LIVE FROM HILL & VALLEY: Jacob Helberg, Delian Asparouhov, Christian Garrett, Josh Wolfe, Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, Mike Solana, Keith Rabois, Qasar Younis, Shaun Maguire, Sampriti Bhattacharyya, David Friedberg, Joshua Steinman & more

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Linear - https://linear.app Figma - https://www.figma.com 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 (00:00) - Zach White (07:54) - David Friedberg (15:15) - Jacob Helberg (19:57) - Keith Rabois (28:35) - Zachary Perret (33:02) - Zak Kukoff (40:17) - Mike Solana (01:00:12) - Michael Eisenberg (01:12:57) - Shaun Maguire (01:25:37) - Josh Wolfe (01:43:02) - Delian Asparouhov (01:50:57) - Christian Garrett (01:58:24) - Eric Glyman (02:06:54) - Karim Atiyeh (02:16:14) - Joshua Steinman (02:26:26) - Fil Aronshtein (02:35:27) - Aaron Slodov (02:44:03) - Sampriti Bhattacharyya (02:51:19) - Jared Madfes (03:01:36) - Qasar Younis (03:15:13) - Justin Fishner-Wolfson (03:23:43) - Cornelius Schmitt (03:28:53) - Ryan Peterson (03:41:47) - Augustus Doricko (03:48:49) - JC Btaiche (03:55:35) - Erik Torenberg

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 T B P N.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  It is Wednesday, April 30th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We're here with Zach White from eight V C at the Hill and Valley Forum 2025.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  In the Capitol Building.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  We're in the, we're in the literal capital, which is great. Uh, we're normally in the capital of capital. Today we're in the capital of America, literally.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Many people call this the capital of America because it is.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Uh, we are here with Zach. Uh, can you introduce yourself? What do you do? What do you like to invest in? What do you, what's your takeaway from Hill and Valley so far?

• 0:33Speaker 02

  So my name is Zach White. I work at a fund called eight V C. We invest in everything from defense to uh, biotech, healthcare. I spend a lot of time doing defense stuff.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  And the Hill and Valley has been a crazy vibe so far. We had Hamas protesters.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  We've had, you know, a variety of different uh, things happening here. So it's, it's been great.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the difference between this year's Hill and Valley versus the last, you know, couple of years. From our understanding, it's been, you know, uh, uh, almost an order of magnitude more people here this year.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's like 10x people here. There's like random influencers here, which is awesome. We have people wrapping Teflon.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Like it's, it's an amazing vibe. Like it's, it's like Coachella for uh, you know, people with uh, G550s. So.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm sure the Tarmacs are absolutely stacked right now. Um, uh, who, who, uh, have you listened to any of those speeches yet? Is there anyone that you're excited to hear?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Who do you think is the best like pitch for an actual concrete plan? Cause there's a lot of people that are just like, we want better communication between tech and DC. But then there's other people that come with concrete things. We need to fund this.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, what's interesting? I think Jensen, he was talking about how we need to just be like onshoring all of these like fabs and stuff. And you know, everybody wants to be in and like in, in is crazy around Jensen. Um, so uh, you know, I think that he has like a really good plan on like what we need to do to make sure that we're not relying on China for all this stuff.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  He uh, he was doing great. And then um, Brian Schimpf also, he, he killed it at Andoril. You know, there's um, there's a lot of stuff that they're doing right now and it's just really exciting to see.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Building the arsenal, right?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  The arsenal.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  That is the most re-industrial. Pilled project right now.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  There's like a bunch of generals here and stuff, yeah.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  And they have the, you know, an actual factory, not just hype videos, right? It's coming out. I think the, it was cool to hear from Jensen personally. I mean, we've seen these headlines around Nvidia's investment in the United States. And our big question historically has been, you know, how much of that is like really real? And it seems like he is, you know, extremely.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have a few questions for Jensen. We want to follow up with him is like, is he a customer of reindustrialization? Or is he truly a reindustrializer? Because Nvidia is an American company. They fab with TSMC, TSMC now investing very heavily in America and Arizona. And we could see that go a lot further, in which case, I don't know why Jensen wouldn't want to buy chips from Arizona, TSMC. That seems very logical, packaging with Foxconn, like he's going to be very happy with that. But is there something that he can do personally to bring back jobs or create more manufacturing infrastructure in America? I don't even know if he has the tools or needs to do that, but that was kind of interesting.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting how Foxconn is always, doesn't seem to be in the conversation. It's so associated with China despite being a Taiwanese company.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  That they have the same incentive to.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Next Hill and Valley, we gotta get the CEO of Foxconn.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Terry. That'd be sick. I mean, I think he just needs to start pushing demand here. Like, there's so much demand and if he starts reshoring it here, all of a sudden, there's going to be a lot of work that people need to do here. And I think that that's kind of just like what he was talking about at Hill and Valley today, so.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other line that stood out to me, he was like, some people, there's going to be new job creation. Some people are going to lose their jobs and then everybody's job is going to change. So it's like, you know, basically embracing that change, I think is.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Except, I don't know if you guys saw the Marc Andreessen clip this morning. Apparently VCs are the only things that stay.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  We've been saying this actually, I mean, I think it's actually, the job of an investor is somewhat, somewhat in the, you know, I would actually compare it to, just to come to Mark's defense a little bit. I would compare it in some way to the job of a lawyer or a doctor where just because a computer can do something well, you still want a human to sort of like sign off on the investment and have responsibility. Because it's just not as satisfying to sort of like fire a, it's not as satisfying to fire a. You know, a robot as it is to say like, you know, you have, you had responsibility over this capital, you know, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  The other big question I have is on the robotics side. I know you've done some AI investing. There's a big question in my mind. Obviously, we've scaled up on the pre-training side and these massive data centers have been built out. XAI famously bought a ton of Nvidia chips. When does that start to happen with robotics companies? Because robots are generating a lot of data. At a certain point, you need to build the big transformer and you need to crunch all that data down. And I haven't seen any of the robotics companies. They're still early. And that none, you know, you see Boston Dynamics, you don't hear about the Boston Dynamics data center.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  You don't hear about the, the physical intelligence data center yet. But it feels like it's coming. Jensen kind of put it as like a five-year timeline. I think anything that we can do to get more sightlines on how that grows is going to be really, really key to Nvidia. Because everyone needs a second act and Nvidia is like the king of the second, third, fourth act. It was scientific computing, then gaming, then, uh, then, then AI and robotics. I mean, after LLMs could be the thing that really drives like massive, massive GPU demand. What's your take?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Brett Adcock might be the guy here, but I, I actually, I really think that like you have to be like really talented at fundraising. You just need such an insane amount of capital.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  You need tens of billions of dollars to do this well. And so it's really going to come down to the people who can actually raise the money very well. And that's like a very small handful of people. Maybe, maybe Adam Newman could do it. Maybe Brett Adcock. I don't know who else, but.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  I was kind of, I was hoping for a surprise Elon appearance today. I don't know if it's, uh, I don't know if it's happening, but, uh.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Probably around here somewhere. He's probably like, yeah, he's probably proximate to where we are right now. We should see him pop in.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Um, what, what else is top of mind for you, uh, this week? I know, uh, in many ways you ate, has placed so many bets in this sort of broad category that's relevant to where we are today. That I, I imagine a lot of it's just kind of like, you know, being a part of this, watching it play out. Where, where do you, where, where do you, uh, what, anything specific you're hoping to learn from today?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  I don't know, I just think that like, this was like, this weird heretical space for so long, and now you see like, hundreds of people here all just like, sort of reveling in the fact that, you know, it's cool to do this now. I'm just kinda like, taking it all in, and I don't know. Joe, uh, from our fund, has been doing this for so long, and he always has this like, pithy thing where it's like, now this is the cool thing, what's the next, sort of contrarian thing to do? And, I don't know, it doesn't seem that contrarian anymore, which is like, really interesting. It's, we see people who are doing all sorts of things, uh, you know, five years ago, that are now here doing defense.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Is there, is there more like, practical, uh, like, or like, tactics that you can do as a founder in an event like this? Maybe not just looking to get a feel for the vibe of DC, but actually understand, okay, there are dollars going towards this, we can make this happen, we can go after this pool of capital? Is this a place where you can learn that? Is that, is that a reasonable strategy?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  I think this is something that you should have like, done some pre-training yourself, and learned a little bit about, like, who are the, who are the dealmakers here? Who are the peoples with the pools of money? Where the programs are recorded? Like, who are the guys? And they're all walking around here right now, and so, you should have basically, done your homework before, and, and walk up to the people that are actually in control of where this money's coming from.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Well, we got Dave Friedberg coming in for a couple minutes. Thank you, Zach.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Nice to see you guys, congratulations.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to, great to have you on.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Dave, welcome to the show. Let's hear it for Dave Friedberg. We will, we are on a, uh,

• 7:53John Coogan?

  we're on a, we're on a mission to get every single All In Podcast host on the show. You're the first.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  How many have you had?

• 7:58John Coogan?

  You're the first, you're the first.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Might be the last, let's see.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, might be the last, let's see how it goes.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  We're on camera here?

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're on camera here, there, there, everywhere, we are live.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  What's your, what's your audience like right now, do you think? How many people?

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Probably a few thousand, growing, it grows over time, the more, longer we stream, the more people flow in.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you mean, you mean the live stream this very moment?

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably a few thousand.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Saying the thousands.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Uh, but now that you're here, it's probably gonna 10x, maybe 100x.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Go to 1020?

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  1030?

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  That'd be awesome.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what are you talking about today?

• 8:29Speaker 03

  So it's the same topic for everyone.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  America leadership.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  America's strength.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  China bad.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  America good.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  America good.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  America good.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Technology reigns supreme.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  We must win.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  So that is the topic.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  I think my, every one of the topics is, I think, worded a little bit differently, but they all have the same. End up in the same spot. The same spot.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about Ohalo and how you interact with the government? Because it's very different than like what we normally hear with like DOD, I gotta get a program of record, the government's gonna buy my stuff, but it does seem like it's important for you to interface with the government in some way. What does that look like for you?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Uh, the seed industry has three, um, regulators. It's the USDA, EPA, and the FDA. So there are regulators, regulatory frameworks and bodies in those agencies. And it's a pretty well kind of tried and true, but there's not a lot of procurement. You're not servicing the government. So DOD is very different. There's a massive industry here that services the government, but like a lot of other industries, agriculture is regulated to some extent.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  It is regulated.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  So there are regulators that we deal with, but we're not building a business selling into the government.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  And supporting government action.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  Are we over-regulated? Are we under-regulated?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Everything's over-regulated.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  That is a matter of fact. I was talking with someone last night who I had dinner with, who works in the government, about his observations coming in to the government and just how insane it is. We were talking about why that is. And I think like every organization has a fundamental incentive to grow from a couple of different points.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  You, as an individual, start out as an individual contributor in a company.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Then you get promoted to be a manager. Now you're managing two or three people. So your career progression ultimately is, I wanna manage 20 people, I wanna manage a department.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  So when you have that incentive model within any organization, whether it's a school, administrative bureaucracy, or a startup, or the government, there's an incentive for people to wanna get more resources.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  So every year, everyone says, not, what can I do less this year? Everyone says, how can I do more this year?

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  And the answer is always, I need more people, I need more budget.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  So the natural flow of any organization... A nonprofit school, government, company over time, get more money, grow, add more people, and ultimately you end up seeing all of these things that don't necessarily map to the mission of the organization, but they're created to meet those incentive models. So in the government, we have a lot of regulatory overhead, like the guy I was talking with, he's like, "I cannot believe the regulatory processes that we've created for no reason. It's just stuff that came out of the blue." So this is true in energy, it's true in agriculture, it's true in drug testing, it's true in so many different markets, that I think it's, you know, it's starting to become apparent to a lot of these outsiders who are now stepping into the government, that

• 11:22Speaker 03

  there's an opportunity. Now, last year, the important point, that there was a Supreme Court case where they struck down what's called the Chevron doctrine, and the Chevron doctrine basically vested authority to the agencies to regulate their industry however they see fit, meaning the courts always said, "Hey, whatever the agency says is the way we need to regulate, we're going to rely on them." And that was the Chevron case from years ago. And what they ended up saying is like, "No, that's actually not true. That agency does not have legal authority to just regulate everything however they want. They have to have a law passed. Congress has to pass a law that says these are the regulations that need to be enforced." And if that law doesn't exist, the agency can't just make up regulations, regulatory process. So what we're seeing now is a lot of attempts, and it's going to all go to court, and there's

• 12:07Speaker 03

  going to be years of court battles, of attempts to unwind and deregulate. And as they do that, they're going to cut people, they're going to change the rules, that's going to lead to people that are regulatory capture people, saying, "Hey, wait, those regulations are awesome, we need them, or we got to keep them in place." And then that's all going to get adjudicated, and hopefully that Supreme Court decision is referenced and holds up as this goes forward. So I think deregulation is a big theme. It's going to take a while, it's going to take a while to work through the courts, sort of like all the Doge actions, they're all going to go to court.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  And you believe that's a trend that we can see carry out across admins? You think it's a decade-plus-long trend, or is it going to be sort of oscillating back and forth?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  I think it is the, I think what happens is it's such a sharp tack right now. My personal belief is that the response to this is a sharp tack towards more socialism, bigger government, more kind of principles of everyone working for and living off the government. And I think that, that what we're going to end up seeing in this midterm cycle... Is candidates and policy proposals that look like they're diametrically opposed because that's how you're going to get elected because people are going to be pissed off about how quick these changes were, how quick these actions were, how bad they're going. So the storyline will be, let's do the opposite. Let's put everyone back in. Let's spend more money. Let's do blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I worry a lot that this is actually going to be now a flip flop back the other way. The American people are going to decide.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  There's so many people in Washington today that have lost their jobs in the last three months and I don't think they're going anywhere, right? They're just sort of like circling around in many ways and I want to find.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Have you seen all the homes listed on Zillow?

• 13:47John Coogan?

  I've seen this, yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  It's crazy. There's like a million homes. The prices are down like 30%.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  There's a lot of talk, especially with the Maha movement of like comparisons to Europe, comparisons to Japan. On the agriculture side, are there any other countries that you look to as examples for what America should be doing? Or are we already kind of like the least bad regulatory regime for agriculture?

• 14:13Speaker 03

  So there's a couple of aspects to that. One is the ingredient supply chain and food. Where a lot of stuff is being addressed and talked about and there's issues there. And that's independent, I would say, of agriculture. So there's a lot of technology and innovation happening and needs to happen in agriculture to grow things more efficiently. That's a lot. That's the work we do at a hollow, for example. And we have these incredible tools that didn't exist using AI to make predictions and take actions in the field and so on and so forth. So the US today is the most advanced agriculture technology adopted market, but we're still very far behind its potential. And when it comes to food supply chains, yeah,

• 14:58Speaker 03

  that's where things are. Okay, great. I'm going to go on stage. We'll see you guys.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Perfect. We'll talk to you soon.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Bye, guys.

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming out. Enjoy your talk.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Is Keith out there? Yeah, yeah. Jacob can come on. We'd love to have you. Jacob, you got five minutes?

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  Sit down.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  We're here with the man himself.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  The man himself.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  The man who organized Hillen Valley and has championed and grown it by a thousand X, I think. It's been fantastic to watch. Last year I was here, I was able to find a seat. Now it's standing room only. What has it been like growing this? Can you give us kind of the general overview of what the mission and goals are for Hillen Valley?

• 15:38Speaker 04

  So the Hillen Valley was always designed to be a bipartisan, bi-coastal alliance between technologists and policymakers. On the basic premise that builders and policymakers are both in the business of building the future. They just use different tools to do it. Builders use the laws of science and nature and policymakers use the laws of man. And ultimately, it was very clear through conversations with Diane and Christian that there was a huge amount of distrust between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. But also, there was this cliche that had taken hold on Capitol Hill that our best and brightest people were focused on advertising technology, not building paradigm shifting technologies.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  And so ultimately, it was clear that, you know, from the vantage point of the tech industry, we actually, as a country, do have a really deep ecosystem of builders working to solve really hard problems. And so we thought it was incredibly important to actually bring them to Washington, give them the attention that they need so that policymakers actually knew this existed, but also thought of them as a toolkit to solve some of our hardest national problems.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  How does it feel being here today? Everybody senses that you guys 10x year over year. Does it feel that way? And I know there's like significantly more demand. I heard a rumor about the waiting list being, you know, well beyond probably even like the actual people here.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  What does Hillen Valley turn into over time?

• 17:09Speaker 04

  It's really interesting because in a way, I think the success of the Hillen Valley Forum actually reflects a lot of the Peter Thielisms about, you know, high growth startups where at first, you know, it's

• 17:24Speaker 04

  An invention that you can't really give a name to because if you're really going from zero to one, it's something that by definition doesn't really exist. And then you start out with something that it's a small community that's really hyped up about it. And all of those principles have actually applied to the Hill and Valley Forum. I mean, we started out and it was kind of this opaque dinner that was totally behind closed doors. And we were initially planning four tables of 10 people. It ended up being 100 people and it just, the growth has actually been exponential.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Now you have random live streamers here.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  And you know you've made it when you draw the Pro Hamas crowd.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Next year, the goal is Code Pink.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  I'm surprised they got in.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  They impersonated press badges.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  Impersonating a journalist. Well, we impersonate.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  We do our best journalist impression. I know you're waiting for confirmation, so you can't talk about much else. Is there anything else that folks should be aware of or take away from Hill and Valley other than, I guess, in terms of like what the audience is getting out of this? Do you have any advice for founders who are in attendance, anyone who's watching online? What is the best way to engage?

• 18:36Speaker 04

  I think it's really inspiring to see so many bright, talented people actually make the effort of flying across the country to come here and show up. You know, they say, there's the old saying that so much about life is about showing up, especially in politics.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  And the fact that people actually spent the money, took the time to come here and engage in these policy conversations really does make an impact. And there isn't a single year where we've had the Hill and Valley Forum where there hasn't been legislation that's actually come out as a direct result of people having conversations here. So it's gratifying to see people show up, but it's also really inspiring to see people talking about re-industrialization this year. This has been, the plague of our country is that we de-industrialized 20 years ago. And it's inspiring to see so many bright people working hard to reverse that.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, cool. Well, we'll let you get back to it. I'm sure you have a million more panels to host and hands to shake.

• 19:35Jordi Hays?

  Pop back on the stream any time.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  But we'd love to have you back.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me. Look forward to doing this again.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Thanks for doing this.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  You want to do this now? Zach, can you come in 15? Are you good in 15 from now?

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  Ten minutes.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do ten with Keith and then ten with Zach.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Ten with Keith and then we'll have you on.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  Is that great? Yeah, Keith, come on.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Sweet.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 19:55Keith Rabois?

  Hey, how are you?

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 19:56Keith Rabois?

  I love this live studio.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. We are live, but we're very fortunate to be graced by someone who's not going through confirmation and maybe can give us a little more hot takes, you know?

• 20:06Keith Rabois?

  Oh, yeah, I could say interesting things.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  First question, do we need a Department of Government Efficiency for confirmation hearings? It seems like they're going slow.

• 20:12Keith Rabois?

  Absolutely. You know, I think this should be simplified at some point, which is basically the president should nominate you for the Constitution and the Senate should provide advice and consent. And we don't need too many other steps in the process. But that said, you know, there's lots of room in improvements in the government. First, saving money is probably more important.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:33Keith Rabois?

  Making it more attractive for talented people, as we talked about, to serve. And Doja said a good example for this is being a magnet for talent. The best people in America want to improve society through the government would be great. Those are much more fundamental. So there's details that can be improved at the margin, but I wouldn't confuse the details with the strategy.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you doing more investing in companies that touch the government now? Because this feels like Hill and Valley is like the floodgates are open. D.C.'s kind of open for business in some ways, willing to do business with startups. We've seen success with the big defense tech companies, but now we're seeing energy and agriculture and a lot of kind of like hard tech companies or hard tech adjacent just atoms not fit.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the big issue is it feels, you know, being here, nothing about investing in these categories feels contrarian.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Anymore, but it was for a long time.

• 21:22Keith Rabois?

  Well, if you look at like the hot sectors, AI still is the most, you know.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  There's some AI founders here.

• 21:29Keith Rabois?

  And defense tech is the second.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 21:32Keith Rabois?

  And so I think that that is a structural problem. I don't think, I agree more with Delian's comments about there's not going to be many successful defense companies. I think the one thing that is a positive change and is structural and, you know, can improve the odds of success for many founders and entrepreneurs is Moving into federal revenue earlier than usual. So many companies have historically had a federal revenue arm. They may not talk about as much publicly for a variety of reasons, but usually that comes after significant commercial success. You might see the sequencing change.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  I mean, the government runs on Microsoft often.

• 22:06Keith Rabois?

  Scale AI had federal revenue, it has federal revenue, that's meaning Varda, significant federal revenue early in the trajectory. That may be more normal and more common.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 22:17Keith Rabois?

  But I don't think government only revenue is going to lead to a lot of successful companies, except for a very, very small sliver. And so we, as a fund, are not really investing very actively in government oriented solutions. We do have, I just did make a defense oriented technology investment, but that's like an outlier. But we have lots of, lots of companies that have meaningful federal revenue and continue to scale.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  And this feels like a category, last time we had you on the show, or maybe it was the first time, you talked about how most, like a lot of people just shouldn't be like, oh, I want to be a founder, I'm going to start a company. They should go work for a great company. And if you're trying to, if you're excited about spaces that are going to require federal funding early, you probably shouldn't start that right, you know, when you're 20 years old, maybe, unless you're, you know, truly one of one.

• 23:04Keith Rabois?

  Well, you need to understand the sales process in the federal government, which is different than the sales process in the commercial environment. And there's probably a limited scarcity, there's probably more scarcity on quality salespeople that can sell successfully to the federal government. And maybe there's 40 of them. And so unless you have an angle to be able to attract one of those 40. So do you have a better product that the salespeople think, oh, my God, I can sell this. The best way to attract salespeople is make their life easy. I've got something cool, differentiated, and I know the buyer. Second, you have a missionary zeal that's off the charts.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Keith Rabois?

  Without, without the ability to attract one of the top 40 people who can sell into, let's say, defense oriented stuff, three letter agency stuff, I think it's really dangerous. So I think that's more critical sometimes than the technical breakthrough. You know, the government is decades behind, as Alfred House is talking about, like, you know, Oracle started serving CIA and NSA. There are examples like that, but there's very few. And so, you know, one every decade.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Keith Rabois?

  So that seems to me to be a bad strategy unless you have a reason to believe you're the once every decade, you know, company. And that should be part of your initial seed deck.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Talk about what you're talking about today. You're doing a talk with Eric Lyman, correct?

• 24:20Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, we just finished. Eric and I were on stage with Senator Ernst from Iowa.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:26Keith Rabois?

  Talking about how we can make the federal government's expenses.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Keith Rabois?

  You know, more streamlined using programmatic expense reporting.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Keith Rabois?

  Like that RAMP offers the commercial sector. Commercial products, commercial customers of RAMP save between five and 15% on expenses. And the federal government, probably we would be able to save more. So there's.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Keith Rabois?

  4.5 million cardholders in the federal government.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Keith Rabois?

  There's only 2 point something million employees.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 24:50Keith Rabois?

  So there's clearly a lot of waste, fraud and abuse.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Keith Rabois?

  The Senator cited a bunch of examples of 80,000 charges on federal credit cards at casinos. Clearly, most of those 80,000 charges are not doing official business on behalf of the federal government.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Hard to justify.

• 25:06Keith Rabois?

  Hopefully, you know, that's the easy savings. It doesn't require cutting programs that people care about, doesn't require this big controversial debate, but every dollar we save goes back to the American family and they can spend it on raising a family successfully. Secondly, if we can cut 1% from the federal budget, just 1%, the Federal Reserve can lower interest rates by 1% safely and allow people to afford mortgages, allow the economy to grow without triggering inflation. So it's a very big deal to save 1 or 2%.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:34Keith Rabois?

  I think a lot of people miss that.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you have any good stories from visits to Washington during the PayPal days? Was it, it was a different time.

• 25:41Keith Rabois?

  It was different. I was actually just mentioning, I don't know if I'd been back in the Capitol before today since 2003.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 25:49Keith Rabois?

  When I was lobbying.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  That means we're officially back. We're officially back.

• 25:54Keith Rabois?

  But yeah, like we spent a lot of time and energy. I spent a lot of personal time and energy using the federal government to help protect PayPal from a lot of people that didn't like us. Visa, MasterCard.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Keith Rabois?

  eBay. And then later, the Treasury Department, post 9/11, the Treasury Department wanted to issue these regs that would have imposed significant burdens on consumers and small businesses.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Keith Rabois?

  And we were able, using a lot of. connections on the hill and messaging about not interfering with ecommerce. Yeah. Uh, to put a, put a lot of pressure back on the treasury to draft much more reasonable regulations. They really wanted everybody to put in their social security. Yeah. Number on everything, like every transaction, which is, you know, crazy. Yeah, intense.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Last question. Jensen was saying SF is back because of AI. What's your take?

• 26:40Keith Rabois?

  Well, he stole my line.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:41Keith Rabois?

  I mentioned that I, my, my version of the line was slight, slightly narrower, but he obviously can expand it. Uh, mine was OpenAI saved SF.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:49Keith Rabois?

  Um, without OpenAI's success, SF would be dead and still dying.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. You get another power law company and that drives a ton of.

• 26:56Keith Rabois?

  Well, it does. And, you know, the people who are favorable to SF would say, oh, that, well, that happens every 10 or 20 years. Like the internet saved SF too.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:04Keith Rabois?

  You know, when I graduated Stanford before the internet, um, SF was like a 12th to 15th ranked city in the United States.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 27:11Keith Rabois?

  Nobody, there was no business going on. Oakland was actually a better commercial city.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Oakland, no way.

• 27:16Keith Rabois?

  The only people who stayed in SF to work at like Bain or BCG were like for lifestyle reasons.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:21Keith Rabois?

  It was a dead city.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Keith Rabois?

  Then the internet revolution happened and although a lot of the best internet companies, the best technology companies were in Palo Alto and Mountain View and Sunnyvale. There was enough spillover at SF to, to sort of save the city. Well, it was just cheaper in some ways, right? Yeah. No, and well, cheaper and you need large floor plan, like a, a floor plan off, uh, floor, floor print, uh, offices, like, uh, and there's, there's been, existed in the city. The city's culture was narrow, really never great for many companies. Like when we considered moving the PayPal office to SF in 2001, Peter asked this question, Peter Taylor asked this question of name a successful SF company.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 27:58Keith Rabois?

  And the largest SF company at the time was like CNET or something incredibly mediocre. So we didn't, we stayed, we moved to Mountain View. Interesting.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Wow. Well, thanks so much for joining.

• 28:07Keith Rabois?

  Pleasure.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 28:08Keith Rabois?

  Great day. Great to see you. And we'll see you out.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Enjoy the rest of the conference.

• 28:11Keith Rabois?

  Cheers.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Uh, Ben, do we need to shift? Thank you. Uh, do we need to shift the microphone a little bit? Have Zach maybe sit at the end of the table, point towards us?

• 28:19Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna go. Yeah.

• 28:21Erik Torenberg?

  Come on in, welcome.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Repeat guest. Yeah, we're gonna go right here so that you're kind of aiming at us right here. So just kind of sit right here.

• 28:32Erik Torenberg?

  Thank you. Lean into the mic as much as possible.

• 28:34Zachary Perret?

  Look at this, doing your own AV setup.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm one of the best in the business here. But, you know, it helps when everyone's an individual contributor when you're running a startup, right?

• 28:45Zachary Perret?

  Totally. I've got to say, getting into this room is the hottest ticket here. The line at your door is just like impressive person after impressive person.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Were you an early, like an individual contributor in the early days?

• 28:56Zachary Perret?

  At that?

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:57Zachary Perret?

  Oh, yeah, of course. Who else would do the work?

• 28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Fintech, remember, fintech wasn't always, you know, one of the hottest categories.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:06Zachary Perret?

  The first like four years of the business were me telling VCs, hey, financial services, we could innovate here. Like, this might be a thing.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:13Zachary Perret?

  2016, someone came up with the word fintech and then it finally caught on.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Crazy story from Keith, you wouldn't have heard, but he said the last time he was in the Capitol Building was in 2003, fighting for PayPal's life.

• 29:23Zachary Perret?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Because after 9/11, there was like a lot of regulation being pushed.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Pushback, yeah.

• 29:27Zachary Perret?

  Yeah.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  But speaking of financial regulation, is like, everyone here is obviously, you know, super aware of what's going on with the DoD. There's a lot of DoD budgets and every defense tech company is looking for their next program record or SBIR. What is the mood in Washington around financial regulations? Are there, is there low hanging fruit?

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and is it getting enough attention?

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Is there a meme that everyone talks about? Or are people talking about it enough?

• 29:53Zachary Perret?

  It's a good question. Right now, there's probably three things that are top of mind for everybody. First is the Genius Act, which is the crypto-stablecoin regulation.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 30:03Zachary Perret?

  That is, as far as I can tell, moving. Though I don't know the day-to-day details of that one. Second is, there's Section 1033 of Dodd-Frank. This is the open banking regulation that was put into place under the last administration. This administration, we'll see what happens, but there's some talk of making a few modifications to it before it fully goes live. And then the third big thing is the conversation somewhat kicked off by Doge, somewhat not about payments modernization. So can we move the payment system of the US to not send out paper checks to everybody in all these places with old addresses and so on and so forth and actually make it a little more modern?

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any type of estimate of how many of those paper checks just never, ever even get? You know, have basically been paid, but just sort of sit in the ether.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Well, they don't get cash. That's money back to the taxpayer. Maybe we don't want to move off paper. This is free money for the taxpayer.

• 30:57Zachary Perret?

  So you've got to keep in mind the cost in the system.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 31:00Zachary Perret?

  You have people that are writing the checks to you. People that are mailing the checks. It probably costs you five to $10 to send out the check to each person.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 31:07Zachary Perret?

  Then you get it, you bring it to the bank. It costs the bank five or $10 to actually cash the check. So getting that out of the system would be a net win, I think.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 31:13Zachary Perret?

  Plus, getting people payments a little faster is not a bad thing.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the difference in your experience, you know, this week versus maybe your first trip to DC for Plaid.

• 31:22Zachary Perret?

  For Plaid ever.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Zachary Perret?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  What was your first trip ever?

• 31:25Zachary Perret?

  I think it must have been seven years since the first trip here. You know, we were lucky. We hired our first head of business development, had worked in a previous administration. At some point, she said, hey, Zach, we should go to DC and meet some people and talk about it. You know, there's some things that are relevant to Plaid. We've known that this open banking rule was going to come eventually. And so.

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  So even seven years ago, you were thinking about this new open banking.

• 31:48Zachary Perret?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, the concept of Plaid has always been to kind of build open banking for the world, to build infrastructure that enables people to link their banking accounts really easily. We've, of course, created a ton of stuff on top of the network that came from that later. But we knew that this regulation was a thing that would be written at some point. So we started spending time here. We hired a policy team in DC. I think we probably still have four or five people that are just based in DC full time. And right now, just the conversation is totally different. The size of this conference, the number of people that are here, the number of other tech CEOs that I'm seeing in DC, even just casually. I was here about a month ago and was walking into a building and out of the building was walking a kind of big public company CEO.

• 32:31Zachary Perret?

  So like, say hello. It's like, that running would not have happened seven, eight years ago.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Zachary Perret?

  So it is kind of a testament to, in some sense, Silicon Valley for people being willing to come out here and have these conversations. In a big sense, it's a testament to the administration and to a lot of the people that have put together forums like this to bring the two sides together. So it's been an awesome event so far.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Well, you got to get to your next panel, I think.

• 32:54Zachary Perret?

  I do, yes.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Well, it's been great having you stop by.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much for having me. Nice to see you. We'll see you out on the floor later.

• 32:59Zachary Perret?

  Good luck and everything. Yeah, see you soon.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Zach. You want to come on? Who else is out there?

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. Let's play the song. Let's play, let's play a sound effect to let everyone know.

• 33:12Zak Kukoff?

  Sound effect, a song? It's like I'm on morning radio.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Scoot in as much as possible. We want to get your mouth right up close to that.

• 33:19Zak Kukoff?

  Alright, you have me all the way on it.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 33:21Zak Kukoff?

  Thanks for having me, guys. This is great.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Can you introduce yourself?

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  By the way, I just gotta say you look very comfortable in a suit.

• 33:26Zak Kukoff?

  Thank you. That's a horrible insult, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm not calling you a suit. I'm just saying, some people here, it looks like they haven't put it on in a long time.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  That's what Will was saying. Will Menais on the stream yesterday was saying, you know it's Hill and Valley when you can't, when you don't need to put in new business cards because they're still in there for the last Hill and Valley. That's the standard of a tech person.

• 33:45Zak Kukoff?

  I will say, when I first moved to DC, I'm a lobbyist. Short version is, I'm a lobbyist. I was a venture capitalist for a long time, a general catalyst, an emergence capital before that. I work here now. I lead the tech and venture capital practice of a lobbying firm. And I also hang out at a think tank called FAI, the Foundation on American Innovation, where I'm a senior fellow too. That's the short version. The long version, it is a suit. I am a suit.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  You are a suit.

• 34:06Zak Kukoff?

  I wear a suit now, all the time. I have ties.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  But you're still a technology brother.

• 34:11Zak Kukoff?

  I am at my heart, a technology brother. This feels like a safe space for suits, to be honest. This feels like, you guys rock a good suit.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  We wear suits every day.

• 34:18Zak Kukoff?

  You guys brought back suits, actually.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  On the lobbying front, you know, Lulu's talked about going direct in the comms world. Going to an event like Hill and Valley feels like going direct for lobbying.

• 34:30Zak Kukoff?

  I agree, fully.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  Talk about the compliments or substitutes of founder-led lobbying, essentially.

• 34:36Zak Kukoff?

  Well, the best founders are the ones who are building the relationships themselves. And the truth is, by the way, I guess I'm talking myself out of a job in some ways. But the truth is, if you outsource, if you are building in a space that is key to regulatory work, and you outsource your regulatory relationships, your government relationships to somebody else, you're not doing your job. Let me think about it this way. If you're raising money, you wouldn't hire a banker if you're good, frankly. You wouldn't hire a banker to go out and organize your fundraiser for you, right? But if you come to DC and your attitude is great, I'll have my lobbyist do everything. I don't need to go meet these people. That's a problem. And in fact, the biggest people, you guys had Blake on the show from Boom? Has he been on?

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Not yet. Not from Boom.

• 35:15Zak Kukoff?

  He should come on. Yeah, he's somewhere, somewhere back there. But Blake's done a great job of this, right? He came in here, five, seven years ago, the idea of supersonic flight was totally outside of the Overton window. But he's done such a good job getting into the DC establishment, and I actually say that as a compliment, not an insult.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  So to put this all in venture terms.

• 35:33Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, please, please.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  The job of a lobbyist is to make great intros.

• 35:37Zak Kukoff?

  Yes, correct.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Much like a VC does and then back channel.

• 35:40Zak Kukoff?

  That's exactly right. It's like a part shrink, part Ari Emanuel, right? You sort of do the like, you're a little bit of an agent selling somebody downstream. You're a little bit of a shrink because they complain bitterly about government. They have every reason to do so. So you hear all of that out too. And then your job is to help, actually in some ways, I think about it as you are teaching people in government who don't know about what you do. You're an educator to them. Because it's not that they don't care or they don't have any, whatever. It's, you're just not high enough in the priority stack and they don't have the background to understand it.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I met a congressman a couple of years ago who was like, "Thanks for telling me about Andor."

• 36:14Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  How do you not know about that company?

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how do you feel, is the average, is part of the, uh, the best lobbyists are selective on who they work with?

• 36:25Zak Kukoff?

  Oh, hugely.

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  You're not going to be successful if you're, if it's not a solid, underlying sort of company. Uh, how much are politicians reading into who a company is working with on the lobbying front? In terms of understanding the quality of the underlying sort of like, you know, potential?

• 36:42Zak Kukoff?

  It's a really good question. The best lobbyists are tremendously demand constrained, right? So you're, sorry, supply constrained, by which I mean like, an infinite amount of people more who want to work with those lobbyists and they have room to work with. The compliment that I love to get is when somebody says to us, "Hey, you don't feel like other lobbyists." Because when you actually, you come in and you bring the client with you, we actually have a real relationship with them at the end of the day. And it's not just, "Oh, I've come in and I've done my briefing book and I've given you your one pager and so on and so forth." So there is a step from it to, you're totally correct. And because the lobbyists who are smart, proactively think about organizing the opportunity, right? Like I had dinner with two members, they came, they're like, "Great, I would love to meet folks in the valley." I don't know anybody in tech.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Is there a, is there a holy trinity of lobbying firms? You know, we, we talk about McKinsey, Bain, VCG, we talk about Goldman, Morgan Stanley.

• 37:30Zak Kukoff?

  It's a really good question.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  Sequoia, Andreessen, Founders Fund, yeah.

• 37:33Zak Kukoff?

  It's not only a trinity, it's more of a single firm and it's mine, obviously. Yeah, there's not really much of a long tail.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Do you have a coupon code we can share?

• 37:40Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  Tell them, TPBN send you.

• 37:42Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Ten percent of the ongoing revenues.

• 37:47Zak Kukoff?

  Oh, ten percent of ongoing revenues.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  I mean, Athletic Greens does that all day long.

• 37:51Zak Kukoff?

  Athletic Greens does that? What's the average order size of Athletic Greens? Because I bet you it's a little lower than a lobbying contract.

• 37:56John Coogan?

  No, but that's the beauty of the Athletic Greens deal. You use the coupon code and you get paid every month.

• 38:01Zak Kukoff?

  That's a nice plug, by the way. That was very well done. Very, very well done.

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys have specific sectors that you're most oriented around? Or things that you avoid?

• 38:11Zak Kukoff?

  We do a lot of tech and science. As a firm, we do a lot of tech and science. I lead the tech component of what we do. We avoid things that don't feel values aligned. So there are some folks in the world who are doing interesting work, compelling work. Gambling, yes. Sin, vice are probably outside of the scope for us a little bit. Anything with a foreign government is outside of the scope for us a little bit. But when it comes to things that are around American dominance, around American dynamism, around global resilience, when America comes first, that's the sort of stuff we focus on. But lobbying is pretty fragmented. The truth is, it's not a great comp for the Bain McKinsey BCG. Because there's a huge, like, anybody, any schmo who has one rich friend can say, "I'm a lobbyist now," right? Because they can get one contract and put up a shingle and say, "Okay, great. I'm going to service as one person."

• 38:56Zak Kukoff?

  It's hard to have, great, 50, 100, 200 clients and do that at a really high caliber.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  How damaging can the wrong lobbyist be? I imagine it can kill your company, right?

• 39:04Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, well, they're your representative. Like, you shouldn't work with somebody if you don't feel comfortable with them telling your story when you're not around. Because part of the gig is, when you guys go back to SF, you go back to LA.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  They're the ones that are talking about it.

• 39:16Zak Kukoff?

  I'm still out there, correct, talking you up all over town. That's right.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're in the market, so.

• 39:21Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, right. Give me a call, guys.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  We're trying to put really, really harsh bans, ideally, but maybe tariffs on foreign podcasts.

• 39:28Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, I think that's great. That's great.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  And we want significant subsidies for American-made podcasts.

• 39:33Zak Kukoff?

  In fact, you guys should be getting a tax break. That's the real deal.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. We actually want it to cost a million dollars a year to host a podcast.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 39:41Zak Kukoff?

  Barriers to entry.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  We need a real license. It's very dangerous.

• 39:45Zak Kukoff?

  You guys are familiar with the taxi medallion system? It's a very similar idea for podcasts. Very, very similar. Podcast safety.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Let's play them off with the sound.

• 39:54Zak Kukoff?

  Thanks for having me, boys. I appreciate it.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on the show.

• 39:57Zak Kukoff?

  Thank you for having me.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  This has been great. Hey, have fun out there.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Would you mind grabbing Mike Solana? I think he's right out there if he can.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  Great having you on, Zach.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  The soundboard is a work in production. We are actively looping the short, but hopefully.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Mike Solana is coming into the street.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Mike Solana.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Welcome to the studio, the temple of technology.

• 40:19Speaker 09

  What's up, guys?

• 40:21John Coogan?

  We got the sound effects.

• 40:24John Coogan?

  We are live.

• 40:25Speaker 09

  Oh, we're live.

• 40:25John Coogan?

  We are live.

• 40:26Speaker 09

  I see my hair. What's up, guys?

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to, great to have you on. What's been your reaction? What, and also, I'd love to know, like, I know you're writing a piece. I'm sure it's churning in your head, but like, what is the, what is the angle? What is the interesting thread to pull on here?

• 40:44Speaker 09

  I mean, I don't know if I'm supposed to say this.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 09

  The thing that I thought was the funniest was getting out of Union Station. The first thing I see are a bunch of sort of failed bureaucrats in shirts that say federal workers matter.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 40:57Speaker 09

  It's just the overall circus vibe of, of DC, I think is funny.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 09

  And then I'm paging through the Washington Post this morning. It's just like horrifying headline after horrifying headline in DC. And they're talking about DC. They're like, people, things are tense. People are losing their minds. No one is at ease.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 09

  And it's just like, I'm in this beautiful hotel overlooking the White House. And there are all these people going to work. They're laughing and drinking coffee. People are happy. I don't know what they're talking about. I don't, like, what you're reading is not what I'm experiencing in DC. Every time I'm here, I'm just like, did I actually move home?

• 41:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's a momentum thing. The people at this event feel like they have real momentum and opportunity right now. And then if you just lost the job you had for 20 years, then obviously they're not, they're feeling, you know, they're not accelerating, right?

• 41:38Speaker 09

  I don't know, but I was, I don't, I hate to be Tom Freeman about it, but I was in a car today and the driver was like, things change here. These people have to, we're looking at these protesters who are outside and he's like, they gotta get over it.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, they gotta get over it.

• 41:50Speaker 09

  That's what DC is.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  I mean, we're reflecting on this with the tariffs. Like, there's all these crazy headlines about like, the global economy is destroyed. And yet, like, the stock market's kind of flat this year. You know, it's not really like COVID level down 30%. We'll see, we'll see what happens with the earnings tonight.

• 42:04Speaker 09

  Nate Silver is predicting a recession, 70% chance.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, but even then, we had a recession a couple of years ago. It was very mild, like, we seem to be better than ever at just maintaining the status quo. Like, America is somewhat Lindy in this case.

• 42:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, you just gotta decide what you want to do and work on that. And you can't, truly, the reason I brought up the noise was because... Also with those federal workers, they were just standing there.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:25Speaker 09

  But then Jack Posobiec gets out there and starts a fight with them and everyone's like, "DC's in chaos." And I thought, "It's not that bad."

• 42:32John Coogan?

  No, no, it's a lot of theater.

• 42:33Speaker 09

  Everything's fine. You gotta just ignore the noise and focus on your own shit.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 09

  And that's what I'm trying to do. It just so happens that the shit that I focus on is noise.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 09

  That's my art, running at the noise.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  The noise is my signal.

• 42:47Speaker 09

  The noise is my muse.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Is there a good metaphor for DC? Is it like, you know, lunchroom tables in middle school or something? Like, I feel like it's very clicky, maybe even clickier than San Francisco Tech. I don't know.

• 43:00Speaker 09

  I find that it's more-

• 43:01John Coogan?

  I'm trying to like, understand what's the mindset of DC.

• 43:02Speaker 09

  I think it's a little more sociopathic than that. I think it's sort of like, all the people care about here is power.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 09

  And they're willing to happily head over to the other table if they're in power, generally speaking.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 09

  And then you have, you have the exceptions, but mostly it's an industry town.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  This is why I felt like kind of out of my element in DC because in tech, there's still a lot of like power games, there's a lot of status games, and you can be like a famous founder, but at the same time, there is the concept of locking in and actually going and building something.

• 43:31Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  But in DC, there's nothing really to build.

• 43:33Speaker 09

  No.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Like, there's no like, "Oh yeah, this person was heads down for six years and then produced like a beautiful piece of legislation." Like, that's not how it works.

• 43:40Speaker 09

  No.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  You're trying to make stuff happen and sometimes that means a lot of dinners.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Anyway, can you talk about kind of your, I mean, obviously you've been in Silicon Valley forever. How has just the mood around Silicon Valley and Washington changed over your career? What was it like when you first got to Silicon Valley and how has it changed?

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe talk about your first trip to DC too.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be interesting to hear.

• 44:05Speaker 09

  Ever?

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 09

  In the context of work?

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Or in the context of work and tech.

• 44:08Speaker 09

  Um, well, the first, my first work trip to DC would have been, I wasn't in DC ever. We didn't do things here.

• 44:15John Coogan?

  Right?

• 44:15Speaker 09

  Yeah. The first time I came out was for Pirate Wires.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 44:18Speaker 09

  Because I was invited out by a congressman and then I realized that, or maybe it was comfortably smug. That might have been the first time I came out.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Effectively a congressman.

• 44:25Speaker 09

  And then I realized there were all these people here who were reading Pirate Wires because they were interested in tech.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 09

  They were interested in like the sort of tech-

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 09

  Center-right maybe perspective.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:34Speaker 09

  Or let's say heterodox perspective within tech.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 44:38Speaker 09

  It's very different than what it was, what, 14 years ago? No one thought about government at all. In fact, it was considered like- I don't know, a red flag if you cared about government.

• 44:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:48Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Um, and then

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  Like a distraction.

• 44:50Speaker 09

  The business has changed and now, you know, the most exciting businesses, a lot of them are working with the government.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 09

  You have to understand how it works.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 09

  And so there's a lot of excitement here and also in Silicon Valley.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I always think that that's like an underrated thing. I mean, a lot of people in, uh, in tech kind of criticize media, tech media when they start talking about politics or whatever. But I think that's like incredibly valuable because it's very hard for DC to get the tech perspective if they're, if it's not from us, it's from, you know,

• 45:19Speaker 09

  In your time.

• 45:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I care especially, right? Uh, are you, do you have that in the back of your mind when you're writing in terms of like the avatars that you're writing for the messages that you want to send? Or is it just like, you're just gonna write and they're gonna read?

• 45:32Speaker 09

  I just get on the page and

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, just let it rip.

• 45:36Speaker 09

  Like spit out what I'm thinking.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 45:39Speaker 09

  And, uh, and I hope it resonates.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 09

  It's been

• 45:41John Coogan?

  Oh, it certainly has been. Yeah, yeah. Uh, so, so I mean, uh, coming out of this, are there, are you trying to interview the politicians and get their perspective and kind of bring that back to Silicon Valley? Because

• 45:51Speaker 09

  Well, I'm here with, uh, one of my colleagues, Blake Dodge.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Blake.

• 45:55Speaker 09

  Blake.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 09

  Who's our new writer at Pyro Wars. So she's doing a bunch of interviews right now and kind of sleuthing around, she said, gathering facts.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  We love sleuthing.

• 46:02Speaker 09

  For our takedown.

• 46:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, hit piece incoming.

• 46:07Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, so she's just, uh, she's exploring now and

• 46:09John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 46:09Speaker 09

  Um, we'll probably, you know, collaborate on something, but

• 46:12Jordi Hays?

  The interesting thing is it does feel like, this is my experience, but, uh, it does feel like it's hill and valley, but there's not a ton, not as much overlap maybe as you would, you would like, right? There's like a lot of people from the valley.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people from the hill.

• 46:26Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  And like technically we're in the same space, but like, it's like tech people.

• 46:30Speaker 09

  I mean, I just don't think they know how to talk to each other. Like, I, I think, I even myself, and I know that, I know better, but I showed up today without a suit. And I rolled up, I, I didn't, I don't, I haven't followed the facts at all. I didn't even know where I was going. I did not know I was going to the Capitol building. I just, I've gotten used to just looking at my calendar and doing things. So I got here and I was like, oh no, I cannot be that guy. So I head back, but I, that's a cultural divide.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:52Speaker 09

  You know, I've never had to wear a suit.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 09

  In San Francisco, I didn't even own a suit until a few years ago. Um, or I think I had one for our LP meeting, but like that, that it's, that's it.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  So today you're wearing Fiorentino label, is that correct?

• 47:04Speaker 09

  Fiorentino.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Oh, John Fio, good friend of the show.

• 47:07Speaker 09

  Jeff Fiorentino.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, we love him.

• 47:09Speaker 09

  A true craftsman.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  He is, he is.

• 47:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, were you surprised at how much, uh, press was allowed to, to come today?

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, we went to the press briefing yesterday. We saw your name tag there.

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  There was like 30 people.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  You were too big. We were sitting there looking around. We were like, we are the fish out of water here.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Speaker 09

  Uh, I don't think so. I think that journalists are looking for things to write about and there are a lot of people here that they would want to write about.

• 47:32Jordi Hays?

  My, my question was more like, obviously they would like to be here just because like there's so many ways that you could spin what's going on. I was just surprised that, uh, Delian and Jacob, they got the invite.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Instead of saying, hey, no.

• 47:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think that broadly tech's relationship with the media is very different than it was.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 09

  Five years ago, the war is over and there are actually plenty of writers, um, who are not unfair. Like even Teddy Schleifer, I just ran into out there, like, that's a guy who's just reporting on wealth and he reports what he sees in both directions. And I think that there are people who have integrity now. And I think it's just the, the environment's different. And you're gonna, there're gonna be hit pieces, but you have to just read people's work and see who they are and what, and, and what kind of, you know, interview they run and then make a, make an educated guess.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  Every once in a while Teddy shows up with the, with the telephoto lens and goes TMZ mode outside of a party, but you know, for most of the time he's just writing, you know, good write-ups. It's good.

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  Are you, uh, obviously, you know, manufacturing, reindustrialization, defense tech are sort of like dominating the narrative here. Is there anybody that, that is kind of flying under the radar that you're, or, or any like industries specifically that you're, that you're seeing?

• 48:45John Coogan?

  I feel like you've written a lot about like the sperm racing stuff and some of the, like the Zainer stuff is crazy.

• 48:50Speaker 09

  Where's the sperm race representation?

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 09

  Infuriating. Yeah.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. We may be doing your subsidy or doing your tax on foreign.

• 48:58Speaker 09

  No, I think, I was having a conversation yesterday and what's actually interesting is they've really expanded beyond tech, uh, or defense tech.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, energy.

• 49:05Speaker 09

  There's much broader, there's a much broader interest in the technology industry now, which is pretty cool. People are open. Who was it? Oh, it was Delian. It was talking to me about how, uh, uh, senators and congressmen were just really excited to even talk. It's a ramp or something.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:19Speaker 09

  Which a few years ago was just not on their radar.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Keith was saying there's about four times more federal corporate cards than there are federal employees.

• 49:29Speaker 09

  Well, that checks out.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  And there was eighty, eighty thousand charges at casinos.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  Like last year or something like that.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  I mean, gambling is the most American thing in the world.

• 49:41Speaker 09

  Federal workers matter.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 49:43Speaker 09

  Federal workers matter.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  It could have been team building activities.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Team building, you take them to the gam- you take them to the casino.

• 49:49Jordi Hays?

  Slots.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  Slot, yeah. What's the difference?

• 49:52John Coogan?

  So what's next coming out of here? How do you think about covering this from the Pirate Wire's perspective? Is it, is it just meeting people, doing interviews downstream, or is there supposed to be like a definitive write-up or new angle? You're, you're just, you're still on the hunt, right?

• 50:07Speaker 09

  I think we're still looking.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:08Speaker 09

  I, I think probably a lot of people are gonna do the just, here's what I saw in Hill and Valley.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 09

  Maybe what would be more interesting is to find some sort of meaningful interaction between someone in tech and someone in DC and write about that.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There, there's all these like big budgets and you see a hundred and fifty billion in defense, but then you get down into like, okay, what is the actual mechanic of a seed stage or series A founder like actually getting a ten million dollar contract?

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, Jacob, Jacob was talking about this too. Every Hill and Valley so far, there's been some policy or like some major sort of business activity that's come out of it. So it's clearly working. The question is like, if we've ten X the size of Hill and Valley, are you gonna get in order to ten X the output, right?

• 50:52Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Speaker 09

  Probably.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  I mean, last year's theme, yeah, last year's theme was TikTok. Have you been tracking that? Do you have a, do you have a TikTok taker? Have you evolved at all since last year?

• 51:01Speaker 09

  Uh, shut it down.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Shut it down.

• 51:03Speaker 09

  Is how, is my perspective.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  Don't even sell it?

• 51:05Speaker 09

  Uh, shut it down. I don't even believe that you can sell it and have it still not be backdoored in some way that I don't understand. But I also just think that we're in Trump era now and like nothing matters.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 09

  And the rules change every day. So it's like, why am I gonna sit here and be like, the right policy for TikTok is because we don't, we're not playing those rules anymore.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  No.

• 51:24Speaker 09

  It's a new set of rules. The rules are, it's like a bu- it's like Trump says some shit and writes executive orders and then a bunch of wizards in coats in DC fight back with like their random pen shit. And it's like, everyone is searching back to past court cases for, I guess, justification for what they're doing. And it all is just to me quite chaotic, but also. I don't care. I, I, my intention for this administration was to be calm while others were crazy.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:50Speaker 09

  And I am trying my best to maintain the calmness through the storm.

• 51:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is a great time to be in media. Does it feel like it's the best time possible to be in like tech media?

• 52:02John Coogan?

  Or is it like the, the war is over where the dog that caught the car?

• 52:05Speaker 09

  Yeah, it depends on what kind of press you're doing. I think right now what's happening in the tech press is people are trying to figure out

• 52:12Speaker 09

  who they are in the context of a very different culture.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 52:15Speaker 09

  And how they're supposed to navigate that. You see this sort of center left, like Atlantic type people who have pivoted wildly to just anti, uh, anti-Trump, anti-tech bro stuff.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 09

  But more so than I would say your standard issue left it.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 09

  Like, I think there's like this strange thing that's happening where people are just trying to find a lane.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 09

  And I'm trying to be, I just want to take my time and

• 52:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 09

  write the stories that matter to me.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  There's also that interesting development with the Ezra Klein abundance thing. That feels like very near, but you're rolling your eyes.

• 52:46Speaker 09

  I roll.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  What's your abundance take?

• 52:48Speaker 09

  Because they just ripped it off of like your standard issue tech bro from five years ago.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  Right?

• 52:55Speaker 09

  Or, yeah, like EAC or what about Anatomy of Next? Like, I talked about all of these things. All of them.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  All those anecdotes came from you.

• 53:03Speaker 09

  In fact, Derek, the author, the co-author of that book, I saw at Founder's Fun for Charter Cities,

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 53:10Speaker 09

  Charter Cities Conference years ago, many years ago, which we hosted.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  But I would describe that as finesse. It's like, we took your best ideas, we rebranded them, and now we're selling it ourselves.

• 53:20Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean,

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. You, you incepted. You, you just say inception.

• 53:24Speaker 09

  I'm not saying they haven't, they've definitely successfully created something that they're now selling. The question is whether or not the conclusion is the right conclusion. Their conclusion, their, their whole thing is like, we've taken all of these ideas and we blame the fact that we don't have them on the people who created those ideas.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 09

  And I think The reason that we don't have, for example, you know, housing in California is it's just the people who are in charge of the government in California. It's very simple.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  At what point, at what point do you expect tech's sort of, you know, basically attention to shift more towards California, given that it's the home of our industry? We've seen the Gary, the Gary Tans.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  And San Francisco's so back.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Gary, the Gary Tans of the world, obviously, kind of were, were, uh, took a big stand now, probably a couple of years ago.

• 54:09Speaker 09

  Yep.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  I would argue that he's suffered in some ways because of that, just given how much negative attention he's drawn locally. But at some point, tech, tech seems so focused on Washington that at some point, you're just going to look around your backyard and be like, actually, we have some pretty big problems here.

• 54:24Speaker 09

  Well, I guess, I think a lot of people are, I think more people, I just recently, I think more people are focused on local politics in San Francisco within our industry than at any other point in my life.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  I would say San Francisco is different than like broadly in California, though. Cause like, we're in Southern California and I would say most of the people in the gundo, again, have much more, partly is the nature of the industry that they're in.

• 54:43Speaker 09

  I mean, LA is a lost cause. I think it's just like, you're never going to save Los Angeles.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  We are saving Hollywood. We're bringing media to Hollywood.

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  Bringing media to the Hollywood. That's our big, that's our big push.

• 54:52Speaker 09

  I think that your best bet is San Francisco. I really think that's tactically the closest, that's the best chance you have at fixing anything. And if you could save even one city, maybe you could do something else. But I think that Gary actually has made a lot of progress. And I don't think it's hurt his brand. I think that it's, it's, uh, he's, he's, I mean, people are asking for his help online.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't saying it's hurt his brand. I was just saying like acceleration of like death threats and like people saying that.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, just frustrating for him.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  Stuff like that.

• 55:20Speaker 09

  That's the price to play, unfortunately.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like raised the standard deviation of his experience. Like he's had some really great experiences and then some really negative ones as opposed to just the anonymous VC who flies in the radar, doesn't get tagged.

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  Did you have a, switching gears a little bit, did you have a reaction to Benchmark investing in Chinese AI? Did that feel, that was very contrarian in some ways, but I was trying to, I was personally trying to understand the decision of like, okay, Hill and Valley is happening next week. We should invest in this company while TikTok is like, probably should be banned, maybe is getting banned, maybe selling, you know?

• 55:55Speaker 09

  I mean, if their job is just to make money. And they think that's gonna make money. It's, there's like a, there's a moral question about it, but then are we gonna break down every single investment that everybody, I mean, what is, I don't know. This is a much longer conversation. Sure. I, I guess I didn't feel the way that other people felt. I don't, I have a much bigger problem with what they did to Travis Kalanick than I do with their investment in a Chinese company. Yeah.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, are you, are you digging in at all this idea that feels like there's a divide right now? It's like, if you're a foundation model company, you want to tell people that we're in an AI war, an AI race, like we have to win the race. Uh, and that, that's a, a good narrative if you're needing to raise a lot of capital and, uh, sort of solidify significance. The other side, and, and this is a real side, and this is actually Gurley's position, which is that we're not in, you know, the idea that you can win the AI war or race and this technology is not just gonna disseminate anyways.

• 56:53Speaker 09

  Right.

• 56:53Jordi Hays?

  And he believes it's flawed. In, in conversations that you've had this week, do you feel like, you know, just sort of, uh, everybody sort of understands we are in an AI race, we need to win it? Or do you have, what, what, and, and kind of maybe, what side are, are you on?

• 57:08Speaker 09

  I don't think anybody knows anything. I think AI is so, like, we're, we're waiting for a paradigm shift. And we're trying to also make really firm predictions about what happens after the paradigm shift. Yeah. And so I, I think that, uh, all I kind of know is that it's obviously really powerful. It's obviously improving really fast.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 09

  But if something is, you know, fundamentally changing society, then it's anyone's guess. I don't think that we know if it's centralizing. I don't think we know if it's gonna be decentralized. I don't think we know if it's a race. I, I actually just, I don't think we know. I think all that anybody knows is that it's powerful and, um, everything else is just people. I don't know. I saw Tyler Cowen announce that we had reached AGI the other day and I felt like. You're just saying shit. Like, I don't, you don't, do you even believe that? Like, I don't think he believes that. Like, I, I think that, I think that people are just, I think that, yeah, I think that a lot of people are just saying shit. That's kind of how I feel about the Trump administration.

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  Did you think there was an overreaction then over the weekend when, when, when 4.0 rolled out and it was just saying like, Solana, like, you might need to go, like, a lot of, you know, like, you were like,

• 58:13John Coogan?

  You're one of the greatest, you'll hear about this.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  Blasegate, Blasegate.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  So, so, so, uh, the latest ChatGPT 4.0 release, they, they fine tuned it. Basically, any question you ask, it'd be like, that is so brilliant. Mike, you are, you are one of the best writers of all time.

• 58:22Speaker 09

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh, absolutely, Mike. This is the best writing.

• 58:26Speaker 09

  You know, it didn't faze me because I was like,

• 58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I am.

• 58:29Speaker 09

  I am one of the best. I was like, he's just accurately reading the landscape. Like, I think A+.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  I felt different.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep it up.

• 58:36Speaker 09

  I love it.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Well, then, you gotta call Sam because they're rolling him back.

• 58:37Jordi Hays?

  No, but I do think there's a story there potentially for Pirate Wires around that. That was the first time I felt like a model could be dangerous, where if somebody is having, you know, significant, uh,

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Delusions of grandeur.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  Delusions of grandeur, mental health issues, they think they're God, uh, they think they're on some, you know, divine mission.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  It confirms all of that and says, yeah, you should go and try.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  Maybe if you go to a friend and you're like, you know, if I went to you and I was like, Mike, you know, confidentially, like, I think that I'm God, and I'm on this thing, you might be like, hey, Jordy, like, let's, you know, talk about it a bit more.

• 59:06John Coogan?

  Let's dial this back.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  Maybe why, like, that's not quite right.

• 59:09Speaker 09

  That's not what I would do.

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  That's not what,

• 59:10Speaker 09

  I would, I would, someone shows up and is like, like some old kind of guy and he looks at me and he says, I'm you from the future.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 09

  I'm leaning in. I'm like, all right, like, I'm listening, like, prove it, prove it. I'm here, I want the, give me the evidence. You said you were God, I'd be like, all right, like, do some God shit. We'll talk.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  All right, all right. We need you to, we need you to do some reinforcement learning, uh, for AI.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is great. We'd love to have you back.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  Dial it in.

• 59:39Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me. Yeah, great to talk on.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  Looking sharp. Glad you got your suit back.

• 59:44Speaker 09

  I'll see you guys later.

• 59:45John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk soon. I, I, I texted Sean McGuire, told him we are ready. Um, hopefully he can swing by. In the meantime, why don't I give you a little, we, we should just literally read some, uh, hey, how you doing? What's up?

• 1:00:01Erik Torenberg?

  Guys on air?

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  We are on air.

• 1:00:02Jordi Hays?

  We're on air.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  Um, you can feel free to introduce yourself. Sit down, tell us about yourself. Um.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  What's uh, what's your story?

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  Tell everyone uh, who you are, what you do?

• 1:00:12Speaker 10

  Michael Eisenberg, general partner at Olive in Tel Aviv, before that at Benchmark.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:00:16Speaker 10

  Yeah, and an original member of the Hill and Valley Forum.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:00:19Speaker 10

  Yeah, four years ago. Yeah, four years ago, it was just a dinner in the Library of Congress rotunda.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Was it, was it better, was the dinner, you know, more intimate, was it more, you know, what, what, what was your read on it then? What's your read on it now?

• 1:00:31Speaker 10

  This is overwhelming.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's big.

• 1:00:33Speaker 10

  You know, for a guy like me, it's like, super overwhelming.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Speaker 10

  You know, I'm used to being on the other side of the microphone, I'm on a podcast, and I interview other people, this is kind of fun.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  It's fun, it's fun, well, uh, yeah, what, what, what, what are you trying to get out of the event?

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Are you specifically looking for founders that you could potentially invest in here?

• 1:00:47Speaker 10

  I'm not, so, we invest only in Israel.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:50Speaker 10

  But, come to Hill and Valley, why? Because politics, the intersection of geopolitics and technology is perhaps the most important issue of our time.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:00:58Speaker 10

  And where there's enormous opportunity.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 10

  Maybe a little capped by the size of, in general, the defense establishment, the M and A side won't be as big as Google, Cisco, Microsoft.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, so is there a angle here where you kind of act as like a, part of your value add as a venture capitalist is a de facto lobbyist for the, until they can afford a lobbyist where?

• 1:01:15Speaker 10

  I'm not a lobbyist, I, I, I would say personally.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  But you can make introductions.

• 1:01:20Speaker 10

  I can make introductions, this is a relationship place.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:22Speaker 10

  Remember the first Hill and Valley, you know, Senator Cotton was here, J.D. Vance, and now the Vice President of the United States was here.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  I remember, I met him last year.

• 1:01:28Speaker 10

  Yeah, and you know, this is where people come.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Joshua will be still here, I should, he should be hopping on in a minute.

• 1:01:32Speaker 10

  You should have Joshua for him.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  He's coming on in, uh, 20 minutes.

• 1:01:34Speaker 10

  He's a great guy, the best. You and I will be together in Tel Aviv next week also.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  Oh, is, so we're having Sean McGuire jump on in just a minute, he told us about how Talpio has become a pipeline for great founders. Can you give us more insight there? Have you backed any Talpio founders?

• 1:01:49Speaker 10

  Yes, we've backed many Talpio, I've been doing this for 30 years.

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, yeah, what, what is Talpio? Why is it such a hotbed for entrepreneurial talent?

• 1:01:55Speaker 10

  Everybody knows about 8200 Unit, which is like the cyber unit of the Israeli military. Talpio does a unique program, it takes about 30 kids a year who are the best and the brightest.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Speaker 10

  The Israeli genius goes there. It's a 10-year program.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:06Speaker 10

  In which you get a couple of degrees along the way.

• 1:02:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:09Speaker 10

  And then you get a budget.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 10

  To go do a big weapons program or military program. And so we give these 22, 23-year-old kids the most immense responsibility. They grow up, they deliver, and they know how to build essentially companies.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:02:21Speaker 10

  In a box.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Uh, can you give some examples of, uh, alums that you think are worth digging into or understanding their history?

• 1:02:27Speaker 10

  Uh, sure. So we backed a company called, uh, One Step.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:30Speaker 10

  It's actually three topio guys, which is like hitting the jackpot.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:02:34Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Guaranteed, guaranteed 100x.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Three of a kind.

• 1:02:37Speaker 10

  They just took, they just took this little telephone device.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Speaker 10

  And turned it into what's called a gate lab.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:42Speaker 10

  And it turns out that how you walk is predictive of your health.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:02:45Speaker 10

  In many ways, it's like a blood test.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 10

  Literally like a blood test. I can tell if you're gonna have dementia.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:50Speaker 10

  Or Alzheimer's, by the way, whether your hip and knee replacement works.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:02:53Speaker 10

  That's what, I mean, the only guys who are literally rocket scientists could turn the phone into what's called a gate lab.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 1:02:58Speaker 10

  Use it to measure everything. That's one example.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  What's the business model? Is this sell to the customer directly or vend that into Apple Health or something?

• 1:03:03Speaker 10

  No, they're actually selling to, uh, uh, facilities that do rehab.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:08Speaker 10

  For elderly people or people of hip and knee replacements. They sold to medical device guys like Zimmer.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:12Speaker 10

  It's growing extremely fast.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:03:14Speaker 10

  You know, incredible genius. And, you know, then there are others. There's a guy out there, you might have met him, Michael Kaufman, who was working with a bunch of guys who come out of that place.

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:03:22Speaker 10

  I think you met him last night.

• 1:03:23Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, uh, collaboration with this group here and, and, and, and your companies back in Israel. What, what does that look like?

• 1:03:31Speaker 10

  The interesting thing about Israel is there's no local market, right? 10 million citizens doesn't make much of a market. 400 million, on the other hand.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:03:37Speaker 10

  Is big. And so if you assume that US defense spending is gonna go up.

• 1:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Speaker 10

  Um, this is a good place to do defense technology. We backed a bunch of companies in the area, a company called ORE, which makes, uh, uh, rocket fuel and, uh, explosives.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 1:03:51Speaker 10

  Uh, using, uh, natural and biological means, uh, and, uh, another company called Dream.

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Chemistry company.

• 1:03:56Speaker 10

  It is like, it is actually a chemistry company using biological means, a specialty chemicals company. Our co-investor there is Standard Industries, he's on WR Grace.

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:04:03Speaker 10

  Um, and, uh, we backed a company, uh, that's in the kinetic defense area, and another company called Dream, you may have heard, was founded by Sebastian Kurtz. The former Chancellor of Austria and Shalif Julio.

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 10

  Uh, that is doing national level AI, uh, protections. One of the fastest growing.

• 1:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 10

  Companies, I think, in the world right now.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your read on whether or not we are really, we're clearly in an AI race? What, what is, is that something that can be won? Or is it like any other industry where it's just sort of a perpetual race? There's, there's no ending, you know, do you have a thesis around?

• 1:04:36Speaker 10

  Do you agree or disagree with Bill Gurley? I agree with Bill Gurley. My former partner, Ben Chou, I, I, I agree with Bill Gurley. It's an infinite game, but I'm not sure the question is framed right. Sure. So AI is going to impact just about everything we do. It's a super accelerant of, of many things. I think the question becomes, because the clock gets sped up. Yeah. You could fall really far behind in every iterative game you play. Right. If you're not at the head of the game, you know, if you're not winning, winning the game, it's not that you win in order to defeat the other person. You win in order to stay ahead. One of the, I've written a bunch of books. One of the core thesis of the books is that the civic society runs on iOS and AI and runs really quickly. And government runs on the fax machines. Yeah. And that's inevitably creates friction. And the society pulls ahead and it creates

• 1:05:21Speaker 10

  tension with the government. I think that's part of the loss of faith in institutions. So if you don't accelerate the clock on absolutely everything, what you just have is unending friction, society kind of collapses on itself. So you need to stay ahead of the race in order for your society actually to be healthy, and then also to deter others from doing other things. But you know, as science accelerates with AI and weapons development starts to, it can be troubling. I give a talk in Abu Dhabi about, it's about a year and three months ago, where I showed that there is correlation, we can argue whether there's causality, I think there is, between the increase in compute power and cyber attacks and interest in, in bioweapon attacks online. I think it's not an accident. There's agents of chaos in the world. Yep. And now they have access to super tools. Yep.

• 1:06:05Speaker 10

  Like AI. So if we don't stay ahead, these people get emboldened and you can't kind of keep them in a box.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  What, you know, there's a lot of talk today around just efficiency in government, specifically around like payments, things like that. Does the US have anything that we can learn from Israel in terms of, do you think Israel's done a better job in terms of like modernizing the way that governments actually run? Or is it still fax machines all the way down?

• 1:06:27Speaker 10

  The really interesting thing about Israel is not the government. What Israel has is the most incredible civic society on the planet. If you look at what happened October 7th, the government was absent, but the civilians all turned up. Yeah. They turned up to evacuate people, turned up with their own weapons and their own cars and took care of business that what needed to be done. And in fact, the evacuees were taken care of mostly by civilians. The government didn't turn up. And what I think Israel is a model for the 21st century, which is it's almost impossible for government to catch up on so many of these technology things. It's just gonna take them a while.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Speaker 10

  What we're doing now is devolving this to citizens to take over more control of the economy, emergency response, and everything else. I chair the largest volunteer organization in Israel. There's actually wildfires going on right now in Israel. They've been set on fire by terrorists. There's 20 places that the fires are. My civilian organization that I chair called the New Guardians is out there with thousands of volunteers, stopping the fires and stopping people from lighting more. And so the lesson from Israeli society is how you leverage technology in civic society to take over more capabilities from the government. Now, you can't defend people like that. That still requires the government and policing should be done by the government. But the Israeli government, I think, is like every government right now, which is there's lower trust in institutions. They're still very, very slow.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Speaker 10

  And they're kind of coming around to this very late. But because of the force of the public, I think it'll get there faster than most other governments.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  What do you think about different GOs to invest in? Benchmark is obviously in the news for the Manus investment, which is kind of controversial, but you could see a world where, hey, they're just great founders. They want to get out. And so, you know, American capitalism is like the path out. Are there more, are there other GOs that you think are interesting or more on this continuum of like east versus west narrative?

• 1:08:17Speaker 10

  I'm pretty bearish on Europe.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 10

  Broadly. I've said on Harry Stevings podcast and other places. I'm super bullish on the US and Israel.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  You went on the King of Europe's podcast.

• 1:08:28Speaker 10

  I did. By the way, I should say I'm an LP of Harry's too. But, you know, he feels the need to disprove me right now if I went, you know, was super bearish on Europe.

• 1:08:38Jordi Hays?

  He's going all in.

• 1:08:39Speaker 10

  He's all in. He's all in. He's dying on the hill.

• 1:08:41Jordi Hays?

  He's got to make it work. He's got to make it work.

• 1:08:42Speaker 10

  This is good to be young and ambitious like Harry is and do it. I think there's interesting things going on in pockets, but still Mecca is, by the way, it's not the United States per se. It's Silicon Valley.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:55Speaker 10

  And New York.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:57Speaker 10

  And maybe Austin, a little bit of Miami and Tel Aviv. It's cities around the world. And maybe just sort of London. I think the most interesting thing going on right now is in actually Abu Dhabi and Dubai. They're becoming a massive magnet for the talent fleeing Russia and Ukraine. It'd be really easy to come there. More and more companies are setting up facilities here. Just here, I met three people who've set up in Abu Dhabi.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 10

  And so.

• 1:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, they have a lot of incentives too. I've heard that they'll basically say free space, free energy. There's a lot of, you know, they'll, they'll basically like massively reduce the cost. My understanding of operating things like manufacturing, any type of like hard tech, you know, projects.

• 1:09:30Speaker 10

  They're also really good at building big projects and they have low cost energy. So they're going to build big data centers. They're building big data centers for the US giants and Microsoft has a partnership, you know, in MGX.

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 10

  With Mobala in Abu Dhabi. I think just interesting things.

• 1:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Speaker 10

  Going on in the Emirates, uh, more broadly, not as much, you know, entrepreneurship coming out of there, but places where you can kind of build infrastructure. Uh, and deploying. I think the really, really big question facing the West right now.

• 1:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 10

  And I'm a fan of Alex. I think we're here to defend the West is how do we create a secure? And resilient supply chain.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Speaker 10

  For the infrastructure we need to stay ahead in AI and not just in AI, AI robotics. Uh, defense, whatever the next generation of bio is and chemicals, as we've talked about.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 10

  That requires real infrastructure and a secure supply chain for the West to win. And we gotta focus on that.

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, what is your postmortem on the BRICS narrative that, uh, I, I don't know, I grew up with, uh, Brazil, Russia, India, China. Uh, Goldman was calling these the next major markets and the way that's bifurcated, if you invested in Russia and China, it's really rough, but. Brazil and India, they've developed, but not fully. Uh, are, are there still like jump balls on the geopolitical? Uh, like, uh, chessboard that can be pulled towards like the broader definition of the West, even if India's not in. What we traditionally think of as the West.

• 1:10:52Speaker 10

  It's funny you should ask this question. I was just remarking to somebody a couple of days ago, there was BRICS and now there's IMEC.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  IMEC, what's that?

• 1:10:59Speaker 10

  Ah, the India Middle East corridor.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:11:01Speaker 10

  So we assume that India would go with Brazil, China and Russia. But if you look at China and Russia in particular, on some level. Brazil, these aren't real democracies and India.

• 1:11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Speaker 10

  Is, is a democracy.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:12Speaker 10

  I think it turns out, by the way, if you invest in a non-democracy, you actually don't own what you think you own.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:18Speaker 10

  They take it from you.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:19Speaker 10

  You don't, you know, free markets is, uh, Freeman said, you know, create, uh, free societies.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:25Speaker 10

  It turns out the opposite is also true. If you don't have a free society, you actually don't have a free market. You don't own what you think you own. And I never thought India was actually a part of that, but this IMEC thing, what's the IMEC corridor? India Middle East corridor.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:35Speaker 10

  It's the alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative.

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  True, yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 10

  You know, people don't understand this, find you a political point. So Turkey, which is kind of on the side now, Turkey, Pakistan, which is now warring with India, are part of the Belt and Road Initiative that China, initiative that China has initiated to try to get to Europe via land. IMEC, India Middle East Corridors Alternative that where you go via India, via the sea to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, you cross through, you know, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, and out to the Mediterranean.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:02Speaker 10

  And then in there. And this, I think, is a big deal. I think BRICS fell apart because uh, democracy doesn't belong with these people, but I think there's a giant opportunity for the West and for the United States. If we can bring India on board and make them a core part of the supply chain across the Middle East and into Israel and Europe.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  Looking into it and more and more companies testing the waters.

• 1:12:21Speaker 10

  But these things take more time.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  It takes a long time.

• 1:12:23Speaker 10

  These things take more time than anyone believes. The supply chain created in Shenzhen, in China, and Taiwan

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:28Speaker 10

  is 30 years in the making.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:30Speaker 10

  It's not gonna happen overnight.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, thank you so much for being on. Sean Maguire is out there waiting. Can you go grab him?

• 1:12:36Speaker 10

  I'm like a warm-up for Sean Maguire. That's like, you know, I mean, life goal locked.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, there we go. This is great. Hey, thank you so much. Yeah, great to meet you. Thanks so much for stopping by. Um, fantastic. I think Jordy has to send a tweet or post promoting the feed. We're gonna bring in Sean Maguire from Sequoia Capital. Welcome to the stream. Third time appearance on TBN. How are you doing?

• 1:13:01Shaun Maguire?

  Let's go.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  I think we have a question.

• 1:13:03Shaun Maguire?

  By the way, he's like leaning down. These guys are much taller and first in than you.

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah, yeah, one. Yeah, we'll do six minutes, then we'll bring him in. Great.

• 1:13:10Shaun Maguire?

  Great. Great to see you. Who's the VIP at one?

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Josh Wolfe is coming on in six minutes.

• 1:13:16Shaun Maguire?

  Good buddy.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  You guys can share a mic for a bit.

• 1:13:18Shaun Maguire?

  I think that'd be entertaining.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, with the initial reaction, is this your third Hillen Valley, fourth Hillen Valley?

• 1:13:25Shaun Maguire?

  Something like that. Third.

• 1:13:26John Coogan?

  I actually met you for the first time at the last Hillen Valley.

• 1:13:28Shaun Maguire?

  I missed, I missed the first one, which is a big mistake. Got the invite. I think I got food poisoning or something like that before.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Shaun Maguire?

  But uh, thing has grown. Every year, it just gets crazier and crazier.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Uh, are you, do you like the framing of like reindustrialization being the focus? Last year was a lot of like TikTok stuff. Is there something else we should be focused on? Or is reindustrialization really the heart and soul of the agenda with Hillen Valley now?

• 1:13:54Shaun Maguire?

  Whatever the agenda is, I think the conference is focused on how tech meets Washington and like how we play nice together in the future. And I think that's the right focus and it's, you know, what technologies are going to matter in the future, what policies can happen that will help us get there. And I think like re-industrialization is critical, but I'm already hearing, you know, there's a lot of talk of a lot of other things too.

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:23Shaun Maguire?

  Like energy, you know, all sorts of things.

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it does, it does feel like even defense tech, if defense tech ends up being involved in anything, it ends up overshadowing it because it's just exciting. You have these planes and drones and it's just dominating.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Great videos.

• 1:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Like great videos.

• 1:14:38Shaun Maguire?

  Even better demos.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  Even better demos. Yeah, the nearest demo is wild.

• 1:14:42Shaun Maguire?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  I got that one early on. Soren's a champion drone pilot, so sort of great drone, uh, great demo. In terms of energy, uh, are, should every venture capitalist be on the hunt for the Elon of energy? It feels like there is a power loss CEO.

• 1:14:57Shaun Maguire?

  I think the Elon of energy might end up being Elon.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  You think he's going to go into it? I mean, we.

• 1:15:00Shaun Maguire?

  I can't read his mind, but if he does, just tell me where to wire the money, Elon.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Is there any limit?

• 1:15:06Jordi Hays?

  The Elon of Elon is Elon.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Cause we're talking about like.

• 1:15:09Shaun Maguire?

  That's kind of my logic.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  Reshoring semis, but like there has to be an upper limit to like, you know, how much industrial work he can do at some point or is that wrong?

• 1:15:17Shaun Maguire?

  I mean, look, on, so there have been, to the credit of the tech industry. There have been probably 10 to 20 pretty promising vision startups in the last five, six years. And probably five to 10 fusion startups. I haven't invested in any of those, which, you know, means I'm not doing my part to just like raise the tide of all. And my kind of, the challenge for me has been it's, even though I believe so much in the category, I have like, I believe in the macro, I have to get the micro right. I made that comment before. And it's, it's been hard for me to pick like who's going to win in that category.

• 1:15:57Shaun Maguire?

  And I, I think this is something that we come struggling with and I think some sectors, there should be a lot of government support. Like for all these, if, if one ends up as.

• 1:16:10Shaun Maguire?

  You know, number 10 in the space, but it's still like a public good and it like is a positive payback for the government. Anyways, I think we need more government.

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  I just feel like there's an opportunity for a startup that's like, yeah, SMRs are cool. People are building those. There's new designs that are great, but our startup is just copy pasting Diablo Canyon. We're going to copy paste it 100 times. 500 times, exactly. But that does seem hard to do.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Who on, uh, we've had a lot of people on from the valley side of Hill and Valley. Who on the hillside have you been, you know, excited about talking with that you think really gets it?

• 1:16:44Shaun Maguire?

  I mean, I was just on a panel with Senator Todd Young and I think he deeply gets it. And for example, one comment he just made was like, he doesn't want to like re onshore everything, only like a small number of very strategic industries. He doesn't want to onshore garments.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:02Shaun Maguire?

  And he's fine with things that are not, there's different levels of like how strategic something is.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Shaun Maguire?

  And, you know, it's fine if the medium strategic things go to friendly nations.

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:17Shaun Maguire?

  And so anyways, I think Todd has had very nuanced opinions. I think up right now or next is Richie Torres, who is someone on the left who I I've generally admired and felt like has very, even though I disagree with him a lot of times, I think he's a very principled person who really deeply cares about America.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Shaun Maguire?

  And is willing to say unpopular things that he believes in. And for me, anyone that is willing to be bipartisan, like not just purely tribal, but take a on like some topic that is core dogma of their party and they're willing to go against that dogma, like that's someone that I generally admire.

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, that should be a good fit for Silicon Valley. Like the whole search for contrarianism is like pervasive in Silicon Valley, right?

• 1:18:00Shaun Maguire?

  Yeah, pervasive in Silicon Valley, a little less pervasive in Washington.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it still exists and there's pockets of it that you have to seek out, seek out. Um, what is your read on the new defense budget? We're hearing this 150 billion dollar number. For a while, it seemed like there was going to be a freeze, maybe very bad for challenger defense tech companies. Then it seemed like the floodgates opened and there's all these huge numbers for even just small series A companies are throwing out, oh, there's a billion dollars hanging out for my thing. How optimistic are you about that? And how optimistic are you about not just like the SpaceXs of the world, but the actual up and comers, the next generation of defense tech?

• 1:18:41Shaun Maguire?

  Unpopular opinion. I simultaneously believe that defense tech is one of the most important categories in the world.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Shaun Maguire?

  But I also believe that there's going to be a very small number of winners.

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:54Shaun Maguire?

  Call it in the West, this including Europe and Israel and America, roughly 10 companies that go on to be really big next generation companies, call it companies with 10 billion plus market caps.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Shaun Maguire?

  And I think there'll be multiple with greater than $100 billion market cap.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:19:12Shaun Maguire?

  And I think that the defense tech companies of the next generation are going to be way better businesses than the last generation. So I think it's kind of- It's a focus on efficiency. Focus on efficiency, focus on vertical integration. If you go look at, like, I think, I think one of the core things people got wrong about Tesla in the public markets, going back to like 2017, 2018, is they were comping it to auto companies. Yeah. And they're coming to GM or Ford or whatever. And people didn't realize that GM and Ford don't really make anything anymore. Yeah. They basically design cars and are, you know, customer acquisition channels and maybe some financing. Yeah. But they subcontract out everything. Yeah. And, and so they would look at, oh, GM or Ford have these market caps and Tesla's

• 1:19:53Shaun Maguire?

  already here. But they would ignore NXP and ignore like all these supply chain companies. Yep. And I think we've kind of been doing the same with the defense primes.

• 1:20:03John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:20:04Shaun Maguire?

  You know, Boeing- Lockheed, they subcontract out almost everything that goes into their finished product. So you're only getting a slice of the market cap. You're only getting a slice of the market cap. Makes sense. And I think these next generation companies are going to have way more vertical integration, higher margins, and actually think that we're going to see a change with how procurement happens to move away from cost plus. I think we're already starting to see that. But basically, the reason it's unpopular is I think there's going to be a very small number of winners that win mega hard and then a lot of, you know, losers or companies get rolled up into the big, you know, the big winners.

• 1:20:37Jordi Hays?

  Were you surprised that, I think the number was $500 million, was earmarked for autonomous systems? And when you compared that to some of the other categories, it felt pretty low. Do you have any insight into how they got around to that number or, you know, general reaction?

• 1:20:53Shaun Maguire?

  So, like, there's different philosophies. I think one philosophy would be that, like, we're trying to push a boulder up a hill in terms of, like, changing the defense budget and moving budget towards next generation emerging industries. And if that's something where, like, every year it's predictably getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and if 10 years from now, 40, 50% of the budget is going towards kind of next generation strategic technologies, then I'll be very happy.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Shaun Maguire?

  What would be very bad is if it was like 500 this year and then zero next year.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Totally. That's a really great take. It's like, it's like if a company raises, you know, $100 million in VC and they have to spend it all in the first year, like, they're going to probably spend it really inefficiently versus like, hey, let's like stage this out based on certain milestones. And so, yeah, I think that's a right take.

• 1:21:45Shaun Maguire?

  And this has been the, look, I learned this lesson the hard way with my cybersecurity company that focuses on defense. Our first big contract, we got, we got awarded a $10.5 million contract and then government sequestration happened, like, they couldn't pass a congressional bill. And we basically got told, like, either we accept the contract with 60 cents on the dollar or no contract at all. So obviously, we took the 60 cents on the dollar, but... And we were lucky that this was actually our first big contract because it taught us from day one how unpredictable government funding can be. But is that predictability, like if you know it's gonna be 500 this year and a billion next year, etc. You can invest strategically. If you have no idea what it's gonna be in the future, it's just very hard to plan.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:22:31Shaun Maguire?

  Yeah, you guys get Josh.

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

  Last question, 60 seconds. Do you have a take on this idea of whether we're in an AI race? But is it an infinite game? Is it just sort of a perpetual game? Or is it, is an AI war even the right framing, right? I feel like this has been a debate.

• 1:22:52Shaun Maguire?

  Oh man, I'm so glad you asked this. I've been obsessing over this for a couple of years. I have a pretty strong opinion that the foundation model companies are gonna capture way more value than people realize. I think it's a combination of operating systems plus cloud, which means this will be incredible businesses. Let me just make this point. So like if you think on the operating system level, there's Windows, there's Apple, there's Android by Google, there's Linux and open source. And these companies, like the value capture of Microsoft or Apple, it's not on the operating system, it's on all the applications that they control and built on top.

• 1:23:37Shaun Maguire?

  And same with Android.

• 1:23:40Shaun Maguire?

  But I think that the operating systems are gonna be the foundation models themselves. I think there's incredible kind of CapEx and development to get to the point where you are the, one of the top operating system that has eyeballs. But then I think the lock-in and the value capture will be with the applications that are kind of verticalized on top. And I think there will be an additional moat, which will be like the moat of cloud. Cloud has done a very poor job of the application lock-in, the way the operating systems did. But they've done a very good job of having a hardware moat and a CapEx moat. And I think it'll, I think, I think these AI foundation model companies are gonna have both. They're gonna have like a CapEx lock-in mode.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Shaun Maguire?

  And they're gonna have like the usage and application mode plus value. And then just the last thing I'll say on this, and like if you look at Linux, Linux probably has five times as many installs as like Windows.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Shaun Maguire?

  But the value capture of Linux is like 1100 of Microsoft.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Yep. But Red Hat's still a big business.

• 1:24:40Shaun Maguire?

  But Red Hat's still a great business, but I personally think this is where we're gonna go with AI.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Shaun Maguire?

  Like the open source deep seek and all this stuff will be great and it'll be, there'll be more open source models used in the world. I think the value capture will be lower by that than XAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, some Chinese, et cetera. Get Josh Wolfe on here.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:25:01Shaun Maguire?

  You guys are the best. Let's go.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta do a whole deep dive on that.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you back in LA.

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  See you.

• 1:25:05Shaun Maguire?

  Peace, guys.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Josh Wolfe and I got a post that we are live. So much to dig into. 60 second question, Jordy. You, you hit him with the deepest possible question.

• 1:25:17Jordi Hays?

  Deepest possible question. I wanted to take more on, on this idea of, you know, should we be investing in Chinese AI companies?

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Well, we have Josh Wolfe, the man himself.

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Welcome to the stream.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  We've been wanting to.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. We've been wanting to have you on for a while.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  I've been wanting to be on for a while.

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you could make it.

• 1:25:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna disagree with everything that Sean said. I don't know. I'm kidding. Perfect, perfect. Line by line, line by line.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, he said AI is valuable. What about that? You're in front of a camera, can you?

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  I think you're good right there.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you should be good there. Yeah, yeah, that's great.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  How's it going? Is this, is this? I'm wearing a tie.

• 1:26:00John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:26:01Jordi Hays?

  You're wearing a tie, you look sharp.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Has it been exactly one year since you put on the suit and tie for Hill and Valley last year?

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Break down your, your first business trip to Washington because I feel like. I've been coming to DC for a very long time. I feel like you've been banging the, the, you know, public, private partnership, you know, drum for. A long time. A long time. And, and many of the companies I feel like, you know, oftentimes I see a new fundraiser announcement from a new. Sort of hard tech company and I'm like, I feel like Josh invested in like this exact company like six years ago or something like that.

• 1:26:30Josh Wolfe?

  Hopefully it's the same company and they raised a lot more money.

• 1:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:32Josh Wolfe?

  Uh, yeah, no, we've been in this for a long time. I think we really started with a lot of like, uh, Intel community facing things. So

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:26:37Josh Wolfe?

  Most of that was sort of software, maybe sensor, SIGINT, uh, data collection. That was a lot easier to work with. Then we started working with soft special operations, which basically had rapid fielding so they could deploy stuff and it wasn't at the scale that you need to like win a big army contract.

• 1:26:49Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:26:49Josh Wolfe?

  We started doing stuff in space with satellites. Um, and then I would say like, really the first pure play, non quote unquote dual use thing, which was unapologetic was first round of Anduril. And, uh, you know, I wish that there was like some sophisticated analysis we did for that, but it really was me and Trey at Balthazar in, uh, in New York. And he's like, I'm going to start this company with Palmer Lucky. I'm like, I'm in.

• 1:27:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm in.

• 1:27:11Josh Wolfe?

  So that was, that was the diligence.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  How have you found, uh, you know, you do, you do a first round in Anduril, but then, and then you're like, okay, this category is going to be really important. You want to invest more, but then there's this issue where the Anduril of Anduril is probably Anarol, right?

• 1:27:30Josh Wolfe?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  And so, and so have you had to hold back in a lot of instances where you're?

• 1:27:34Josh Wolfe?

  There are venture funds and we, we compete with them and we partner with them that are sort of a little bit more, uh, polymerous and they're doing lots of deals with lots of different people. We try to be really monogamous. And so there was one company in particular, um, I'll say it out loud, but it was Dive Technologies. They came to pitch us and they were doing subsea, which was sort of complementary to our company Sail Drone, which is doing autonomous fleets of onsea. And I said, you know, I think you would really be better off as a part of a platform that has the muscle and the, uh, mechanisms to be able to win contracts and, um, scale and manufacturing and think about this as part of a portfolio. And so at first I think they were a little bit hesitant, but then they ended up going to Anduril. And I gotta say, I think it was like 60 or 90 days. We then won the big OSOC deal.

• 1:28:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Josh Wolfe?

  And that to me is just like proof positive of high tech in the right platform, able to execute. Matt Grimm, credit and props to him. I mean, he picked up his family, moved to Australia, set up this operation, 60 plus people, billion dollar plus contract, like very, you know, but, but clear sign of winning. So we love that. But yes, it is harder to do something that is in a category as Anduril expands because we really want Anduril to just be, you know.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Is there a different type of underwriting that investors could be thinking about? Not necessarily, hey, I'm trying to back.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  The next Andorol and I'm underwriting to 1% chance of $100 billion outcome? Or is there a world where, yes, we're building something that might get acquired? Or might go through an M and A process? Is that even the purview of venture at that point?

• 1:28:57Josh Wolfe?

  You go back to Sequoia, Sequoia funded Cisco, you know, Cisco.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:59Josh Wolfe?

  But then Sequoia made a fortune selling company after company to Cisco in the late 90s, right? So, so if Andorol, you know, ends up being a 50, 80, 100, 200 billion dollar business. The ability for them to buy a company for a billion is venture making for a lot of fun. So I think that the ecosystem is growing the right way that it should.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:15Josh Wolfe?

  We will have a bubble in aerospace and defense. It will happen and it will happen in part because of capital formation, which is really interesting. So you've got venture funds like us, that us and Sequoia and founders and KP and Coastal and a handful of people that are doing, you know, these kinds of investments. Then you've got dedicated specialist funds.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:31Josh Wolfe?

  Yeah. And then you've got fund of funds. And the fund of funds are interesting because you have a bunch of universities and endowments and hospitals that are like, we won't invest in the defense category because we are not comfortable being part of a kill chain. We as a partnership are, right? But they might not be, but we would invest in a fund of funds that is investing in a venture fund that is investing in a company. So you have this moral remove that is going to provoke more formation of capital, but there won't be enough companies in the first few years. And so you're going to get a bubble. There's going to be a bunch of frauds. There's going to be a bunch of crashes and disasters.

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  Is there an argument against building like a dedicated defense tech fund? Have you ever done a segmented fund? I know a lot of big, big VC funds have.

• 1:30:06Josh Wolfe?

  No, we, we, we have like a little opportunity fund for some of our best defense companies, but not a carve out. We are generalists. We like to have one pocket, one pool. You can do a $100,000 check, you do a $100 million check.

• 1:30:16John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:30:17Josh Wolfe?

  And you can go sort of all sectors, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. If somebody's a specialist and super passionate about it, like go for it.

• 1:30:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  What was your play, what was your kind of DC playbook? What advice would you give to your portfolio maybe five years ago? And how is it different than today?

• 1:30:32Josh Wolfe?

  You know, five years ago, I think you were working with a lot of lobbyists to try to get meetings on the Hill. You'd be lucky if you can get a Senator, you were mostly getting congressmen or staffers, you know, if that. Today, I think everybody wants to be in the conversation because they don't want to be ignorant. You have a lot more alliances between red and blue, Republicans and Dems on things like shared adversaries. China, you know, that's a question which everybody. converged upon. Yeah. So, American competitiveness, thinking about the scientists, the engineering, people are going to debate some of the policy stuff. Should we be cutting science funding? Should we be partnering with South Korea, Japan, or UK and these kinds of things? But everybody wants to be in the conversation. So your access today is evidenced by this conference. I mean, what Jacob and Delian and Christian have done here is just really amazing because it started as this napkin sketch. It became a crowd.

• 1:31:15Josh Wolfe?

  Now the crowd has become sort of a movement, but the caliber of the people that you're getting is both extraordinary. And the politicians sort of keep getting older, but the people that are doing the tech companies that we're looking to fund keep getting younger. And I think that's a beautiful thing.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Are you taking, would you say you're taking more, a lot more pitches today? I mean, I imagine.

• 1:31:31Josh Wolfe?

  In the halls here?

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  In the halls here. No, no, no, just in the context of, I know you guys have all, you know, been focused for a long time on like, you know, finding like researchers that were developing, you know, things that could be commercialized. But I imagine like just the scale of inbound as hard tech, manufacturing, defense tech, all these categories like became like hot.

• 1:31:51Josh Wolfe?

  Oh, the number for sure.

• 1:31:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming like the number of pitches just gone through the roof.

• 1:31:55Josh Wolfe?

  I mean, the number of entrepreneurs, and by the way, the best entrepreneurs frankly are the people that we backed at Anduril. And we've done two people that have vested and, you know, sort of with blessing have gone and left and started their own company. And so being able to find these fountains of talent that have seen success, have seen rapid scaling, have seen valuations. They understand the venture game. They can raise money. They can attract technologists. They can in-license IP or develop it themselves. Those are the people that you can back time and time again. So I think we have a decade-long run of amazing talent in this ecosystem. That isn't going to be just Silicon Valley, right? It's going to be SoCal. And it's going to be other parts of the US down in Texas and, and maybe even Florida. How do you think about? And by the way, sorry, and international too. We did our first two ever Israel investments. Both are defense companies. Yeah.

• 1:32:39Josh Wolfe?

  We did a company in Japan, company in the UK. So we're interested in not just American defense also, but American allied defense. Totally.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  How do you think about VCs as a conduit to DC? It feels like potentially low hanging fruit for some sort of value add. You know, a lot of VCs would say, oh, we'll help you find your first VP of Engineering, or we'll help you with some comms puzzle. But like, almost like light lobbyist, just making some introductions to the senators and congresspeople that you might know. Is that a more modern form of value add that's coming out of venture funds these days?

• 1:33:15Josh Wolfe?

  I think partners at firms like ours and others have relationships and they're authentic relationships and you spend time with these folks and you admire them. There's congressmen who I deeply admire and I think are the future leaders, both Republicans and Democrats. People like Richie Torres and Jake Altenkloos, and then on the Senate side, Young and Slotkin. I mean, these are like real patriotic Americans that are smart and savvy, might have been in the CIA, might have been a Marine, but quite savvy. And they are tech savvy and they're young and they want to know these companies. And, you know, they want a future donor base too in their own self-interest. As Ben Franklin said, would you persuade appeal to interest, not reason?

• 1:33:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:46Josh Wolfe?

  But I think understanding that game and also understanding tech moves at this crazy velocity that is hard to compete with. It's why tech wins, because they outcompete, because they move faster. Government does not move that fast. And so you have to be a realist. Government is moving faster than it has in the past, particularly in defense. You look at this appropriation bill, this reconciliation bill, $1 trillion, 47 billion plus going to be going towards shipbuilding, autonomous systems. Like, that's going to be a big boon for Anduril, for Hadrian, for Varda, for Saildrone.

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about founders that are trying to time some of these broader structural changes? If you were in, if you're in shipbuilding at all, the best time, if you want to take advantage of this new bill to start your company was maybe a decade ago. Because you're sort of ramped and you failed and you have a great team and you have some credibility. But how do you think, what's your advice to kind of early-stage founders that are seeing the world change and trying to kind of navigate and see opportunities? You know, an example being like, you know, I'm not convinced that like every manufacturing, you know, automation company is like going to do, is the right time to start it is now because we don't know, the future is like murky, right? Like, a lot of these things are unfolding. How do you, how do you help founders kind of understand?

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Market timing when there's so much in flux.

• 1:35:00Josh Wolfe?

  The honest answer, a lot of it is luck.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Josh Wolfe?

  I mean, honestly, like, I always say that there's a five-year psychological bias that you want to be invested today, where you should have been five years ago.

• 1:35:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:09Josh Wolfe?

  Okay, but I'll just give you a few quick examples. You think about the people that were doing modular reactors.

• 1:35:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:14Josh Wolfe?

  I'm not a personal great believer, and I think it's great for society. We're not invested in them. I did a lot of nuclear, nuclear waste cleanup.

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  You agree with Sean on that. You guys, it doesn't sound like you guys.

• 1:35:21Josh Wolfe?

  I hope it happens.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  You more solar bowl, or?

• 1:35:23Josh Wolfe?

  Uh, it's happening, and it's getting cheaper. Like, I'm not crapping on solar, but it's just, it's not super exciting.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:29Josh Wolfe?

  But, but, but I'm a huge nuclear bow. You know, I've renamed it Elemental Energy.

• 1:35:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:33Josh Wolfe?

  Uh, but, but if you were developing modular reactors, you might have been like, okay, it's large baseload power, it's better than interminency, but you weren't anticipating that there was going to be this data center buildup.

• 1:35:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:42Josh Wolfe?

  Which is at least part of the narrative.

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  And now you need gigawatt scale.

• 1:35:44Josh Wolfe?

  Correct. And whether or not that will actually see the light of day today, they're able to capitalize and draft off the hype of that. So that's number one.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  They're thinking about bringing back Three Mile Island, Diablo Canyon, potentially. There's a lot of big opportunities for the large-scale nuclear.

• 1:35:57Josh Wolfe?

  You, you look at people that are doing minerals and mining, which is not a really sexy area, but suddenly you're thinking about supply chain geopolitical conflict with China. You're thinking about robots and magnets and things that have to go into, uh, magnets and motors.

• 1:36:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so my question is like, you know, if you're in, if you're doing anything in mining or rare earths, obviously great if you started a company three years ago and then you get to capture this momentum, but will we see, do you see potentially enough explosion of sort of demand and, and new markets that you could still start something today?

• 1:36:25Josh Wolfe?

  You can always start something today.

• 1:36:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:27Josh Wolfe?

  But you got to remember that I think some of the best successes are not just like execution, you follow this playbook, but it's luck.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:34Josh Wolfe?

  Fifteen years ago, we started a high-tech nuclear waste cleanup company to go after the defense nuclear waste from pre- and post-Cold War lawmaking. All of a sudden, earthquake, tsunami, Fukushima disaster, we become the only US company picked for the cleanup to clean up this nuclear disaster, right? That became a boon for this company. It was a total black swan for Japan, a negative one, a total positive black swan for this company.

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Josh Wolfe?

  Uh, today, Saildrone, autonomous fleets of boats, they started oceanographic research and all this kind of stuff, bright orange ships. The guy that's here, I don't know if you've seen him, Hondo Gertz, he's a big hulking guy.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:03Josh Wolfe?

  The two of us are together, it looks like the old poster of Schwarzenegger and DeVito. And he's like, you know, I got a big strategic idea for you. What if you paint these things gray?

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:14Josh Wolfe?

  Instead of bright orange?

• 1:37:15Qasar Younis?

  We could do some other stuff with them.

• 1:37:16Josh Wolfe?

  And all of a sudden, you open up to this defense market.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:18Josh Wolfe?

  But that wasn't in their founding thesis of we're going to make a fleet of autonomous systems for Task Force 59 in Bahrain and then expand to the rest of the world.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think, I mean, you mentioned some of the other countries that you're investing in. Japan, I think you mentioned Australia. What do you think the future of partnership between the United States and Middle East allies looks like?

• 1:37:39Josh Wolfe?

  Huge.

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  Explain.

• 1:37:40Josh Wolfe?

  You know, we call this sci-tech diplomacy. We brought onto our team maybe six, seven years ago, Tony Thomas, T2.

• 1:37:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:47Josh Wolfe?

  Head of SOCOM, 90 people, 90 countries, 90,000, you know, all special operations. Incredible guy, great entree into aerospace defense.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:54Josh Wolfe?

  A guy that was on the board of one of our early intel companies that we were focused on in intelligence community was Brett McGurk.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:00Josh Wolfe?

  Brett just left the administration. He was in Bush White House, Obama White House, Trump White House, left the Trump White House because he had put together the counter ISIS coalition. And when Trump surreptitiously sort of pulled out from Syria, he abandoned the Kurds and he had built that allied nation with the Kurds and said, that allied force with the Kurds and said, we're going to supply you militarily. He then resigned, came back in for Biden. His capstone deal was the Gaza Hamas Israel hostage deal. John 20th left, joined us a few weeks later, company in the Middle East. We met with MBS, we've met with Tanun and ABZ, Abdul bin Zayed. I am so bullish about UAE.

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Josh Wolfe?

  UAE is so ideologically righteous on being coexistence. All three major religions, you know, the Abraham Accords, major Sinai.

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:44Josh Wolfe?

  Tech Forward, Cleveland Clinic, NYU, Johns Hopkins, the Guggenheim, the Louvre, major cultural institutions. It's incredible and they're building it super fast, but they're building it thoughtfully.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:55Josh Wolfe?

  And the ability to make a decision very quickly, high tech. You think about G42 and some of these other things, they've decided we're not going to cast our light with China. We're going with the US. We're going to build data centers, we're going to partner with the US and it's going to be at like giga scale, hundreds of billions of dollars. Super bullish about UAE, Saudi I think is next, both for normalization with Israel. They want to be in the defense umbrella of the US. They are going to spend a lot of money on AI infrastructure.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:17Josh Wolfe?

  And compute.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we saw the Falcon 9B.

• 1:39:19Josh Wolfe?

  Huge.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Josh Wolfe?

  So UAE, Bahrain, Saudi next, I think, in the region, but of course, Israel. I mean, it is a tech mecca. Many of those countries realize it's really far to fly to Silicon Valley, but if you can go to Israel, it's a big deal. Tel Aviv is right there, short of flight. Our first two deals, like I said, defense focused. Hamut Al Meridor, who ran Palantir in Israel, we backed her with Sean in a company called Kela.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  Oh, great.

• 1:39:41Josh Wolfe?

  So Luxon Sequoia teamed on that and just really bullish on the region.

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about how quickly information spreads today? It feels like a category, you know, a decade ago, you'd have a category that could be underhyped for a long time. Now, if somebody enters a space, they release a video and suddenly like a bunch of new people are pouring in. Where are you looking at this point, just besides your own network for the next founder that you're going to fund?

• 1:40:08Josh Wolfe?

  So I have this as a flaw in my personality, which is, you know, I want to know everything that everybody else is talking about, but then I need to understand what's the white space, like Sherlock Holmes, what's the curious incident in the dog in the night, the thing that people aren't talking about. So I'll give you one because it's unsexy and I've talked about it publicly. Maintenance.

• 1:40:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:21Josh Wolfe?

  Maintenance is the most boring thing you could think about, but here's the simple logic that I had. It wasn't reactive to a quarter or even a year. It was the basic idea that the cost of capital is going to rise.

• 1:40:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:40:29Josh Wolfe?

  Okay, if the cost of capital rises and you're not funding low interest rate stuffs.

• 1:40:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:40:34Josh Wolfe?

  If you think about CapEx on a financial statement, you've got growth and you've got maintenance.

• 1:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:40:39Josh Wolfe?

  Everybody's been fending growth, new data centers, new satellites, new military installations, new HVAC systems, equipments, hospitals, everything.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:45Josh Wolfe?

  Now, if you're a CFO or you're a capital allocation committee or you're a board and you're like, do we really need to spend another hundred or billion on that? Do we need another data center or can we maintain the stuff we have? So I think that there's going to be a demand shift from buy the new shit to how do we maintain the old shit? And that is going to be demand for preventative maintenance, early maintenance detection, robots that can go out into certain things and repair them. So all of that, I think, is going to be a big wave. That's the kind of thinking at Lox that we're thinking about orthogonally. Everybody else might be tacking here, but how do you find something? Start making some bets and then in three, four, five years, everybody wants to be in that space.

• 1:41:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for joining. This is great. Delian Aspreuha coming back. Triple J. Love to see you.

• 1:41:21Delian Asparouhov?

  Hey, come on the show again.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we'd love to go way deeper on a proper area.

• 1:41:25Delian Asparouhov?

  So much to talk about.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. And we're bringing in Delian Aspreuha from Founder's Fund, a co-host and co-creator, co-founder of Hillen Valley Forum. Very excited to have him on the show for the, what, seventh time? So let's bring him in. Jordy is posting, amplifying the stream, pumping it up, pump up the numbers. How we doing, Ben? Can we get a little review of the stream is up? The internet's working. It was a fascinating, I'll give you a little inside baseball here. We brought in something called pop-up Wi-Fi to do this stream. And it does not look like something that would normally get through security at the Capitol. It's locked and only the TSA can unlock it. Capitol's security police do not have the key that TSA has.

• 1:42:11John Coogan?

  And so it was very tricky to get in. They had to x-ray it a bunch. We couldn't get into this locked Pelican case. There's a Wi-Fi router and a bunch of cellphone like modems in there. But we got it through and we are live streaming. And we're very excited to have Delian coming in later. We also have Christian Garrett hopping on to break down the other third co-founder of the Hillen Valley Forum 2025. And Jordy is tagging madly all of our guests, getting us into the timeline promoting the stream. And we have, we have an absolutely stacked lineup. We got Delian and Christian coming on, then Eric Lyman. Lulu should be coming on.

• 1:42:52John Coogan?

  A lot of repeat guests breaking down what's going on in DC today at Hillen Valley. And here he is. Delian, welcome to the stream.

• 1:43:01Delian Asparouhov?

  TBN, Hillen Valley, TBN.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:43:05Delian Asparouhov?

  Let's fucking go, baby. Let's go.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  How are you feeling?

• 1:43:09Delian Asparouhov?

  Good. You know, make sure to arrive here on Monday. Got a little accustomed to the East Coast. Realized I haven't, you know, switched time zones in like three months.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  It's tricky.

• 1:43:16Delian Asparouhov?

  It's probably, it's weirdly the most brutal time zone.

• 1:43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:18Delian Asparouhov?

  It is, yeah. It's tough. It's tough. You know, we started off the day strong.

• 1:43:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:22Delian Asparouhov?

  Hamas protesters from the get-go. That's how you know you've made it as a conference.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  This is the first time you've been protesting, right?

• 1:43:27Delian Asparouhov?

  Disguised as a journalist. First time, yeah. And she, that's when you know you really made it. If somebody is disguising themselves as a journalist to sneak into your conference.

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Pretty crazy.

• 1:43:34Delian Asparouhov?

  And protest on behalf of terrorists.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was Carp actually saying? Was he being particularly controversial?

• 1:43:40Delian Asparouhov?

  I think he probably had anything to say.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  He didn't say anything?

• 1:43:42Delian Asparouhov?

  Literally, he was like, you know, he was like talking about his book and they were like, "Oh, you're killing Palestinians."

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yeah.

• 1:43:48Delian Asparouhov?

  As Trump was like, "Oh."

• 1:43:52John Coogan?

  But other than that, how's the reaction been? What have the most important messages been? Obviously, reindustrialization is the theme, but what else is popping up today?

• 1:44:00Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, I think what's cool is like, this is a week where, you know, we talked about this in a couple of prior segments around the, you know, continuing resolution. And so this week, the, you know, sort of big bill in Congress is the reconciliation.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:44:10Delian Asparouhov?

  Transfer from basically, you know, sort of leadership into now, you know, congressional language that actually goes and gets appropriated to individual program offices. And so I think it's like a really fascinating week to have this conference because, you know, a significant portion of that bill was around shipbuilding. And then today, we have panels on shipbuilding with some of the appropriators that are literally, by the way, on the other side. I've been bopping back and forth between Capitol Hill briefing congressmen and then the Congress. And so it's just like, there's something magical about it where this stuff is happening on like the perfect, you know, sort of week. And then the other thing that's been fun is even for congressmen that weren't aware or not even attending the event, they've been like, "So do you know what's going on? Like, I have like a lot more Silicon Valley tech companies on like my briefing calendar this week than like ever before." And I was like, "Well, sir, like, I'd like to describe to you about this thing called the Hill and Valley Forum. Would love to have you for the following year."

• 1:44:55Delian Asparouhov?

  So I don't know, it just feels like an institution. And then the, you know, other piece of feedback that's been fun is like, congressmen have even said that like, "This is a place where they get far more casual time and especially on a bipartisan basis." Like, yeah, tonight's dinner, we have 17 Republicans, 17 Democrats.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:45:11Delian Asparouhov?

  And it's extremely bipartisan and it's totally off the record, completely casual.

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  If one person misses the dinner, somebody will write an article. "Oh, you know."

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  It's left wing, it's right wing.

• 1:45:21Delian Asparouhov?

  Exactly. We keep it right down the middle.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Like, sorry, you can't come in.

• 1:45:24Delian Asparouhov?

  We guarantee it's 17 and 17.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  It's gotta be equal. On the $150 billion appropriation, is that an update to what we talked about? I think the first or second time you were on the show where you said, "Hey, maybe there's not more money coming. Maybe it's not going to be a jump ball for a bunch of startups." Has this updated your thinking?

• 1:45:41Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it was sort of, you know, the February bills were clearly like a pause. I was just like, look, we're not just going forward with what the prior administration did.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:48Delian Asparouhov?

  And even though we're very late in the game on passing this year's budget, we're just going to pass a continuing resolution to put everything on pause. And then let's instead, you know, sort of set it from the top. So it's definitely, you know, sort of a step in the right direction. Obviously, you know, SecDef is talking about the first trillion dollar, you know, sort of defense budget.

• 1:46:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:03Delian Asparouhov?

  Since we last chatted also, they pushed out the executive order on basically analyzing all the contracts and programs that are behind schedule and behind budget.

• 1:46:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:10Delian Asparouhov?

  And, you know, sort of, you know, looking at canceling those. So, yeah, I think generally trending, you know, sort of all in the right direction. But I'll always continuously reiterate of just like, this doesn't mean that there needs to be like unbridled optimism. All of this is default going to Silicon Valley companies. Like, a significant amount of that reconciliation package

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Delian Asparouhov?

  has a bunch of line items that are currently only possibly be served by traditional defense contractors and like the primes. And so, you know,

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  Is there anything to read into when you see a really round number versus a very precise number?

• 1:46:38Delian Asparouhov?

  The round numbers are when leadership are doing it. The precise numbers is when the program office is actually saying like, what do you actually need?

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  But is one more bullish than the other? If I see a, if I see a very precise number and I'm like, oh, that's definitely happening versus the round numbers, just like, oh, they just threw something out and they're going to figure it out later.

• 1:46:53Delian Asparouhov?

  The precise number is one to be more bullish on. The reconciliation package is like, great.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:57Delian Asparouhov?

  But it's leadership saying like, there should be approximately 150, like, million dollars, you know, sort of sent towards, you know, sort of this package. And it's like, okay, but like,

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  What does that really mean?

• 1:47:06Delian Asparouhov?

  Is that really the right number? Like, it happens to be exactly 150 million dollars exactly on the dot? It's like, what's necessary? There'll be some points here.

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Early in my career, VC was like, oh, we, we, we, we had our whole team run like a DCF. We know exactly. And the value of your company came back at 100 million dollars. And I was like, there's no way that you actually have a spreadsheet that's been out perfectly seven zeros or whatever.

• 1:47:25Delian Asparouhov?

  Exactly.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:47:26Delian Asparouhov?

  Well, you know, according to leadership, it happens.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  It happens. It happens sometimes.

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how do, how do you think about sort of forecasting, uh, government demand? One of the, one of the things that, that was, uh, top of mind this week was 500 million dollars allocated for like autonomous systems broadly. Felt low for a lot of people when you compared it to other categories. Yet, uh, Sean McGuire's point was like, if you kind of just, as long as that number's going to go up over time, maybe it's good and it's a more efficient way to kind of deploy budget where, because if you're like, you spend $5 billion this year, it's going to be spent pretty poorly. But how do you think about kind of like forecasting government demand and how should, uh, teams think about it?

• 1:48:05Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I think you can sort of use the reconciliation package as your sort of like combination of TAM and CAGR, right? Yeah. It gives you a sense of like what the current TAM is, but they're clearly indicating also what the CAGR of that is going to be. And so I think in some ways for defense startups and startups in general, you know, to go back to like the Peter Thiel's Year to Wonder philosophy, you want to monopolize a small market first and then grow from there over time. And so in some ways, if they were forced to spend $5 billion in a single year, probably inefficiently and probably zero chance that it happens to be one provider. There's no way that any startup, no matter how great you are, is ready to spend $5 billion in a single year. Yeah. And so by default, it's super disparate, there'd be a bunch of different players, which you might not necessarily want. 15 shipbuilding players, like, you know, probably what's best for the country is like, probably not one, probably not 15, but probably like three that are constantly competing against one another, right?

• 1:48:50Delian Asparouhov?

  I think that's probably what happens in like the launch provider world, right? If you look at, um, last week, they announced the latest phase of national security, basically, you know, so launch contracts and, you know, SpaceX, you know, ULA won as per, you know, sort of usual, but they did introduce Stoke Space and, you know, Rock Lab. And so it's like, yeah, I think that's probably like an appropriate sized pool and the equivalent on like, you know, sort of shipbuilding. Um, so I think you can think of it as a TAM, but it's not guaranteed, just like in any TAM in technology, you're not necessarily immediately going to capture it. It's like, you know, Varda had equivalent, you know, sort of areas where there was some language around nuclear weapons monetization, reentry testing, et cetera, of, you know, sort of budgets that were in that same, you know, sort of dollar range. But again, that's just like literally the first step of, okay, now that's going towards that program office. Now you have to start thinking about what do the contract look like? What are the actual missions that you're going to be providing for them? The hardware that you're providing for them?

• 1:49:34Delian Asparouhov?

  But yeah, I think generally, you know, bull for defense tech. That's great. That there's a whole set of, you know, sort of budgets now that in particular are very uniquely tech forward, right? So if you look at like the concept of like unmanned fighter jets and unmanned surface vessels, this reconciliation package is by far the biggest budgets that you've ever seen for those types of activities. And obviously that is a particular area. There's some in there that's like ammunition and like, you know, army barracks, like, you know, refurbishment and things like that. I'm not sure that like Andro is great at like army barracks refurbishment. Sure. But like, I think they'll probably be pretty great at some of this like unmanned surface vessel, you know, sort of type of activity. And so it's really exciting to see like some of these TAMS be pretty big that are very clearly only servable by like, you know, this next generation of tech companies. Yeah.

• 1:50:16John Coogan?

  Uh, we gotta get to Christian. So last question, or we want to let

• 1:50:20Christian Garrett?

  No, this has been great. You, uh, yeah, just, just congratulations.

• 1:50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is awesome.

• 1:50:25Christian Garrett?

  I, I said, uh, this is the highest density of absolute killers that I've, that I've, you know, set foot in in, in a long time. So.

• 1:50:33Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm glad after I saw you guys' Y C thing, I just like texted Tugend afterwards and I was like, yo, this at Hillen Valley, it's gonna be sick. We pulled it off. It's amazing. Good to see you, boys.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:50:43Delian Asparouhov?

  We'll see you out on the floor. We don't need any more part-time podcasters.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Christian Garrett from Hillen Valley 137. How you doing? Let's break it down. How's the day going? What's the latest with you? Is that your third or fourth coffee? Or are you on tea now? Cause you're, you're losing, you're losing your voice.

• 1:51:02Christian Garrett?

  I'm a tea guy.

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  You're a tea guy.

• 1:51:03Christian Garrett?

  Um, I'm half European.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:06Christian Garrett?

  Uh, and any way that I can dig at Delian.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:10Christian Garrett?

  By showing how strong Europeans are. I think one way I can do that is by, uh, drinking a lot of.

• 1:51:15John Coogan?

  And you're also wearing a European watch today. We got the Cartier Santos on.

• 1:51:19Christian Garrett?

  I can neither confirm nor deny anything that you say.

• 1:51:23John Coogan?

  It looks fantastic.

• 1:51:26Christian Garrett?

  How's the day so far? Is it, I'm sure it's been a blur. Yeah, it's been awesome. Um, I'm sure you've heard from folks all day. You'll hear from more, uh, from founders, investors, um, folks in office. Uh, I know you guys will have elected reps in and out over the next few days and today.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:40Christian Garrett?

  Uh, the enthusiasm and excitement, um, is really, really special. Uh, this is the fourth year and just to see how big it is, um, is a testament to how much our ecosystem has changed. You know, I talked about earlier, uh, it was less than a decade, nine years ago, that Palantir sued the army for commercial preference and violating Title 10 U S 2377. Um, and today, you know, Palantir is seen as one of the greatest partners and the army particularly is seen as one of the greatest partners to Palantir and to our ecosystem. Uh, it's, it's incredible.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  Apparently SpaceX sued as well and they use the same lawyers as Palantir.

• 1:52:17Christian Garrett?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  So whoever that is.

• 1:52:19Christian Garrett?

  There's a lesson in that.

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's got a good, uh, got a good business going. I know that the theme is reindustrialization. What are the other con- Conversations that are happening here. What are the other subtopics that people are digging into?

• 1:52:31Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, yeah, I think within that, right, you can go all the way down the supply chain or value chain to, you know, rare earth elements and minerals.

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:40Christian Garrett?

  We just had a panel recently with, you know, James Latinsky from MP Materials, Ray Scully from Lyrac.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Think about right place, right time with MP Materials.

• 1:52:48Christian Garrett?

  Right time. He's awesome.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:52:49Christian Garrett?

  He's awesome.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  When did that company start? Years ago, right?

• 1:52:51Christian Garrett?

  Years ago. Oh, the company's around for decades.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  Decades.

• 1:52:54Christian Garrett?

  It's one of the oldest minds and they took it over. It's a great turnaround story.

• 1:52:57John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:58Christian Garrett?

  One of our partners, Lower Carving Capital and Clay Dumas moderated that. Congressman Richie Torres is in that.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:03Christian Garrett?

  That was incredible. We then went all the way up to, you know, we had a panel with Friedberg and Sean McGuire, Senator Todd Young on manufacturing, which we hit on everything. We actually talked about how energy and education are the key unlocks there.

• 1:53:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:15Christian Garrett?

  And then you go up to defense, right? And Androl obviously has hit on this and you'll see more talks from Saronic and others talking about the work that all these defense companies and the existing primes are doing to shore up our industrial capacity. So I think you've just seen the full gambit. I know Jensen hit on semiconductors as well.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Jensen's interesting because he's, I was asking this question of like, is he a customer of reindustrialization? Or is he truly a reindustrializer?

• 1:53:41Christian Garrett?

  Oh, he's both. And I think you see where Nvidia is going, right? They're now selling full systems, right? I mean, they're moving.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're manufacturing that, right?

• 1:53:47Christian Garrett?

  From just a GPU. I mean, they're doing the networking, the cooling.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:50Christian Garrett?

  So if you extrapolate where that company is going.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:54Christian Garrett?

  And you look at where they are today, 100%, you're right, they're on both sides.

• 1:53:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can't really be a trillion dollar company with just, hey, we just designed some stuff and then let TSMC handle the rest. There's so much more about that company. Yeah, fascinating. Jordy?

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm interested more on who on the hillside really gets it. Richie Torres's names come up quite a bit. How many people like that does the valley need in order to, you know, continue to be successful, right? Because I feel like a big, a big, a big part of what's exciting about this event is, is because it's bipartisan, it's not about this admin, right? It's about the next 10 years. It's about the next 15 years, the next 20 years. And so how many people are, you know, we talk about this in Silicon Valley. It doesn't take that many great CEOs to like transform an industry, right?

• 1:54:46Christian Garrett?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:54:47Jordi Hays?

  And sometimes it just takes one, right?

• 1:54:48Christian Garrett?

  Yep.

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  And so how many, how many true allies you think we need? And are those people today or are you hoping, you know, next year we get more?

• 1:54:57Christian Garrett?

  Well, I mean, one piece of that, which is more of a meta point, but I think it would be great for government to have its own version of founder mode, right? We need to get back to that within government. You know, Sean Sandgaard talks a lot about this and how that's something that's been missing. And if you look historically, when we've had success, when we were really great at building, it was because we empowered individuals within government to own these programs and see them through.

• 1:55:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Christian Garrett?

  Um, so I think that's a meta point.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  Person who's responsible for high speed rail.

• 1:55:20Christian Garrett?

  I mean, we, Sean always talks about Admiral Rickover, right? He's a great example of this person, right? I mean, like, we need these people again. Um, now I will say today, Congress, uh, there's a lot of champions in Congress, a lot of people that get it. They provide support, they obviously draft policy, they provide cover. Um, but what you really need more of are these kind of founders at the individual level from the program officers, the folks running these departments. And so, you know, I think that will be a big unlock. Um, and then circling back to your question, right, within Congress, you look at the folks here today, right? You have Senator Shaheen, um, you have Congressman Richie Torres, you have Congressman Gabe Amo, um, you have Senator Todd Young.

• 1:56:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:56:00Christian Garrett?

  Um, and then you have, you know, House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking later. I mean, you really see across the board, both Democrats and Republicans, there are folks that understand the importance of this. And, you know, the last panel said this, like, this is as bipartisan as it gets, right? Like, we want to have a, a critical mineral, rare earth element dependence, uh, we want to get rid of our dependency on China there. Right? We want to have redundancy there, uh, and a strong supply chain. We want to have energy abundance.

• 1:56:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:56:24Christian Garrett?

  Right? Um, and we want to have a strong deterrent strategy and a strong military.

• 1:56:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Christian Garrett?

  Um, and so Democrats and Republicans align on that. And the tech industry is preaching something that is in of itself aligning and unifying. And so I think that puts us in a very good spot, um, to try to build bridges and be successful.

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you, I know you work with a lot of later stage companies, but, uh, can you share some best practices for government relations lobbying that you're seeing tech companies get it right? What are they doing?

• 1:56:50Christian Garrett?

  Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting is, um, and I've talked a lot about this. Mark Andreessen has a lot of great stuff on this. You know, tech doesn't have a trade association, and that's actually a very good thing. So it is on the onus of individuals, founders, entrepreneurs, operators, the companies, and the investors, I think, as well, to spend time within government, educating policymakers on various subjects where they're experts in. A lot of the work that you see here are from folks that do not sell to the government, right? There's no revenue to be had here, right? There's just educating and making sure that their industry is a recipient of good policy, good regulation, and good support. And I think that, you know, from the first part, I think the best thing is like making sure you have these relationships with folks. They are willing to take the meetings. It's incredible.

• 1:57:34Christian Garrett?

  It's, uh, and so I think that would be the first step.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:38Christian Garrett?

  I think the second is also figuring out like where's the highest leverage thing that you want to focus on. You don't want to come here and just take meetings for the sake of meetings either, right? You want to be focused on something very specific. You want to care about something very specific.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:48Christian Garrett?

  And that makes it easier for folks to digest.

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:51Christian Garrett?

  And so I think that's the other piece is like figuring out where your business should be focused on, whether it's a potential contracting opportunity or something you want in a budget.

• 1:57:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:58Christian Garrett?

  Or whether it's just a specific policy or regulation that you care about. So I think it's like first, go build relationships.

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:04Christian Garrett?

  Go rely on your investors, go do this directly, like that's the way to do it.

• 1:58:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:08Christian Garrett?

  And that's how our ecosystem is going to do and always has done it. And then number two is figure out what the high leverage thing is, and quite frankly, don't go take the time in DC until you have that.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Interesting. Okay. Cool. Well, we'll let you get back to it.

• 1:58:21Christian Garrett?

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:58:22John Coogan?

  I'm sure you have a million meetings and panels.

• 1:58:23Christian Garrett?

  See you guys later.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see you later. And let's bring in Eric from Ramp. Welcome to the stream. Let's hear for Eric Glyman. Is, has your panel already happened or is it coming up? It happened this morning. It happened this morning. It was a ton of fun. We were locked into the stream. Yeah. But, all right, give us the overview. Revoy was fired up. Yeah, give us, give us the high level. What is the pitch and how did it go? It was fantastic. Look, I think, um...

• 1:58:51Eric Glyman?

  For private companies, startups, whatever it is for a lot of years,

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:54Eric Glyman?

  Getting more from every dollar spent is just obvious, right?

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:57Eric Glyman?

  You know, a dollar saved

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:58Eric Glyman?

  is not a dollar earned.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:59Eric Glyman?

  The average American business has an eight and a half percent profit margin, so a dollar saved is 12 earned.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:04Eric Glyman?

  You know, the government is thinking about this.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:07Eric Glyman?

  Of course, there's a lot of tax dollars in, but the deficit is growing every year. And so whether it's Doge and the folks there or other parts of the government, everyone is starting to think about, how can we start to apply modern tools to drive savings?

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:21Eric Glyman?

  And in many ways, Ramp is at the forefront of it. A lot of the payment systems that are used by the government from the Treasury, which doesn't require, at least in the past, who was sending the payment? Why did we send it? What was the purpose and adulation of every payment? Now that's starting to get put into on credit cards, they're still using old antiquated designs where you have one system for cards.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:44Eric Glyman?

  But your actual expense policy doesn't drive how these cards behave.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:47Eric Glyman?

  And so there's people who are able to go and use cards for purposes that are not really advancing taxpayer interest. And so we talked about this both, you know, at a high level. So Senator Joni Ernst talked about how she's approaching it, how the Doge team's approaching this. And then Keith and I shared a little bit from the Ramp context, how we work with private companies.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Is there a story that you're particularly drawing from of a more recent tech company selling into the government that's not in the defense tech? Obviously, we all know the SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril stories, but at a certain point, Microsoft must have said, hey, we're going to try and sell Windows into the government or we're going to try and sell Outlook or Excel into the government.

• 2:00:29Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:29John Coogan?

  But that's a long time ago. It's a huge company.

• 2:00:31Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Are there other companies that aren't maybe government first but have developed best-in-class government sales functions that you look to? Or as like interesting anecdotes? Are there other case studies that you've heard about that are interesting? Is there anyone out there?

• 2:00:48Eric Glyman?

  It's, I mean, I just think, you know... I mean, a couple of things. I don't think people realize the scale of how large the US government is.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:57Eric Glyman?

  Between federal, state, local education.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:01Eric Glyman?

  One of the most mind blowing stats that I learned is one in six Americans who work, work for the US government.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 2:01:08Eric Glyman?

  It is huge.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:09Eric Glyman?

  And I think at some scale, if you want to go and be a, you know, a scaled technology provider, financial service provider, healthcare provider.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:17Eric Glyman?

  You're going to work with the government.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:01:18Eric Glyman?

  I just think so. And so one of the openers this morning was the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:24Eric Glyman?

  Who, you know, he had started an accounting software.

• 2:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:01:30Eric Glyman?

  Company called Great Plains. He sold it to Microsoft.

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:34Eric Glyman?

  I think Microsoft is a great example of it.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. That's probably the best example that I can think of.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:40Jordi Hays?

  In terms of a government contractor.

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  And interestingly, they're one of the big tech companies that never really blinked in their support of the government.

• 2:01:46Eric Glyman?

  For sure.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  When there was that era in 2015, 2014, where a lot of these companies were saying, hey, maybe we want to stay away from the US government.

• 2:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:53John Coogan?

  For a variety of reasons. So it's good to see that there's like a resurgence here. In terms of like technically, or not even technically, but just like the sales process, is that wildly different than a normal sales process? Or is it somewhat like just selling to a Fortune 500 company?

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  I look at it, I mean, not to, not to interrupt, but I think the, the dynamic, if you're, if you're a scaled up, you know, fintech company and you plan to be in business in 50 years, like you said, you know, you're going to be working with the government at some point.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:23Jordi Hays?

  So it's more about figuring out the right ways to do it early on and also not being, you know, understanding like always having urgency because I think that every American can get behind, can get behind efficiency, right? It became political over the last, you know, 90 days due to Doge and stuff like that. And like you said, one out of, one out of every six people works in some way for the government, then obviously that's going to get political. But when I, when I look at it, you know, it's just about how do you.

• 2:02:50Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Defense if you're, if you're dual use or you're, you know, primarily serving the private market or private companies.

• 2:02:58Jordi Hays?

  You can think, I feel like, a lot more long-term versus the defense, you know, defense tech companies that are here and they're like, "If I don't get the government this year, I'm done." You know, and so I think like, having that, I'm sure that sort of like, long-term thinking around partnership with the government has driven a lot of your decision-making.

• 2:03:17Eric Glyman?

  Oh, for sure. I mean, look, it's, I mean, maybe a couple of things. I mean, first, I actually just think there's like a very, I think some of the story of technology, I think about, you know, Steve Jobs' old famous quote of, you know, "A computer is almost like a bicycle for the mind. It allows you to go faster, do more, think at an accelerated rate, and ultimately achieve more." And so I think it's not, well, it's great that people are trying to modernize defense. I think that there's a lot of people doing many types of great work. You know, Departments of Veteran Affairs, Departments of, whether it's like, it's Education, Interior, there's people doing important work. And I think one of the examples that often,

• 2:03:59Eric Glyman?

  I think just makes clear and connects with people is, you know, there are, I think about a million folks serving in armed services and they're doing expense reports too.

• 2:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:04:10Eric Glyman?

  And you take, you know, some of America's most courageous, people who were serving, sacrificing a lot to do this, and then you say, "You know what? I'm gonna make you do hours of expense reports."

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  I had a buddy on a nuclear submarine for years, and I was like, "What was that like?" You know, and he was like, "A lot of paperwork."

• 2:04:28Eric Glyman?

  A lot of paperwork.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  And I was like, "I can't believe you're 30,000 leagues under the sea doing paperwork." But he was like, "Yeah, that was my bike."

• 2:04:34Eric Glyman?

  Don't get me wrong, like, it's like, you should explain why, but it's like, actually, like, it would be great if a lot more of the work was to, you know, defending the country, going in the VA, serving our veterans, whatever it may be. So I think that there's like a human and moral side to it. But to the other question you ask of working with the government, in some ways, it's, this was all like... Pretty organic. I mean, there was a tweet.

• 2:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:00Eric Glyman?

  Put out, I think in February.

• 2:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:02Eric Glyman?

  That, you know, I think there was 4.7 million credit cards.

• 2:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:05:08Eric Glyman?

  Issued for, I think there's about half the number of federal employees and people were running where all these extra cards.

• 2:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:14Eric Glyman?

  So a lot of cards were turned off and at the time, you know, we reached out to someone who was a former customer. Put us in touch and so it's early, we're involved in the same process as everyone and I think no matter who does it, I just think that. The way I would almost describe it is people would find it ludicrous if our air force was flying with propeller planes in a jet age.

• 2:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:37Eric Glyman?

  And yet that's kind of what's happening with the tools we use to, you know, make expenses, do our accounting. Make sure attestation is clear. These are old disparate systems that, you know, I think private industry has adopted tools like Ramp leading the forefront of. It's integrated. Your expense velocity drives it. You can buy it, does your expense report, your accounting. And so however it goes, I just think countries are going to be a lot better off using modern technology.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the thing that I thought was fascinating is they couldn't actually turn extra cards fully off. It was a dollar, a dollar limit. Which is like, okay, there's.

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  Integrated system.

• 2:06:15Eric Glyman?

  Well, and even speaking of that, like, you know, you'd think, okay, let's go and turn a limit, you know, to zero or $1 or whatever handy. I've heard stories of individual people because of the way the portal was designed, spent four days going one by one.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  Oh, they couldn't even run a cron job.

• 2:06:33Eric Glyman?

  It's not as, because no one has done something like this, but it's like when you look into these things that you think should be trivial are.

• 2:06:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:40Eric Glyman?

  Very hard when you have old systems like this. Yeah.

• 2:06:43John Coogan?

  Well, we'll let you go and we'll bring in your co-founder to dig deeper into the bowels of the financial system.

• 2:06:50Eric Glyman?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:06:51John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, Kareem. First time, first time.

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Man, that's so.

• 2:06:56John Coogan?

  Good to see you guys. Good to have you. Welcome. Nice. Welcome. We get to see supplies. This is fantastic. Yes, we do. So we, yeah, so obviously we're talking about. Getting the entire government on ramp and then getting every country in the Western world on on ramp. One at a time.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  I was talking to the Anduril guys about some of the integrations that they have to do into like these antiquated systems just to do communications. Because they want their drones to play into the modern systems. Have you started even digging into like what the technical standards are that are running? We've talked to folks about like the SWIFT system.

• 2:07:32Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  And you know, stable coins, but then there's also like the overnight payments thing. Like where do you even start with that? Is it a GPT query or do you start talking to people? Like, how do you build your your knowledge as a technical mind in how the government runs? Because I was telling Jordi, I want to talk about the the running the government on ramp more just because like. I don't think most people know how expense reports work in the government. Like, I don't think it makes sense. So yeah, what was your journey to kind of digging into this to seeing like, is it technically feasible?

• 2:08:02Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was crazy. Even yesterday, I was hearing a story of someone who spent three years of the government. Yeah. File an expense report on their first week. And only got the check back after they left.

• 2:08:13John Coogan?

  Every year delay.

• 2:08:15Karim Atiyeh?

  It's kind of crazy.

• 2:08:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean, think about in in the. You're at a company and you file an expense report and the company says, yeah, we're going to pay you back for this. But you don't get it for three years. You would be, you would be, yeah, yeah, yeah, interest, but but also it's just offensive, right? It's not, it's not nice to an employee who's, you know, you know, to basically take, uh, take their their funds for such an egregious amount of time.

• 2:08:39Karim Atiyeh?

  It's kind of crazy. It's basically companies and government in some cases using. Their employees as a bank.

• 2:08:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:46Karim Atiyeh?

  That's kind of what a bank is supposed to do, like.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:48Karim Atiyeh?

  From the cash so they could do your business and eventually you pay them back. Yeah. And like to your point on the the complexity of those systems, I mean, one of the first thing I did when we started on ramp is. Try to understand how ACH works.

• 2:09:00John Coogan?

  Sure, totally.

• 2:09:00Karim Atiyeh?

  And it is like absolutely mind blowing.

• 2:09:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:03Karim Atiyeh?

  It really boils down to very basic CSV files, Excel files almost. That every single entity.

• 2:09:13Karim Atiyeh?

  Puts together, constructs, and then at the end of the day, they get shared through some system and there's some computer sitting somewhere that's reconciling these files together. That's why it takes so long to send money is like all these systems run in batch, take a full day to get access to that, to get access to the information and be able to reconcile it. And you've got about eight of those, right? You've got one for like bank to bank payments, you've got some for, I mean, really the way people used to file expenses is they used to submit their credit card statement that doesn't connect at all to the receipts that they have in their inbox. And then you have to wait an extra day before you find out that you actually forgot to submit the receipt that you wanted to submit for the restaurant that you were at.

• 2:09:57Karim Atiyeh?

  But, I mean, I think if you connect these systems, obviously you can move a lot faster. Talking to people in the government, I don't think they even know what they're supposed to do. So a lot of them just end up either not filing expenses or they get a card with no controls and they're lucky if they have it and they share with their friends and who knows what the money's being spent on. But, yeah, one step at a time.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  Do you know much about like the counterparty? Obviously Palantir pioneered like the forward deployed engineer because Shom Sankar was telling us the first time they sold Palantir for on-prem installation, the team on the other side, a software developer, tech person, IT person who worked for the government, installed Palantir on a box with like four gigs of RAM and they needed 16 or something like that. And we've seen with Doge, folks like Luke Ferrator are going in. You could see Luke Ferrator in another world, like working at Ramp or working at Palantir or working at any of the high-growth, very strong engineering culture companies. Do you think that there's a need for America's best and brightest to kind of do a tour of

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  duty as maybe just an insane IMO level software developer in the government, even if that takes away from your pipeline, I'm sure?

• 2:11:11Karim Atiyeh?

  A hundred percent. That would be great. I mean, this is a company that we all have a stake in.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:11:17Karim Atiyeh?

  The equivalent would be...

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 2:11:19Karim Atiyeh?

  We're the... We're all American, right?

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:22Karim Atiyeh?

  You get a equity stake in

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do.

• 2:11:24Karim Atiyeh?

  In the government, like if the government's run well.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:26Karim Atiyeh?

  We all win if we were operating more efficiently. We're making better decisions and we all pay less in taxes.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  No, it's funny. Efficient spending, which, you know, Ramp is focused on non-payroll spend, right? And so payroll spend gets political really quickly, right? We talked about this with Eric briefly where, yeah, if you're on the government's payroll, you don't, most people don't want to be off it, right? Like, they have a job, they've maybe been doing it a long time. But non-payroll spend should be the least political thing ever, right? It should be like, we should spend as little as possible and the dollars that we do spend should, every single one, down to the penny, should be spent efficiently. What are your other kind of reactions? How much are you spending time here at the event versus, you know, meetings around town?

• 2:12:13Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah. I mean, the event is taking another form this year. It seems it's a lot bigger than it used to be and the level of excitement is incredible. I think it's the first time that I felt that government is really trying hard to modernize, build bridges with companies in Silicon Valley, New York and other places. So I think people are on the same page that, yes, we do need to spend less. We do need to introduce technology to help us. And look, with a lot of the advancements in AI, some of the problems that seem too intractable, now you could just throw all your massive databases into an LLM and you can wrangle it that way. So we got better tools now to do the work.

• 2:12:57Karim Atiyeh?

  A lot of people are excited about it, so we'll see what we can do. I mean, frankly, we're

• 2:13:00John Coogan?

  There are a lot of founders that are here thinking about very specific regulation or deregulation. Obviously, like nuclear energy is the biggest one that is very concrete, may speed up the time to get a new reactor design approved. Is there anything like that in finance? What is it? Give us some of the history. What's the good and what's the bad?

• 2:13:20Karim Atiyeh?

  I mean, it's everywhere. Like, money transmitter licenses is the most basic one. Today, too. Move money around, you need a license, but you not only need a license, an American license, you need a license in every single state.

• 2:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:33Karim Atiyeh?

  Which is kinda crazy.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:34Karim Atiyeh?

  Cause they're all looking at the same things and making sure that you're abiding by the rules. And like the rules are quite similar, but it's kinda crazy. I remember having to sit down in a room with Chora on our team who helped us do a lot of that work. And there was a stack of papers, this thick, and I just had to sign one at a time.

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:13:53Karim Atiyeh?

  It's like, I read the first one, it's like, I know what this is about. I read the second one, they're very similar. And at some point, I'm just like, signing all of them.

• 2:13:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm already all in, yeah.

• 2:14:00Karim Atiyeh?

  You're trapped in a room, there's a cup of coffee, it's like, go, sign.

• 2:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How has it been, when you look at sort of incumbent financial services companies, a lot of them have had, I imagine, a large presence in Washington for a long time.

• 2:14:14Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  You imagine Ramp ends up with, you know, a fairly big office here at some point? How do you, how do you look at that? I imagine you've been taking trips here. I know you've been coming to Hill and Valley, but is this a place that you, you and the team expect to be a lot more?

• 2:14:30Karim Atiyeh?

  We'd love to. I mean, it'd be great to put our best resources forward and try to help, but I honestly think about it the same way I thought about a lot of the products that we build. I think it'd be a win if people spent as little time as possible in them.

• 2:14:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:44Karim Atiyeh?

  And more of the work is being automated. I think part of the problem that you have in and around Washington right now is like the incentives are so misaligned that you have incentives to like drag projects on, they cost massive amounts of money.

• 2:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:00Karim Atiyeh?

  Any little change that you wanna do is also like another massive bill. And like, our hope is to just build great technology and hopefully if we do that, if we do that well, we don't need massive sort of like time and people investments to get them to work. Technology's just doing their job.

• 2:15:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was talking to Eric too, that the thing that stands out to me is Ramp is playing in decades. And there's a lot of founders here that are like, if I don't get a program of record in the next two years, like I'm done.

• 2:15:27Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  And I think Ramp's position is being able to think long-term. There's very pressing problems that we have right now. You know, spending being, being one of the biggest, but how do you kind of zoom out and be like, you know, you know, in, in the fullness of time, I imagine Ramp and, and the government will have a, you know, very meaningful partnership and, and it's about finding the kind of right ways to do it in the beginning without understanding that you have tens of thousands of, of happy customers and you gotta make sure that they're like, you know, continuing to get resources and attention. So.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  Well, that's fantastic. We'll let you get back to the conference.

• 2:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much for coming on. Come on again soon. We'll have Ara on probably next week at this point.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. Great.

• 2:16:08Jordi Hays?

  The rotation.

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  And let's bring in Josh Steinman. You got a minute? Come on down.

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  There he is. Look at, look at that.

• 2:16:16Joshua Steinman?

  Fantastic. Looks fantastic.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Steinman, we ended up on the same flight.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:24Jordi Hays?

  For those who didn't see and Steinman.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  A lot of paparazzi photos going on.

• 2:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Steinman spotted us because I had a huge Ramp logo on my jacket.

• 2:16:32Joshua Steinman?

  Jack is outstanding.

• 2:16:34John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:16:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's great to see you.

• 2:16:36Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah. Great to see you too. Where'd you get that though?

• 2:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we made it. Yeah.

• 2:16:40John Coogan?

  This is a one of one right now, but we will be multiplying them soon.

• 2:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Our people will talk to your people and get your jacket.

• 2:16:46John Coogan?

  Every guest will get, will get one for sure.

• 2:16:48Joshua Steinman?

  That's the thing people don't understand, the LA streetwear scene.

• 2:16:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:16:50Joshua Steinman?

  Like so far away from tech.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:16:52Joshua Steinman?

  You can get super high quality stuff, very well made.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:16:55Joshua Steinman?

  So I saw that and I was just like, it was perfect.

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:58Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah. It was awesome.

• 2:16:59John Coogan?

  Um, so yeah, how's the conference been? You're, you're probably one of the few tech founders here with real DC experience. When did you first go to DC? When you first get into politics? Take me through your journey a little bit.

• 2:17:11Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah. So, you know, I started my career doing expeditionary stuff as a military officer.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:18Joshua Steinman?

  So two tours in Iraq.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:17:20Joshua Steinman?

  Um, one, uh, my first tour, I was at a unit down in, uh, Virginia and Southern Virginia.

• 2:17:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:26Joshua Steinman?

  And then my second, I came up here to a, to a, to an intelligence agency here in DC.

• 2:17:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:31Joshua Steinman?

  Um, and honestly it was 20, I think I showed up in like 2011 and it was like peak Obama.

• 2:17:41Joshua Steinman?

  And as a military officer in DC, you kinda, you were definitely the help.

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Joshua Steinman?

  You know, you'd like go out to a bar and like girls would be like, oh, what do you do? Oh, you're not some like staff director on the hill. Like, you know, thanks.

• 2:17:52John Coogan?

  Get out of here.

• 2:17:53Joshua Steinman?

  Um, yeah.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  But it worked out. You have a family now.

• 2:17:56Joshua Steinman?

  It worked out, yeah.

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  Someone liked you, yeah.

• 2:17:58Joshua Steinman?

  That's true.

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:17:59Joshua Steinman?

  It's true. No, it was good. So, um, did that, got out, went to Silicon Valley.

• 2:18:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:03Joshua Steinman?

  And then, yeah, got a phone call from an old boss after President Trump won election the first time during the transition. He's like, come help me out on transition, White House transition.

• 2:18:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:15Joshua Steinman?

  And I came and just didn't leave. He asked me to stay. I was a National Security Council staffer in the White House for four years.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic. What were the top, what were the top issues then and how have they evolved?

• 2:18:26Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah. So I think the biggest issue in the unclassified space was telecom technology.

• 2:18:33John Coogan?

  This is Huawei?

• 2:18:33Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, exactly. So 5G. So this was like one of the big issues that I, you know, owned for four years. So yeah, think of it like if you were in the middle of the Cold War to go to the Russians and be like, hey, can you build out the electrical grid?

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:48Joshua Steinman?

  Oh, of course, my friend. Yes, we'll have the best electrical grid for you.

• 2:18:53John Coogan?

  That's a fantastic Russian impression.

• 2:18:54Joshua Steinman?

  Don't worry.

• 2:18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:56Joshua Steinman?

  And you know, it's very clear that like, and there's, there's Wall Street Journal call, journal articles about this.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:01Joshua Steinman?

  Like the Chinese in Africa with Huawei, they just use it as a spying tool.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:05Joshua Steinman?

  So it's like, why would we have those people build the American telecom infrastructure?

• 2:19:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:09Joshua Steinman?

  Why would we have them build the telecom infrastructure of our Five Eyes partner?

• 2:19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:12Joshua Steinman?

  Like London, Australia, other places. So yeah, I think that was probably the biggest.

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  And where do, where do we stand today with 5G? I see a 5G icon on my phone sometimes.

• 2:19:23Joshua Steinman?

  Boom.

• 2:19:23John Coogan?

  Is it real 5G or are we behind?

• 2:19:26Joshua Steinman?

  So interesting you should say that.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:28Joshua Steinman?

  You know, a bunch of the companies kind of raced to brand 5G as like here.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:32Joshua Steinman?

  When actually the infrastructure.

• 2:19:33John Coogan?

  It wasn't quite there, right?

• 2:19:34Joshua Steinman?

  Exactly. So I think a lot of that stuff's been rolled out and being rolled out. You know, the big challenge is that. America's a big landmass.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 2:19:43Joshua Steinman?

  So I'm guessing we're probably mid rollout. You'd have to talk to,

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 2:19:46Joshua Steinman?

  Actually, you guys should have Brandon Carr, the FCC chairman.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've met him a few times. Yeah, that'd be great.

• 2:19:51Joshua Steinman?

  He's great.

• 2:19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:52Joshua Steinman?

  So he'd be able to tell you like what percentage, if you put a gun on my head and you're like,

• 2:19:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:56Joshua Steinman?

  Take a guess. I'd say like 65% or something.

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:19:58Joshua Steinman?

  Um, because it's a race.

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the theme's reindustrialization, but in terms of what you do.

• 2:20:03Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:04John Coogan?

  Uh, what are the more interesting sub themes going on?

• 2:20:07Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  Um, I'm sure you're excited about reshoring manufacturing, but there's other stuff top of mind.

• 2:20:12Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, Spain, power, power outage and explosion of Northrop Grumman missile man, you know, manufacturing and testing facility.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:20Joshua Steinman?

  In the past week.

• 2:20:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:21Joshua Steinman?

  So like there's this.

• 2:20:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. You think that was an attack?

• 2:20:25Joshua Steinman?

  So here's the thing.

• 2:20:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:26Joshua Steinman?

  Do I think it's an attack? I'd say it's likely 50/50.

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  We got a tinfoil hat?

• 2:20:30Joshua Steinman?

  Get the tinfoil hat. Here's the problem.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:32Jordi Hays?

  No, I.

• 2:20:33Joshua Steinman?

  You look at the top five, like, uh, you, you list out like the top 10 facilities that the United States and our allies use to manufacture weapons.

• 2:20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:43Joshua Steinman?

  Half of them have had catastrophic events in the past two years.

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:46Joshua Steinman?

  So I don't know. Does that seem like a coincidence to you?

• 2:20:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:49Joshua Steinman?

  In the military, we used to say like, once is a tragedy, twice is a coincidence. Yeah, three times is enemy action. So like, the number's big.

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:58Joshua Steinman?

  And yeah, they're like, oh, these things go boom.

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Joshua Steinman?

  But like, let me tell you, like, it is 10 plus years old, unclassified. You have cyber actors going out and, uh, modifying safety systems.

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:09Joshua Steinman?

  To tell operators that things are operating within the right parameters.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:13Joshua Steinman?

  So that they blow up.

• 2:21:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's well, it's well established that Western, you know, uh, groups have, have tried to meddle with bronze, you know, uranium enrichment.

• 2:21:23Joshua Steinman?

  Exactly.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Why would they, why would the adversaries not want to do the same thing back? It's just common sense.

• 2:21:28Joshua Steinman?

  This is what warfare looks like.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:30Joshua Steinman?

  And the fact that we don't know, and I'm not saying it is or it isn't.

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:33Joshua Steinman?

  What I will say is every single person out there building these types of facilities today or running them now. Like needs to have the capacity to monitor them 24/7.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:42Joshua Steinman?

  Otherwise, you're not going to know. And so it's like, what are you actually building for?

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:46Joshua Steinman?

  Like you're building so that on the day that things actually kick off, you'll finally figure out if you built a defense company.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:52Joshua Steinman?

  If it survives.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  I want to talk a little bit more about the shape of your business today. I embarrassed myself as a podcaster, you know, we try to be experts in everything. But I completely botched the understanding of your company. And so how much of it is consulting driven? How much of it is product driven?

• 2:22:08Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  How much of it is SBIR, program of record?

• 2:22:12Joshua Steinman?

  Yep.

• 2:22:12John Coogan?

  The, the stuff we hear in defense tech?

• 2:22:14Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:14John Coogan?

  Give us a, give us a rundown of where you are today and where you want to go.

• 2:22:17Joshua Steinman?

  Zero consulting, zero government.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:20Joshua Steinman?

  100% private sector.

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:22:21Joshua Steinman?

  It's a SaaS offering.

• 2:22:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:23Joshua Steinman?

  We come in and protect an industrial facility against cyber attacks.

• 2:22:26John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, okay.

• 2:22:26Joshua Steinman?

  So we do that by installing sensors in the facility.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  Sure, okay.

• 2:22:29Joshua Steinman?

  And then we've got a software layer that's collecting essentially anything that generates data.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:22:33Joshua Steinman?

  These things are already generating data on like a big like.

• 2:22:36Jordi Hays?

  You're looking for patterns, right?

• 2:22:38Joshua Steinman?

  We're looking for patterns. We're looking for the absence of certain things.

• 2:22:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:41Joshua Steinman?

  We're seeing like, hey, what process is running in this place?

• 2:22:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:44Joshua Steinman?

  What's talking to what?

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:45Joshua Steinman?

  And we're basically the first company to actually take every single thing that's generating data on an industrial infrastructure.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:51Joshua Steinman?

  And take that information and look for threats.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, we talked to the founder of Chain Guard, looking at maybe supply chain attacks.

• 2:22:57Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  Is that something that's completely complementary or in some ways competitive to what you do?

• 2:23:02Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, we're trying to do a deal with them, right?

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. Yeah, we're live, by the way.

• 2:23:06Joshua Steinman?

  It's all good.

• 2:23:07John Coogan?

  But we'd love to see it. We love, we love companies working together.

• 2:23:09Joshua Steinman?

  I literally think my co-founders meeting with them like right now.

• 2:23:11John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:23:12Joshua Steinman?

  So, hey, guys.

• 2:23:13Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears a little bit.

• 2:23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:15Jordi Hays?

  How important is it that Hill and Valley is bipartisan? That's been something that, you know, we're, we're, uh, Delian and Christian have been.

• 2:23:23John Coogan?

  Your feed typically isn't really bipartisan per se.

• 2:23:26Jordi Hays?

  But in the context of if you're a serious, uh, technology company and you want to be around crushing it the next four years and the four years after that.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:35Jordi Hays?

  And then the 10 years after that, right?

• 2:23:37Joshua Steinman?

  Totally right.

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  I, I feel like, uh, and you, I'm sure got to experience the sort of back and forth nature of Washington. But when it comes to, um, you know, uh, talk about, uh, how, how you think Hill and Valley can kind of, um, evolve from here from your perspective as somebody who's spent so much time in Washington.

• 2:23:56Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, here's the reality is that obviously like I spent four years, first day to last day in the Trump, in the first Trump admin. And was never going to be befriended by people on the left, just because of that. They didn't have to know me.

• 2:24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:09Joshua Steinman?

  All they had to know was that piece of information.

• 2:24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:11Joshua Steinman?

  And like, I was just never gonna have an opportunity to even talk to them.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:14Joshua Steinman?

  Um, I do have friends, I wouldn't dare mention who they are, that are on the other side of the aisle. I wouldn't wanna, you know, I wouldn't wanna put them in a, in a, in a spot.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  In a crosshairs.

• 2:24:22Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, exactly. But like, there's good people on both sides.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:25Joshua Steinman?

  Um, and I've done a lot of good work with folks, you know, in the, in the Democrat Party. Um, and so I think that you wanna find people that wanna solve the problem that you're solving.

• 2:24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:36Joshua Steinman?

  And that can be any number of reasons. It's because you're gonna put a factory in their district.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:41Joshua Steinman?

  It's because they care about an issue, because they're on a subcommittee, and like you hope, and I would encourage folks to just look for those folks.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:48Joshua Steinman?

  They'll be on both sides. Um, obviously, uh, you know, part of it is just like the brand that I've built, coming out of the place that I came. I was, you know, I'm talking to folks that I know, and that's what my feed looks like for that reason.

• 2:25:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:00Joshua Steinman?

  Um, but yeah, I mean, it's, part of it is just, that's, you know, that's how I've been.

• 2:25:06John Coogan?

  So, yeah, you, I mean, you mentioned you're entirely B to B, no B to G yet, or, uh, are we properly resourced on the cybersecurity government?

• 2:25:16Joshua Steinman?

  Huge fight.

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  Because, you know, we know about Palantir, we know about some, I mean, Microsoft sells to the government, but is there a cybersecurity champion that sells to the government right now? Who, who, who should we be looking to?

• 2:25:28Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, not really. I mean, some of the solutions in the space are okay, they're not great.

• 2:25:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:34Joshua Steinman?

  You buy them, and then you have to like, put a bunch of people on top of them to make them work.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:25:37Joshua Steinman?

  Um, but yeah, look, we're in some talks with some interesting folks.

• 2:25:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:42Joshua Steinman?

  I'm hoping that we'll be able to announce something soon.

• 2:25:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:44Joshua Steinman?

  With, you know, some of the folks here in this space about building secure facilities, secure factories. And I just think that that's probably the most critical thing for us to think about from a security perspective, because I want us to be able to sustain operations on day one, or day two, or day 10, or day 50 of a conflict.

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:02Joshua Steinman?

  Because that's gonna make it more likely that we're gonna be able to stay in the fight and win.

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. And if we can't, like, it's a huge problem. Yeah. Yep, that makes sense. Well, uh, should we let him know? No, it's been great. You have another question? It's been great. Fantastic. Thank you for jumping on. I'll see you back on the floor. See you on the floor. Yeah. Bill, come on, give us an update. You haven't been on the show in weeks. It's been far too long.

• 2:26:26Fil Aronshtein?

  Gentlemen.

• 2:26:27John Coogan?

  We got Phil from Dirac in the studio in the Temple of Technology in the capital of the Capitol. Great, great tie, by the way. Is that a unicorn? Fantastic tie. What's on there? No, no, no. I thought it was a unicorn.

• 2:26:36Fil Aronshtein?

  Actually, it is Moogle Conquerors. I was recently in London.

• 2:26:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:40Fil Aronshtein?

  Took a trip down Savile Row, walked into Drake's and said, you know what? That six of six, you know?

• 2:26:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:46Fil Aronshtein?

  Only six made tie?

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  Oh, you gotta have one. There you go. You have one of six. You gotta meet the other five guys who wear the same tie.

• 2:26:52Fil Aronshtein?

  So true. I was actually thinking about this.

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  Let's get a group chat. Let's get a group chat.

• 2:26:56Fil Aronshtein?

  1990s, you know, Patrick Bateman style, like, you know, let's see Bateman's card.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:27:01Fil Aronshtein?

  Popular in the 90s. I'm thinking we're gonna be bringing back ties.

• 2:27:03John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:27:04Fil Aronshtein?

  Let's see Bateman's.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  Uh, we've talked about your business before. Uh, it feels like mostly B2B selling into defense tech companies, selling into, uh, uh, hard tech companies. Uh, what is top of mind for you here? Obviously, it's a great event. Good to meet people, but is there, uh, is there a particular agenda item that you think is important to highlight at Hill and Valley this year?

• 2:27:25Fil Aronshtein?

  Absolutely. So, yes, we sell into airspace and defense, automotive, ag and construction, maritime recently, uh, to be announced, uh, soon, but, uh, closed the maritime deal, which is very exciting.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:27:37Fil Aronshtein?

  There is a very, very critical lack of discussion around the American worker.

• 2:27:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:27:43Fil Aronshtein?

  You know, we, the average age of the American manufacturer is 55. For the next five, 10 years, we're losing a lot of those folks. And with that, critical tribal knowledge.

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:51Fil Aronshtein?

  That without writing down, institutionalizing, capturing in some way, we are going to see an immense loss of our ability as a nation to produce.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:28:00Fil Aronshtein?

  And so there, you know, I've said this before, I'll say it again, you know, we have spent billions of dollars on environmental conservation. We have spent $0 on tribal knowledge conservation as a country. Um, this is something I'm advocating for from a policy perspective.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  You have a hot take on AI not disrupting your business or not really disrupting, uh, the, I guess, like, the American worker. Can you unpack that a little bit and take me through how you see AI changing the way we, uh, design and manufacture things in America?

• 2:28:29Fil Aronshtein?

  So. Little bit of a complex perspective, I guess. When you look at what LLMs are useful for generally, right? People will throw them at generative tasks. But when you look at what LLMs have been trained on, it's more broadly like the internet. The internet, all the forums and all of this context.

• 2:28:48John Coogan?

  Chaos.

• 2:28:49Fil Aronshtein?

  Context is key, right? And what you do not have in those LLMs is the context of what you need made, the specs of it, and how to actually do it. Because, kind of like what I mentioned earlier, it's tribal knowledge. And by that virtue, it means it wasn't written down anywhere.

• 2:29:05John Coogan?

  And even if you, like, even if it was written down, your scan is probably private. It's not just out on the internet, not crawlable, like, you know, some sort of private database. Interesting.

• 2:29:13Fil Aronshtein?

  Exactly. And so while LLMs are useful as a technology, you need to put them in a position to aggregate, contextualize, and then leverage

• 2:29:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:20Fil Aronshtein?

  critical information that is not, you know, in a LLM that OpenAI might have been able to train on. So, you know, I think if you were ever going to see AI actually disrupt manufacturing, you're going to have it, you're going to have to have a way to embed it within the workflow and infrastructure of an existing manufacturing facility and make sure that you are able to well-integrate it into the flow of folks who are not super tech savvy.

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where are you bullish in terms of AI and manufacturing? I can imagine, you, we've seen those reports that like, oh, I, I emailed a Chinese manufacturer, a European manufacturer, and an American manufacturer, and the Americans and the Europeans didn't even get back to me for a week. That feels like, at the very least, you could just have a chatbot that takes your order and gives you some data.

• 2:30:04Fil Aronshtein?

  So, that specific problem is the problem of quoting. Complex, not really AI LLM-y. People have been doing quoting software for a while.

• 2:30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:14Fil Aronshtein?

  It's really computational geometry intensive, generally pretty complex. And so companies like, you know, Paperless Parts will, or Xometry will like help you with this.

• 2:30:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:25Fil Aronshtein?

  What we're describing there isn't really like an AI problem. It's a, like, work culture problem, generally. Like, we as Americans work very, very hard.

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:35Fil Aronshtein?

  But the, the Chinese have the underdog mentality.

• 2:30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:38Fil Aronshtein?

  They've been hungry for 30 years.

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:40Fil Aronshtein?

  They've been on the come up. You know, we, what we're running into is that 1991 was a 1776 moment for China, you know, for

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  What specifically in 1991?

• 2:30:49Jordi Hays?

  Momentum.

• 2:30:49Fil Aronshtein?

  So basically for 50, 60 years from 1945 to 1991, we were in the Cold War, right? And so we have this, you know, global battle of, you know, the West versus communism.

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  But is 91 different than 89, follow the Berlin Wall? Why 91?

• 2:31:05Fil Aronshtein?

  I say 91 generally, you know, either one is just sort of like that marker of when we basically said, the West has won, global American hegemony has won, you know, we can sort of like rest in our laurels. Very similar to-

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Beginning of the Clinton era.

• 2:31:16Fil Aronshtein?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, NAFTA and all that stuff. We basically said, let's pick a couple of nations to offshore our production to. Globalism is going to win. Let's pick China, Japan, Korea, offshore all production. You know, fund all that infrastructure and then, you know, just trust that they'll have our best interests in mind. Very much like this industrial colonialism, like our own version of it. And so if you look at historically, you know, you had the global power do that, set up colonies, and then get very, you know, comfortable and think, you know, it's the end of history, we've won. What's happening with China is exactly what happened in 1776 now, where we, you know, have basically seen China say, you know what? You know, Japan and Korea, you want to play with the US, fine, you know, just like Australia and Canada.

• 2:32:00Fil Aronshtein?

  You know, pay ties to the vassal state or to the, to the, to the mothership. Um, fine, right? But China is now saying, you know what, we're not going to play ball. We are going to go, you know, 1776, we are going to come up. So there's that underdog mentality of one generation, two generations of 30 years of that baked into the culture of the Chinese manufacturer. And that's what we're fighting against.

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, uh, do you think there's enough conversation at Hill and Valley around just labor in general? Cause I imagine like part of your thinking is like, who's going to be using my product in 20 years? Right? Like, that's a big question. And it's one that's interesting because it actually does feel like there's less direct ways for private companies to develop the next labor force for manufacturing, right? It's like, yeah, individual companies can train people.

• 2:32:45Fil Aronshtein?

  Yep.

• 2:32:45Jordi Hays?

  You can try to, you know, coach people from legacy firms. But it does feel like an area- That the government can have a tremendous impact. Are you hearing conversation so far throughout the event on that? Or it should?

• 2:32:58Fil Aronshtein?

  Certainly a little bit, but I would like to see more. A lot of technology brings the top up. And so you see this distribution of technology at manufacturing companies. This is always, you know, always been the case. And so the companies with the most money, all the enterprises, the Lockheeds, the Toyotas, the Fords, you know, all the big guys can just dump money on the fanciest schmanciest, you know, AI LM stuff. But the key to saving the American industrial base isn't just making the top most, you know, wealthy companies have more and more advanced technologies and having like a 99% 1% split of that distribution technology. It's bringing the bottom up. And so when you talk about like the labor base, what I'm starting to hear folks get is, you know, this is in something that I deeply agree with. We don't want cheap labor. Like we don't want bug man cheap labor. We want smart labor.

• 2:33:42Fil Aronshtein?

  And so that's why, you know, tools like us, tools like a bunch of other things out there are geared towards saying, hey, we are not just going to radically improve quality of life for the modern manufacturer. We're going to build something that makes people want to go into this job because of how cool and modern it is. Like, you know, people love building software engineers, love building tools for other software engineers. And there's this flywheel effect and positively reinforcing feedback loop of cool tool, cool tool, cool tool. When you start doing that for production, you end up having younger folks saying, that looks super cool. SpaceX has all these cool tools. That sounds awesome. Let me go work in that facility. And so government.

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, SpaceX is an interesting example because didn't, didn't their, their warehouse management system like spin out as its independent company or something?

• 2:34:28Fil Aronshtein?

  No, not exactly. It is, people have, it is like very, very common for like somebody to work in this like thousand plus software engineering org. They have this internal software they call Warp Speed.

• 2:34:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:39Fil Aronshtein?

  Warp Speed Warp Drive. It is, you know, fairly sophisticated. And you'll often have like somebody who was at SpaceX fairly early on that team to say like, I'm going to do this and productionize it. And then they like spin it out. It's been like five, six.

• 2:34:51John Coogan?

  There's been a couple of others.

• 2:34:53Fil Aronshtein?

  They're, they're fine, but you know.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, Jordy, any other questions?

• 2:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this has been great.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  Back to the conference. Thank you so much for stopping by. If Aaron's out there, you want to send him in?

• 2:35:03Fil Aronshtein?

  I will. I will. I think I just saw him.

• 2:35:05John Coogan?

  Okay, great. Yeah, yeah, grab him because I think he was hanging out for a little bit and we got to bring him on. We got four more people, maybe five more people on the guest list. Ben is sweating. He needs a bathroom break. Should we take five? Can we go to, can we go to a break? Uh, we are going to take a five minute break, folks. Thank you for watching.

• 2:35:23Jordi Hays?

  Five minute break.

• 2:35:24John Coogan?

  We'll be back in five minutes. Have a good one. Welcome back to GBPN. We just took a quick break, got another coffee.

• 2:35:31Jordi Hays?

  We are in the capital of America today.

• 2:35:34John Coogan?

  This, this room is the capital of the capital today.

• 2:35:37Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right. It's the center.

• 2:35:39John Coogan?

  And we're here with Aaron. Been on the show before.

• 2:35:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you in person.

• 2:35:44John Coogan?

  Camera was a little shaky here last time, so I don't know.

• 2:35:46Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, you were walking around your factory floor.

• 2:35:48John Coogan?

  The team can shake the camera a little bit as we walk around the floor to simulate what it's like to be in the trenches. Yeah, there we go. Uh, just so everyone's familiar.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  Big moment, big moment for you. Uh, you've been banging the reindustrialized drum for years. And, uh, it's the theme of the entire event. Uh, why don't we start with, uh, your reaction to Jensen's speech earlier on high level AI, but then AI factories and how you're thinking about that?

• 2:36:18Aaron Slodov?

  I mean, it's amazing, right? Like, he's obviously, oh, you gotta do a little holding. All right. Yeah, just as close as possible. Okay. There we go. Um, no, it's, it's, it's amazing, right? Like, you have the most powerful man in AI sitting up there talking about bringing American manufacturing back, right? And like, the role of AI converting electricity to now like tokens for, for everything. It's, it's a really phenomenal way to kind of like wrap, wrap the story, I think. Um, and converting that into real outcomes, right? No matter what the industry is, um, with the focus on obviously like manufacturing, right? Like.

• 2:36:55John Coogan?

  And yet you've often said that AI is not a, a one-shot solution for manufacturing. Break that down.

• 2:37:02Aaron Slodov?

  So, all right, yeah, uh, when people get a chance to like. Go through the transcript, watch him talk or whatever, right? Like, there are key things that he kind of mentions you can pick up on, right? Like, we can do this stuff in anything that has to do with like text and images today, right? Like, you might not want to diagnose a disease because there's no room for error there.

• 2:37:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:21Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah. Manufacturing and like, all of his talking about like, getting to physics faster. This is kind of like how we do these things eventually, right? Like, it's a matter of computing accurate, real-time physics for something. Not just, you know, like a bottle falling, but like, if I'm trying to design a mold, right? For like, mass production, I need that thing to be five micron tolerant or better. And, right now, you know, there's no way to do that. With current architectures and models and stuff like that. This is why, not blackpilled on it, but like, the horizon is longer.

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. So, a lot of work to do. Can you talk a little bit about some of the work you're doing with Re-Industrialize?

• 2:38:00Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah, so, last year, you know, incredible show of force from this community, right?

• 2:38:06John Coogan?

  It grew from like, wait, was last year the first year?

• 2:38:08Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Because it grew from like, an idea to like, a massive, massive conference.

• 2:38:12Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:13John Coogan?

  Well, give me the stats, break it down.

• 2:38:15Aaron Slodov?

  So, last year, we had about like, 4,000 RSVPs and like, 800 attended.

• 2:38:20John Coogan?

  Wow, that's a lot.

• 2:38:21Aaron Slodov?

  Um, and yeah, I mean, it snowballed from like, I wrote that techno industrial manifesto. We threw together, uh, like, two and a half months.

• 2:38:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:29Aaron Slodov?

  And, it was crazy. Um, it just all came together magically, but, you know, it was obviously-

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  And so, going back to Detroit? For this one?

• 2:38:39Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  Or DC?

• 2:38:40Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah, so, um, we're gonna be back in Detroit. Uh, we have an amazing benefactor, uh, who, you know, was pretty impressed, I guess, by the first one.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:38:50Aaron Slodov?

  And, uh, they're giving us a brand-new skyscraper that they just built.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:38:55Aaron Slodov?

  It has a beautiful-

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  I'd hit the size gong for that.

• 2:38:58Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful convention center, uh, attached to it. And, yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be wild. It'll be very, very high quality.

• 2:39:05John Coogan?

  More than 800 this time? What does it take to get in the off the guest list then? That's hard.

• 2:39:10Aaron Slodov?

  Just DM me. But yeah, it'll, it'll probably be around the same.

• 2:39:14John Coogan?

  And, and is it a similar hill and valley mix founders, politicians, or are there other folks? Is this a place where someone could go and just find a job or?

• 2:39:21Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  Talent, everyone, everything in between?

• 2:39:23Aaron Slodov?

  This, this is like a, it's, you know, it's a good champagne problem to have because you want all these different facets from everywhere to be there. But at the same time, uh, I think ultimately what we're going to struggle with and, and need to refine over the years when we do this is we want high quality decision makers there, right? Because like the whole community has to move forward somehow. So that might just be day one.

• 2:39:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:39:46Aaron Slodov?

  Eventually. And then day two, we can kind of go into like startups and like, you know, maybe a trade show kind of thing like that. So there's, you know, it's all in motion.

• 2:39:54John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:39:55Aaron Slodov?

  We'll, we'll take all the feedback and.

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  When, when is it? How can people learn more? Give us the plug. Is there a T B P N coupon code yet? If not, can we get one set up?

• 2:40:03Aaron Slodov?

  Yes, we will have a T B P N coupon.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  Thank you. I want to kick back on every sale.

• 2:40:10Aaron Slodov?

  Gulfstream 50, Gulfstream 50 will be.

• 2:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Just send the jet. That's all.

• 2:40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:15Aaron Slodov?

  July 16.

• 2:40:16John Coogan?

  July 16 in Detroit.

• 2:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're super, we're super excited for reindustrialize.

• 2:40:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll be out there.

• 2:40:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, how, where, where do you think, uh, where do, what, what do you think people are missing this week around reindustrialize? When you look at kind of like the guest lineup and everything like that, are there areas, we were talking to Phil. One area that I kind of identified as something that doesn't feel like it's a huge part of the conversation is labor.

• 2:40:39Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Right. It's like, who's going to, uh, even if we're building automated factories, uh, we still, you know, need to upskill. Uh, just due to how many people within manufacturing are retiring.

• 2:40:50Aaron Slodov?

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:40:51John Coogan?

  Education technology has always been hard.

• 2:40:53Aaron Slodov?

  No, this, it's, it's insane, right? Because in Jensen's talk, right? Like he was talking about trades, right? Like elevating trades. If we want to be able to accelerate these things faster, just because the gap has grown so large and we don't have time.

• 2:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:06Aaron Slodov?

  We don't have another 20 years to teach these people, right? So. Uh, yeah, that's kind of like where my company comes in, right? Like, we're trying to encode tribal tradecraft into technology. And then maybe it doesn't take you 20 years to learn how to make a mold anymore, right? It takes like a year.

• 2:41:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:22Aaron Slodov?

  Yeah, how much?

• 2:41:23John Coogan?

  How much?

• 2:41:23Aaron Slodov?

  So, so.

• 2:41:24John Coogan?

  Taken people, you know, forklift operator and pretty soon he's like, just CNC and stuff. It's cool.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, I, uh, how, how can you, can you break down? I'll give you an example. I saw somebody take, they were working on their irrigation in their backyard, seemingly the very complicated system that like one person had kind of designed a long time ago. They were able to take a picture of it, plug it into Grok or 4O and the, the model was able, able to spit out like a completely on point analysis of the situation.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Aaron's about to put you in the truth zone.

• 2:41:53Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:41:54John Coogan?

  This is impossible.

• 2:41:55Jordi Hays?

  And, and so, so is that, is that, you know, clearly for a simple consumer application, it works. Uh, are we going to see that in manufacturing in the same way where an individual might not have that? You're talking about ingraining tribal manufacturing knowledge into AI. Are, how, how bullish are you on that? Or, or, uh, what's the timeline?

• 2:42:15Aaron Slodov?

  So, again, just go back to the mental model of like, how much precision and accuracy do you need to accomplish the, the end task, right? So like in manufacturing, there's some room for error depending on the process. So ultimately I'm, I'm super bullish on this, right?

• 2:42:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:31Aaron Slodov?

  But factories have to be rebuilt, literally like from the ground up with a software nervous system, right? And like AI will play a huge part, not in just the, like the SG and A kind of stuff, right? Like.

• 2:42:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:44Aaron Slodov?

  Doing invoicing or whatever.

• 2:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:45Aaron Slodov?

  Get rid of that. Uh, the actual skill encoding is the thing that becomes this like weird, you know, physics driven deterministic model. Like if you need to engineer something, that's a, that's a really out of distribution problem.

• 2:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:58Aaron Slodov?

  Right? Like you need to understand the physics behind it. I mean, like, does a tradesperson? No, but like they sit there and do it for 20 years. They've done it 10,000 times. So like their brain is a physics simulator. So it's just like, how close are we getting there? You know, with like each task as it gets more and more refined and like accurate, I think.

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fantastic. Well, we'll let you get back to it. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 2:43:22Aaron Slodov?

  Thank you.

• 2:43:22Jordi Hays?

  Very, uh, excited for reindustrialize and, uh.

• 2:43:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 2:43:27Jordi Hays?

  Good, good work on being ahead of a massive wave.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:43:31Aaron Slodov?

  For sure. Thank you.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, awesome. Well, we have, uh, Sam Preeti coming on from Navier.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  Aaron, would you mind grabbing her?

• 2:43:40John Coogan?

  Navier, we're talking boats, talking maritime.

• 2:43:42Jordi Hays?

  She is a roboticist. She was formerly at NASA.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:45Jordi Hays?

  And she also was working on subcritical nuclear reactors at Fermilab.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  And fun fact, I filmed a two-person podcast with Jason Carmen where Jason Carmen was on one of your boats.

• 2:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Welcome. Sit down. Sit down. Here you go. Great to have you.

• 2:44:03John Coogan?

  I'd love to start with a quick.

• 2:44:03Jordi Hays?

  I was just reading off your bio, absolutely cracked. MIT Mechanical Engineering PhD.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  You're screwed in so you can be as close as possible.

• 2:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you can grab the microphone. It's a little bit heavy, but you can hold it.

• 2:44:14Speaker 21

  Okay.

• 2:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, this will be fantastic.

• 2:44:16Jordi Hays?

  How's your hill and valley been so far?

• 2:44:19Speaker 21

  It's been great. It's really incredible people.

• 2:44:21Jordi Hays?

  This is the first one?

• 2:44:23Speaker 21

  This is my first one. Yeah.

• 2:44:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:24John Coogan?

  Are you hoping to be a beneficiary of all like the momentum around shipbuilding broadly? Or is this more just about meeting folks in Silicon Valley and the Hill as well?

• 2:44:34Speaker 21

  I think, I think this is incredible time, you know, to build hard things.

• 2:44:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:40Speaker 21

  I mean, something that, you know, I feel like for years people were holding back and suddenly you see the momentum everywhere and you feel it here.

• 2:44:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:47Speaker 21

  They have done an incredible job. I don't think I've, you know, been in any conference where you're seeing builders, policymakers, everyone coming together and just saying, "Let's build. Let's do it now." And it's awesome to see that energy.

• 2:45:01John Coogan?

  Speaking of building, what, can you describe exactly what you're building? What design trade-offs you made that put your product standing out from the pack?

• 2:45:11Speaker 21

  All right. So, you know, the foundation behind building Navier is building next-generation maritime vessels. And, you know, when we are thinking of next-generation marine vessels, you have to think about like, you know, why, why suddenly now, right? So, America is number 11 in maritime and, you know. Very small number of vessels. China is putting out thousands of them.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:35Speaker 21

  So the goal is just not to think about, okay, how do we outnumber China?

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:45:40Speaker 21

  To really win, you have to out innovate China.

• 2:45:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:44Speaker 21

  So that means when you think of building marine vessels, what does out innovating mean?

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:45:49Speaker 21

  Means that how do you build vessels that are just not a little bit better, but a step function better? What that means is not just automation, software and all that. How do you reduce per unit mile, right? Per unit payload cost of moving things on water?

• 2:46:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:06Speaker 21

  The world moves, the whole world, right?

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:09Speaker 21

  It moves on the terms of, you know, what is the cost and speed at which goods and people move? If you tap into that economy, if you tap into that problem, suddenly you're controlling how the world economy moves. That's a trillion dollar market.

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  And functionally, in terms of the actual design of the vehicle, is it a hydrofoil?

• 2:46:31Speaker 21

  It's electric hydrofoil.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  Electric hydrofoil.

• 2:46:33Speaker 21

  Yes, I mean.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  So unpack that a little bit.

• 2:46:35Speaker 21

  The one that is out in the market is electric. We build more than just electric.

• 2:46:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:39Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:46:40John Coogan?

  So yeah, what were some of the design trade offs? What are the specs? And how do you pitch that to the eventual customer? Who is the customer?

• 2:46:49Speaker 21

  Well, so the focus, as I say, is to build a maritime company. When I started this company.

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:56Speaker 21

  We were amidst Covid, actually, right? And, you know, no VC was interested in maritime and there was no excitement around it. I'm just going around and saying.

• 2:47:05John Coogan?

  Now it's like the hottest segment possible.

• 2:47:08Speaker 21

  That's not venture backable. And then the first application, when you think about, you know, goods and people and you're thinking electric, the first application is moving people in coastal cities. I mean, that's a good demonstration of the use case, operational efficiency and cost, right? But this Covid, everybody is like work from home.

• 2:47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:29Speaker 21

  And no VC would believe that people will ever, ever take a, you know, ride and go to work.

• 2:47:35John Coogan?

  But people have commuted across the bay for years.

• 2:47:37Speaker 21

  Yeah, but suddenly during Covid, people thought that no one again, again, remote work is forever, right?

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:47:42Speaker 21

  So to do that, but for me, it was important, let's get the tech out and let's get money to get the tech out. So what we did is that, well, you know what? The first problem we had, water doesn't have a brand. Let's build something Sure, sure. That gives that awe-inspiring, magic, you know, that emotion. Yeah. And put it out in the water, like you feel when you see a rocket. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's why we started with like this super cool, sexy, hybrid Navia 30 and 30 Pioneer Edition. And the initial customers and who backed us are like, you know, tech entrepreneurs and whatnot. I mean, they bought recreational boat buyers bought this boat. Yeah. Um, then we also had like, you know, hospitality and so on. Uh, but now we have, you know, the recreational part is a small segment.

• 2:48:27Speaker 21

  Our major customers are defense and also we work with the, you know, our, our control systems. Our technology is with the US Navy vessels right now.

• 2:48:36Jordi Hays?

  How does the DOD think about, um, uh, maritime kind of fuel sources long-term? Are EVs a part of like how they're thinking or is it more traditional sort of fuel sources?

• 2:48:48Speaker 21

  It all depends on your use case, right? So EV, when you make it all electric boat, it has certain use cases. So some of when you're thinking of low heat signature. Yeah. That in kind of like noise and, and there are certain applications where you're looking at electric, um, all electric application. Yeah. Uh, but you know, the other ones that you're really looking, I mean, what, what is the process of a hydrofoiling boat, right? Forget electric or a gas, like compared to a conventional piling hull, you're taking out the hydrodynamic drag. As a result, you're getting like three times longer the range. So when you're thinking of long range, it will platform. So it's, you know, you're putting a payload that you don't want to be like, you know, Bouncing around. Bouncing around. Yeah. You want a steady platform.

• 2:49:33Speaker 21

  So so far you would need like large platform, gimbals and whatnot, right? Yeah. So that's for payload, but also for crew because crew, you know, CTV, crew transfer vessels. People can get injured when you're always slamming against them. Yeah, makes sense. They're kind of.

• 2:49:46John Coogan?

  Last question, or should we move on to Jared? I know he's waiting out there.

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  No, uh, I, I'm just curious how like, talk about the, you know, what, what it's like being in Washington, you know, today versus even a couple of years ago. I imagine the response has just been completely different in so many ways. It feels like, you know, uh, you know, um, The ocean is becoming, I think in a year it'll be overheated. Right now, it seems like it's getting the right amount of investment.

• 2:50:13Speaker 21

  It's 70% of the world, and I hope there are more and more maritime company. I mean, we need to build, you know? And, I mean, it's a huge economy. I mean, people are, you know, all of this talks about jobs getting taken over and we want our jobs. And I'm thinking, wow, we are going to unlock a whole new kind of economic opportunity. I mean, there will be so much jobs, so many things that will spin out and the secondary effects of it, that to me is exciting. I mean, there's a whole industrial revolution that will happen around maritime. And I think it's awesome to be a part of it.

• 2:50:47John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:50:50Speaker 21

  Thank you.

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  We have to record a stream from the boat.

• 2:50:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:53John Coogan?

  Jason already filmed on one. It was extremely cinematic.

• 2:50:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can be nice and stable.

• 2:50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, it actually was really stable. He was on the phone and we recorded the whole thing. It was amazing.

• 2:51:02Speaker 21

  You know, we did 20-degree banking turn and the champagne doesn't spill.

• 2:51:04John Coogan?

  That's amazing. If you, if you don't mind, can you grab Jared? He's out there in the, in the suit with the Marlboro pin, I think. But yes, fantastic. Jared, welcome to the stream.

• 2:51:17Jordi Hays?

  Come on in. Look at that. He's normally in a racing jacket, but you look fantastic in a suit.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  He dressed up, first time since last Hillen Valley? Or you throw on the suit every once in a while?

• 2:51:26Speaker 22

  I, I wore a tux at the inauguration.

• 2:51:28John Coogan?

  Okay. That's about it. That's great.

• 2:51:31Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:51:32John Coogan?

  Well, what's top of mind for you? I want to hear about stable coins. I want to hear about the stuff that's less about re-industrialization of manufacturing, maybe more on the crypto side. What is, what's most interesting to you today?

• 2:51:45Speaker 22

  Yeah, so the crypto industry obviously showed out extremely heavy for, extremely heavy for the

• 2:51:50Jordi Hays?

  You can, you can hold it.

• 2:51:51Speaker 22

  For the incoming, yeah, the current administration.

• 2:51:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:51:54Speaker 22

  Effectively there, yeah.

• 2:51:55John Coogan?

  Crypto ball and like

• 2:51:56Speaker 22

  250 million dollars donated.

• 2:51:57John Coogan?

  Lots of crazy stuff, but also lots of reasonable stuff.

• 2:52:00Speaker 22

  Yep. So since then, we effectively have a few pieces of legislation that is going to be delivered.

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:07Speaker 22

  So there's currently two stablecoin bills, one in the Congress and one in the Senate, one in the House, one in the Senate.

• 2:52:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52:11Speaker 22

  One is called Stable, that's the one in the House.

• 2:52:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:52:14Speaker 22

  And Genius is the one in the Senate.

• 2:52:15John Coogan?

  Genius.

• 2:52:16Speaker 22

  So the main difference between the two

• 2:52:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:52:18Speaker 22

  appears to be the treatment of non-US issuers.

• 2:52:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:52:20Speaker 22

  Now, there's only one significant non-US issuer.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  Is that Binance?

• 2:52:23Speaker 22

  It's Tether.

• 2:52:24John Coogan?

  Tether, okay.

• 2:52:24Speaker 22

  Yeah, so Tether has roughly, god, I'm gonna book you the number.

• 2:52:28John Coogan?

  A lot.

• 2:52:28Speaker 22

  It's over 150 billion issued.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:30Speaker 22

  Circle is number two.

• 2:52:31John Coogan?

  Isn't it the most profitable on a per-employee basis, something like that?

• 2:52:34Speaker 22

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know how many people work on the Medallion Fund at RenTech, but it's not that.

• 2:52:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:38Speaker 22

  Like, this has gotta be it.

• 2:52:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:39Speaker 22

  They claim they've made over 20 billion dollars in profit over the past two years.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:52:43Speaker 22

  It's an absolute monster of a company.

• 2:52:44John Coogan?

  It's crazy you can make, I mean, Medallion Fund makes sense because they're doing such complex stuff, but stablecoins seem simple to me. I don't know. Maybe I'm underselling them. I need to talk to the founder.

• 2:52:52Speaker 22

  If you're someone in a country like Nigeria.

• 2:52:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:55Speaker 22

  You have double-digit inflation rates.

• 2:52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:56Speaker 22

  Your country desperately does not want you to be able to access US capital markets or even like,

• 2:53:01John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:53:02Speaker 22

  Things to hedge against inflation.

• 2:53:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:04Speaker 22

  You want dollars.

• 2:53:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:04Speaker 22

  And so the demand for dollars has been so strong that, you know, people all over the world go through a bunch of extremely complicated UI processes. You know, they use random blockchains.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Who will use a bunch of these swapping functions?

• 2:53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who would possibly do this? Not an American consumer. Well, it doesn't matter.

• 2:53:18Speaker 22

  Yep.

• 2:53:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:19Speaker 22

  And it's like, most stablecoins from Tether are issued on a blockchain called Tron.

• 2:53:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:23Speaker 22

  Those people here have probably never heard of Tron.

• 2:53:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:25Speaker 22

  So it's a very international user base. The pull of the market, you know, we talked about product market fit. The product market fit of stablecoins is so insane. And the fact that there's a debate between, you know, the sections of the House on should we write legislation that potentially kneecaps

• 2:53:38John Coogan?

  Tether or not.

• 2:53:38Speaker 22

  the one group that is doing the most to export the dollar abroad, I think is extremely interesting.

• 2:53:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:53:43Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:53:43Speaker 22

  And this is on the heels of, you know, Circle's trying to IPO right now.

• 2:53:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:46Speaker 22

  We saw that prospectus. So compared to the 20 billion profit over the past few years, I believe the EBIT on Circle's 62 billion dollar issuance was like 258 million.

• 2:53:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people did not like the S1. It was not, um, and, and

• 2:54:01John Coogan?

  It just felt like they were leaving a lot on the table.

• 2:54:03Jordi Hays?

  Their, their, their distribution costs are high due to the Coinbase relationship, I think, but

• 2:54:07Speaker 22

  Yeah.

• 2:54:08Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, that makes sense. It's like, um, the, the, the T bill is arguably the best, America's greatest export, right? Like, it's, if you, if you count the T bill into trade deficits, it'd be like a much, uh, very generalized.

• 2:54:20John Coogan?

  Different story at that point.

• 2:54:21Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:54:37Speaker 22

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

• 2:54:52John Coogan?

  Who on the Hill are the biggest proponents of crypto? Who are the names the crypto founders need to be following?

• 2:54:58Jordi Hays?

  Who's the one politician with the laser eyes?

• 2:55:00John Coogan?

  That Base Mike Lee?

• 2:55:02Speaker 22

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:55:04John Coogan?

  That's his account. When he goes online.

• 2:55:08Speaker 22

  Extremely based. Ted Cruz was one of the first guys to understand how Bitcoin mining can actually help secure energy grids.

• 2:55:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:55:15Speaker 22

  He was extremely early to that. Of course, Gilliam Brand, alumnus in the House French Hill, you know, the Chair of the Financial Services Committee. These are all people you need to pay attention to. And then there's, you know, a whole crop of new freshmen congressmen and senators. Richie Torres is extremely on the money and he's not even, you know, on the right. So this is very much bipartisan issue.

• 2:55:33Jordi Hays?

  Almost every single person has brought up Richie Torres.

• 2:55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, lots of people.

• 2:55:40Jordi Hays?

  How much time have you been spending a lot of time in Washington the last few months?

• 2:55:44Speaker 22

  Oh, I've been spending a little bit of time in Washington. Look, so much money was given by so many different groups in crypto that there are a lot of us on the ground. So the people actually writing the language, working with the White House, that is extremely saturated. Where I have been spending a bit of my time is I'll meet with junior staffers. You know, I don't have any face to lose, so I'm happy to sit down with, you know, the lowest of the low. Everyone's actually really fantastic. But no, I'll go and I'll make sure that everyone around a certain elected official knows at least what are the range of opinions that they should probably have. I'm not going to say, hey, you should think this, but it's, you know, these are the arguments for one thing. These are the arguments against it.

• 2:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Is the crypto industry in somewhat of a, what was the example you gave with tech? It's like the dog that caught the car.

• 2:56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:28Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that, is that a good analogy here?

• 2:56:30John Coogan?

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

• 2:56:41Speaker 22

  Yeah, look, I think you're seeing a lot of headlines saying things like Coinbase is trying to tank the stablecoin regulation, the forced market structure bill. I think it's, of course, going to be more nuanced than that. I think that there are groups that say, hey, we've won huge. We want to be able to go really hard. Let's get everything we ask for. And then there's others that want incremental wins. I will say that Sacks and Bo Hines, who is kind of his deputy helping run many of the crypto operations out of the White House, they're incredible. Like Sacks was a direct crypto investor. He was an LP in a bunch of crypto funds, founders that know him, love him. And Bo Hines, not a lot of people knew him from before, but I mean, he like, in law school, he wrote, I believe, you know, one of his theses on crypto regulation.

• 2:57:22Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:57:22Speaker 22

  He, he was a big investor. He worked with a lot of companies. So they're, they're really on the money. And, and yes, maybe the, the dog caught the car, caught its own tail, but I'm, I'm actually extremely optimistic. And then, you know, out of Treasury, Besant and Commerce, Lutnik, you know, both these guys are extremely pro Bitcoin, pro crypto, so.

• 2:57:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of US-based crypto, or sort of crypto companies generally feeling more comfortable coming back to America? Are we seeing that now? Or are we seeing more offices being spun up? Or is it a little bit more like, well, we already did the work to set up infrastructure internationally. We, we want to wait to see how this stuff plays out.

• 2:57:59Speaker 22

  Yeah, there, there's a few things. So the first is, if companies don't come back, the founders are starting to. There was a class founders that wouldn't step foot in the US.

• 2:58:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:07Speaker 22

  It's like Paolo, the CEO of Tether.

• 2:58:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:58:09Speaker 22

  He literally would not come to the US because he didn't know, like, maybe, maybe he'd just get seized at the airport.

• 2:58:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:14Speaker 22

  So the fact that, one, they're coming back, they're being public about it, and they're showing their face, they're meeting with people, that's big. Other things that like, you might not think of, crypto conferences, companies would be scared to sponsor US-based crypto conferences.

• 2:58:25Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:58:25Speaker 22

  Because they're like, oh, if we sponsor this conference in New York, maybe we'll get the attention of the wrong regulator. That's over. If you talk to the conference organizers, they'll be like, okay, no, our business is, is back better than ever.

• 2:58:32Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 2:58:32Speaker 22

  So I think, you know, the next stage is offices open up, headquarters open up, and the market structure bill that hopefully. will come later this year will be a real catalyst for that. And the other, the other thing that's really important is a lot of trading activity has moved to the international offerings of these exchanges. When you look at spot volume, which is just, you know, if I buy Bitcoin directly versus perpetual futures volumes, which are derivative products. Majority of crypto trading volume is all in perps.

• 2:58:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:57Speaker 22

  And perps are not really clear if they're legal in the US.

• 2:59:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:01Speaker 22

  There's some guidance that will hopefully come from the CFTC. They just did a request for information a few days ago, earlier this month. Coinmist has said that they plan to offer futures contracts with a settlement date very far in the future. So you could theoretically do like 100 year future contracts. It live rebalances and it fills the role of the perps without new regulation. It's illegal for futures contracts not have settlement dates in the US.

• 2:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:59:22Speaker 22

  Yeah. So hopefully that all gets addressed and we can move the liquidity back to the US because every US based crypto hedge fund has to set up offshore accounts to be able to trade their profits.

• 2:59:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Are you expecting any legislation around real world assets? I mean, stablecoins in some way are taking a real world asset, even if it's, you know, a, you know, a number in a, in a database. And bringing them on chain, what do you, what do you expect on that front over the next couple of years?

• 2:59:49Speaker 22

  A lot, a lot of people will get really excited about real world assets, RWAs. It's a horrible name for something. I mean, RWAs in finance is another thing.

• 2:59:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:57Speaker 22

  But I think that the way that the stablecoin bill is written is that if something is directly redeemable as a receipt, you might be able to issue a tokenized version of it.

• 3:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:06Speaker 22

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

• 3:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 3:00:16Speaker 22

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

• 3:00:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:25Speaker 22

  I am far more interested in something being used as collateral, which in a sense is bringing liquidity to it. The problem is if I was to tokenize a share of, you know, if, if we start a company tomorrow, we raise a 10 at 50 round. And I want to tokenize that and say, oh, I want this to trade at 50. There's no one, there's no buyer for that, right? Sure, sure, sure. You need a buyer of last resort, right?

• 3:00:43Jordi Hays?

  No, and that's the interesting thing. I think the lending aspect is fascinating, but illiquidity is such a feature of private markets. And everybody's realized that at this point, right? You don't want a company to be, you know, a company to be on chain. They have a bad news cycle, then suddenly it's trading at like 90% less.

• 3:01:02Speaker 22

  Yeah, totally. And I think there's some companies that I imagine will see get tokenized in some form. Maybe it's out of trust in Sweden, or sorry, Switzerland.

• 3:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:10Speaker 22

  Or maybe UAE, or maybe even the US.

• 3:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:13Speaker 22

  And the ones to expect are, did you see that Yahoo Finance has a secondaries tickers?

• 3:01:18Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 3:01:19Speaker 22

  Yeah, they have charts now where they show where secondary transactions are reported to have traded.

• 3:01:23Jordi Hays?

  We need to add that.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  We do. Well, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 3:01:28Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you. Come on the show again.

• 3:01:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have to have you back for a deep dive.

• 3:01:32Jordi Hays?

  Crypto Day.

• 3:01:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're doing Crypto Day. Can we bring in Kaster Younis when we have a second? How are you doing, Christian? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's bring you in next. If you don't mind waiting 10 minutes. Thank you so much for stopping by. I know you have a crazy schedule, so we really appreciate it.

• 3:01:46Qasar Younis?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 3:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  Thank you, and congratulations on all the success. First up, would you mind introducing yourself for those who might not be familiar?

• 3:01:53Qasar Younis?

  I'm a short man.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can actually hold the mic here, whatever works. Some people are just doing this. What is best for you?

• 3:01:59Qasar Younis?

  I am clearly not. So my name is Kaster Younis. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Applied Intuition. Late-stage company based in Silicon Valley.

• 3:02:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:02:08Qasar Younis?

  We do vehicle intelligence broadly speaking. Let me explain a little bit of what that is. Sometimes people think we only do autonomy, but as I was just talking on stage at Hill and Valley, like imagine you work on a mine and there's these giant dirt movers that move like, you know, their size of a house.

• 3:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:24Qasar Younis?

  Your mining operator, you go up to it, you know, that machine should be intelligent enough to understand who you are.

• 3:02:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:02:30Qasar Younis?

  What you're trying to do. As you get in, you talk to it, there's this teaming concept.

• 3:02:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:02:33Qasar Younis?

  So we think about AI as like on, you know, in your screen, literally on your phone.

• 3:02:38John Coogan?

  Chat box.

• 3:02:38Qasar Younis?

  Maybe you talk to chat box. So we were the next kind of generation of AI, which is this AI that's all around you.

• 3:02:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:02:45Qasar Younis?

  But specifically on moving machines, cars, trucks, tanks, planes.

• 3:02:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:02:50Qasar Younis?

  And that human AI teaming, that's the company.

• 3:02:53John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the path to full autonomy and what AI means in the context of just, I guess, vehicles broadly? We've seen tell operation.

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Full autonomy even the right thing to be aiming for when teaming is clearly like. You know, like the more natural way to collaborate with machines.

• 3:03:10Qasar Younis?

  So within vehicle intelligence, a broad umbrella, there's a subgroup is autonomy. And within autonomy, you can break that up into kind of two subgroups in itself. Just for simplification, because you guys are not autonomy engineers, right? No. So, alright.

• 3:03:22Jordi Hays?

  We're broadcasters.

• 3:03:24Qasar Younis?

  Alright, alright, we won't bust out any software tests for you. But most of the audience, they're much better than we are. Okay. Dump it down for us, not them. Exactly, exactly. So, instead of talking about like society of automotive engineers, like autonomy levels, just think about autonomy as, is there a person in the driver's seat or not? Sure. The Waymo, there's nobody in the driver's seat. Yep. In a Tesla, there's somebody in the driver's seat. Yep. And that rough analogy applies all the way to tanks, to planes, to drones, whatever. Sure, sure. Is there a human sitting there, a human not sitting there? Yep. So, in the human sitting there, that's the assistance version. Yep. And really, in the warfighter example, that can be one-to-many machines. Sure. Right? It's collaborative autonomy, it's multi-mode, right?

• 3:04:06Qasar Younis?

  In the, there's no human, in the Waymo example, then it's a pure level four autonomous system, and that's a robotaxi. Both of those things exist. Yeah. So then the question is, well, why would you use one versus the other? Yeah. The Waymo version, broadly speaking, is way more expensive. Tesla is already a functioning business model. Yep. You can go buy a production Tesla that has FSD, and it works pretty damn well. And it's profitable. Yeah, and it's profitable. Waymo hasn't figured that out, and it will. And just the nature of the actual machine, it's more expensive. The compute is way more expensive, the sensors are more, the entire operations are more expensive. But what you get is you get that last 5% Yep. of scenarios that Waymo will take care of, that the Tesla requires your intervention. Yep. Because I can't do this.

• 3:04:52Qasar Younis?

  And so then you can take that into other domains, like, let's say, construction. Mm-hmm. To get that last 5%, it's generally not possible right now, because in those domains, they're more, let's say, open Yep. than something like a road. Yeah. And so then you need a human teaming. Take, for example... You're in a fighter jet or you're in a tank and you have to make a lethal decision. Yeah. That's where teaming becomes really important.

• 3:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Or a car, the beauty of a car is a car can just stop, right? It's not like it's not like moving something that's very heavy, right? And it could be damaging. Um, how, uh, how much has your?

• 3:05:28Qasar Younis?

  But the answer to the question, autonomy is here. Mm hmm. It is here and it's just like, a lot of times people ask us like, oh, when is self-driving going to be a thing? It exists. Yeah, totally. It's just now, it's like mobile phones, like when did mobile phones happen? Well, let's ask that simple question. Between the eighties and 2007 when we had the iPhone moment. But even then, like the iPhone, it's not like the iPhone, everyone got an iPhone. It was really expensive. It took a long time. Then the iPhone actually isn't the thing that consumers care about. Yep. They care about Instagram. Yeah, the app store. They care about Uber. Yeah. And like if you're trying to think about like an Instagram, like you can't even think about Instagram on an iPhone. Not at all. But the first iPhone, by the way, no app store. No app store. No front-facing camera. Yeah. So you couldn't even, there's no such thing as Instagram. No selfies. So the, the, the macro point is autonomy is the spectrum. Yep.

• 3:06:11Qasar Younis?

  So you should think about autonomy as like, it's going to come in drips and it's going to be, it's unevenly like the, the old Peter Thiel saying. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the technology is unevenly distributed.

• 3:06:21Qasar Younis?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how much has your vision expanded, right? I imagine, uh, early on, you know, even the last few years, I'm, I'm assuming that people came out seeing your success being like, oh, we're going to do applied intuition for XYZ. And then you're probably sitting there being like, well, applied intuition is applied intuition for XYZ.

• 3:06:38Qasar Younis?

  I mean, that's the normal competitive situation.

• 3:06:41Jordi Hays?

  But, but has your vision always, you know, been the same or?

• 3:06:46Qasar Younis?

  We're not a meek, we're not a meek company. No. You know, we're like, we're like street fighters. Yeah. How long have you been doing this? Don't let, don't let the suit, uh, don't let the suit, uh, you know, I come from Detroit.

• 3:06:54Jordi Hays?

  You're a brawler.

• 3:06:55Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:06:56Jordi Hays?

  No, but how much, how much?

• 3:06:57Qasar Younis?

  Eight years, overnight success. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:06:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming your vision always was, was massive, but it, but now, uh, you know, seeing the, the technological advancement.

• 3:07:07Qasar Younis?

  Yes and no.

• 3:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Are you discovering new markets every month?

• 3:07:10Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, I think our, the, the, the core hypothesis that we had, the core like, you know, quantum of idea that we had was. We saw Tesla emerging, this is 2016, 2017, and it was like, oh, the car is gonna be a software thing.

• 3:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:24Qasar Younis?

  And we just don't know what that means, but we ultimately want to participate in that. So I, you know, I grew up in Detroit, my co-founder grew up in Detroit, we're a family of automotive folks, my parents in factories, his parents is engineers, I went to the General Motors Institute. So we saw, you know, I worked in factories for a bunch of years, and so you just, you just see the car business and you're like, this business is gonna change.

• 3:07:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:47Qasar Younis?

  I think that was the very vague, rough idea.

• 3:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:51Qasar Younis?

  And then the product strategy over the years has been, let's build all these products to make cars more intelligent.

• 3:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:56Qasar Younis?

  We got into defense about a year after we started, so now seven years ago.

• 3:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so early, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:08:00Qasar Younis?

  Very early on. You know, it's not random, like General Dynamics and General Motors.

• 3:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:05Qasar Younis?

  Their, their technical headquarters are like, you know, five minutes from each other.

• 3:08:09Jordi Hays?

  How worried, so you, you were dual, you were dual-use from almost early, how worried do you get for founders that are here that are not, that aren't dual-use, given your experience working with the government?

• 3:08:19Qasar Younis?

  I'm just trying to eat. I don't, I don't, I don't know about their businesses, man.

• 3:08:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, but I'm, but I'm, but I'm.

• 3:08:25Qasar Younis?

  Good luck.

• 3:08:26Jordi Hays?

  But, but I imagine like if you had started out and you were just doing defense and you was autonomy and it was, you know, whatever, eight years ago, you may not have made it.

• 3:08:34Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, we're doing just automotive. I think, I think it's, you know, it's, there's a, our, our company values, we have these values that run the company, but they can all be reduced to two words, radical pragmatism.

• 3:08:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:08:44Qasar Younis?

  Automotive specifically and defense are anti-cyclical.

• 3:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 3:08:48Qasar Younis?

  So, you know, it helps, like that's not random.

• 3:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense, yeah.

• 3:08:51Qasar Younis?

  So I think, I think it's positive. I think just for us, the problem space in a car and a tank are actually surprisingly similar.

• 3:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:59Qasar Younis?

  They're both human operated, they both are large machines that are electromechanical and then now are becoming more software.

• 3:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:05Qasar Younis?

  I think if I'm a defense-only company, I think it's, I think it might be easier to be a commercial company to come in defense than a defense company to go out to commercial.

• 3:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 3:09:13Qasar Younis?

  The main reason is, in the commercial ecosystem, you gotta fight. The globe, you gotta find everybody and it's not about I know the DOD procurement methodology and therefore I get a big contract. It's like I have to have the best product and it has to be priced the cheapest that it can be bought globally.

• 3:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:29Qasar Younis?

  Because otherwise I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna win. I think for us, the transition into defense, being from Michigan, I mean, take home, you know, the, the tank and automotive, the, where they build tanks and the Detroit arsenal.

• 3:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:42Qasar Younis?

  Literally a mile from where I grew up.

• 3:09:43Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 3:09:43Qasar Younis?

  General Dynamics, three, four miles. I mean, Detroit is a defense ecosystem. It's the building of the stuff.

• 3:09:48Jordi Hays?

  So you, you're clearly much more focused on existing form factors, right? Cars, tanks, things like that.

• 3:09:54Qasar Younis?

  Drones.

• 3:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Drones. Uh, when, when, I'm sure you've been approached by humanoid robotic companies.

• 3:09:59Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, we have. Look at this, this guy, are you a plant by one of our investors?

• 3:10:05Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 3:10:06Qasar Younis?

  Who is it, Josh Wolfe or who?

• 3:10:07Jordi Hays?

  We had John earlier. No, but I, but I'm curious to get your, I'm curious to think, you know, hear about how you're thinking about these new form factors. We don't know at all how they're gonna play out.

• 3:10:17Qasar Younis?

  Yeah. So we have been, we have been approached by, I would say, by three humanoid companies now who've said, hey, can we use the tooling? Can we use some of the technology? I think for us, we like to enter markets where there's a bit stability and maturity because you don't want to build a bespoke thing for company A and then it's, you know, some bespoke company B. We're a product company. We're a services company.

• 3:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:38Qasar Younis?

  Humanoids will get to that. The macro thing that you're tugging on is actually this abstraction from hardware or software. There is a company actually that, that's like applied in the past, which is Microsoft. Microsoft started as a tooling company, then got into operating systems and then got, got into applications. But they did it all on the PC in the eighties. We're doing it on the vehicles in the, you know, 2020s, but it's the same thing. It's you're abstracting away from the hardware that exists in a car or, you know, whatever truck, commercial truck. The humanoid is similar. There's a hardware-software bifurcation that's gonna happen.

• 3:11:11Jordi Hays?

  How do you balance then wanting to be a part of the sort of evolution of these new form factors, but not over-invest too early? It's like that's the challenge, right?

• 3:11:23Qasar Younis?

  You know, billion-dollar question. I think most companies, we have, Mark Andreessen is our first investor and our largest shareholder, and he's our sole official board member.

• 3:11:32John Coogan?

  Oh, nice.

• 3:11:33Qasar Younis?

  So Mark's been with the company a long time, and Mark has this great line, which is, "Companies are almost always too early."

• 3:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:41Qasar Younis?

  And that's super counterintuitive, because you always think, "Don't be late, don't be late." Actually, the mantra everyone should be saying is, "Don't be early."

• 3:11:49John Coogan?

  Don't be too early.

• 3:11:50Qasar Younis?

  Don't be early. And so I think, I say like, "Right now is the best time to get into self-driving."

• 3:11:56John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:11:56Jordi Hays?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 3:11:57Qasar Younis?

  Because all the technology's kind of figured out. So now you're gonna enter against a Waymo or against a Tesla with none of the cost of the 15 years, and you have to take all of these engineers who are at Cruise and Argo and are at Waymo and a Tesla, and you recruit them and you build self-driving.

• 3:12:12John Coogan?

  Zooks and Cruise, there's so many different folks.

• 3:12:14Jordi Hays?

  With all the tribal knowledge of what works, what doesn't work, and they get to work with you.

• 3:12:17Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, and not more than tribal knowledge, it's like, actual hard tech.

• 3:12:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:12:22Qasar Younis?

  And so they now know, you know, it's like building the first web application in the mid-'90s, that's a miracle. Today, junior high kids build web apps as a part of their class project.

• 3:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:34Qasar Younis?

  Autonomy's gonna be the same way, humanoid robots are gonna be the same way, it's just the time factor. So if you're trying to monetize, that's the business we're in, you know, that's what commercial world is, private business, you have to find, where's that meniscus line? And as soon as something becomes mature enough, because you also can't be too late.

• 3:12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:50Qasar Younis?

  If you're too late, then there's a bunch of players in the ecosystem. Actually, you know, you talk about defense tech, my actual fear for a young defense tech company isn't, "Can you make it a commercial?" I think you can build a very viable, vibrant, defense-only company.

• 3:13:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:03Qasar Younis?

  It's just there's a lot of defense-only companies now.

• 3:13:04John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 3:13:05Qasar Younis?

  And suddenly, you know, the pricing pressure goes down, because you're the fourth company that's doing the same thing.

• 3:13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I can't wait for the next season of BattleBots. I'm sure kids will be building all sorts of crazy autonomous solutions, because there's so many open-source packages that they can piece together.

• 3:13:18Jordi Hays?

  Were you surprised, by the way, that the new spending bill allowed for like $500 million of autonomous systems? A lot of people said that felt low.

• 3:13:28John Coogan?

  But we had Sean McGuire on the show earlier and he was like, well, it's not low if that's the starting point and we go up from there, which is

• 3:13:36Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, I don't generally use proxy, I don't use dollars as a proxy for importance. The DeepSeek, you know, outcome is a very clear example that you can do a lot with limited resources.

• 3:13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:49Qasar Younis?

  I think the more important message broadly speaking is autonomy is where, you know, AI meets the warfighter. That message, I mean, I keep saying that again and again, you know, trademark copyright, whatever it is. But the point being is like, it's the thing, the teeming aspect

• 3:14:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14:07Qasar Younis?

  of the warfighter with the machine, that's the future.

• 3:14:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14:10Qasar Younis?

  How we get there, that's all details. But we all have to agree that that's what we got to get to.

• 3:14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:15Qasar Younis?

  If we agree to it, then we can figure out the, you know, reconciliation and this specific bill. Well, all that'll get shaken, shaken up. I don't think enough people still agree that that, of that vision of the future.

• 3:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it really does feel like of the other, there's probably 20 other line items that were autonomy will be stuffed in, but it won't be headline autonomy spend.

• 3:14:33Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, exactly. And I think like, you know, even applied, you know, for our company, we don't cast ourselves as an autonomy company, we cast ourselves as an intelligence company.

• 3:14:41John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:14:42Qasar Younis?

  A vehicle intelligence company, right? And so like, why do we do that? Because autonomy is a, is a

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  Component of the intelligence.

• 3:14:48Qasar Younis?

  It's a component. It's kind of like saying that, you know, is the government funding enough engines? It's like, well, the car business that we're really talking about.

• 3:14:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14:55Qasar Younis?

  The engine is a very important aspect of the car.

• 3:14:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14:58Qasar Younis?

  But you're funding actually the larger industry.

• 3:15:00John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

• 3:15:02Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  This is a lot of fun. We'd love to have you back for a much deeper dive on the company.

• 3:15:07Qasar Younis?

  This is great.

• 3:15:07John Coogan?

  This is great. We'll reach out.

• 3:15:08Qasar Younis?

  Cheers.

• 3:15:09John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bring in our next guest. Welcome to the TVPN livestream. How are you doing? How is your, how is your Hillen Valley experience been?

• 3:15:22Augustus Doricko?

  You've got some good entertainment value.

• 3:15:23John Coogan?

  What's the latest?

• 3:15:24Augustus Doricko?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:15:25John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you. John? Pleasure. Would you mind introducing yourself for the stream for the viewers who are watching?

• 3:15:31Speaker 24

  Justin Fisher-Wolson, one of the founders of 137 Ventures.

• 3:15:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic. How would you describe your fund, what you do for anyone at home?

• 3:15:40Speaker 24

  So, I mean, we started the business back in 2011. I used to be a founders fund.

• 3:15:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:44Speaker 24

  Left when we sort of had this belief that companies were going to stay private longer.

• 3:15:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:49Speaker 24

  And that if that happened, you know, founders, executives, all the early employees, we're going to end up wanting some liquidity.

• 3:15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:55Speaker 24

  Because, you know, your life is different when you're 35, when you're 25.

• 3:15:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:59Speaker 24

  When you're 45, like, people's needs change. And so we kind of built the business on that premise. And we've continued to expand. Like, once you've got great relationships with the founders, you can do some primary investing, help people run tender processes for all the employees. And it's kind of where we built it. Hot take is...

• 3:16:16Jordi Hays?

  It's finance with a deep understanding of venture and the founder.

• 3:16:21Speaker 24

  Absolutely, right? I mean, venture's finance. I mean, I'm not sure all the venture people necessarily...

• 3:16:26Jordi Hays?

  But it's not... It's sort of... It's a different product in the sense of like, okay, we're going to give this entrepreneur money, set and forget, you know, kind of bet on them versus like running like a firm and like built... Like, it's financial services in some way.

• 3:16:40Speaker 24

  I think you're right. Like, we're trying to build long-term relationships with people, right? Like, we were early investors in SpaceX and like, we've continued to invest with them for the last 15 years, right? I mean, we've done something similar with Androl, right? Like, we're just... We're trying to build long-term relationships with great companies and continue to invest in whatever way we can.

• 3:16:57John Coogan?

  So, a bit of a hot take is, is the Lina Khan effect on M&A markets good for your firm because it leads to companies staying private longer because they don't get acquired?

• 3:17:08Speaker 24

  I think... Well, so I think there's this like misperception that US government policy is the thing that drives the M&A markets. Like, it definitely is part of it, but like, like, go back to the...

• 3:17:17Jordi Hays?

  It was a good excuse for the last couple, you know, few years.

• 3:17:20Speaker 24

  That wasn't what blocked like the Figma deal, right? Like, that was the Europeans, right? So, like, just because America's like, "Great, anyone can buy anything." Like, the companies that are buying other companies are global and they're regulated globally.

• 3:17:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:17:32Speaker 24

  And so, like, just solving it in the US is not going to actually solve the M&A problem that you're describing.

• 3:17:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:17:38Speaker 24

  So, like, do I think less M&A is sort of good for us? On the margin, sure, right? I mean, like, it's, you know, like, it's... But even the IPO market's kind of closed.

• 3:17:46John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:17:47Speaker 24

  Companies staying private ultimately means they they end up taking more investment in the private markets.

• 3:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:52Speaker 24

  And I think at some point, the great companies, they mean, they get cash flow positive. They don't need primary capital anymore.

• 3:17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:56Speaker 24

  Right?

• 3:17:56John Coogan?

  They stay private.

• 3:17:57Speaker 24

  So that leads you to these liquidity events, tender events for employees. And like, that's how we've scaled.

• 3:18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:02Speaker 24

  Over time.

• 3:18:03John Coogan?

  Do you buy that idea that like Elon Musk kind of ran the A B test with Tesla and SpaceX, had a great experience at SpaceX, didn't have a really great experience in the public markets at Tesla? I mean, fantastic stock performance, but like headaches. And so the takeaway was, hey, maybe stay private longer. And then other founders kind of learned that lesson as well. Is that reasonable?

• 3:18:23Speaker 24

  I mean, I certainly think Elon had a better experience in the private markets than the public markets.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:18:28Speaker 24

  But I mean, personally, I think, I don't want to speak for him, but like, I get the impression that he, you know, he really appreciated all of the retail investors who supported.

• 3:18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:35Speaker 24

  You know, him and the company and his vision of where the company could come from.

• 3:18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:38Speaker 24

  And like, that's actually like an incredible thing. Like, there's so many small investors across the country.

• 3:18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:44Speaker 24

  Who believed in the company. And and then because of that, actually made huge sums of money.

• 3:18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:49Speaker 24

  Right?

• 3:18:49John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:18:50Speaker 24

  By being investors. So like, I think he actually really does care about those people because they were there for him when in summer sex, other people weren't.

• 3:18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:56Speaker 24

  Um, in the private markets.

• 3:18:57Jordi Hays?

  And in many ways, your guys' model is not, you're not like, oh, I'm so annoyed this company that was in our portfolio went public. It's like you win and kind of buy their situation.

• 3:19:05Speaker 24

  Yeah. I mean, look, ultimately, I think LPs do need dollars back, right?

• 3:19:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:19:09Speaker 24

  Like, you can't have a system where like, all you do is take money from people, give it to other people, and then like, it's worth a lot more, but no one ever gets any money back. Like, that that system will ultimately break.

• 3:19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:17Speaker 24

  But, you know, I think if you're right about the companies and you're compounding over a long period of time, like, that's that's ultimately the goal. So you get a little more more leeway when that happens.

• 3:19:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you do you have a take on the new, uh, permanent capital vehicle that, uh, Thrive put together? It's kind of an interesting story that we haven't seen a lot of VCs do that, but obviously Warren Buffett's famous for it. There's a lot of other folks that have built these holding companies.

• 3:19:40Speaker 24

  Yeah.

• 3:19:40John Coogan?

  We've seen more just. Different strategies in venture, I would say. You have continuation vehicles, you have growth stage, almost private equity type deals happening. Like, what is exciting about the new era of VC in 2025?

• 3:19:54Speaker 24

  I mean, we've looked at some of these permanent capital vehicles. I think they're interesting. I think they solve certain problems. I think they create other problems, right? Going back to liquidity point.

• 3:20:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:20:02Speaker 24

  It's permanent capital. It's like, it makes it hard to get, it makes it hard to get the money out. But they do solve certain issues. And I think it's really nice as an investor to be able to take a really long-term view on things and not get caught up in the market cycles. Like, the trick is like, just, like even your conversation about applied intuition, it's like, if you can just be in this company for a really long period of time, like, who cares what multiples are today?

• 3:20:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:26Speaker 24

  I care whether or not the fundamentals of the business 100x over the next 10 years.

• 3:20:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:20:31Speaker 24

  Who cares? Even the multiples are terrible, then it won't matter.

• 3:20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:20:33Speaker 24

  Right? Like, so that's

• 3:20:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem like there's a shift. I mean, the, I don't know who came up with the idea of a 10-year life cycle for a fund. It seems arbitrary. It seems like they were just like, eh, like, make it double digits, make it a round, nice round number. But now it does feel like VCs are starting to think, oh, well, like, there's extension periods, there's continuation vehicles. Maybe we should be thinking in 20-year cycles, 25.

• 3:20:53Speaker 24

  Look, it turns out everything is historical and structural.

• 3:20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:56Speaker 24

  The reason it was 10 years is that, so you go back to like, when we started the business in 2011, right?

• 3:21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:02Speaker 24

  The first company that really kind of stayed private for a really long time was like Facebook.

• 3:21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:07Speaker 24

  Right? Like, that was sort of the, that was sort of

• 3:21:09John Coogan?

  That wasn't even that long.

• 3:21:10Speaker 24

  It wasn't, but like

• 3:21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it wasn't the time.

• 3:21:11Speaker 24

  But back then, right, the average

• 3:21:12John Coogan?

  If you look at like Sequoia with Google and, and like, these companies went public so fast.

• 3:21:17Speaker 24

  Time to liquidity was like, you know, I think probably four or five years back then. When we started 137 in 11, it was like six or seven years.

• 3:21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:24Speaker 24

  It's now like 12 or 13 at this point.

• 3:21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:26Speaker 24

  So like, people picked 10 because they couldn't conceptualize that companies would still be private 10. And they're like, they like doubled it and rounded it up.

• 3:21:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:21:33Speaker 24

  Right? And so now what's happening is like

• 3:21:35John Coogan?

  No way this company is going to be private 10 years. This is super safe.

• 3:21:38Speaker 24

  Exactly. And then, and that's, and that obviously, that broke the system.

• 3:21:42Jordi Hays?

  How, how early do you, you try to identify these companies, right? Because once you have a generational company in the portfolio and, and you plan to help support, you know, all the shareholders over numerous years, it doesn't Matter exactly when you get in, but I'm assuming that other now even growth stage investors are looking for you guys for signal in some way or another to kind of just given the track record of 137.

• 3:22:12Speaker 24

  And for us, I think we're looking at companies that are kind of post-product market fit and that are scaling the business.

• 3:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:19Speaker 24

  And the thing that's sort of changed, if you look at the last 20 years or so, is that there's really no, there's really no cap, right? Like, it used to be that a billion-dollar company was like an incredibly huge outcome. And like, honestly, there's hundreds of those companies in the private markets now. And so like, for us, it's really just this question about what, you know, can the investment hit our cost of capital? And if you have, you know, you have an opportunity to invest, even like take SpaceX at 350, it's like, if you can believe that's a trillion-dollar company, like, that can still be a great investment. So like, sure, it's a big number or whatever, but like, it doesn't really matter where you are, it matters where you're going.

• 3:22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:55Speaker 24

  And that's, I think, the thing that is different in the private markets, or really, even, look at the public markets. I mean, look at the valuations on Nvidia. I mean, that's a, that's an incredible growth story in the public markets, like...

• 3:23:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't see that at that scale usually, but...

• 3:23:07Speaker 24

  Well, I mean, look at Google, look at Apple, right? And then like, look at all of the, all of the major tech companies, like, it's...

• 3:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:13Speaker 24

  The opportunity is much bigger than people imagined.

• 3:23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. Any other questions?

• 3:23:17Jordi Hays?

  No, this is fantastic.

• 3:23:18John Coogan?

  We'll let you get out of here.

• 3:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much for standing by. Thank you so much for putting this whole thing on, it's...

• 3:23:21Speaker 24

  We're happy to help, help make this thing possible. You guys have done quite, quite the job this year. I hope, I hope you make it back next year.

• 3:23:28John Coogan?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 3:23:29Jordi Hays?

  We'll be back. Perfect. Thank you so much.

• 3:23:32John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 3:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:23:34John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 3:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's get Ryan Peterson in.

• 3:23:36John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, well, yeah, we have Zellerfeld. We, I think we should bring in Cornelius real quickly, do five minutes. We need to go into lightning round, folks.

• 3:23:41Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to text Ryan?

• 3:23:42John Coogan?

  We got a bunch of people, yeah.

• 3:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Come in five minutes.

• 3:23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:23:45Jordi Hays?

  Lightning round, Cornelius.

• 3:23:46John Coogan?

  We got to talk about...

• 3:23:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's talk about the chain real quick and the fit, because it is one of one.

• 3:23:52John Coogan?

  Every time I see him, he's dressed fantastically.

• 3:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Here, pull, pull this up.

• 3:23:54John Coogan?

  This is happening, Zellerfeld.

• 3:23:56Jordi Hays?

  Thanks.

• 3:23:56Speaker 25

  Uh, yeah, obviously, as I'm from Zellerfeld.

• 3:23:59Jordi Hays?

  You can put your shoes on the desk if you want, if you want to put it up for the audience, since you are in the shoe business. There we go. There we go. Right on the desk. Look at this.

• 3:24:08Speaker 25

  4D printed shoes.

• 3:24:09John Coogan?

  3D printed shoes.

• 3:24:10Speaker 25

  Yes, in the US. So, so far, we have done most of our production in Hamburg, Germany.

• 3:24:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:24:16Speaker 25

  So that's where we started. But, obviously, like, a huge part of our market right now is the US, so we are just bringing that back. Um, we had 200 printers in Hamburg, Germany, and now we're bringing 2,000 printers here to the US, printing millions of pairs a year.

• 3:24:32John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Insane. Insane. Where's all the, where's the demand coming from outside of the tech community?

• 3:24:38Speaker 25

  Um, it's mostly fashion guys. So, um, I don't know if you have seen, but we are printing shoes now for Nike, for Louis Vuitton, for Claire, even like, lots of celebrities are wearing our shoes all the time. But Drake did a huge cowboy boot with us, because he just bought a Texas, uh, in Texas, a ranch.

• 3:24:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:24:58Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:24:59Speaker 25

  And he needs some cowboy boots, so, um...

• 3:25:01Jordi Hays?

  Just make it, make it.

• 3:25:02John Coogan?

  What have you learned from, I mean, we read a story in the Wall Street Journal recently that Nike was having trouble, uh, Nike was having trouble using robotic automation to assemble shoes and, and, uh, meld the upper with the soles, because there's so many different sizes. It feels like a unique case for 3D printing, but, uh, is there any hope to iterate on your product to a point where there are multiple materials?

• 3:25:24Speaker 25

  Yes, um, also multiple colors. I think previous experiments often failed, mostly because everybody is trying to make the same product as before, just assembled by robots, kind of. But...

• 3:25:39John Coogan?

  You need to think about it from first principles.

• 3:25:41Speaker 25

  A hundred percent.

• 3:25:42John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 3:25:43Speaker 25

  And, um, then you can do even crazier stuff that traditionally wasn't done in performance footwear or so. So, all of a sudden, with 3D printing, every shoe can be custom-made. So, when you think of performance, you know, everybody talks about, I don't know, I think Nike's mission statement is, goes something like, "Making every athlete's dream come true." But like if you think about it, lots of those brands, like they have custom fitted shoes for those performance athletes, but what about the kid on the on the school schoolyard that just wants to kick some soccer, for example, and all of a sudden with 3D printing, you can get those kids the same custom fitted experience like a pro soccer player.

• 3:26:23Speaker 25

  And when you think of not just performance footwear, but even anyone, I think what will happen is, I mean, I wear this, this is happening cap because printed shoes will be on every foot.

• 3:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 3:26:35Speaker 25

  And a big reason is because all of a sudden you can do stuff like, I don't know, every shoe fits whatever design.

• 3:26:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So talk about the time today, shoes are made in factories far away from the end consumer.

• 3:26:49Speaker 25

  Yep.

• 3:26:50Jordi Hays?

  They get made, they get sent, eventually they get to the consumer, whether it's through retail or online. Talk about kind of like, what is the actual activity, you know, where is the printing going to happen long term? Is it, is, could we get to a point where Nike?

• 3:27:03Speaker 25

  Fully decentralized.

• 3:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, could Nike in a retail store, could somebody design a shoe and print it in real time? Is that where we're going?

• 3:27:10Speaker 25

  So basically, basically what's going to happen is you will have farms all over the world, maybe a little bit like Coca-Cola has bottling plants all over the world.

• 3:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:27:20Speaker 25

  And then what's going to happen is you buy a shoe, for example, on Zellerfeld.com, and depending on where the end consumer is, that's where the production job is going to get to. And then what I fucking love is that people are now buying shoes on Zellerfeld.com and like basically like few seconds later, the printer starts printing and you can have a custom fitted shoe, I don't know, two days later.

• 3:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:44Speaker 25

  And that is completely changing the game. And without, you know, usually in footwear, you have cycles, production cycles and marketing cycles of 18 months and longer.

• 3:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:54Speaker 25

  So you need to make the commitment in the factory in Asia 18 months before, but you don't even know how many will sell. So what's great here is that on-demand production basically changes that completely and it can still be as quick as Amazon.

• 3:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, it's such an interesting story, just given, you know, we've studied how Nike Nike just struggled to bring back shoe production with with one of the most advanced manufacturers in the world. But again, it was because they were just taking the the traditional way. Shoes has like 14 parts or something like that, trying to make it with a robot. And I think what you're doing with shoes, we can apply to so many other categories in terms of.

• 3:28:29John Coogan?

  Thank you for stopping by.

• 3:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 3:28:31John Coogan?

  We'll let you get back out there.

• 3:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, come back on the show soon.

• 3:28:34John Coogan?

  Hold D dive. Should we bring in Augustus Ryan Peterson?

• 3:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's do Ryan Peterson.

• 3:28:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:28:38Jordi Hays?

  I told unless Ryan Augustus was on the schedule.

• 3:28:41John Coogan?

  Augustus, do you have to go or can we do Ryan for five minutes? Okay, wait, hold on for a minute. We got Ryan because I think he has another call. We'll bring you in in 10.

• 3:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Man.

• 3:28:49John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 3:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, we're still live. Ryan Peterson, welcome back to the show, third time.

• 3:28:54Speaker 26

  Treated like cattle.

• 3:28:55John Coogan?

  Yes, I know. It's really rough.

• 3:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Sorry about that.

• 3:28:58John Coogan?

  We're not A plus.

• 3:28:59Jordi Hays?

  You're still the guest of honor.

• 3:29:00John Coogan?

  We're iterating, we're learning, but how has your Hill and Valley experience been? How's your time in DC been?

• 3:29:06Jordi Hays?

  It's great. It's great to be in the capital.

• 3:29:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:08Jordi Hays?

  I haven't been here since January 6th. No, I'm just kidding. Bad joke.

• 3:29:15John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, you're in a very interesting business. Obviously, in the news, everyone has called you. You've done Mad Money. Wall Street Journal is calling you the most boring business that we need to know about or something like that. What is top of mind? What are you telling lawmakers that could change or could, you know, improve to? Like, what does a great outcome here look like in the next couple of years? What's your stump speech right now?

• 3:29:38Jordi Hays?

  Couple of years.

• 3:29:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, what's the next?

• 3:29:41Jordi Hays?

  A couple of days.

• 3:29:41John Coogan?

  You know, we worry about the next couple of weeks. What's on your mind?

• 3:29:45Jordi Hays?

  I don't think anyone cares what I think. I told them tariffs should come way down.

• 3:29:48John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 3:29:50Jordi Hays?

  What we've seen in our data is a 60% decline in freight from China to the US.

• 3:29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you unpack that? I heard something about like the the freight rates are actually high because they're not even their ships aren't even moving. Is that right?

• 3:30:01Jordi Hays?

  No, rates are pretty reasonably low right now. There's a risk of it going higher, like I think.

• 3:30:08Speaker 26

  It will be a first-class problem. If they undo the tariffs and a lot of volume comes through.

• 3:30:12John Coogan?

  Then it goes high.

• 3:30:13Speaker 26

  Then you'll see this spike.

• 3:30:14John Coogan?

  But if you're willing to pay the tariff, you have a really high margin, you can get stuff out of China right now.

• 3:30:19Speaker 26

  Yeah, it's a little bit so like, so you've had a 60% decline in bookings of ocean freight from China to the US.

• 3:30:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:30:24Speaker 26

  That's resulted in 25% decline of sailings.

• 3:30:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:30:29Speaker 26

  Ocean carriers pulled 25% of the ships, they're not sailing.

• 3:30:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:30:32Speaker 26

  So like, it's a little bit harder to get service.

• 3:30:34John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:30:35Speaker 26

  Because like, ships are getting canceled.

• 3:30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:37Speaker 26

  It's actually made bike sport more valuable because if you're booking directly with an ocean carrier, they might cancel the sailing.

• 3:30:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:43Speaker 26

  We'll find you a different one on a different carrier. We'll solve your problem.

• 3:30:46John Coogan?

  That's the value.

• 3:30:47Speaker 26

  So on some level, some of this like helps us a little bit, but I'm very worried for our customers that those are their businesses.

• 3:30:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:30:54Speaker 26

  60% decline, a lot of companies just deciding, opting out of the system.

• 3:30:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they can't, they can't necessarily move to a new manufacturer immediately, right?

• 3:31:02Delian Asparouhov?

  They didn't spend enough at the inauguration to get the exemption.

• 3:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 3:31:06Jordi Hays?

  What uh, what's been, what have you been hearing on the ground in China? It's, it's, it's hard to, 60% reduction in freight coming out of China is very bad for China, right? Like the, the, the sort of, the party can kind of spin that however they want. They have a lot of control over.

• 3:31:26Speaker 26

  Very bad for China, you're saying?

• 3:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, very bad, very bad for China. In an economy that was already bad, in an economy that had extremely high youth unemployment, have you heard anything from the, you know, I, I, you know, all the different groups that you interact with on, on that side of the pond?

• 3:31:43Speaker 26

  Um, definitely, yeah, I mean, it's bad for both parties, you know, you kind of have a game of chicken and there is an outcome where the cars are crashing each other and everybody dies. Uh, and so you hope somebody swerves and gets solved. I, my view of it, I don't have a lot of like inside intel here. It's certainly bad for factories.

• 3:32:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:32:02Speaker 26

  Uh, I just think China can withstand a lot more pain than America.

• 3:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Just due to the way the system works.

• 3:32:09Speaker 26

  Like the last hundred years of Chinese history, they like what is it, a couple percent of GDP decline? Like, oh my God, look at the history they've been through.

• 3:32:16John Coogan?

  They're ready for that.

• 3:32:16Speaker 26

  A little bit worse than that. Warlord era, like all these different famines and things that.

• 3:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Like pain is built into the culture.

• 3:32:24Speaker 26

  These are kind of, yeah, this will be a pretty small amount of pain for them to bear. American side were kind of soft. There's a lot more feedback mechanisms here.

• 3:32:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:33Speaker 26

  Trump, I had to say, is like an iron will.

• 3:32:39Speaker 26

  On a lot, you know, I don't like any of the policy. I don't like any of the tariff policy. There's other policies I, you know, would not what we're going to talk about right now. But I don't like any of, anything about the tariff policy and yet, got to have respect for this guy who's like, the whole world is, it's everyone against Trump.

• 3:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:54Speaker 26

  And he doesn't care.

• 3:32:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:56Speaker 26

  I would have this power.

• 3:32:58Jordi Hays?

  We, we've, you know, heard rumors that, that there's, you know, there's obviously just been a constant rumor mill rumors moving the market, trillions of dollars, uh, you know, in seconds. But, uh, is there any sense of optimism on the ground with, on the, with the politicians that you've been seeing this week?

• 3:33:16Speaker 26

  Um, I, I've, there's, let's just say, uh, there's a sentiment that tariffs, the tariff with China at 145 is not sustainable. It's not where they meant to be, not where they want to be. That it will come down.

• 3:33:32John Coogan?

  But there needs to be renegotiation around that.

• 3:33:34Speaker 26

  Unclear to me what they think the triggers are, so therefore the timeline for when it would come down.

• 3:33:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:39Speaker 26

  Or what it comes down to, because on the day of the reciprocal tariffs on April 2nd, when it was announced that China was at 54%. And that was already a shocker. Like that was the top of the list and the worst and the.

• 3:33:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:33:52Speaker 26

  Kind of, that's going to, and that's on top of the prior Trump administration.

• 3:33:55John Coogan?

  And the oil stuff that you mentioned.

• 3:33:58Speaker 26

  Venezuela, so like.

• 3:33:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:34:00Speaker 26

  Now that seems quaint and you're like, oh, let's get to 54. Well, I'll be, but 54 was also really bad for companies. So.

• 3:34:07John Coogan?

  If we play this out and there does wind up being a reindustrialization, more American manufacturing, maybe it's an automated facilities, what does the future of flexport and logistics look like? Is it more trucks and trains and automated trucking? What are you thinking about in like five, 10 years just to power a more efficient logistics system in the domestic lower 48?

• 3:34:30Speaker 26

  Oh, in domestic side? Yeah. I mean, we, we acquired convoy.

• 3:34:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:34:34Speaker 26

  Uh, so we have a truckload business. We do about 200,000 truckloads a year.

• 3:34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:38Speaker 26

  Uh, that is 98% automated.

• 3:34:40John Coogan?

  Really?

• 3:34:41Speaker 26

  It's amazing tech.

• 3:34:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:34:42Speaker 26

  98% of the loads, nobody does anything.

• 3:34:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:34:44Speaker 26

  On the human side. 2% need to have an exception managed.

• 3:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:48Speaker 26

  Yeah. Uh, so that is probably gonna, yeah, scale that thing like crazy. But by the way, the truckload business, if the tariffs keep going where they are, that's gonna collapse too. I mean, it's not really a counter.

• 3:34:59John Coogan?

  What are you trucking? You're trucking stuff that came off a boat.

• 3:35:01Speaker 26

  Yeah, exactly. Um, and they're not, this idea that it's gonna like lead to this manufacturing boom is kinda fake. Like, you know, I heard from a senator yesterday that said they do a lot of, they have a lot of, um, auto manufacturing in their state, that all the auto manufacturers have told them that if they don't get an exemption on parts, they're gonna go under. Well, they got an exemption on parts this morning.

• 3:35:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:35:19Speaker 26

  Or yesterday. So, well, hopefully these feedback loops are working and we don't just like kill. I knew that was gonna happen because you're like, they're not gonna let all the auto manufacturers.

• 3:35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 3:35:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. It's a, I mean, it's a bad situation.

• 3:35:34John Coogan?

  Chaotic time.

• 3:35:35Jordi Hays?

  If you have your, you know, team in Washington, you can get, get stuff done. And if, and if you're, you know, even if you employ a hundred people, you can't, it's hard to get your, you're still a tiny business in the eyes of everyone else. I mean, we were talking, Sean, Sean Frank had an interesting, uh, kind of, uh, policy, you know, recommendation or idea, which was like, basically take what I would have to pay in tariffs and make me invest it here in the U.S.

• 3:36:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:36:01Jordi Hays?

  So I can basically buy some time. Don't just come down with a, you know, just absolute hammer. Cause I can't, like, I can't set up a factory in three months, even if I wanted to spend, you know, a billion dollars.

• 3:36:12Speaker 26

  Yeah. They announced today that they would do, um,

• 3:36:18Speaker 26

  Allow you to expense 100% of CapEx if you're building a factory. This could be really big, like first year, straight line depreciate the entire amount of the build out. So you know, more policies like that might get the industrialization.

• 3:36:32John Coogan?

  Can you paint me a picture of who the, who the major power players are in DC? Are there trade organizations that are doing stuff here? We've seen some of the different, like the longshoremen's union. Are they, do they have a view on this? Are there different organizations and leaders who are championing the, the, these causes?

• 3:36:53Speaker 26

  Representing business?

• 3:36:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like you are honestly one of the champions of like the e-commerce community.

• 3:36:59Speaker 26

  Trying to do that on behalf of our customers.

• 3:37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, on behalf of your customers, but are there other more official organizations?

• 3:37:04Speaker 26

  I'm sure there are. N R F, National Retail Federation is typically the, the main channel for this. There's a few others I'm not that familiar with.

• 3:37:13John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:37:14Speaker 26

  The big CEOs are going direct. I mean, you've seen they seem like they roll at the White House.

• 3:37:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:37:20Speaker 26

  The, but yeah, not really much of a voice for small business out there. So we're trying to do that. I'm sure there's all kinds of lobbyists. You, you mentioned the longshoremen, so the ILWU is the West Coast Sports Union. They came out opposed to tariffs last week.

• 3:37:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:37:33Speaker 26

  ILA endorsed Trump and they have not come out against this. Yeah, so ILA is the East and Gulf Coast Sports Union, the ones that went on strike last September.

• 3:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:42Jordi Hays?

  But, but much less affected.

• 3:37:43Speaker 26

  The guy, I will cripple you.

• 3:37:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but isn't there, aren't they much less affected because it's not trade with?

• 3:37:49Speaker 26

  A lot of trade, uh, no, a lot of, um, a lot of the East Coast trade comes through the Panama Canal. Or through the, it used to be through the Suez, but around the Cape of Africa right now. So yeah, I mean, they gotta be opposed to this. It's bad for their business, but Trump, you know, helped them get there.

• 3:38:05John Coogan?

  Is the talk around the Panama Canal beneficial to trade long-term? If that happens, whatever Trump was talking about, like taking more control there, not letting China grab it?

• 3:38:14Speaker 26

  That is, so.

• 3:38:16John Coogan?

  It felt like it kind of fell out of the news because the tariffs are so much bigger.

• 3:38:19Speaker 26

  The crazy thing about Trump is that a lot of these stories of things that he's done or said or actions would be like the story of the year. Yeah. For like a normal presidency and they can't last two days.

• 3:38:29John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 3:38:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have 20 current things at once.

• 3:38:33Speaker 26

  Yep. Um, the media can't keep up. The Democrats definitely can't keep up. None of us can keep up.

• 3:38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's wild.

• 3:38:39Speaker 26

  The Panama one.

• 3:38:42Speaker 26

  Was they're trying to get them to the two port, the ports on either end, it's not the canal itself, but the ports on either end owned by Lee Ka Ching.

• 3:38:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:38:49Speaker 26

  Hong Kong based billionaire, richest man in Hong Kong. He went to sell it, the Chinese blocked the sale.

• 3:38:56John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:38:57Speaker 26

  Which I think I've seen that the Trump administration argued that the very act of the Chinese being able to block the sale is a potential violation of the treaty by which the US handed over the canal zone to Panama.

• 3:39:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:39:13Speaker 26

  Now they're threatening, maybe we'll invade Panama again and take it over. I don't think anyone wants to see that happen.

• 3:39:20John Coogan?

  Okay, that's interesting.

• 3:39:21Speaker 26

  It doesn't, I don't think from an efficiency standard, that's really relevant. I'm sure there's national security reasons.

• 3:39:26John Coogan?

  Stuff's going through.

• 3:39:27Jordi Hays?

  What have you heard about even, I saw a story about iPhone suppliers not being able to get equipment out of China, did you see anything about that?

• 3:39:36Speaker 26

  Oh.

• 3:39:37Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that, is that not even surprising?

• 3:39:39Speaker 26

  I didn't follow it very closely, I'm not sure.

• 3:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, just kind of an, you know, there's, there's, you know, the idea that we would decouple even the iPhone supply chain from China without sort of inward pressure from China.

• 3:39:54Speaker 26

  Couple of things I heard here in DC is that they, like senior people, shall not be named, have said that 145% is a decoupling rate. If they understand that, that at that tariff level, these economies will decouple.

• 3:40:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:40:09Speaker 26

  And that's evidenced now with the 60% decline in bookings, like basically instantly.

• 3:40:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:40:13Speaker 26

  And that that's not where they want to be, they do not intend to do a decoupling.

• 3:40:17John Coogan?

  It's more strategic decoupling.

• 3:40:18Speaker 26

  In a dramatic fashion, on such a short time scale, etc. So I think that that speaks to like, and Trump has said as much, that they're going to lower the tariff rates, it's just a question of when and how low do they go is the big, those are massive variables. My view is that when it needs to happen, almost right away, I don't, like, if they last a couple, if they wait a couple of months, I think you're going to have huge fallout and damage to the economy and small business going, getting wiped out and employment and all that stuff. Inflation.

• 3:40:48Speaker 26

  How low, I don't really have a good read on that, like, at what level is, no one's gonna tell you honestly.

• 3:40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 3:40:56Speaker 26

  Bloomberg asked me this morning, what level, I'm like, 0%.

• 3:40:59John Coogan?

  0%.

• 3:41:00Speaker 26

  Don't ask me, I'm a free trade guy.

• 3:41:02John Coogan?

  You know my business.

• 3:41:03Speaker 26

  So, I don't know what level it needs to be for business. I don't think anyone really knows though, like, these models are super complex.

• 3:41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. And there's all these second and third order facts.

• 3:41:10Speaker 26

  Yeah, like, it's really hard to predict.

• 3:41:12John Coogan?

  We'll have to keep tracking it.

• 3:41:13Speaker 26

  And then you have, like, what's the dynamic by which Trump can walk this back?

• 3:41:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:41:17Speaker 26

  Like, I think you need to scapegoat.

• 3:41:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:19Speaker 26

  You need to find someone and blame them.

• 3:41:21John Coogan?

  Blame them.

• 3:41:22Jordi Hays?

  We should find somebody from the event. There's gotta be one guy. There's gotta be one guy. They're probably here.

• 3:41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:27Jordi Hays?

  Delian, Delian?

• 3:41:28John Coogan?

  It's your fault.

• 3:41:29Jordi Hays?

  You gotta do something for the country right now.

• 3:41:31John Coogan?

  Delian's like, "I'm only interested in space, actually."

• 3:41:34John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. This is fantastic.

• 3:41:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm, uh, I want the tariffs to end so you can get a good night's sleep.

• 3:41:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:41:42Jordi Hays?

  You deserve it.

• 3:41:42John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's bring in Augustus Doricko. Welcome to the stream, Augustus. Third time, another third timer on the show, Augustus.

• 3:41:52Augustus Doricko?

  How's it going, Doc?

• 3:41:52John Coogan?

  Welcome, how you doing?

• 3:41:53Jordi Hays?

  The hair's looking amazing.

• 3:41:55John Coogan?

  Thank you for the weather. It's fantastic. Not too hot, not too cold. I feel like you pulled some strings.

• 3:42:00Augustus Doricko?

  The pleasure's mine.

• 3:42:01John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 3:42:02Jordi Hays?

  We got here and we were like, uh, I was making a joke, I was like, wow, our politicians, the swamp would set up in one of the nicest climates I've been in in a while.

• 3:42:12John Coogan?

  I was like, it's normally terrible.

• 3:42:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm here on like, we're here on like, the one nice week of the year.

• 3:42:17Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the, with big fluffy cumulus clouds, beautiful cumulus clouds.

• 3:42:21Jordi Hays?

  Love the cloud seeding should we want.

• 3:42:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:42:24Jordi Hays?

  Have you been, you've been here in DC a lot less than random state legislatures, you know, capitals?

• 3:42:32Augustus Doricko?

  Um, yeah, I mean, for those that don't know, there were, we're up to 33 states that proposed a weather modification.

• 3:42:37John Coogan?

  33?

• 3:42:38Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 3:42:39Augustus Doricko?

  However, uh, 18 of those bills were either dropped, amended to carve out cloud seeding, and still ban chemtrails, which is gonna be crazy. Cause those bills will pass and then people will still see chemtrails.

• 3:42:51John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:42:52Augustus Doricko?

  Uh, or, Montana, great case, we showed up there, we're like, hey, cloud seeding's pretty cool, huh? And then they funded a program.

• 3:42:58John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 3:42:59Augustus Doricko?

  So, yeah, yeah, we'll be expanding there. But, um, the folks in DC that we met with, they all are way more... Level-headed and just say like, "Hey, we're not going to concern ourselves with the whole QAnon thing. Cloud seeding seems like a great water supply tool. I'd love to start working on report language, etc., etc."

• 3:43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 3:43:18Jordi Hays?

  How much is water scarcity a factor in re-industrialization? I mean, even last week, we were talking about how the oil, the water demands of oil production, and just how absolutely insane they are. Not to mention, they end up with a bunch of water that they don't really know what to do with. They're trying to evaporate. But how much is that a kind of a factor? And what kind of conversations have you been having here at the event?

• 3:43:48Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, you know, Jensen gave his speech earlier today, right? And I think a lot of people intuitively...

• 3:43:53Jordi Hays?

  You're holding this?

• 3:43:54Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, sorry. A lot of people intuitively talk about how energy is this like fundamental primitive in all industrialization. So are critical minerals. So is now intelligence and human capital. Water, because nobody has ever had any ability to like work on it and provide new supply, has kind of just been this assumed limitation. It's going to be necessary to produce more. Should we want to build up this industrial base? Should we want to increase ag production? Particularly like the TSMC plant in Arizona? Nobody knows where the water for that's going to come from.

• 3:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 3:44:26Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, yeah, like you need it to come from either the mountains in Flagstaff or the Colorado River. And the only way to get it, there's cloud seeding.

• 3:44:33John Coogan?

  There are crazy stories about the water at TSMC. If it's slightly saltier, it affects like the yield of chips and stuff. It's like total alchemy.

• 3:44:40Augustus Doricko?

  Oh, yeah, no, it's magic, dude. It's like, there's all these aerospace parts. CP talks about this all the time. Like, yeah, like there's some parts made in Michigan.

• 3:44:47John Coogan?

  Chris Power?

• 3:44:48Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah. That people...

• 3:44:50Jordi Hays?

  C3PO.

• 3:44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:54John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 3:44:54Augustus Doricko?

  And it's like, yeah, there's like a little bit more of whatever in the water in Michigan. And without it, then you can't make like the lubricant.

• 3:45:01John Coogan?

  Same thing with the tap water in New York. Makes a good pizza and bagels, right?

• 3:45:05Augustus Doricko?

  Exactly.

• 3:45:06John Coogan?

  Isn't that the rumor? Jordy won't touch it, but...

• 3:45:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the tap water in DC is rough.

• 3:45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's not a fan.

• 3:45:11Jordi Hays?

  Not a fan.

• 3:45:11John Coogan?

  He's not a fan. Anyway.

• 3:45:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bring us into some of the other conversations that you've been having here at the event. What's exciting? Um, it, it, uh, yeah, walk us through that.

• 3:45:24Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah. I mean, I think for one, um, deepening our collaboration with the Middle East, right? Like it's no secret. People talk about the Trump admin and how close they are to MBS, to the Emirates and otherwise. Um, I think that because that country is very seriously like enacting this vision for a crazy future, for greening Saudi Arabia, for billions and billions poured into AI. Um, one, they're a great capital partner for a lot of like the tech ecosystem that wants to like grow out of its nascent and deploy, but also I think they like make us look in the mirror about what's possible. Um, so talking to people that have been doing work there, that's exciting. Talking about how we're collaborating in the Middle East. That's a big deal. Um, what's the name of that? Like regulatory portal? You like submit a paragraph and it's like,

• 3:46:08Augustus Doricko?

  get rid of this regulation, please.

• 3:46:10John Coogan?

  Oh, Doge dot.

• 3:46:12Augustus Doricko?

  No, no, no.

• 3:46:13John Coogan?

  Bitcoin or something.

• 3:46:14Augustus Doricko?

  It's like, it's like the FTC has something. Um, and you just go like, yeah, get rid of this. And if they accept your.

• 3:46:19John Coogan?

  I think you just tweeted Elon, actually, if you want.

• 3:46:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please fix Gary Tan.

• 3:46:24John Coogan?

  Please, please, they add Gary Tan. I think that does it usually.

• 3:46:27Augustus Doricko?

  Exactly. Uh, if you get it approved, though, they name the like new regulation after you.

• 3:46:32John Coogan?

  Okay. So you want to do that? That's good. Uh, speaking of like national regulation, is there any, uh, obviously the first time we met, you talked about China, um, planting trees and terraforming the Gobi Desert. Uh, is that, is there any world where that becomes like a national policy or do you still do you need to go state by state?

• 3:46:48Augustus Doricko?

  No, dude. So, uh, Secretary Burgum gave us these great remarks this morning, um, about how all of our federal lands should be considered a national asset.

• 3:46:57John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 3:46:58Augustus Doricko?

  Totally makes sense.

• 3:46:58John Coogan?

  And we probably have, I think of federal lands as like the forests and like, you know, uh, Yosemite, but there's probably a federal land that's desert, right?

• 3:47:07Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, no, there's tons of, tons, tons. Yeah. Millions of them.

• 3:47:10John Coogan?

  Why don't we just convert this into the next Yellowstone?

• 3:47:12Augustus Doricko?

  Exactly.

• 3:47:13John Coogan?

  Create a Yellowstone club.

• 3:47:14Augustus Doricko?

  Dude, like next Yellowstone, which would be sweet, or also more timberlands, which you can harvest.

• 3:47:18John Coogan?

  Or farmland.

• 3:47:19Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, exactly. So like all of the, or just give it to Teddy and have him tear it all up and strip mine it or something. That's also fine with me as long as you have a proportionate amount of new Yellowstone's.

• 3:47:29John Coogan?

  Wait, who's Teddy?

• 3:47:29Augustus Doricko?

  Feldman?

• 3:47:30John Coogan?

  Oh, Feldman. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. From Durin. Yeah. Makes sense.

• 3:47:32Augustus Doricko?

  Sorry, Gundo brain.

• 3:47:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Everyone's on first name basis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really not doing a lot for the listeners at home might not be familiar with the inner workings of the Gundo politics.

• 3:47:44Jordi Hays?

  Where are you headed next? Back to the Gundo?

• 3:47:46Augustus Doricko?

  Uh, I get on a midnight flight back to Gundale.

• 3:47:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:47:48Augustus Doricko?

  I'm gonna interview a bunch of scientists.

• 3:47:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:47:50Augustus Doricko?

  And then I get on a midnight flight tomorrow to Florida. And then on Sunday, I go.

• 3:47:55John Coogan?

  By the way, most brutal flying midnight. You land at like 3 a.m. It's the worst and then you're back on an overnight. And the overnight to Florida is terrible because it's only five hours.

• 3:48:05Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:06John Coogan?

  So you can't even get a full night's sleep.

• 3:48:07Augustus Doricko?

  You get cooked. Well, I did Salt Lake to DC this morning.

• 3:48:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:48:10Augustus Doricko?

  First of all, flew into Dulles, huge mistake.

• 3:48:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:13Augustus Doricko?

  But on the flip side, my row was empty, so I laid down.

• 3:48:16John Coogan?

  Oh, you laid down, slept. That's great. Okay, good. There you go. You gotta get those points out. Well, hopefully you can get some sleep. Hopefully you can, uh, make it through those flights. Uh, we appreciate you stopping by. Thanks so much.

• 3:48:26Augustus Doricko?

  Thanks for coming on. Great to see you.

• 3:48:26John Coogan?

  This is always good to have you on.

• 3:48:27Augustus Doricko?

  Um.

• 3:48:29John Coogan?

  Sure, of course.

• 3:48:30Augustus Doricko?

  Hey, thank you.

• 3:48:31John Coogan?

  You can take this whole tin. There you go. There you go, man. What a guy, what a guy. Yeah, yeah, I still got it, sorry. Uh, anyway, should we bring in the next guest? Who do we have? I know we got a couple of folks here. Let's bring them down. How you doing? I met you, the last Hillen Valley.

• 3:48:45Speaker 27

  Yes.

• 3:48:45John Coogan?

  Uh, welcome, welcome to the stream. Jordy, good to be here. Would you mind, uh, doing an intro for the, for the viewers? Uh, introduce yourself, the company, what do you do? Hey, grab the microphone. Hillen Valley. Yeah, grab, yeah, grab it like this. And then just hold it like you're giving a speech at the most important event at Hillen Valley.

• 3:49:04Speaker 27

  Awesome. Well, thanks again for having me. Good to see you again.

• 3:49:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:07Speaker 27

  Uh, so I'm J.C. Peta, I'm the founder and CEO of Fuse.

• 3:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:10Speaker 27

  Our, uh, fusion company working to accelerate the worst transition to fusion energy.

• 3:49:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:49:15Speaker 27

  While also safeguarding humankind. So it turns out if you try to create an artificial sun on Earth in a bottle

• 3:49:21John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:49:22Speaker 27

  And use a lightning bolt to implode a pellet of fuel.

• 3:49:24John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:49:24Speaker 27

  That's really useful also to ensuring the safety, reliability of our nuclear arsenal.

• 3:49:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:49:31Speaker 27

  And so we're, you know, very committed to, uh, continuing to help the US modernize its nuclear arsenal and being, uh, offering radiation.

• 3:49:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:39Speaker 27

  As a service.

• 3:49:40John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, when we talked, it was fascinating because you were much more commercialized than most other nuclear founders that you talked to who are more in the, let's get all these approvals, let's build a big thing. Uh, what has that commercialization been like? And can you concretize the actual product that you're selling and to who?

• 3:49:55Speaker 27

  Yeah, yeah, so, uh. We have customers both in the US government and two, you know, public companies. Sure. And we've built two machines that are operating today. One is the world's highest power energy delivery system. We call it Titan and we published. It's one terawatt, but for billions of a seconds. One terawatt, wow. But for billions of a second, it's twenty word of the whole, twenty percent of the whole world power production. Yeah. But it's just for billions of a second. Yes. And it's not a fusion machine. Okay. It's just an energy delivery system. Sure. But it creates pulses of radiation. Yes. That are so intense. Yeah. And then you can expose electronics or materials and see how they behave. Okay.

• 3:50:38Speaker 27

  So you're creating hostile environments similar to what would happen in, you know, human-made hostile environments and expose electronics, materials to those types of radiation, whether it's X-ray neutrons. Yeah. And see how they would behave. Yeah. That's really critical to ensuring, you know, reliability, safety of critical assets in space. Interesting. As well as now conventional systems. Okay. Um, and I don't know if you saw last week, but there was an announcement that the US will be spending nine hundred forty-six billion over the next ten years to modernize the arsenal. And it's twenty-five percent increase in budget since twenty twenty-three. So it's a big deal. Yeah. And by, you know, producing this radiation and reducing the dollar per rad

• 3:51:23Speaker 27

  and, you know, the availability of radiation, we can, you know, save taxpayers billions of dollars while offering radiation as a service.

• 3:51:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk about the energy requirements of re-industrialization, which is the theme of Hill and Valley. I think a big question is like, okay, where's, where's the power going to come from? Even if you're not looking at AI or a lot of the conversations that you're having here around, uh, with some of these bigger, you know, companies that, that want to come back to the US, but want to make sure that they're able to, you know, have the energy and infrastructure to actually thrive here.

• 3:51:58Speaker 27

  Yeah, it's a really challenging problem. I love the quote from Jensen today where 1 gigawatt is like $60 billion and it's the annual revenue of Boeing.

• 3:52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:08Speaker 27

  Yeah, that's clearly not going to work out very well. The good thing about fusion, you know, the first thing I'll say, which may be a bit controversial, but fusion is still like, we're still far from commercializing it.

• 3:52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:20Speaker 27

  It's still probably going to take a decade or two to actually put electrons on the grid.

• 3:52:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:24Speaker 27

  But it's still really important and we can't afford for another country to get there first.

• 3:52:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:29Speaker 27

  Yeah. But the good thing about fusion is that it's location independent. So you can put it anywhere you want, right?

• 3:52:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:36Speaker 27

  The fuel is hydrogen, which can be found in seawater.

• 3:52:39John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:52:39Speaker 27

  So you can literally take a data center and build a fusion plant right next to it and not have to integrate with the grid.

• 3:52:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:46Speaker 27

  And I think fusion being, you know, safe, clean, abundant, on-demand makes a really appealing case for industrials because you can build a power plant right next to your industrial plant, whether it's data center,

• 3:52:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:59Speaker 27

  a steel factory, glass factory,

• 3:53:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:01Speaker 27

  etc. But, and when you think about, you know, the changes that have happened over, you know, industrialization, you know, there's been no new nuclear facility built in decades.

• 3:53:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:13Speaker 27

  So the workforce, it actually knows how to build, it's gone.

• 3:53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:17Speaker 27

  Whereas like China is building dozens of plants and we've seen satellite imagery recently that's become open source on exactly our footprint of our facility being built. And so we just cannot afford for China to become for fusion what Saudi Arabia has become for oil.

• 3:53:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:33Speaker 27

  And that's a really critical.

• 3:53:34John Coogan?

  So is that, is that the long-term business plan for you? Like find commercial applications today that advances the R and D pipeline for ultimately Q greater than one fusion production that can be grid scale?

• 3:53:46Speaker 27

  Yeah, great. So, so you know, Q greater than one, all this stuff, it's great, like pat on the back.

• 3:53:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:51Speaker 27

  Good for you, you may do it, but ultimately it's, how much does it cost?

• 3:53:54John Coogan?

  Yes, Q engineering or.

• 3:53:56Speaker 27

  Yeah, well, Q commercial.

• 3:53:57John Coogan?

  Q commercial, I guess.

• 3:53:58Speaker 27

  Right? And, and also reliability, like if fusion is not a base load power, which means it's running. Ninety nine point nine percent of the time. How is it really competitive with other sources?

• 3:54:08John Coogan?

  So you're doing one billionth of a second now and you need to get to twenty four seven.

• 3:54:12Speaker 27

  Yeah.

• 3:54:13John Coogan?

  So you're just, you're just ten doubles away, I guess.

• 3:54:15Speaker 27

  Well, we just need to increase the rep rate. So we'll still be pulse, but just increasing the repetition rate.

• 3:54:20John Coogan?

  And that's, that's the thing with fusion, because even helium is like pulsed, right? That's the idea.

• 3:54:25Speaker 27

  And our pulser today actually operates at point one hertz frequency.

• 3:54:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:54:29Speaker 27

  But we still blow up the chamber and that's still something to work on. But the good thing is, you know, the way we say it is radiation as a service. As we're getting paid today to produce more radiation. The cheaper the radiation, the higher our margins. And the more we fire, the more money we make. So we're getting paid to optimize our radiation service and radiation is ultimately energy.

• 3:54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:54:49Speaker 27

  And so we're getting, you know, we're building a sustainable business to get to the sustainable future that we all want. And there's a massive, multi-billion dollar business to be built along the way, which is what, you know, a lot of our investors on the road.

• 3:55:02John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 3:55:02Speaker 27

  To get this.

• 3:55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, where, where is the business now? How many employees? How big?

• 3:55:06Speaker 27

  Yeah, so, so we have around fifty people now. We've got a couple of millions in revenue.

• 3:55:11John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 3:55:11Speaker 27

  We're on active contracts supporting.

• 3:55:13John Coogan?

  It's very rare for fusion companies. Congrats. It's very cool. Yeah, thinking outside the box.

• 3:55:18Speaker 27

  And yeah, so we're still, we're still humming.

• 3:55:21John Coogan?

  Well, good luck to you. Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you have a fantastic rest of Hill and Valley. We'll see you out on the floor. Yeah, we'll see you, we'll see you later. You got anyone else? Uh, yeah, Eric Torrenberg wants to stop by. Uh, talk about group chats. Eric, get in here. Get over here. I, I have a bone to pick with you. I saw you, you posted that you started a new group chat and I'm not in it. Oh, don't worry. I was so looking forward to getting added to something where a bunch of people are yapping and I have to put it on mute because. I wanted to be one of the smart people. Yeah, no, I learned my lesson. The next one, I'm yapping so egregiously that I definitely get in the hit piece.

• 3:55:55Erik Torenberg?

  You will, you'll be, you will be invited. You know, they can kill Chatham House, but they can't kill the idea. It's going to resurge again. Of course, it's still, it's still running. You know, even if the world had a nuclear war.

• 3:56:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:56:07Erik Torenberg?

  Mark Cuban and Brian Goldberg would still be there every day.

• 3:56:10John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, do good it out.

• 3:56:12Erik Torenberg?

  Do good it out.

• 3:56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have we gotten to the bottom of who Ben Smith is? It sounds like a generic name, it sounds like a fake alias. It's something that you see on a lot of fake IDs from, you know, high school students that are trying to buy beer. I'd love, I don't want, I'm not a big fan of doxing, but I'd love to get to the bottom of who this man really is.

• 3:56:29Erik Torenberg?

  Ben Smith, who, you know, doxed the group chat.

• 3:56:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:56:31Erik Torenberg?

  He is-

• 3:56:32John Coogan?

  That doesn't mean that we should dox him, but I want to know personally, I'm not going to share it.

• 3:56:35Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, no, I agree.

• 3:56:36John Coogan?

  Who is, who is Ben Smith really?

• 3:56:38Erik Torenberg?

  I think he's saying anon for now.

• 3:56:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:56:39Erik Torenberg?

  I want to respect that.

• 3:56:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:56:41Erik Torenberg?

  You know, he- That's very kind. I follow the paradoxical commandments, you know, even if people don't, even if people dox you, you don't dox them.

• 3:56:46John Coogan?

  Don't dox them back, that's smart.

• 3:56:47Erik Torenberg?

  We'll keep his identity private, but I do know that as an anon, he did publish the Steele dossier.

• 3:56:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 3:56:53Erik Torenberg?

  While he was at BuzzFeed. And I also know that he apologizes.

• 3:56:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:56:58Erik Torenberg?

  Or he almost regrets it.

• 3:56:59John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:57:00Erik Torenberg?

  Which to me is as good as an apology, and I believe that people can grow and change.

• 3:57:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:04Erik Torenberg?

  And so I'm proud of him.

• 3:57:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:57:06Erik Torenberg?

  Because- There you go.

• 3:57:07John Coogan?

  So, uh, yeah, any other lessons from the, from the story, from group chats? Where's the future? What, what, what's next?

• 3:57:14Erik Torenberg?

  Well, I think, you know, I got a lot of people emailing me being like, uh, you know, people like I play pickup basketball with, they don't even know, being like, "How could you platform Tucker Carlson?"

• 3:57:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:57:24Erik Torenberg?

  Like, "How could you do it?"

• 3:57:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:25Erik Torenberg?

  Like, how, and I'm like, "I'm sorry." You know, first off, I regret to inform you that Tucker Carlson's pretty big already.

• 3:57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:30Erik Torenberg?

  And also, it's a private group chat, so I'm not sure exactly how I'm platforming Tucker Carlson. But, um, so a lot of people are angry that people are getting together-

• 3:57:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:57:38Erik Torenberg?

  And having conversations.

• 3:57:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:40Erik Torenberg?

  But, um, you know, we're going to keep doing it.

• 3:57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:43Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. We're going to keep doing it. Um, you know- I'm not leaving.

• 3:57:46John Coogan?

  I'm not leaving.

• 3:57:47Erik Torenberg?

  The goal was to have a left-right exchange, and we're going to keep-

• 3:57:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was the original debate.

• 3:57:51Erik Torenberg?

  We're going to keep trying to, to make it together. I invite more of my friends-

• 3:57:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:55Erik Torenberg?

  Uh, on the left and the right to, uh, to be a part of it. And, um-

• 3:57:58John Coogan?

  You haven't gotten any emails, "Well, how could you platform Mike, uh, Mark Cuban?"

• 3:58:02Erik Torenberg?

  Well, no, I didn't, I didn't get emails that, but I got DMs every day-

• 3:58:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:58:05Erik Torenberg?

  Uh, while Chatham House was going of like, "Why is Mark Cuban here?"

• 3:58:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's good. It's an anti-echo chamber.

• 3:58:10Erik Torenberg?

  And how does he have so much time to chat every day? And my theory is that the pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is being a poster.

• 3:58:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:58:18Erik Torenberg?

  Once you've truly made it, then you could just post all day.

• 3:58:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:58:21Erik Torenberg?

  We have this ongoing fight with Antonio Garcia Martinez,

• 3:58:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:58:24Erik Torenberg?

  who now we should call Antonio Gracias, the Valor guy, because he's always getting mistaken for him.

• 3:58:29John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 3:58:29Jordi Hays?

  I know. It is. It is funny.

• 3:58:31Erik Torenberg?

  He should just own it.

• 3:58:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Just rename.

• 3:58:34Jordi Hays?

  Antonio Gracias.

• 3:58:37Erik Torenberg?

  Because they're like, great speech today when he did the Doge thing.

• 3:58:40John Coogan?

  Oh, talk to him. That's hilarious.

• 3:58:42Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, you should have him on and just like talk about the...

• 3:58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should have them both on. We're thinking about doing, you know, you get both of the, you know, both the apologies on.

• 3:58:50Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 3:58:51John Coogan?

  Both the Sri Rams on. There's four Kevin Jangs. We're gonna get all them on.

• 3:58:55Erik Torenberg?

  So we have this bit with Antonio where he's like, as soon as I'm rich, I'm getting out of this.

• 3:58:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:58:59Erik Torenberg?

  Like, as soon as I'm richer, and he just always comes up with, as soon as I'm like, you know, much richer, I'm getting out of group chats.

• 3:59:05John Coogan?

  Retiring from talking.

• 3:59:06Erik Torenberg?

  And of course, you know, Mark Adreson's in the group, all these other people who, you know, have done phenomenally well and are just posting all day. And he's like, they're like, you'll never leave.

• 3:59:13John Coogan?

  This is the best.

• 3:59:13Erik Torenberg?

  In fact, you'll step it up.

• 3:59:15John Coogan?

  You'll step it up.

• 3:59:16Erik Torenberg?

  So I think the demand is there. I think the supply is there, and we're gonna, we're gonna keep doing it.

• 3:59:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think these groups...

• 3:59:22Jordi Hays?

  So I have to say, I mean, I think people don't realize like how much work everybody, whatever, four years ago was like, everybody should have a community. And then you had companies making Slacks or Discords or things like that. And it just takes like a massive amount of work to sustain chats. Like, we talked about last time you were on the show, the sort of like admin lift, like there's a software solution, but then there's like cultivating and there's like selecting, like who should be in a group and all these different things. And it's actually, makes so much sense to have a third party like do that, not have it just be on one member. One day they might wake up and they don't want to do it anymore, but should the group die? It's like, no, the group should be able to live on. And so having a...

• 3:59:58John Coogan?

  What's the ideal size? Are you, uh, Dave Morin had Path. It was 150. What's that Dunbar's number? I think Chatham House got up to like 330.

• 4:00:07Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:00:08John Coogan?

  Well, Jayden got too big. What are your best practices?

• 4:00:11Erik Torenberg?

  Jayden got too big. I think, you know, dozens of spinoff groups have formed.

• 4:00:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:00:15Erik Torenberg?

  And it's like 10, 20, 30.

• 4:00:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:00:17Erik Torenberg?

  I think it's a... It's a good question. I will say I'm a bit of a street group chatter. Shriram and ACZ, these are academic. They have a rigorous operation. They have community managers. I'm excited to lead, co-lead this operation with it with a niche. Now that Shriram has left and so I'm excited to get support on the moderation side and to come back out, you know. This is a blow to Chatham House, but we will be back.

• 4:00:41John Coogan?

  Rebuilding.

• 4:00:41Erik Torenberg?

  We will rebuild.

• 4:00:42Jordi Hays?

  No, it's still there. It's still there. You still see Mark. You still see Brian. They pop up.

• 4:00:48Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 4:00:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm doing the show. I'm like, what are they fighting about? We should probably talk about it on the show.

• 4:00:53Erik Torenberg?

  Exactly. I'm willing to say publicly that, you know, so nobody kill, except this anon guy Ben Smith.

• 4:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:00:59Erik Torenberg?

  Who I, I.

• 4:01:00John Coogan?

  We'll get to the bottom of it.

• 4:01:01Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, exactly. We'll get to the bottom at some point. But outside of that, you know. But I will say even before that, it was getting too big.

• 4:01:08John Coogan?

  You sure?

• 4:01:08Erik Torenberg?

  And I will also say that on the record that nobody killed Chatham House, but Brian Goldberg did kill Chatham House. A little, a little bit. I love Brian Goldberg.

• 4:01:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I actually learned a lot from him.

• 4:01:18Erik Torenberg?

  But he's very active.

• 4:01:18John Coogan?

  Sharing like his business experience and I, I was unaware of him as a founder or a business operator before and, and the other, the other names were kind of, okay, I already know their, their bit and I know their shtick and.

• 4:01:29Erik Torenberg?

  No, no.

• 4:01:30John Coogan?

  So it was interesting.

• 4:01:31Erik Torenberg?

  I love how outspoken he is. He's also a media tycoon.

• 4:01:33John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 4:01:34Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. In the women's space.

• 4:01:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I own fashion magazines. I own fashion magazines. I don't, I don't know.

• 4:01:38Erik Torenberg?

  I was like, how did Tara respect your business? He's like, well, we have some advertisers.

• 4:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He broke that down very interestingly.

• 4:01:44Erik Torenberg?

  He's brought a lot to it and, um, yeah.

• 4:01:46John Coogan?

  Very cool. Anything else?

• 4:01:47Jordi Hays?

  What, what do you, uh, what's exciting so far about Hill and Valley? Is it nice to, it must be nice to be at an event or like a social community thing that you didn't put together yourself?

• 4:01:57Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, yeah. And I was just at the American Diamond Summit last month and that was fantastic too. And this is also fantastic. I mean, I think it's just, um, amazing how, how, how big this space is. I will say it's like, and you guys have covered on the show, but it's like, um. This is like the new Silicon Valley and I feel like when Paul Graham made that Palantir tweet, it was like a clash between sort of old Silicon Valley and, and new Silicon Valley. And it's interesting to just sort of see. Not just the new people that have emerged, but sort of the new ideas around building companies. Like it's not just sort of make something people want and just talk to customers. And just built something in a day and

• 4:02:30John Coogan?

  Maybe he's right. Maybe there'll be a cracked founding team, ex andoral, ex palantir, digital ads. Digital ad startup.

• 4:02:37Jordi Hays?

  One thing that comes to mind, we had Mike Solana earlier on the show and and he was basically talking about how like Ezra Klein's whole abundance, you know, theory and ideas like a lot of the stuff that he had, you know, was like

• 4:02:52John Coogan?

  All these were Silicon Valley ideas.

• 4:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Like this idea of charter cities and, you know, energy production and all these things. So I think we're all on the same team. That's what I just appreciate about Hill and Valley. Like the number one

• 4:03:06Jordi Hays?

  person on the Hill side of the event is that gets brought up is Chris Torres.

• 4:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Democrat and I think people associate, you know, a lot of these different characters with the right, but so many of these issues are just American issues.

• 4:03:20Erik Torenberg?

  A hundred percent. Matt Iglesias, who was a Chatham House member for, I think, a week before he just decided to leave and I'm a fan of him. He tweeted a platform for the Democratic Party and David Sacks quote tweeted and said, this is conservatism. So there does seem to be a lot of convergence. I love what Derek and Ezra are doing with with abundance, sort of bringing free market economics to the left in a, in a way that is palatable and accessible. It's more nuanced than that, of course, but yeah, there seems to be a convergence happening. And if we have a sort of both parties, you know, being more moderate, moving to the middle, you know,

• 4:03:57John Coogan?

  I think the future of American politics is something I'm calling like far centrism or alt center. Just, just the most extreme centrism. This is the future.

• 4:04:07Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 4:04:08John Coogan?

  Just being really extreme about it. Unless, unless there's representation by both houses, we have a split split House and Senate, I'm not happy.

• 4:04:17Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, it is, um, it is really interesting.

• 4:04:21Jordi Hays?

  How much time are you expecting personally to stay in Washington? You have a lot of places you could spend any time. Is it an area that?

• 4:04:28Erik Torenberg?

  We, we, um, you know, is my second week on the job. We have a robust DC operation. And I want us to tell that story a bit more and help. So we're going to do a policy podcast. And so, so I want to spend more time here and also bring on people who are really at the intersection of

• 4:04:45John Coogan?

  It does seem like it fits really like they, like we were talking about this like lobbying adjacent VC activity, introductions to people on Capitol Hill. That feels like It definitely fits into the Andreessen machinery.

• 4:04:56Erik Torenberg?

  Totally.

• 4:04:57John Coogan?

  Of like, hey, if you're doing enterprise sales, like they'll set you up with a bunch of people.

• 4:05:00Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 4:05:00John Coogan?

  PR was often something they were very, very good at, even hiring, you know, find your VP of engineering.

• 4:05:06Erik Torenberg?

  Totally.

• 4:05:06John Coogan?

  Uh, doing some light lobbying, maybe not being a lobbying firm or, but introducing to the right things. Making sure if there's a government relations organization, you know how to build it.

• 4:05:15Erik Torenberg?

  And I love that we're also collaborative on this because it just moves the whole industry forward. Like we have same crypto policy, same AI policy, same policy across, it just helps everybody. So.

• 4:05:22John Coogan?

  Great.

• 4:05:23Erik Torenberg?

  That's a place where we all get to bring them together. One thing I also just want to say is Gavin Newsom is another example of somebody trying to move to the center.

• 4:05:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:05:30Erik Torenberg?

  And, uh, you know, bringing on Charlie Kirk and.

• 4:05:32John Coogan?

  Extreme centrists.

• 4:05:33Erik Torenberg?

  Podcast. Let's make that a thing.

• 4:05:35John Coogan?

  Bar center.

• 4:05:36Erik Torenberg?

  Bar centrists and I hope that it works out. I hope that it helps him in the primary.

• 4:05:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Seems like he's better off for every American.

• 4:05:43Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 4:05:43John Coogan?

  If there's more like unity across the aisle.

• 4:05:45Jordi Hays?

  I just want to know, I just want to know what, what, uh, pointing next.

• 4:05:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. The next point is leak it, announce it on TV.

• 4:05:54Erik Torenberg?

  Always be pointing.

• 4:05:56John Coogan?

  Very important.

• 4:05:57Jordi Hays?

  No, but I mean, I think, I think American dynamism is, is no longer contrarian.

• 4:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:03Jordi Hays?

  We saw this, remember Hereticon this year was like the least contrarian person I saw was wearing a like, uh, make America greater again hat. Beyond that, everybody was doing nuclear. That was like no longer contrarian.

• 4:06:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:17Jordi Hays?

  So it's just like a big thing I'm trying to figure out while we're, while we're here is like, you know, what, what is the thing that nobody's talking about today? That will be, you know, maybe the entire subject matter of the Hill and Valley or the, or, you know, the next American dynamism summit in a couple of years.

• 4:06:34Erik Torenberg?

  Hundred percent.

• 4:06:34John Coogan?

  Well, just chat with yourself.

• 4:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Group chat dynamism.

• 4:06:37Erik Torenberg?

  Exactly. Well, whenever, uh, whenever Catherine or whoever on the team has it will, will be on TV.

• 4:06:41Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know, my last, my last thought here is, is it feels like, uh, group chats with people that you don't know, that have differing beliefs are the antidote to GPT four O.

• 4:06:53Erik Torenberg?

  A hundred percent.

• 4:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Agreeing to whatever you're.

• 4:06:55John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 4:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Right. It's like you go on chat GPT.

• 4:06:57John Coogan?

  Highly disagreeable.

• 4:06:58Jordi Hays?

  You know what, boss? Like you're a hundred percent. Everyone else is wrong. You are right. And then you go on a group. And it's a way to get

• 4:07:06Erik Torenberg?

  It's like fuck you.

• 4:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 4:07:09Erik Torenberg?

  You're wrong. No, no. Yeah. Make disagreements great again. And yeah, hopefully we can continue to be in these spaces.

• 4:07:15John Coogan?

  That's a great place to end the show. Thank you for watching.

• 4:07:18Jordi Hays?

  With Eric.

• 4:07:18John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the stream. We'll be posting a ton of clips and we will see you tomorrow or Friday, depending on when we get back to LA. Talk to you soon. Bye.