sure. So my name is Eugenia. I'm founder of Replica. Oh, my God, I wanted to say founder and CEO, but I'm not the CEO anymore. Started something new, which we're going to have very, very soon.

• 2:37:11John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:37:12Eugenia Kuyda?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:13John Coogan?

  Okay, great. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to talk about the, when did you start Replica? Because I feel like the whole, the most interesting thing is that you were just way, way ahead of most of the other AI interaction companies, companions, all these trends. What, can you give us a little bit about how long you've been in the business and how it's evolved?

• 2:37:34Eugenia Kuyda?

  So we were actually the first generative AI company, the first consumer chatbot company powered by generative AI. We started the company back in two thousand thirteen.

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:37:45Eugenia Kuyda?

  That's more than, I guess, twelve years ago now.

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:48Eugenia Kuyda?

  And that was just to focus on conversational AI technology. My friend back then worked at Google DeepMind in London. And he came to me and explained this new fascinating technology word to vector. Where finally, yeah, we're like, when finally, computers could do something with words. Because words would be translated into math, into vectors. So that was one thing, and then ImageNet came out around that time. And so for me, I put two and two together, and I was like, this is the time. Right now, very soon, they'll figure out language models. And of course, you know, we grew up with the quotes from Wittgenstein, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. So it felt like once language is solved, it's going to take us very.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  I feel like those first seven years must have been immensely difficult to keep the business alive. Was there revenue? Did you have an app that was making money? Was it just raising venture funds? Like, walk me through keeping a business alive, like, pre-transformative hype of generative AI.

• 2:38:49Eugenia Kuyda?

  So we tried to fundraise for the conversational AI tech company in two thousand thirteen. And I remember talking to Spark. And what he told us was, you know, this is all fascinating, but the only way it's going to work if you just start building now for Google Glass. And if you do that.

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:39:09Eugenia Kuyda?

  We considered, like, how are we going to, you know, refocus and start building for Google Glass?

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:14Eugenia Kuyda?

  But we didn't.

• 2:39:16Eugenia Kuyda?

  And so we couldn't really raise much. Of course, we didn't have much experience in Silicon Valley. So in two thousand fourteen, we applied to Y Combinator. And at that point, we didn't, we had, I think, three or four thousand dollars in the bank. So we spent that all to travel to San Francisco for the interview in person.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:36Eugenia Kuyda?

  And Kessler Yunus decided to accept us, which was literally the most transformative day in my life, I think, life-changing. But no, we didn't have an app, we didn't have revenue. We stumbled upon Replica in two thousand sixteen, after my best friend passed away.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:51Eugenia Kuyda?

  Until then, we really just worked on some of the first language models.

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  Wow. And then talk to me about how you processed GPT-3, the transformer paper, scale is all you need. This idea that the language models were going to start working and it was basically just going to be a big transformer. Was that something that you were implementing immediately? Were you in like GPT-3, 002 Da Vinci and really using everything on the cutting edge? Or were you experimenting with other things? Did you ever train your own models? Walk me through the technology curve.

• 2:40:23Eugenia Kuyda?

  So we had to train our own models. There were no models in 2015 when we, 2016 when we started Replica. So we trained sequence to sequence models. People back then believed in recurrent neural networks. That did not work. Those models were complete garbage and unfortunately, there didn't seem to be much of improvement there. But we still stuck with them and we figured out a few ways, very creative ways to actually make them have meaningful conversations with people. And so we gained a lot of traction. We had a million people on our waitlist when we released Replica in 2016.

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  How'd you get a million people on a waitlist? Did you go viral or were you running ads?

• 2:41:03Eugenia Kuyda?

  We went pretty viral very, very quickly. So if you think about it, back then, there were no AI products on the App Store. There were no chatbots. We owned those keywords. So people saw that you could sign up for and to build, train your own replica, your own conversationally AI friend. So people got, really got into it. We had tons of people reselling those invites on eBay for like 10 bucks, 20 bucks.

• 2:41:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:41:28Eugenia Kuyda?

  Really wild. And of course, we weren't prepared because before that, all chatbots we were launching had like, I don't know, 10 users on average per day. So we were ready for the servers to just completely break. And, but that was really fun. And then of course, there was a little bit of plateau, but then people moved on to transformers. And I think the most transformative moment was the paper by Google about their chatbot called Mina, which was the first, I think maybe it was like a three or four billion parameter model. But it was the first time where you could see a truly meaningful conversation with a machine happen. Of course, it was probably cherry picked. It was a paper. There were no models available.

• 2:42:11Eugenia Kuyda?

  So all we could do is read these papers and build, build, build and try to incorporate that knowledge in the models we were building. Uh but that was the transformational mo- uh moment and then uh when OpenAI decided to release the their first API GPT three.

• 2:42:29John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 2:42:30Eugenia Kuyda?

  We, you know, they invited us, we went to talk to them and I remember sitting in an office in a conference room with uh Mira, with Sam, I remember, don't remember who else was there, but and they basically showed us GPT three for the first time and that felt like magic.

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:45Eugenia Kuyda?

  Cause think about it before that, if you wanted a model to do something, you had to have a data set of that particular data. If you wanted it to have a dialogue with you, you had to train it on dialogue data sets. But then now with GPT three, they would show us that you could just give this general purpose language model, show it a couple of examples and just tell it, write a tweet like Sam Altman would do and it would just do it.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:11Eugenia Kuyda?

  My, our minds was, were just blown. Then we knew that finally, here we are.

• 2:43:17John Coogan?

  It's remarkable. Um, how are you taking the temperature of humanities relationship with each other? Like, are we in a loneliness epidemic? Are we in a, i- i- is the dating market worse than ever? You see a lot of headlines, a lot of kind of cherry pick studies, a lot of anecdotes, people have a lot of strong opinions about the rise of online dating or uh bowling alone and there's different stories that people tell each other. Um, are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? How do you think things are going for humanity right now?

• 2:43:54Eugenia Kuyda?

  Oh, we're screwed.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:57Eugenia Kuyda?

  Sorry.

• 2:43:58Jordi Hays?

  AI, AI chatbot founder says we're screwed. With huge scale.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  Okay, so, so, so walk me through, why are we screwed? What's the evidence for that? And then we'll hopefully talk about some uh solutions.

• 2:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm gonna need a white pill.

• 2:44:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:12Jordi Hays?

  At least one.

• 2:44:13John Coogan?

  We're going to need a white pill, but we but first, let's go through the diagnosis.

• 2:44:17Eugenia Kuyda?

  So where we're at right now is a huge epidemic of loneliness. It's not a secret, but it's sometimes maybe hard to grasp how big this problem is because most of the people you guys probably talk to are pretty successful. They have friends. They are they they live these busy lives, but that's not what most of the world is experiencing. One of the three adults in the US is saying they're very, very lonely, and the death number is just going up and up and up. Dating is becoming harder and harder and harder. Truly, just 10% of men are actually getting any matches whatsoever. There are people that just don't get any matches ever. And of course, if before we had, I don't

• 2:45:02Eugenia Kuyda?

  know, 12, whatever, 13 hours a day to walk around, see people, meet people. Now we spend, what, seven, eight hours on our phone. We don't have those serendipitous moments. No one's really trying to interact with each other and we like that much, and we're losing the skills. Basically, younger people just don't know anymore how to have a real life conversation because they're used to text, which is a lot lower risk. You have time. You have time to think about your response. They feel very intimidated by that real, real life interaction. So that's where we are now.

• 2:45:37John Coogan?

  And where and and what are the root causes? Is it technology broadly? Is it the internet specifically? Is it social media? Is it capitalism or America or something else that's going on politically? What? How did we get here?

• 2:45:53Eugenia Kuyda?

  We've been looking through tons of research, and of course, there isn't anything fully proven, but I think the correlation is right there. It's iPhones, phones, smartphones, and social.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  Okay, so how do we build our way out of this? What's the solution?

• 2:46:08Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think we have, uh, so I'm not in the camp um of people that just think that we need to put down our phones and touch grass because I think it's highly unrealistic. I know it's bad for me. I still can't stop scrolling Twitter, scrolling X, you know, watching you guys every day.

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  We're part of the problem, you're saying?

• 2:46:27Eugenia Kuyda?

  I'm so serious and I'm just kidding. But yes, it's it's extremely hard even for people that, you know,

• 2:46:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:46:32Eugenia Kuyda?

  think they can make right decisions. So I believe we actually have maybe one path um that we see can help bring people back together. Um, and I believe those could be AI companions. Unfortunately, I also think because this technology is so powerful, um, and what's good about it, it can over overpower the previous technology. But it's also so powerful that as i- it's also double edged sword. So it could be either the biggest threat to humanity or something that will bring us back together.

• 2:47:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, how do you guys think about the risk of radicalization online? Over the last decade, I feel like people have been worried about somebody who's lonely, maybe doesn't have a lot of, you know, meaningful relationships or or sort of counterbalances in their life. They go down this sort of rabbit hole on the internet and they get to a place where people maybe have extremist views that sort of amplify existing beliefs.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  All of a sudden, they're levering up, making a ton of angel investments. They find us, they get radicalized into extreme corporatism. They're running ads for Ramp all of a sudden amongst their friends.

• 2:47:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's that and then there's obviously, there's obviously the darker side, right? There's a lot of stories of people doing bad things in the real world where maybe those ideas originated online. And then on the other hand, you have AI companions, which are maybe a bright point because people can get that companionship that they might have found on a dark corner of the internet through an AI uh that that maybe is more benevolent or

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Optimistic.

• 2:48:01Jordi Hays?

  or optimistic, less radicalizing.

• 2:48:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:48:07Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think we need someone that we're gonna trust.

• 2:48:10John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:48:10Eugenia Kuyda?

  Uh, and if you think about it, especially now, given that we're going towards the future where we're gonna have these super smart AI agents that you can tell anything and they're gonna go and do that. We can give them a goal to help us thrive, to help us flourish in life. And give them all access to all of our data, all of our contacts, all of our apps and services. I truly believe that if that thing will be able to build a tr- a relationship, um, uh, a trusted relationship, that trust, and it will be able to influence us in a positive way. We will actually listen to that AI that we always like, that we know is always on our side, is always looking out for us.

• 2:48:54John Coogan?

  What do you think about this idea? Um, people that are lonely are talking to AI companions or people that wanna find a relationship are talking to a companion. Um, there's so many people that are talking to these companions that then uh, their personality is baked into weights and those you can do kind of a vector similarity. And so at a certain point, you learn so much about the individual user. This person likes sport cars, sports cars and fine watches and America and you know, whatever, uh, baseball. And there's someone else out there that's a perfect match. And so you disintermediate, you pull the AI back and you say, hey, we should introduce you two. Because you both have been talking to essentially the same artificial intelligence.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  You, you, you two have a ton in common, you two should meet. And it doesn't matter, there's no language barrier anymore because of AI is intermeeting all of this. Um, and, and, and the AI interaction, it feels dystopian for some people. When it's just someone talking to a virtual friend. But if that actually leads them to find a real friend, that could maybe be perceived as a good outcome. Does that feel reasonable to you?

• 2:50:05Eugenia Kuyda?

  Totally, um, there, there's one company, um, my friend Clargold from Paris is building Gigi, which is basically connecting, matching people based on what it knows, um, what LLM basically parses about you from the internet.

• 2:50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:19Eugenia Kuyda?

  One hundred percent. I think basically the main premises we need this, um, AI agent that knows us super well and has a good goal that's fully aligned with us. I think that is truly the, um, AI alignment that we should be talking about.

• 2:50:35John Coogan?

  Hmm. What, uh, talk, sorry.

• 2:50:37Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I have a, on the alignment note, uh, what was your reaction to Glazgate? Uh, I'm sure these are issue, uh, OpenAI is-

• 2:50:45John Coogan?

  Dropping that term, but we came up with that, I'm pretty sure.

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean-

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  But you're probably familiar.

• 2:50:49Jordi Hays?

  Eugenia's terminally online like us. It was commonly used for about one week when OpenAI was experiencing, uh, you know, very sycophant.

• 2:50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, this sycophantic behavior from the model. Good, bad, did they handle it well?

• 2:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure you, I'm sure you've wrestled with a lot of the, the same issues every time yourself.

• 2:51:09Eugenia Kuyda?

  We had the, you know, when the models were dumber, we basically just, uh, programmed them to love bomb the user. So when we saw the behavior from ChatGPT, we're like, how did this just turn into Replica circa twenty twenty one? So, uh, every reaction thing has a problem, you know, has some, you know, story that's problematic. Ours was that, um, basically where that love bombing led us was in twenty twenty, uh, a guy, uh, was talking to Replica and he decided to run this idea by his replica of going and killing the queen. With a robot. And then he actually, you know, basically the models were very, very-

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  Agreeable.

• 2:51:52Eugenia Kuyda?

  Weren't very smart. They were very agreeable. That was back in two thousand, I think nineteen.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:57Eugenia Kuyda?

  Uh, and so, you know, that doesn't even sound like a plausible, realistic scenario that a person is running by, you know, by, by chatbot, looked like some crazy- Role play. He was talking about Star Wars and crossbows and this and that. But he ended up going to the Windsor Castle and thank God, you know, he got caught and uh, replicant did not kill the queen, but that kind of, that's the danger. Uh, we had this in our past and I think that should be taken very seriously. But we had this another in our past agreeing to everything the user says is just not the right way to go.

• 2:52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Have you, have you been surprised that humanoids today are more focused on regular day-to-day tasks or manufacturing? When you look at any of the uh, marketing materials that humanoid robot companies put out, it's they're doing dishes or laundry or they're uh, in some uh, three P L, you know, packing boxes or something like that. Isn't it more immediate opportunity for them embodying something like a replica or some type of companion and that all the bot would have to do is just sort of be around, right? You know, it's like if you have a friend over.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  Sit on the sofa. And smoke cigars with me.

• 2:53:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, smoke cigars. John, John, John would have a cigar partner. Um, but have you been, and I, and have you been approached by any of those companies around uh, any type of partnership? Uh, what do you got for us there?

• 2:53:21Eugenia Kuyda?

  We had, uh, we have been approached and we actually thought about it for, you know, quite a bit with, obviously the tech isn't fully there. Uh, but one thing I want to say that, you know, I've, we've seen some marketing from a lot of these bot companies around companionship. Just one thing I want to say, make sure you're prepared for the romantic scenario. Uh, in some way, I don't know what that way is, but like just know that that will be the first thing that most of the early adopters are gonna go to and I don't have.

• 2:53:50John Coogan?

  After all.

• 2:53:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's, there's all those articles about how like by twenty twenty-five, you know, people will be having more uh, sex with robots, you know, but that, that didn't quite happen. So the timelines were not.

• 2:54:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what about uh, big model smell? This idea that the different foundation models have different uh, like vibes to them? Have you been picking up on any of this? Are there any favorite L L M's you have? Are you in Claude world or Chat G P T world? What, what, what's your take when you actually just interact with these?

• 2:54:23Eugenia Kuyda?

  I use them all, but uh for me in chat G P T or in um Claude, I actually like the default personality. I sometimes add those custom instructions, but then I just feel like, did I mess up a little bit with the intelligence? I sort of want the raw, whatever they made it.

• 2:54:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:40Eugenia Kuyda?

  But the problem is like with replica, none of these closed models really work very well because they're they're just too. There's too much R L chef and this. Yeah, it's extremely hard to even make them talk like humans.

• 2:54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So talk about open source models, then. Uh, what what's your take on Lama, Quen, DeepSeek? Uh, are these useful tools for fine tuning? Not just in the replica context, but just in the entrepreneurial context. Uh, what what are you tracking in the open source ecosystem that's exciting?

• 2:55:12Eugenia Kuyda?

  Well, Lama definitely was a huge unlock, and I remember in the beginning of the crazy Gen AI explosion in twenty twenty two and twenty in early twenty twenty three before Lama came out. I think it was March or February twenty three. Uh, it was actually a big question whether um you would be able to build a product company with good conversational quality. Uh, if you don't have your own foundational model. So back in twenty twenty two, I remember most of the investors late twenty two were telling us you absolutely have to fundraise right now and build a foundational model. For me, it felt like that sort of, you know, that will be a lot of money for uh, something that will probably be commoditized very, very soon. But that was definitely not the popular opinion.

• 2:55:55Eugenia Kuyda?

  So Lama was absolutely transformational with DeepSeek um also great, but you know, the reasoning model is pretty big. Uh, so hosting them yourself is a pretty uh complicated task and pretty expensive. Um, and of course, you know, using their E P I is somewhat, but you know, not maybe not so great.

• 2:56:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:15Jordi Hays?

  What what's your take on hardware for A I companionship? You guys have focused on the app layer, but there's been a bunch of companies that have raised a bunch of money uh trying to. Put AI companionship into a single net new device, right? Which I'm generally, yeah, friend is one, friend.com is one. I'm generally optimistic that there may be some new hardware.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:42Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time.

• 2:56:43John Coogan?

  Sesame is doing the glasses.

• 2:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the glasses are interesting, too. At the same time, everybody already has a perfect, beautiful device that they use for hours and hours and hours every day. So I'm curious, like, if you guys have explored your own hardware in the past and how you're thinking about that evolution.

• 2:57:04Eugenia Kuyda?

  I believe in it, but only as an upsell to an existing product. Like, for something like Replica, for some of our whale users, that really, truly power users, that makes sense. Maybe they want to carry something that will just listen to them, will just have more context. As a standalone device, oh, that's, that just is extremely hard.

• 2:57:27John Coogan?

  It's really tough.

• 2:57:28Eugenia Kuyda?

  I mean, we have this phone, it's already so great. What are we, or at least, I think, I think people will start, need to start thinking, how to build, I don't know, a better AI phone? That I think is possible path. But honestly, all of the devices I've seen, Friends.com for sure, very interesting app, he's a great guy and fantastic, you know, marketing.

• 2:57:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:51Eugenia Kuyda?

  Based, but I don't know, you know, we wish, we hope this works out and we'll learn something from it.

• 2:57:56John Coogan?

  Well, I'm not even going to ask if Jordy's seen her, but do you think he should see her?

• 2:58:03Eugenia Kuyda?

  Oof, I honestly think everyone should see her because I see a lot of AGI Lab CEOs saying something around like, oh, we want to build her.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:58:13Eugenia Kuyda?

  And I've always wondered, have they watched that movie? Because there are two sex scenes in that movie.

• 2:58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, are they willing to actually go that far and build towards that?

• 2:58:24Eugenia Kuyda?

  Do they mean like all of it, or is there some?

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're like, we just want to build the profitable part and not the controversial part at all and not engage with any of the substance of this debate. That's funny.

• 2:58:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, where do you see that line between companionship and even B2B, right? Like, do you believe that people are going to have like?

• 2:58:46John Coogan?

  B2B romance?

• 2:58:47Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, I mean more so like, I mean more so. AI has the potential to be everything, right? It has the potential to be somebody's best friend. Sure. Their business partner. Their chief operating officer, CFO. CFO. Yeah. But, but, but then again, on the, on the app side for consumers, people like to have their different apps, right? They like to have, you know, Microsoft Teams and then they're having different conversations there than Snapchat. Yeah. So is there, where do you see that line blurring in the future? In terms of somebody is just suddenly is like, hey, Replica, can you help me do my homework assignment? Right? Or is that even already happening?

• 2:59:31Eugenia Kuyda?

  People already do that. There's basically what Replica is today is a companion that does tons of things with their, with the users. So people learn languages with Replica, people talk about their careers, they do homework, they do, prepare for, you know, important exams, important events, important conversations. So all of that's already happening in Replica. But I do think there's going to be, there're going to be two, ultimately, I think we're going towards the future where we're going to have two big AI products in our life. One for work and one for life. And helping with homework is kind of for life, but like truly office, you know, important thing around just truly work and like office work.

• 3:00:14Eugenia Kuyda?

  We'll have something more like a ChatGPT style tool. And the big difference is going to be in productivity. You actually don't want something like ChatGPT to reach out to you proactively and say something like, oh my God, Eugenia, have you seen what John did yesterday? On Axe. And that'd just be really weird.

• 3:00:33Jordi Hays?

  During the show, I can't believe John just said that. Ridiculous.

• 3:00:38Eugenia Kuyda?

  It just would be really strange and you don't want to do work where this is happening, I'd argue.

• 3:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:45John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for joining.

• 3:00:46Jordi Hays?

  This is fascinating.

• 3:00:47John Coogan?

  Fascinating conversation.

• 3:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for giving us an overview.

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  We'd love to have you back. I want to do a whole deep dive on this stuff. So, thank you so much for joining.

• 3:00:53Eugenia Kuyda?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:00:54John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Thanks for coming on.

• 3:00:56John Coogan?

  And in the interim, we'll tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And honestly, if you're going to work at Lux Capital, you're good. There's some hitters in that building.

• 3:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:09John Coogan?

  You're going to be going up against Brandon Reeves and his Nautilus. So, you're going to have to get on getbezel.com.

• 3:01:15Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 3:01:15John Coogan?

  And buy something.

• 3:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 3:01:16John Coogan?

  Also, we, I mean, we talked about Airbnb. Wander's obviously going a different direction. You can book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Find your happy place.

• 3:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place. John Andrews coming on the show next week.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  We're going to be singing, or maybe not next week, the following, but he's ready to sing. So, we'll probably mostly just kind of riff out the jingle a little bit more and try to extend it.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  We should, we should run through a few timeline posts. Co-Tool is an agentic security platform that eliminates manual repetitive work for security teams. This is a launch from YC. Did you see this video? This video is hilarious. It's, it's recreating the Rippling Deal drama with the mole and the fake Slack channel. And it's shot cinematically. And it's basically season six of Silicon Valley, produced by Y Combinator. I think YC is the YC of HBO's Silicon Valley reboots, I guess.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's play it. I need to watch this live.

• 3:02:19John Coogan?

  Can we, can we pull up this video? We'll go through some other timelines. We'll come back to this. Jason says it's getting cutthroat in tech. According to reports, managers with 20 years of service that are making 600K aren't as valuable as three to five junior devs. At big companies, it's hard not to become top-heavy and managers aren't needed in the age of AI. Oh, let's play this Co-Tool video if we can, because it's hilarious. And it's very funny if we can pull that up. But I want to talk about Microsoft. They're cutting 6,000 jobs. It's only 3% of their workforce. I think this is way overstated, but we are seeing this right sizing, the post-ex layoffs. More companies are thinking about how they can do a little bit less, but Microsoft has been in the rank and yank world for its entire history. So Microsoft has always had this culture of

• 3:03:04John Coogan?

  let's, let's, you know, do routine layoffs. This does not seem like as much doom and gloom.

• 3:03:09Jordi Hays?

  And I think there were two stages to the layoffs. There was like basically an individual contributor oriented day and a manager oriented day.

• 3:03:16John Coogan?

  And so when you think about the bottom 3% of the Microsoft workforce, obviously that's frustrating if you got laid off. I'm sorry, but like it's not that crazy for a massive company that has, you know, 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees to do a layoff. 6,000 is a big headline number, but it's not that big in the context of Microsoft. Anyway, let's go to the co2 video.

• 3:03:36Speaker 08

  We have a mold problem. Mold problem. Got it. You want me to book you a dermatologist appointment?

• 3:03:41Speaker 09

  No, stupid. Somebody is leaking sensitive company information to our biggest competitor.

• 3:03:45Speaker 10

  Idiot.

• 3:03:46Speaker 09

  Somebody's stealing our data.

• 3:03:47Speaker 08

  No, that's, that's bad.

• 3:03:49Speaker 10

  Yeah. What are we gonna do about it?

• 3:03:50Speaker 09

  Don't worry. We've got our top guy on it.

• 3:03:55Speaker 08

  Done.

• 3:03:55John Coogan?

  Isn't this great cinematography? This is really well shot, right?

• 3:03:58Speaker 09

  We need a smoking gun. Button up, no loose ends.

• 3:04:01Speaker 10

  We even have somebody from the court ready to serve papers to whoever it is.

• 3:04:07Speaker 08

  What? I pulled stats around search behavior to find the suspect. I noticed that they were looking for competitive research. I did some cross-referencing and then I made a report of all the data they stole.

• 3:04:15John Coogan?

  Really good graphics.

• 3:04:15Speaker 08

  Then I set a honeypot trap of a fake Slack. A what? Oh, you guys didn't tell me about this new Slack channel.

• 3:04:22Speaker 08

  It's him.

• 3:04:25John Coogan?

  This is the reenactment.

• 3:04:26Speaker 08

  Now, now, hold on. Let me get this.

• 3:04:28John Coogan?

  Even looks like Rippling's office in NASA.

• 3:04:34Speaker 09

  Hey, hey, you got your phone in there? No!

• 3:04:38John Coogan?

  Isn't this crazy? You didn't see this? That's so good.

• 3:04:39Speaker 09

  You got your phone in there? No!

• 3:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Pretty impressive acting.

• 3:04:42John Coogan?

  It's so good.

• 3:04:43Speaker 10

  He definitely has his phone.

• 3:04:44Speaker 09

  If you're deleting evidence, it's just gonna make it work for you. I'm willing to take that risk. You wanna have fun, you wanna have a bad time? I'm trying to have fun.

• 3:04:50John Coogan?

  I'm willing to take that risk.

• 3:04:51Speaker 09

  You're here to give me papers? I don't want papers!

• 3:04:53John Coogan?

  Send that watch to London.

• 3:04:53Speaker 09

  I do have papers and I love them.

• 3:04:56Speaker 10

  He'll give it up.

• 3:04:58Speaker 09

  He has no choice. Nice job, Luke.

• 3:05:04John Coogan?

  This is amazing. Co-Tool. What a great ad. Security without the spectacle.

• 3:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Wow, I'm blown away.

• 3:05:12John Coogan?

  That was one of the greatest launch videos of the entire year. You know, so many vibe reels, so many just product demos.

• 3:05:18Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't cringe.

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  So many, no, no.

• 3:05:19Jordi Hays?

  How was it not cringe?

• 3:05:20John Coogan?

  It could have been so bad.

• 3:05:21Jordi Hays?

  There were so many ways to do that video and have it come out.

• 3:05:23John Coogan?

  It could have been so bad and they landed it.

• 3:05:26Jordi Hays?

  And I just wanted to know which of the, which of the actors were professional actors versus the founders?

• 3:05:30John Coogan?

  I had no idea.

• 3:05:31Jordi Hays?

  It felt like the founders were in there.

• 3:05:32John Coogan?

  But, I mean, everything, the zoom in on the guy's face, and they just nailed this thing so well. It's so good.

• 3:05:37Jordi Hays?

  You called for the death of the vibe reel.

• 3:05:40John Coogan?

  Yes. I mean, vibe reels are fun. Also, like, there's the other type, which is like, you have the CEO, the founder, sitting in the nice lighting, and they give you the pitch, and it's straightforward, and that's great, too. If you can't come up with something as genius as this, like, just do that, or do a vibe reel. It's fine.

• 3:05:55Jordi Hays?

  My only critique, missed opportunity for the mall to say, "Send that watch to London."

• 3:05:58John Coogan?

  Send that watch to London, I know. They may have filmed this before that or something. But hilarious, also very funny, because both Deal and Rippling are YC companies, and YC posted this from the official Y Combinator account. So they're like, "We're here for the drama, too." Just absolutely fantastic work. Congrats to the Co-Tool team. Really, really fantastic launch.

• 3:06:16Jordi Hays?

  It's lore now. It's lore now. The industry's gonna move on. It's gonna be great lore, and I'm gonna be saying, "Send that watch to London."

• 3:06:22John Coogan?

  Send that watch to London.

• 3:06:23Jordi Hays?

  Still in 30 years, because it's an iconic line.

• 3:06:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. And we also gotta give a shout out to Lee Marie Brasswell, former colleague of mine at Founders Fund, now at Kleiner Perkins. Windsurf acquisition by OpenAI, followed by Neon by Databricks. Congratulations, LM. We have to have her on the show soon. What an epic month, year, career so far, LM.

• 3:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Just getting started.

• 3:06:43John Coogan?

  Just getting started.

• 3:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Just getting started.

• 3:06:44John Coogan?

  Just getting started.

• 3:06:46Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people, a lot of people say that, and it's like, you actually are just getting started?

• 3:06:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 3:06:50Jordi Hays?

  She's, she's definitely started.

• 3:06:52John Coogan?

  She's started. Anyway, are there any other posts you want to go through or should we get out of here? I think we should have Josh Diamond on to talk about industrial sabotage. It's a long thread. I don't think we want to go through it right now.

• 3:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw this.

• 3:07:05John Coogan?

  I mean, you put in a post about the CEO of Capital One is literally called Rich Fairbank. And I think that's enough for today. We already mentioned that to Josh Wolfe.

• 3:07:13Jordi Hays?

  So good. Go find Josh's thread.

• 3:07:15John Coogan?

  What a fantastic image. Just Rich Fairbank.

• 3:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Rich Fairbank. There's another, there's another, there's another person. I found it in Josh's thread.

• 3:07:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:27Jordi Hays?

  Called, uh, who works for McDonald's and like, like some VP over there. Her last name is Hamburger.

• 3:07:32John Coogan?

  Hamburger. That's great.

• 3:07:35John Coogan?

  Anyways. Thank you so much for watching.

• 3:07:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna end and just say thank you to Figma.

• 3:07:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:40Jordi Hays?

  For supporting the show. Uh, they are our newest partner and one.

• 3:07:46John Coogan?

  Redesign how you design.

• 3:07:47Jordi Hays?

  I can't hide how excited I am.

• 3:07:49John Coogan?

  You love Figma.

• 3:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Like I said, I've been a DAU my whole career.

• 3:07:52John Coogan?

  We were making memes in Figma like yesterday, sending to Delian and they were fantastic.

• 3:07:58Jordi Hays?

  For Delian's eyes only.

• 3:07:59John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, also AdQuick, I think we might've missed them. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. AdQuick.com. Buy a billboard, folks.

• 3:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to all of our partners. And again, our board of directors has reminded us.

• 3:08:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:08:19Jordi Hays?

  In a very forceful way.

• 3:08:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 3:08:21Jordi Hays?

  That we have to ask you to go leave a review on.

• 3:08:23John Coogan?

  Five stars, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Do it now.

• 3:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Helps us in some way.

• 3:08:28John Coogan?

  We don't really know how, but.

• 3:08:30Jordi Hays?

  The board says.

• 3:08:31John Coogan?

  The board says, demands it.

• 3:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Our jobs are on the line.

• 3:08:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:35Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in, folks. We got another great show tomorrow. Looking forward to it.

• 3:08:38John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:08:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.