Siri Needs an App, Apple Preps for Post-Cook, Scott Nolan Truth Nuke | Shervin Pishevar, Horacio Rozanski, Glenn Fogel, JD Ross, Nick Fleisher, Rob Slaughter, Sajith Wickramasekara

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:31) - John's Op-Ed: Siri Needs An App (23:51) - Apple Prepares For Post-Cook Era (37:31) - OpenAI Acquires Healthcare Startup Torch (41:34) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions to Claude Cowork (01:00:30) - Shervin Pishevar is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, known for co-founding Hyperloop One and Sherpa Capital, and for early investments in companies like Uber and Airbnb. In the conversation, Pishevar discusses the courage of millions of Iranians protesting for freedom, the oppressive actions of the regime, and the role of technologies like Starlink in supporting the movement. He emphasizes the need for international support, particularly from the U. S., to aid in the transition towards a democratic Iran. (01:20:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:31:07) - Horacio Rozanski, born in Argentina, is the Chairman, CEO, and President of Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading advanced technology company. In the conversation, he discusses his journey from an intern in 1991 to CEO in 2015, emphasizing the importance of aligning personal values with organizational culture. He also highlights Booz Allen's strategic focus on integrating advanced technologies like AI and cybersecurity into government missions, underscoring the firm's commitment to innovation and national security. (01:51:35) - Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings and Booking.com, discusses the company's strategic initiatives, including the integration of agentic commerce and AI to enhance customer experiences. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging technology to streamline complex travel arrangements and improve customer service. Fogel also highlights the company's commitment to innovation and adaptability in the rapidly evolving travel industry. (02:14:17) - JD Ross is the co-founder of a company modernizing insurance brokerage by replacing traditional brokers with a platform for risk management. In the conversation, he discusses their recent $42 million Series B funding led by Keith Rabois and Sequoia, their flat-fee model aligning incentives with clients, and the integration of AI to enhance operational efficiency. (02:30:36) - Nick Fleisher, co-founder and CEO of Sandstone AI, discusses the company's recent $10 million seed funding led by Sequoia Capital and their mission to enhance in-house legal teams' efficiency through AI-driven solutions. He highlights the challenges legal teams face with scattered information and the need for a centralized platform that integrates various business systems to provide comprehensive context for legal workflows. Fleisher emphasizes that by automating routine tasks and consolidating data, Sandstone AI enables legal professionals to focus on strategic business discussions and proactive risk management. (02:39:48) - Rob Slaughter, a U. S. Air Force veteran with 13 years of active duty, co-founded Defense Unicorns to address significant technological challenges in the defense sector. He highlights the difficulties in delivering modern software to military systems due to air-gapped environments, stringent cybersecurity standards, and a skills gap among operators. Slaughter emphasizes the importance of enabling rapid software updates in mission-critical systems to maintain a strategic advantage. (02:48:51) - Sajith Wickramasekara, co-founder and CEO of Benchling, discusses how his company has spent a decade transitioning scientific research to the cloud and is now integrating AI into scientists' workflows to streamline drug discovery. He highlights the challenges in biotech, emphasizing the lengthy and complex process of bringing new medicines to market, and notes that while AI adoption in life sciences is growing, it requires significant effort to integrate effectively into existing systems. Wickramasekara also comments on the biotech industry's recent challenges, including a downturn following initial excitement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and observes a positive shift in the industry's outlook, as evidenced by the optimistic atmosphere at the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. (02:59:53) - Scott Nolan, CEO of General Matter and former Founders Fund partner, discusses the critical need to reestablish domestic uranium enrichment capabilities in the U. S. He highlights the nation's decline from leading global enrichment in the 1980s to less than 0.1% today, emphasizing the risks of relying on foreign sources like Russia and China. Nolan outlines General Matter's plans to build a facility in Paducah, Kentucky, aiming to be operational by the end of the decade to support the growing demand for nuclear fuel, especially for advanced reactors and AI data centers. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, January 13th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. Uh, that's correct, Bobby Cosmic. There are eight guests today. We might actually have nine. Let's pull up the linear lineup. Uh, we got Shervin Pishevar coming on the show, uh, to give us an update on what's happening around the world. Uh, Glenn Fogel, Horatio from Booz Allen's coming on the show. We're talking about AI and the enterprise in the, in the consulting world. JD Ross is coming back for with coverage. We got some news there. Uh, Sandstone has some fundraising news. Our Lambda Lightning round is going to be popping off and then we're capping it off with Scott Nolan in person, breaking down, dropping a truth nuke on the state of nuclear power.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Don't forget about Bob Slaughter.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Bob Slaughter. That's a good name. We're excited to talk to him.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  As well. Looking forward to that.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  We're going to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. And of course, for those who might have forgotten, our linear lineup is of course created by linear, the system for modern software development. Then here's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Everyone wants to know, did John get a haircut? Yes.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I did yesterday.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  Cleaned it up a little bit. It's getting wild.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Some, some length still. We'll see. We'll see if we like it. Um, anyway, uh, I think Siri needs an app. I think that that's under discussed. The news is that Apple and Google have a deal. We talked to Ben Thompson about it yesterday. A billion dollars going from Apple to Google. Now, my real hot take is that I think it's going to flip at some point. And I think Google or someone else is going to pay Apple to route LLM queries to them because with the universal commerce protocol, agentic commerce protocol, uh, with ads and LLM responses, there's going to be a whole bunch of moments where a

• 2:04John Coogan?

  An LLM query is actually profitable and on average, I think they will be profitable. I think the price of inference will continue to decline and the value of each query, the monetization of each query will increase until there's a flipping and then all of a sudden, every LLM query that's generated is on net across the entire, across the entire category, generating profit instead of generating losses, which is what's happening right now. Of course, just like with Google, when you search for, you know, how old is Leonardo DiCaprio or something, they're not making a lot of money on that. They're not running a lot of ads on that. But when you go to search for insurance or something like that, they, they charge a pretty penny for those ads. And I think the same thing will be true

• 2:48John Coogan?

  for LLMs broadly.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  It is kind of interesting. They don't, I just looked it up. They don't run ads on how old is Leonardo DiCaprio. You'd think that they could figure out some type of ad to serve.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, you'd think Brian Johnson would be buying an ad on that.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Like some peptide.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Cause you're like, oh, he looks great. And what's he doing? Oh, and then they just put, look like Leo. He's 51.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  Leo was born in the seventies, which is crazy when you say it like that.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, he's looking great. He was at the, he was at the Golden Globes having fun, celebrating his movie.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Goofing around?

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. He was goofing around. He was caught on like some mic, looking at somebody. I don't know. I saw some random clips. Anyway, but the real, the real thing I wanted to debate with Tyler was I was arguing that Siri needs an app. It's crazy. Siri came out in 2010, hasn't had an app for its entire life. I mean, it actually started as an app back in the day. It was Siri is from the Stanford Institute of Research and Intelligence or something like that.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What was it? It was like a $200 million acquisition?

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know. Seems like good value. Before we keep digging into Siri, let me tell you about Vanta, Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So it was an app that you needed to install on your iPhone. There were a few of these speech recognition apps that you could go and you'd open up the app, click a button. Siri, because I think the fact that they were on the, on the West Coast, was able to get the deepest integration in Apple, sort of win the home button over time, win the Siri button. And eventually they teamed up and actually, oh, I have triggered Siri on my Mac.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Fantastic. And so,

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Eventually Siri gets baked into the operating system level and the rest is history. The first couple of years are pretty good. People are excited. You know, you can, it was somewhat magical to be able to just press a button, ask for the weather, ask for a stock chart, ask for, you know, what's on your calendar, dictate a text message. A lot of that was pretty great. The user numbers are interesting. The, I don't know how much they disclosed. This is sort of a rumored number, but there's, the estimates are around 500 million active Siri users globally, which is huge, absolutely massive. But there's 1.5 billion iPhone users, so having only a third of your user base use your AI feature

• 5:12John Coogan?

  seems a little bit low, if that's the case.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  Ian Mackey says in the X chat, Siri was born out of SRI International.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, SRI, which I believe is Stanford, the Stanford Research Institute or something like that. I think that's where SRI comes from. But they're clearly not getting enough out of it. People aren't using it. Everyone in Texas, I never use Siri. Obviously, some people do.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, some people are using it now because we're saying Siri.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're triggering it.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  Ryan in the chat said we triggered it for it.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  We triggered it. I triggered it too. Anyway. So obviously juicing it up with an LLM like Gemini makes a ton of sense. Of course Gemini is a sponsor of this show. Gemini 3 Pro, it's Google's most intelligent model yet. They got state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. But this deal between Google and Apple makes a ton of sense for a few reasons. Google's actually profitable, has the money. They don't need to take a huge amount of cash from Apple. They can give them sort of a deal on it because.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  It was really fun. Ben, Ben kept throwing around big numbers yesterday. Like, let's be honest, we're in tax. It's not a lot of money.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's funny.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  It's actually true.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  It ramped up because at first it was the $30,000 DaVinci Resolve, the Blackmagic Ursa immersive camera. That's $30,000. He's like, that's nothing. You just put those over it. And that's true for tech. And then he was like, you know, Apple's paying Google a billion dollars. That's nothing. It's like, they're both nothing.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the whole thing with the.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Alphabet's a $4 trillion company now.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  The live, the, the infrastructure, the hardware. To do a live Apple Vision Pro broadcast being $30,000 or something in that range is like the fact that they could copy and paste that around every stadium and suddenly have like a probably a, a, I imagine they could scale that to hundreds of millions of dollars of like.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  You'd think so, pay-per-view and stuff, yeah.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not, not even pay-per-view, but just a subscription.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  It's like the.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Even just selling headsets. I mean, the headset's $3,500.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  You only need to sell 10 headsets to offset the price of the, of one immersive camera. Like, you should be able to do that. Uh, anyway, uh, we, we, we covered the Apple Vision Pro in detail yesterday. Ben Thompson joined the stream. You should go check out the, the video if, uh, if you haven't watched that. And, uh, he actually gave us a shout out. He mentioned his appearance in the Stratechery Daily Update today, which was very fun. Um, but, uh, so, so my, my take is that I think over time this will flip and I think over time, Google will be paying Apple for all of the LLM routing that happens because Google will be monetizing those queries. You will go to Siri and you will say, what's the weather? And Gemini, under the hood, will tell you the weather and they probably won't monetize that very well.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  But then every once in a while you'll say, hey, Gemini, order me a new TV. And it'll say, what size do you want? And it'll just.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Order me rain from Rainmaker.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It changed the weather. Uh, and, and they will get either an affiliate fee or a transaction fee, or there will be an ad that's placed in the stream of content that comes back. And I would imagine that right now, Apple's saying, don't do any of those ads, don't monetize these queries, but over time I imagine that they will. Um, but the big thing that I wanted to discuss with Tyler, he was fighting me on this. He says that, uh, he says that Siri does not need an app. I think that Siri will need an app. I think that the, the LLM chat interface is so dominant at this point that, uh, everyone has the experience of going back and forth, uh, asynchronously, like it's chatting to a helpful assistant, like you're texting with a friend, you want to be able to scroll up and see.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you think about it, it'd be very annoying if you had a real-life assistant and they were like, you can only call me.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Well.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  I won't.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Tyler, explain. Explain your position.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  So it's not, not that.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  No. No. You flashbanged him.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Hit him with a flashback. So he's trying to help John. Uh, opinion denied, Tyler.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Opinion denied. We have a flashback now on the stream. What good timing.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  So Tyler, once the flashbang wears off, please tell us.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's not that I disagree. I'm not like anti-app. It's just like the fifth most important thing that they need to like do.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Like, I don't care, like, okay, would you rather have the same Siri, but there's also an app? Or a new Siri, there's no app.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  It's a better model, like, obviously, you're picking the latter.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're picking the better model, but what I'm saying is that as soon as you integrate a better model that has more, he's gonna flashbang again.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  I'm too powerful.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  I'm watching this.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  So, so as soon as you, as soon as you have deeper responses and more back and forth and more knowledge retrieval, Siri has, they had Wolfram Alpha integration. I think they had a Wikipedia integration for a little bit, but it was more just like pulling up a Wikipedia snippet and then you would either open that, if you want to go deeper, you would open that webpage in Safari and look at the actual Wikipedia. Now, there's new context and new content that's being created on the fly by these models because you can ask questions that don't exist in a single Wikipedia page. Gemini, under the hood in Siri, will instantiate that for you, give you those paragraphs. And you might not be able to read through all of that in one screen time session.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  You might get a text message, need to answer it, you might get a phone call, you might have to put your phone down to, you know, keep doing what you're, whatever you're doing, and you want to come back to it. And so, yes, you could just say your prompt again and re-instantiate it all, but that takes time. These models are slow, especially if you're firing off a deep research report.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, yes, like, these are, I agree that these are important things, but these are like far from the most important thing. I could just say, okay, if I'm asking about chips yesterday, we have this long conversation and then I, I say, okay, yesterday, we were talking about chips, let's continue that conversation. That's, that whole thing solves now.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Yes, so, so that is a, that would be amazing. But the current chat apps don't even have that functionality. If you go to a new empty chat box.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  You could very easily implement that. There are on all the, okay, on Claude, on ChatGPT, Gemini, you can search through your past chats.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Do you know how bad the search is? The search is not LLM power. It's not, it's not that good. It's not that good. It's not, it's not actually an LLM query. It's not, it's not just you're talking about something like you're talking with a friend. You have to use keywords again. You're back in like traditional search world. You, you don't just go to the same empty box and say, hey, remember when we were talking about the, the fall of the Roman Empire, uh, re pull that, pull all that up. It doesn't do that.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Okay, sure. But that's, I don't think that's that hard to implement. You just put them in betting models.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  But we're talking about Siri here. It can barely pull up the weather. Like, we're going from, we're going from like a D tier product to now we're baking in a new model, Gemini, which is going to take it to like B tier.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Implementation of the metal, of the model is way more important than if the app works. If, if I can like search through it correctly.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Like the, the implementation of the model is like not a trivial thing. Like you have to get a lot of things correct.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  What do you mean? Like what about it?

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Like, if you, uh.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  You mean like the APIs and the hooks and like the tools that it will be able to use within the iOS ecosystem?

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. For it to be like smooth, for it to be like a good product, like you, it has to be like fast.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, to give, to give.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Things that are more important than being able to search through yesterday's.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And I think that's why the, the, the language is like, is Gemini derived models, Gemini distilled models, because they do want to be able to run something that's like Gemini, but on device. And obviously they have great hardware for that, Apple silicon. And then also, they've actually built out really solid APIs across the entire iOS stack since they have a shortcut functionality, which is woefully underutilized, but that was initially designed to be working with, it was initially designed to plug into Siri. So you should be able to order an Uber with Siri or order DoorDash with Siri. Uh, all of that didn't really take off in terms of Siri usage, but the APIs

• 13:11John Coogan?

  are there. So I think the implementation should be fairly simple. Or do you think they need some sort of RL environment?

• 13:17Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, it's just like, so, okay, if you're doing a deep research, are you even, like, are we even sure that that is, you want to be using Siri for that? Like, maybe it's just better to do it. Whenever I do deep research, I never do it on the app. I'm always on, like, my laptop.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Nerd, nerd alert.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Because it's just, like, way more information dense. There's a bunch of links that I want to click on.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  No, people definitely fire off deep research reports on their phone. Maybe they go read them later on their laptop. But we live in a mobile-first world, and Apple, and that's the Apple customer base. Apple, Siri customers are going to ask long questions that get long answers, and they're going to want to come back to those from time to time. And where else will they do that, other than an app? With the neatly organized, also, you can't even remember. Like, part of what's cool about these apps is that if I pull out the sidebar, I can scroll through and I can remember, oh, wow, I was looking at, you know, the NBA's history, and, you know, their attendance over different, I don't even remember firing this off. When did I ask about this?

• 14:18John Coogan?

  But, like, I did, and now I can go back and enjoy the fruits of its labor. And I can enjoy the result.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I think there's so many more things that are important. Like, okay, even if, okay, so they're using Gemini.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Like, what would you rather have? Would you rather have Gemini 2.5 and an app?

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Or Gemini 3 and no app?

• 14:35John Coogan?

  It's not a trade-off. They're getting the best Gemini, obviously.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Okay, clearly, Apple-

• 14:40John Coogan?

  And then also, the app is coming. That's what I'm saying.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Apple is bad at implementing AI.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Do you agree with that?

• 14:46John Coogan?

  They have been, to date. Yes.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Okay, so-

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, no one debates that Apple Intelligence was sort of botched.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  So I think there is definitely a case to be made that they need to prioritize certain things, and the implementation of the actual model, like, them using the best model that's going to be fast, it's going to, like, maybe on Siri, people are used to having fairly short responses. You don't want paragraphs and paragraphs unless you ask for it.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Stuff like this is, I think, much more important than having a specific app.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  Yes, and I wouldn't be surprised, I mean, truthfully, developing the type of app that I'm discussing about Siri, like, it should be able to be one-shot by cloud code in like a day. Like, it's super simple, right?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Let's pull up-

• 15:18John Coogan?

  But, but, but what are the probability that you think an app comes out this year?

• 15:24Speaker 03

  For Siri?

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Uh, I think it's probably pretty high.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  Hi, so what's wrong with my logic then?

• 15:30Speaker 03

  No, I think I'm not disagreeing with you.

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  Someone in the chat said they already have a Siri app internally.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  They've been testing.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no idea if that's true, but.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Okay, wait, I want to move on to whatever you want to say, but at first I want to say, tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Okay, let me say one more thing.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'm just saying like.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm about to flashbang you.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  If, okay, if you're like writing this, who's the audience? Like Apple, right? You want to make a change?

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Maybe, right? Okay, so it's like Ben Thompson comes on yesterday.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  All I'm saying is that, is that, is that I'm excited for, I'm excited to be able to access Gemini with a button. I feel like that's what this deal is giving me.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, that has nothing to do with an app.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  But, but also after I access Gemini with this button, that triggers, trigger flashbang. Then I want to be able to see my list.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Oh, Lambda, Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Wait, you have a, you have a sound cue for Lambda now?

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I do. Uh, pull up this clip from Gary Tan testifying in the Senate.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, let's see.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  About. Who here actually uses Siri? I personally do not because I know that it does not have the cutting edge technology that.

• 16:58Speaker 05

  I don't get along well with her.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, but exactly, that Anthropic or OpenAI or many other American labs could provide. And imagine if, uh, Apple opened it up so that similar to when you open Windows, you have to choose a browser.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Oh, model picker?

• 17:16Speaker 04

  What if you could choose your AI agent?

• 17:18John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  Then there are a billion consumers in the world who would suddenly have access to not just one self-preference Siri, but a variety of American labs. And that would open up investment, that would open up prosperity.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  I like this. The Trupo with the N card. When is that from? Is that recent?

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Ian is on an absolute tear.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  The goat over Huber.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  Thank you, Ian.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  Hi, he says current Apple's currently hiring 300 Siri-focused roles.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  They're going big. They're they're gonna do everything. You don't think one of those is an app developer?

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Okay, no. Okay, back to what I was, let me just finish this. Okay.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  So you think that's intentional? Do you think that's intentional? Like, you know, kind of a reference to the movie 300?

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Oh, their last stand against against the 10,000 ChatGPT employees. I will let you respond, but first I'm going to tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub hit ship higher quality software faster.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Continue.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, so Ben Thompson came on yesterday.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  And he said he wants one thing, okay? He doesn't to to change the Apple Vision Pro. He doesn't want, oh, a new productivity feature or, oh, I want to be able to FaceTime my friend while watching the NBA game. All he wants is to edit, to remove all the edits from the NBA game.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  You have to choose one thing. If you don't have to.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  So if the audience is Apple, like, what I want them to know is like, you guys need to pick the right model. You need to implement it well. It's not, I don't care about the app.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  That's like way later.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Okay, I I I hear you. I I think that makes some sense, but I I don't think it's as it's as much of a trade off as you think it is. I mean, they did just for Apple Intelligence, they did like six different things. They had like the the the generative emoji. They had a whole bunch of different things. Visual intelligence. They've had a variety of products. None of them really hit.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Is there one that was good?

• 19:11Speaker 03

  They need to choose one thing. That's good.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  One that was good. I don't know. But I'm ready to move the goalposts. Ready to move the goalposts. We have the goalposts. So my new definition for Apple AGI, Apple and Apple Intelligence, Apple Superintelligence? Apple Superintelligence?

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  It's just a functioning search function feature in iMessage.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  That would be very good.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  That's AGI for Apple.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  That's ASI. No, my, my definition is I want to be able to go to the new Siri. And so I, I got an iPad and the iPad just accidentally installed like every app that I've ever installed on my phone on the iPad, which wouldn't be that bad because on my phone I have one home screen and then I have a second screen and then the third screen is just the app library. And it just has a search box and then the app library actually very intelligently organizes things into productivity, utilities, entertainment. It does all that for me. I don't need to organize it. I don't choose where things go. It knows if it's a creativity app or a travel app or a news app. It puts it in its correct category. I don't need to manage that. So it's great.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  I have a whole bunch of apps on my phone and they're all organized. For some reason, the iPad was just like, let's do pages and pages and pages of all these apps on actual screens. And there's no rhyme or reason to them. And I want to organize them all into a logical format. But I think I'd have to go and, you know, at least remove all of them from home screen one at a time. It would be like thousands of taps to get rid of all of them. Probably take me like 10 to 20 minutes. It's annoying. It's not going to happen. I just won't do it. But it's a good test of agentic AI to be able to, with a single prompt, one shot, hey, clean up the whole desktop. Because we're seeing that today with Claude Co-Work. Co-Work is the name? Not coworker?

• 21:01Jordi Hays?

  Co-Work.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Claude Co-Work. Okay. Claude Co-Work. A lot of people are having fun installing Claude Co-Work and then, and then saying, hey, go clean up my desktop. Organize it. Now, who knows if this is valuable? I don't think you care about clean desktops.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  I really don't. I did see a post, somebody was like, wow, Claude Co-Work cleaned up all the files on my desktop. This is going to change everything. And I was thinking, you know, every once in a while, I'll clean up the files on my desktop. But it's never once changed anything, everything.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, no. Usually I just make a folder with like archives.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  And in fact, I don't find it.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  I don't find it. And then I do that again and again and again.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  Like if it was really important, we'd probably have somebody on the team that was like just really good at organizing desktops.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Sure. And now we do Claude Co-Work.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Organizing. But I want to be able to, but I do think as trivial as that example is, I think it's a good example of what an agentic system should be able to do if it has the proper hooks into the OS layer. Claude Co-Work can do it on desktop. What's the iOS equivalent of that? It's gotta be Apple Intelligence. They have their walled garden. The walls are standing up. They're not letting Claude Co-Work go around your iOS installation and hook into all your different local APIs. That's the domain of Apple Intelligence. That's the domain of Siri. Siri's now powered by Gemini. It should be able to do this. Let's see if that's what they launch. And that's the model implementation that you're talking about. And that's what I agree with you on. I just think there'll also be an app.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Yeah. But I like the former is much more important than the latter.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  Yes, I agree.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  We're moving on. The Germinator called all of this back in November. So anyways, this isn't even new news, but we should.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  It's now official.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  We gotta give it up for Mark Germin though.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  The Germinator.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Athlete.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  The Germinator's back on the calendar. We're gonna have him on.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Can't wait to catch up with him. Cause John Turnus is in the news too. We'll get to that. First, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  150K.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  That's a lot.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  So, Apple ran a blind test of frontier models and picked Gemini. Interesting. And there's this old photo of the Tim Cook meeting with Sundar Pichai from Google in a dimly lit cafe or restaurant, probably in Cupertino or Menlo Park somewhere. I was hoping they would do a jersey swap at this event because of course, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang swap jerseys at one point.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook very clearly mewing here. I think they're both mewing at each other. They're both mewing at each other. They're just having a mew off.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yes, that's how they really decided.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  They're not even talking.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Whether or not they want to do business together. Anyway.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's go over to the New York Times. The New York Times has a new profile. Specifically, Callie Huang and Trip Mickle. John Turnus, a low-profile but influential executive at Apple, could be next in line to replace the company's longtime chief executive, Tim Cook, if he steps aside. They say around 2018, Apple considered adding a tiny laser to its iPhones. The part would allow consumers to take better photos, more accurately map their surroundings, and use new augmented reality features. But it would also cost Apple about $40 per device, cutting into the company's profits. John Turnus, Apple's head of hardware engineering, suggested adding the component to only the more expensive Pro models of the iPhone, said two people familiar with the discussions.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  Those devices, Mr. Turnus reasoned, tended to be purchased by Apple's most loyal soldiers.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Hostages.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Hostages, who would be excited about new technology. Average consumers, on the other hand, probably wouldn't care. Threading the needle between adding new bells and whistles, let's give it up for bells and whistles, to Apple's products while watching the bottom line, has defined the careful, low-profile style of Mr. Turnus. And we have to take a minute to talk about the nominative determinism of turn us. Turn us around. Mr. Turn us around. Our AI strategy is failing. We need somebody to turn us around. Mr. Turnus could be the man for the job. He joined Apple in 2001. He is now considered by some company insiders to be the frontrunner to replace Tim Cook, Apple's longtime CEO.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Apple last year began accelerating its planning for Mr. Cook's succession, according to three people. Mr. Cook, 65, has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload. Should he step down, Mr. Cook is likely to become the chairman of Apple's board.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Look at this. They're also doing some numerology. Turnus is 50, and that's the same age that Cook, that Tim Cook was when he took over for Steve Jobs in 2011.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  I, we see you, we see you, New York Times, doing the, the hard hitting analysis.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Like Mr. Cook, Mr. Turnus is known for his attention to detail and his knowledge of Apple's vast supply network. Both men are also considered even tempered collaborators, capable of navigating the bureaucracy of one of the world's wealthiest companies without ruffling feathers. His rising profile caused debate amongst Apple alumni and rank and file employees about whether he would lead like Tim Cook, who succeeded by making the company more predictable and incremental, or Mr. Jobs, who laid the foundation for the company's success with risky bets and visionary

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Venturi in the chat says, Apple needs a social network. Do they have it already? I feel like iMessage is a social network.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Ping, if you remember Ping, they had a social network that they acquired, I believe, from Jeff Ralston, the former YC partner, but it was, it was like Spotify where you could see where other people are playing. You'd go on Apple Music and, or it wasn't called Apple Music back then. It was Ping, which was linked to iTunes. You could see what other people are listening to. And then every artist would have a profile where they could share content. It was a very music driven social network.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  Follow me on Ping.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Follow me on Ping.

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  Ping me.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Ping me. Never, never really took off, though. Other than that, I think iMessage is a very, very strong social network. And, I mean, certainly if, if, if Meta owns WhatsApp and includes that in the family of apps, and messaging is obviously a huge driver of social networking activity these days. People sharing content through there. Snapchat is a messenger. Instagram is, you know, you look and you see there's more shares on this reel than likes, because people are sending it to each other. That's what people do. That's how people.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think, I think the people have long had the idea to build a family focused social network, and I don't think they'll ever be successful because group chats on iMessage function.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  Do that very well.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  You just can't keep up with Apple on that.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Before we move on, Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code back prototypes and apps fast.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Turnus's rising profile. Uh, sorry, you got that.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Uh, if you, uh, this is. If you want to make an iPhone every year, Turnus is your guy, says Cameron Rogers.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but how much do we read into this?

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Wait, they already do make an iPhone every year, but.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but it's all, but, but it says some, I mean, obviously this is, we don't have the context here, but.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  What he didn't say was if you want to build the next.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  You want to build the future.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, the futuristic, you know, if you want to get the Apple car project off the ground, Turnus is your guy. He said, if you want to make an Apple, an iPhone every year, like clockwork, keep the trains running on time at Apple, Turnus is your guy. Yeah, people, uh, we, we read that other quote about Turnus where, uh, they were saying like, has he, has he done any hard, has he made any hard decisions? No, and someone was clearly taking shots at him. It feels like there's a little bit of like politics going on over at Apple. Uh, people jockeying for the next role, but whatever's happening with John Turnus clearly is working because it's one profile after another. And he's the name I keep hearing more and more, certainly above Craig Federighi, Eddie Q, some of the other folks who are sort of household names in the Apple ecosystem.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  They're not getting profiles like this written. Everyone needs to meet and learn about John Turnus. So, Apple's plans for artificial intelligence are also a big question. Is he AGI pilled? Is he A S I pilled? Whatever his timelines, is he a doomer? We got to get to the bottom of this. Hopefully, yeah, hopefully, the New York Times is asking the hard questions. We, we will find out. While other giant technology companies have spent tens of billions of dollars developing AI, Apple has largely been on the sidelines and it pushed off making major changes to its products with new AI technology. It'll be up to Apple's board of directors to decide who will eventually replace Mr. Cook, who also sits on the board. The rest of the company's eight board members did not respond to requests for comments and Apple declined to make, uh, Mr. Turnus available for an interview. They couldn't get the New York Times, uh, in the room with Turnus.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  The Financial Times and Bloomberg previously reported on, uh, aspects of this. So, he's the youngest member of Apple's executive leadership team. Overnight success. Getting some young blood in there, sort of a Doge situation, I guess. The, the, the boys, the, the Turnus child at the, at the helm. No, he's 50. It would be Apple's first chief executive in three decades to have spent his career working in hardware. Unlike some of the other candidates to replace Mr. Cook, Mr. Turnus has worked on many of Apple's devices, as well as the global operations that manufacture those products. He would take over as a relative unknown outside of Apple. Inside the company, he is known more for maintaining products than developing new ones, according to six

• 30:25John Coogan?

  former employees. And Mr. Turnus, who has been an engineer in Silicon Valley for all of his adult life, has limited exposure to the policy issues and political responsibilities.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting, that can be viewed as a knock, right? Like, he's not just given Apple's history as an innovator, but like, what's the highest leverage place that he can spend his time? Probably focusing on the products that are already hits, that have real product market fit.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  The political responsibilities can't be that complicated. I mean, he knows the supply chain. All he has to do is make a solid gold iPhone, send one to 1600, and call it a day. Make sure it's very ornate, and you'll be good to go. He's a Californian native. He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Penn, where he was on the varsity swim team. For a senior project, he designed a device that allowed quadriplegics to use head motions to control a mechanical feeding arm. Wow, it's like Neuralink back in the day. In the four years after his graduation from Penn, he designed headsets and other products at a virtual reality startup. Wow, throwback. Then he joined Apple, first working on screens for Macs as the company transitioned away from

• 31:36John Coogan?

  the colorful IMAX in the late 1990s.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk to Mr. Turnus at some point, but I would love to know what people's VR timelines were when he was working on VR in the 90s.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  They were like, 10 years max, in the next decade, for sure. He was a man of the people, adding that the decision to sit with his team likely helped Mr. Turnus manage and motivate his staff. When he was working at Apple, their team, the team he was on, moved office floors, switching from a closed office plan to a mostly open seating with few offices. When he was promoted, Mr. Turnus had the option to move into one of those fancy offices, but he said, "No, I'm sitting with the crew. I'm riding with my boys. I'm hanging out in the open plan," which is, you know, tells you a lot about who he is as a person. In 2005, Mr. Turnus had been promoted to lead Apple's hardware engineering team for

• 32:30John Coogan?

  the IMAX as it made the G5 series, which helped inspire, who helped, Michael Hillman hired Mr. Turnus and worked with him at Apple for more than a decade. That team was working on using magnets to hold the computer's glass screen in place. Interesting. The technique was unusual for its time and faced skepticism, but Mr. Turnus still pushed for it. When presented with such an out-of-the-box idea, he would champion it, said Mr. Seifert. Mr. Turnus spent extended periods of time working with manufacturers in Asia. He traveled between the continent and Silicon Valley and learned how difficult it could be to have a manufacturing supplier deliver on Apple's design expectations. Apple also paired Mr. Turnus with an external

• 33:15John Coogan?

  consultant to advise him on leadership. He got a leadership coach. He became a key lieutenant of Dan Riccio, his predecessor as Apple's head of hardware. By 2013, his role had expanded to include overseeing the Mac and iPad teams. In recent years, he has shouldered more responsibility for updates to Apple's products, spearheaded the iPhone Air, which was released last year with a new slim design and was a key leader in Apple's transition from using Intel chips to silicon, to Apple silicon. And of course, the iPhone Air, not a really hot seller, apparently, not doing that well financially necessarily, but from an engineering perspective, people are very excited about-

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Former Apple employee, friend of mine, said he got the iPhone Air as the worst iPhone he's ever bought.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  Really?

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  Wow, roasted.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Well, before we talk more about the iPhone Air, let me tell you about Labelbox, delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. Get in the box. The Labelbox, Apple. You know you need some training data. You know you need some high-quality training data for your Frontier AI. You need some data to train on Siri. Get on Labelbox.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  Get in the box.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  So, the iPhone Air, obviously, it even might, you know, reviews are mixed, reviews are not great. Some people complain about different things. Some people love it, but it hasn't been flying off the shelves. But when you see the X-Rat-

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  Remember that story of the founder who said, "This is the strongest iPhone ever made. Nobody can possibly break this. It's impossible."

• 34:43John Coogan?

  What happened next?

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  And that was quickly broken in half by a Gundo founder. That was an iPhone Air.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Smashed, smashed. But you can imagine- The innovation that went into making the iPhone Air so small could be used for a foldable phone, which was probably coming, could be used for more miniaturization. If they do some sort of lapel pin or something else, they they're clearly have packed a lot of power into such a small form factor. So is he a nice guy? Yes, says Mr. Rogers. He is a nice guy. He's someone you want to hang out with. Everyone loves him because he's great. And here's the quote that lives in infamy. Has he made any hard decisions? No. Are there hard problems he's solved in hardware? No.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  How can you say, how can you say he's?

• 35:31John Coogan?

  He's never made a hard decision, says Cameron Rogers, who worked on product and software engineering management at Apple from 2005 to 2022. Cameron Rogers, hater of the year right here. Who is this person? But Cameron Rogers is not clearly not not pulling out the glaze nater for Turnus. It's absolutely brutal to say.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember the same guy who said earlier in the article, if you want to make an iPhone every year, Turnus is your guy.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got it.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  Which again, I read that and I was like, okay, that sounds good. Surface level.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Cameron Rogers is just taking shots.

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  Every year. We should have Cameron on the show.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  The hater in chief, chief hating officer. It's crazy. I mean, certainly you cannot be at Apple for two decades and never have made a single hard decision or solved a hard problem in hardware. Like, that seems impossible.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, there's another, there is a hardware engineer at Apple today named Cameron Rogers, but it is

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Different person.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  Different.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Well, in a 2024 commencement speech at Penn's Engineering School, Mr. Turnus told graduating students that in the future, they would be proudest not of specific projects, but of the journey to make them all happen. Quote, "Now, while you're on that journey, there's going to be many times in your career when where you have to take on something new," he said, "and sometimes you might wonder whether or not you can actually do it," giving a little inspirational talk at Penn's Engineering School commencement speech. Very fun. Well, good luck to him. I don't know. I think he can figure it out. I would be shocked if he's really never solved a hard problem. Seems like he has some beef with this Cameron fellow. And well, I don't know. Well, we'll see Cameron Rogers.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  Maybe Turnus needs to respond. You drop a diss track. I don't know.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  I would love to see that.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more, all with amazing customer service. OpenAI, they've acquired Torch. It's a healthcare startup that unifies lab results, medications, and visit recordings. Bringing this together with ChatGPT Health opens up a new way to understand and manage your health, says OpenAI.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay, founders of Torch. Torch was a four-person company.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  Oh, small.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  They, the co-founder of Torch, Ilya, I believe, one of the other founders, previously built Forward.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  Ilya was also an early Uber GM, so trained at the Travis Kalanick School of Mogging. Anyways, Forward, little backstory, healthcare startup founded in 2016. They wanted to rebuild the healthcare system from the ground up. Sounds, uh, sounds cool. They originally were trying to do this kind of like, uh, the, the, the general belief was that healthcare was, uh, too reactive instead of proactive, right? You go to the doctor when you're sick, not to just kind of generally be healthy. They had an app, they wanted the, the sort of physical spaces to feel like Apple stores, right? They wanted

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  this Apple-like, um, experience for health. Uh, subscription-only model. Uh, they didn't accept insurance initially. Uh, bunch of folks, founders fund, Cosla, Eric Schmidt, bunch of legends were, were in the round. Uh, 2018 to 2022, they expanded to dozens of locations. Uh, they had, uh, body scanners, real-time blood work, a bunch of different software that they had built out. 2021 reached a valuation of over one billion, raised a quarter-billion-dollar-ish, uh, Series D round. Uh, at this point, uh, from that point on, they, uh, they sort of pivoted to focusing on this thing called CarePods. Uh, and these

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  were like, trying to be autonomous, like AI-driven medical kiosk. So honestly, probably, uh, right idea, maybe a little bit too early. Um, eventually in 2024, they shut down very abruptly. Uh, it sounds like they basically just ran, ran out of money. Uh, came back very quickly. With Torch and now they are of course being rolled into OpenAI. So you can, I think the, the right way to read into this, OpenAI just launched OpenAI Health. They're now acquiring Torch. I would assume that they want all, they want all of your, they want all of your health data. Like they really want to help you with your health.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  They want your blood. They're out for blood.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  They want your blood.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  They want your blood work.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe they could say like, hey, this month, instead of, instead of paying, you could be a blood boy for us. Our researchers are working really hard.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Need your blood. I'm ready to upload. Upload me. Just let me know. Let me know.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to read the, the message that Torch wrote. Torch says, everyone deserves the best answers modern medicine can give them. And yet we've all had people close to our hearts who didn't get the answers they needed about their health. We have more data about our bodies than ever before, but it's never been harder to bring it all together. Patients see only a fraction of their own records while clinicians have little, have too little time to parse the growing stream of data. Patients bringing in from wearables and consumer health companies, you know, function, et cetera. AI is the most important new tool we've had in decades for turning the chaos into clarity. But AI can't help you if your health data is scattered across four hospitals, two labs, seven apps and three web portals. We started Torch to build a medical memory for AI, unifying scattered records into a context engine.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  That helps you see the full picture, connect the dots and make sure nothing important gets lost in the noise again. So.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Mike has a little life hack here. If you're an early stage AI founder, rename yourself to Ilya and get an M and A offer. Just crazy enough to work. I like it. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Every time I see one of these, one of these new features drop from.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Claude Co-Work or OpenAI ChatGPT Health. It just feels like the Siri thing is like bigger and bigger. Back to what Tyler was saying about implementation of the model. Because Apple has Apple Health. There's a whole promise there of what Apple Health as an app can do. You want that to be AI-enabled. They so they need to update that as well. And there's there's so many different, okay, shopping, agent to commerce. Like, like, there's Apple Pay. Is Apple Pay integrated with Siri and the new AI function? So they really do need to go around and update all over the place if they want to stay. You know, they have some dominant positions carved out. But every AI company is trying to eat off Apple's plate and as much as they can.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  But there's really, really strong lock-in to most of the Apple ecosystem. So they they it's not over if they don't move right now and get the app out and get updates out. But it's very clear that if if, you know, Apple or ChatGPT Health is rolling out.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  You know, it's going to take time for people to ramp up, start integrating things, start using it. But if that behavior develops and it's another two, three years until Apple responds like, yeah, they are going to be a laggard in that category. There's a Claude Co-Work reaction thread going on from Zvi Mushowits. Lots of people kind of mixed reviews. Eleanor Berger says, "Research preview. This is the future, not the present. For now, if you want a local agent, Claude Code is still the best you can recommend, even if it's for non-coding tasks." Some people are saying it's buggy. Have you had a chance to try it out, Tyler? Can you install Claude Co-Work today?

• 43:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so I downloaded it yesterday. But it's kind of, we talked about this earlier in the gym. Like, I actually don't know what to do with it because I'm like already technical, already have Claude Code.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  My sense is that this is basically just a. We get it. My sense is it's basically just a UI wrapper. Seriously, we get it. We get it, you're technical.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Hit him with the flashbang.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  It's too powerful.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  No, okay, but it's like a UI wrapper around Claude code.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  So it's like not providing maybe an insane amount of like brand new functionality.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  I mean, there's a, there's a huge swath of consumers who are just never going to really open the terminal. Even if it's, even if it's, even if Claude, even if you go to Claude and say, how do I install Claude code? I heard it's hot. And Claude code says, literally just hit command spacebar, type T E R M, hit enter, it'll open the terminal and then copy and paste this line and then tell it what you want, just like it's chat GPT or Claude. People still won't do that because it's like, oh, what's this weird thing?

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  You need like 15 gigs for it too.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you do need some space in your hardware, but that's not a huge issue for most people.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's, it's not fully frictionless.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Whereas, yeah, whereas an app might, uh, might sort of hold your hand through that a little bit more. Uh, and so I, I, I'm, I'm optimistic about this, but I do think that the marketing and the messaging and actually like the, the thread boy influencers are going to be pretty important here where if you see someone demo something cool with Claude cowork, you, that's going to be a key to open it up. A lot of people, you know, in the early days of chat GPT rolling out, a lot of people were sharing prompts. What's a good prompt? You know, prompt engineering, like, oh, you take this prompt and do this. There's a lot of people need inspiration. It's the same thing with mid journey. Like if you just give someone a blank box and tell them, uh, it can, this is an image generator. I'll just say like dog.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  And then you just give them a picture of a dog and they're like, yeah, it looks like a dog. I could go to Google images. What's special about it is like, I want it to be my dog and I want it to be fighting Darth Vader and I want it to be on in downtown LA. And then it creates something that you can't just find on Google images. The same thing will be true on, uh, on Claude cowork. There are tools for just cleaning up your desktop. There's, I think Alfred is one of them. There's a few others that just do automated, uh, sort of deterministic, uh, cleanup of desktops. Uh, but people will eventually be sharing Claude cowork workflows, prompts, best practices, and just giving people the idea as simple as that sounds, the capability is there, but there's this capability, application overhang where you need to actually tell

• 46:00John Coogan?

  people, hey, this is something that you could use Claude cowork for.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Mike says, think the position as cowork is actually really sharp. I agree. Uh, I, I think that, uh, it's kind of a mouthful Claude cowork, but. Going back to what I was saying last week, when when people, when when some lab leaders have been talking about the potential of AI, they just say, oh, AI is going to do this, AI is going to do that. Obviously, the the at least near term reality is humans are going to use AI to do things.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  And I think anthropic trying to be more human about it and saying like, hey, you're working with this thing. It's not, it's not claudimating you away.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  There are people having fun with the Claude funds, the portmanteaus. First, before we read through these, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software development, web apps, servers and databases running one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. Near, friend of the show, says his job, oh, it got claudimated away. No one has, no one, I can't believe no one has said this, not even a single name. 1,000 likes, people are into this.

• 47:01Jordi Hays?

  Paula says he hates AI, oh, he's claudestraphobic.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Claudestraphobic, okay. These are getting a lot of likes, but not exactly belly laughing for me.

• 47:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, not quite.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  I'm glad people have a fun. I do think Claude's a funny name and, you know, it's it's it's.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John John Palmer was really pushing like, hey, now's the time.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  To rebrand.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  A rebrand, rename. I mean, a naming exercise can be, you know, a very expansive project. But I do think it's probably too late. We're right, wait, Claude is going all the way.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, they've all sort of worked out. I don't know, ChatGPT.

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  Bard in hindsight, Bard was kind of under.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  I feel like Bard.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  Having a digital Bard.

• 47:46John Coogan?

  Bard, yeah, Bard was funny. But Gemini works, they're building up the brand there and Claude works as well. ChatGPT, such a mouthful, so such an insane name, so clearly, you know, named by a developer, but, you know, it just broke through in such a way. And then they did buy chat.com, so, you know, it winds up working. Claude code for the rest of your work, American middle class desk jockeys watching the asteroid hit the dinosaurs. We will see, we'll we'll see how much this moves productivity, how much this move GDP. That's the big question for this year is how much will people actually be able to, you know? Use this to do the work they do every day. I've been in jobs where my job-

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John, organizing desktop files was actually a $1 trillion industry.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  And-

• 48:38John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I, I have, I have been, I was, I, I was an intern once and my job was basically to open up an Excel template every day, copy paste some, some numbers, uh, sort of make sure all the formulas held. And over the internship, over the couple of months, I wrote more and more Visual Basic. So that my job went from eight hours on the first day to four hours to eventually it was like 15 minutes. I would just like get there and just hit a script. I would just click a button and it would just do everything. And that was just with like normal software. Um, now you probably have to, you have to, you know, reality check. So make there's, make sure there's no hallucinations, but in general, like some of these jobs can be automated.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  The question is like, if someone uses this to automate their own job, will they just be sitting there, you know, watching reels in the small corner? And when their boss comes by, they alt tab so that they're looking, oh, I'm still working really hard. Nothing's been automated. These, I, I models are slop. I, I definitely still need my job. You know, where, where does the value accrue? Who's, who's, who's reclaiming the value? Is, uh, I mean, we did, we did talk to a friend who was saying that, like, you know, someone who's a, uh, uh, has some sort of desk job, has been effectively automated by ChatGPT, but just spends all day golfing now. And the boss doesn't know that the job's been automated because the boss doesn't understand.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  We might see a bull market in water cooler talk.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Ooh, yeah, that's possible.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  As people automate more and more of their work and just decide to yap.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of water, let's go over to Augustus DeRico, the Rainmaker himself. But first, let me tell you about AppLovin, profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Augustus says, I'm AI-pilled after seeing what the new grad philosophy major I hired to fly drones from a mountaintop has automated at Rainmaker with Claude. He's very happy.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we keep asking Tyler, hey, can you automate this? And he says, uh, sorry, sir. It's, it's, it's not, it's not possible yet. It's not possible yet. I don't, I don't believe it. I never said that.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  He basically say everything. So Boris Cherny, who is

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  Runs Claude Code.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  Run Claude, runs Claude Code.

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  Remember, he popped over to OpenAI for like two weeks, right? Um, no, that was Cursor. Oh, he popped over to Cursor.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  Wait, so he went to Cursor, he churned and went back to open, uh, went back to Anthropic?

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  So he's literally churning.

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  Crazy moment last summer.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  He's churning, his churning in terms of his jobs.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Churning through jobs. Interesting.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 51:17John Coogan?

  Good nominee to determine. Well, how much code did he write to develop Claude Co work? He apparently used Claude Code entirely and did none of the coding himself. Fantastic. Uh, very, very cool. So he said, since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work, doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, canceling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from a hard drive, monitoring plant growth, uh, controlling your oven. These use cases are diverse and surprising. The reason is that the underlying Claude agent is the best agent and Opus 4.5 is the best model. Today, we're so excited to induce, introduce Co Work, our first big step towards making Claude Code work for all your non-coding work.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Uh, the product is early and raw, similar to what Claude Code felt like when it first launched. And that's the big question, Tyler, is, uh, is Claude Code was very bare bones, rough around the edges when it launched. It's now so full functioning that everyone loves it and it's building whole new products. Uh, what do they need to add to Co Work to make it, uh, an even better product? I don't know. I, I, I, I feel like in the, in the, uh, app ecosystem, in the chat app ecosystem, the level of value that comes from product design, UI, UX is still underrated.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  Obviously, no one doubts that the models are great. Uh, but if you use the Claude app and you have it, you have it, you generate a deep research report or something like that, you click the play button to have it read it to you. You can't fast forward or rewind. You can't change the speed. And you also, if you close your phone, it just stops playing. So you need to be sort of like touching the phone to keep it working, to keep it open, while you listen to this report. And that just feels like, oh, that's like not a good user experience. And ChatGPT has solved that and has some more. They can do background audio. And these are all sort of simple APIs in iOS, but it takes time and consideration.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  You have to decide where the buttons go and what they look like. And Claude Code can do a lot of that, but it takes time and someone has to make the decision.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  My, my neighbor Murph in the X chat says, I'm interested in Noah No Work. Claude Code work.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  Noah No Work? I like that.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  That's great. Anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built with, for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Netcap Girl Sophie says, okay, Claude, take this unstructured data and turn it into dashboards that will give executives deeper insights into critical business functions. Make no mistakes.

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  Cheer Ticket says, all reliable, because Sophie posts some version of this.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  Once a day.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  Once a day?

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  No way.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  He's gone viral with the same concept.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Wait, but like, has it always been about Claude?

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Oh, just about.

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  There's constantly being re, re, re-purpose.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  Playing the hits.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  Playing the hits. You gotta play the hits.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Critical business functions.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Atlas says, Claude, here is a picture of my crush. Claude, here is her phone number. Make her my GF. Make no mistakes.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  That's also his, been playing the hits. Everyone has their role to play in the post-singularity hangout sesh. Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles in object storage, fast, ten X cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  There's a billion dollars inside OPUS 4.5 Model Waits and you just need to type the right Claude code prompts to get them out. Says Frankie. Very true. Lots of opportunity. Actually, knowing how to code is no

• 55:00Jordi Hays?

  Jawan says, "There's no point in learning or doing anything anymore. Just learn English and acquire a good mental model of things and just type, bro. Just type."

• 55:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Lots of opportunity. We'll see. I mean, you have to actually be inspired to come up with something that people want. Talk to users or something like that. Claude Code is so successful, they had to make Claude Code not for code, instead of just Claude.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's

• 55:26John Coogan?

  Claude Code not for code, instead of just Claude. It is funny that there's these opportunities to retool the brand around, because we're now three levels deep. There's Anthropic, there's Claude, and there's Claude Code, and Claude Co-Work. And you could have just said Claude Code and Claude Co-Work are now just Claude. It's one thing. It works in the terminal. It also works on your desktop. It's one thing. But it's interesting that Anthropic clearly sees some sort of divide between technical and non-technical users that they assume that will persist, at least for a reasonable amount of time. Let's see. Introducing Claude Co-Work.

• 56:08John Coogan?

  It's giving an AK-47 to a monkey, which is one of my favorite meme images ever. If you scroll up, you'll see.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  One of the best formats.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  It's one of the best

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Of all time.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  Yes. You could definitely do some damage on a computer, or in a corporate environment, if you really turn it loose on the network. We will see. I'm sure there will be more total ridiculous mistakes than malicious intent, but it will be interesting. So, Déjà Vu Coder goes on to say, "Initially, I thought it's computer use, but looks like it's Claude Code shaped with more UI/UX focused towards non-technical people, especially those who

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  Real quick. Gold Rock in the chat is headed to an interview with Goldman Sachs. One, let's give it up for Goldman Sachs. And two, let's all send some good luck towards our boy."

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Yes, uh, Sholto also posted, of course, because he's involved in this.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yes.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  What else was going on? Yes. Oh, Ramp also has a coding agent. They built their own. Fax Herbert shared this. The Tri-Ramp engineering team built a coding agent last month called Inspect, and it's now dominating our internal use cases. I can't tell you how fun it is to continually have my mind blown by our technical folks. Very, very interesting to actually. People are very confused by this, but, uh, you know, it's a very special team, very special company, and so it makes sense in this, in this particular context to build something special. And they also have an agentic spreadsheet product at this point, and they've been having a lot of fun developing new software very, very quickly all over the place.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Before we move on, CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And Rune is back to vague posting. He says that the elves have left for Valinor.

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  Please, sir, can I have a crumb of context?

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Just a crumb.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  The I require context hat goes on. Elves?

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  We need one, we need a hat here.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  We do.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  The I require context hat.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yes, I, I don't know exactly what he's referring to. It is a vague post, but we'll have to dig into it. Maybe we'll have to have him back on the show.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, QT Cash is speculating, saying, given that Rune is likely referencing his own Quorn comment, talking about the downfall of OpenAI, what does this mean for the future? Quorn says, apropos of Suscover now having left OpenAI for good, I've gone back to my thinking about the long-term consequences of Altman's coup and something I began to wonder in 2021, when the news about Anthropic broke, what if the elves have left Middle Earth? What if OpenAI has lost its mojo? If so, what would that look like? And how would we know? What's the rot narrative?

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting. Oh, wait. So Zoomer also says he's talking about the California tax proposal, Fed shenanigans. You're misreading the tweet. So the elves could just be our most

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  And this is the power of vague posting.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  People find.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  It's a bunch of different ways.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  It's like sprinkling, you know, some tea leaves.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  So, yes, I mean, regardless, you know, OpenAI, have they lost their mojo? Certainly not when it comes to vague posting. Tyler, what do you think?

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah. So there's like the two different ways to look at it, right? It's either about California or OpenAI?

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  But so I think he probably meant it as like, okay, this is about California billionaire tax. But like all the news about that has broken like earlier this week, like all the, everyone's leaving, right? It's, it's kind of late to post that.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  But it's a perfect time to post as you kind of see at least the vibes on X, like really hard going against OpenAI pro anthropic.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  So I think it's like, if someone asked him about it, he's like, oh, it's about the billionaire tax, but you know, subtly.

• 59:56John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. It could also, it could also be, so the elves could also be Sholto and Dor Cash and Valenor could be the gym because they did a workout together with Atlas, Creatine Cycle. And they're looking in fighting form. Well, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  And the backbone of TBPN.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so there's, um, there's some, oh, we do.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  Uh, in the restream waiting room, we have Shervin Pishevar. And we will welcome him to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Shervin, how are you doing?

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  Good guys, how are you?

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We're good. Good to see you again. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Uh, maybe you could start with just, give us the highest level of what's going on in your world, what's going on around the world. Uh, how are you interpreting the news of the last few weeks? This has been going on for more than.

• 1:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can't imagine what a roller coaster it's been.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  How are you introducing this at the highest level possible?

• 1:01:04Speaker 06

  At the highest level possible, this is one of the greatest displays of courage by humans, young Iranians and Iranians of every age. By the millions are in the street the last couple of weeks, you know, demanding their freedom. They've been living in an open-air prison for the last forty-seven years. The work that, you know, the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has been doing has succeeded in having millions of people calling out for him to return, for there to be a process towards a democracy, towards a transition process. The people are demanding their freedom.

• 1:01:48Speaker 06

  And just in the last forty-eight hours, the numbers are staggering. Twelve thousand people have been killed by the army, the military. The Supreme Leader Khamenei, who is one of the most evil humans on the planet, has ordered the mass killing of people. So you have an open-air prison where people have no freedoms, and now you have an extermination camp happening. So you have horrific videos coming out. These people are defenseless, they have nothing to protect themselves except their hopes and dreams and their demands for freedom.

• 1:02:33Speaker 06

  They're calling out for Reza Pahlavi to return, and he's the son of the last king. He's a big believer in freedom and democracy and has a plan for reconstruction. And many of us, including myself, have joined his efforts and his movement. And now the difference is you have President Trump, you know, outwardly saying to the Iranian people, "We have your back." We're locked and loaded. That gave the people the courage to come out and protest for the last couple of weeks. And this is not a protest movement anymore. This is a revolution.

• 1:03:14Speaker 06

  They want a complete change in the government. But what we're, you know, working on is essentially a process to have an interim government led by Reza Pahlavi, who millions of people are asking for. And the time to act is now. President Trump said that he has their back. And at any minute, that can be, he reaffirmed that today. You know, Prime Minister Netanyahu has said the same things of, and that, you know, the connection, by the way, is very biblical between the Jewish people and the Persian people.

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

  Cyrus the Great, 2,500 years ago, earned a spot in the Bible by freeing the Jews from slavery in Babylon, returning them to their homeland in Jerusalem and rebuilding their temple. He's celebrated by the Jews, he's celebrated by the Persians, he's celebrated by the Christians. He had the first Declaration of Human Rights. And then biblical symmetry 2,500 years later, it's the Jewish people who are helping the Persian people free themselves from the shackles of slavery, from these terrorists that have held them in an open-air prison for the last 47 years.

• 1:04:34Speaker 06

  The whole world has been reshaped by the huge mistake of 1979 of allowing these extremist, Marxist, Islamist coalition to take over. And we've seen the effect they've had. They funded all of the terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East, including Hamas and Hezbollah. And now we see the invasion of Europe and the UK and, and, you know, potentially America as well by, by extremist ideologies. And that, that, that, that needs to end. It needs to end now.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  What's the next domino to fall? Like, what, what, what does forward movement look like for the revolution?

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Do you want to get to like tens of millions of protesters? This is just growing the protest movement? Is there an election process? Is there some specific mechanic that we're waiting to, to look for?

• 1:05:28Speaker 06

  We're beyond the tens of millions. The, the, the tens of millions were in the streets in the last couple of weeks. It's the biggest, biggest numbers ever. The, the, the Crown Prince Rezapalavi has been calling for people to come in the streets at certain times and they've been listening. We have an open channel of communications because of Starlink. These freedom technologies, as I call it, I've been working on that since 2010. I had a dinner with the Secretary of State back then and I said, the last bastion of dictatorship is the router. And we need to be able to use satellites to bring beam internet communications to people so that dictators and tyrants can't block the internet.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  So what are they doing? So, so the regime is making efforts to neutralize Starlink, is that correct?

• 1:06:15Speaker 06

  That's right. I, I actually, when I started this project with a band of rebels, we, in 2022, we, I went to SpaceX Starlink, bought, you know, tons of, of Starlinks and we figured out three different routes to smuggle it into the country to get it to the protesters. At the time, there were only nine Starlinks in the country and now there's thousands. And those Starlinks are the way that these videos that we're all seeing from the protests are, are reaching the world. Otherwise. Now, now they're using military jammers to block uh and jam the Starlink connections.

• 1:06:58Speaker 06

  And luckily, you know, Elon and his team are some of the smartest humans on the planet. So they've figured out how to, how to, uh, you know, uh, get around that. Uh, Ukraine was a great laboratory for, uh, that as well. And when the Starlinks went there, it changed the whole dynamic of the war. Um, and, um, I had played a, a role in making some introductions there. And, uh, and now, uh, what we're seeing is, is, uh, is, is the same dynamic in, in Iran. Now there's tens of thousands of Starlinks, uh, they're getting around the jamming. President Trump reached out to Elon, it's in the news yesterday, uh, for more help, uh, with Starlink.

• 1:07:38Speaker 06

  So, you know, this is something as an industry, as, uh, Silicon Valley and tech, that we should be very proud of. Uh, these technologies that we work on are, are what I call freedom technologies. Um, and they're, they're, uh, part of the arsenal of taking down really these criminal and terrorist organizations and tyrants that have taken over sovereign nations with nuclear bombs or attempting to get the nuclear bombs. So, um, you know, the, the, the, these are the technologies that can be used, uh, increasingly so to let humans, uh, have the freedoms and the democracies that we're so blessed to have in America. Um, you know, I, I escaped, uh, Iran, uh, during, uh, the Iran-Iraq war.

• 1:08:22Speaker 06

  I had bombs falling on me as a kid. Um, and my father had to escape Iran because he was a journalist, radio intelligence for the, the last Shah. And he put bravely put the foreign language broadcast to let people know how to get out of the country. He saved a lot of lives and the Supreme Leader then, Khomeini, put him on the execution list. So I didn't see my dad for two years, bombs were falling every night. And, uh, I remember as an eight-year-old kid. All my drawings were of war, of, you know, tanks and guns. And I had this fantasy as an eight-year-old, I was really into remote control planes.

• 1:09:03Speaker 06

  And I, and I thought, what if I could use these RC planes to bomb Khomeini's house? And now forty-seven years later, under the forty-seventh president, that possibility is very real.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  What is the dynamic between the armed forces that are killing protesters? And like, how do you wake up and, you know, put on a uniform and then go gun down, you know, your countrymen? Like, how, like, how is that, how is that sustainable? At what point, at what point do those people start to turn?

• 1:09:41Speaker 06

  We've seen this in other revolutions, you know, people, you know, you can't, you can't kill fifty million people. At some point, people begin to defect. And I was with the Crown Prince just a couple of days ago. And, you know, one of the stories was that there's, you know, thousands of people are calling in sick from the military and the police. That's a form of a labor strike. And, and, you know, they don't want to kill innocent people. They've been shipping in mercenaries who don't even speak Farsi or Persian.

• 1:10:21Speaker 06

  And they've been using mercenaries as well to, to, to kill innocent people. These are occupiers. They're not Iranian. They're, they're, they're, their souls are not Iranian. They're Islamic extremists that took over a country. We should have never allowed it to happen. And a free, democratic Iran, going back to the roots of who we are, would be the greatest peace and economic dividend in the world. We've been working on something called the Cyrus Accords, which we want to basically join the Abraham Accords and have an Iran and an Israel that are at peace, and Iran and the Middle East that are at peace together.

• 1:11:02Speaker 06

  A new digital Silk Road where all these economies are working together, jobs are being created. And some of the greatest engineers in the world are Iranians, we all know. Silicon Valley is full of- Incredible Iranian American entrepreneurs, the calculations I have, if you add up Uber, Google, eBay, all the different companies that were, you know, either founded or early on built by Iranian Americans, it's in the trillions of dollars of contributions to the American economy, and that's only with a million Iranians. Imagine with 92 million brilliant Iranians, what could be unleashed in the world? Instead of exporting terror, we'll export hope and innovation.

• 1:11:47Jordi Hays?

  How have economics played a role, or the local economy played a role in this current revolution? I know that's part of what's the just frustration with the state of things, I think, was the regime offering like some effectively like stimulus checks or something of that sort? Saw something like that, but what's going on that I'm sure that's kind of feeding into the movement?

• 1:12:16Speaker 06

  Well, the currency has collapsed. As of yesterday, the conversion rate to the dollar was zero. The currency has collapsed, inflation has gone off, has I gone out of control? I don't think this is the interview for Soundboard. Yeah. We're coping. It's okay. But the water system has collapsed, the power system has collapsed. This is a perfect storm, and we're days away. If action is taken and the head of the snake is cut off, I predict there'll be 50 million

• 1:12:57Speaker 06

  Iranians in the street celebrating, and, you know, Reza Pahlavi returning, interim government that would be recognized by all the governments in the world that are aligned with freedom and democracy in the Iranian people. This is a moral cause of our time. These are the brave hearts of our time. These young people by the millions are sacrificing their lives for a freedom that they might not live to see. Think about that for a second. That is the kind of spirit that started Americans, started the Western democracies of the world. My great-grandfather started the first constitutional

• 1:13:39Speaker 06

  revolution from Tawbris in 1906 and recruited an American named Morgan Schuster. If you read the book, The Strangling of Persia by Morgan Schuster, he's a Midwest American, brilliant man who has a statue in Iran in his honor from back then. And they tried, they were inspired by Jeffersonian democracy to bring democracy to America. And that paved the way for all the modern rebuilding, the Palavi, the original Palavi, Reza Palavi, and then his father, Mohammed Reza Palavi, continued. And by 1978, Iran had the fourth largest army in the world. It had one of the greatest economies in the world. Everyone

• 1:14:24Speaker 06

  was coming there, Sinatra. And it was a beautiful, beautiful place. And, you know, there was a coalition of Islamic extremists and the beginning of the woke Marxist socialist era that we're now seeing in places like New York and Maldani. And they've exported this strategy because it was so successful for them to take a major strategic asset and country with major resources like Iran and own it and then use that asset, those assets that God bless Iran with, to export that ideology and that terror. So this is

• 1:15:04Speaker 06

  the fight of our times. If we defeat the Islamic regime, we will unleash an era of peace and prosperity for the world.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  What's the history of protests in Iran? It feels like there's been small moments, 2009 with disputed elections, 2017, 2019, 2022. It feels like every few years, there's a moment that could grow. It hasn't in the past. Walk me through some of the history and then help me understand why this time might be different.

• 1:15:37Speaker 06

  That's a great question and also a good framework to think about what's happening exactly at this moment. Like, the next forty-eight hours, I think, is do or die. Each time those protests got to a moment where it could have turned into a change, a significant change in the government, like, like, uh, two thousand nine, the Green Revolution, two thousand nine and ten, um, you know, the president, uh, at the time, President Obama, uh, made a major, major, critical mistake, and he didn't back the protesters the way President Trump is backing the protesters. And, and when you don't back them, when you don't give them the courage that they will have the support of America and other, other democracies

• 1:16:20Speaker 06

  in the world that care about freedom and, uh, care about, uh, this, you know, destroying terrorism that is a threat to our way of life, um, uh, it, it fizzles out, and then they learn, the Islamic regime learns, uh, and they become even more, uh, extremists and, uh, abusive and, you know, causing, uh, you know, the, the hangings by the, by the thousands and imprisonments and rapes and to scare people and terrify people. They keep power through, through fear. And the thing I learned, uh, when I went to try to spread, um, satellite communications in those revolutions in Libya, uh, I went there,

• 1:17:01Speaker 06

  um, two weeks before Gaddafi was killed, um, and, uh, went to Benghazi, went to Tripoli a month after it was, it was freed, went to, to Here Square. Uh, I wrote something called, uh, "Fear is finite and hope is infinite." When the people lose their fear is when, uh, freedom movements actually succeed. And, and the people, as you can see, by the millions in the streets, even with all the killings, they're still coming. Last night, they all, they still came out. Uh, they've lost their fear, and that's when these types of tyrants fall. So if there is support from the air, from the skies, like Starlink, that, uh, we, we began that project patiently in order so this, when this day came, there, there

• 1:17:45Speaker 06

  would be, uh, open communication. ...of the world and coordination, but also support from the sky in terms of taking out some of these tyrants, you know, and we took out the nuclear capability before because that was an existential threat, but but these these evil leaders are are as as bad as a nuclear bomb. They're just a nuclear bomb in a bot in a human form.

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  I feel like a lot of people who grew up and came of age during the war on terror don't have a lot of optimism about regime change. They tend to think that even if there's someone, some interesting person, a lot of energy to come in and lead, there's like the infrastructure is so important because a government's just not just one person. There's, you know, ministers and leaders and all sorts of a chain that that needs to form. And if you don't have a full government ready to go, how can you just rip and replace, drop in someone new? Their their minds go to the debathification in Iraq and all the

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  chaos that happened there. How how do you think Americans who've who've, you know, sort of been blackpilled on regime change in the Middle East should be thinking about a positive outcome here?

• 1:19:05Speaker 06

  Well, one experience in Iraq, first of all, Iran is not Iraq. It's 92 million people, you know, 87% are don't even consider themselves religious, you know, and so it's a very different nation that is yearning for freedom, loves America, loves, you know, Western culture, wants their freedom. And let us not forget, America saved the world in World War Two. Then the Marshall Plan rebuilt all of Europe. Look at Japan's success.

• 1:19:46Speaker 06

  And and and so, you know, and then you look at Reagan and tear down this wall and the pressure that he put on in the Soviet Union and and all of the And that's sign efforts to that happened to weaken the Soviet Union are are is Germany today a bad place to to to live? It wasn't until, you know, potentially extremist Islam invaded invaded Europe. Is Poland a bad place? I was just in Poland multiple times for for my work and my investments. It's a thriving economy. So, you know, we have to look at the positive examples of what's possible.

• 1:20:25Speaker 06

  When you unleash freedom, you have economic boom and you have humans that are thriving and contributing to our world.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming and giving us the update. Best of luck to you and everyone involved and stay safe. And best of luck. We'll talk to you soon, Sherwin. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We got to go over to the OpenAI device. There's new leaks, alleged leaks. We'll see. It's a new audio wearable meant to replace AirPods. This aligns with what the information has been leaking. The code name, Sweet P. Interesting. It looks like a metal eggstone with two little capsules behind the ear, aiming for a 2 nanometer chip, maybe a custom chip for phone-like actions. Big ambition, 50 million units in year one. That's a lot of devices.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Foxconn has been told to prepare for five total devices by Q4 of 2028. All not known but a home style device and a pen are still considered.

• 1:21:38John Coogan?

  I wonder how serious going to Foxconn if you're OpenAI, you go to Foxconn and you say, prepare for five devices? What does that really mean? Does it mean, okay, help me prototype, do some demo runs, build me one or two? And and maybe we'll do one of the five, maybe we'll do two of the five. Is Foxconn really reorienting everything about this? Are they totally prepared to make five? How serious that, serious is that? I don't know. All I know is that it's exciting. I like, I like hardware. It's fun. It's a, I'm, we're seeing it. We're seeing glimpses of this with the kids, with the board and with the, the, what was, what was it called? Camera box? No, sticker box, sticker box.

• 1:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I mean, OpenAI, it sounds like. Johnny's team are the ones that are kind of pushing for this form factor, according to, obviously, this is a rumor, but picking a form factor similar to AirPods, which have insane product market fit, which last time I checked are like a $20 billion revenue line for Apple. Very, it could be a standalone business by itself. And again, if you look back to the infamous interview with Gersner, Sam was saying, like, we have a device coming.

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Jordi Hays?

  We have a device coming. Don't worry, don't worry about that.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  That's a lot of revenue, potentially. I mean, I, I don't know if they sell them. What, what do you think the price point for a, for a OpenAI device would be? $300? $1,000? $9.99? $3,500?

• 1:23:07Jordi Hays?

  I feel like, I feel like they have to, I feel like they have to stay in the range of the AirPods.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  And AirPods are between $100 and $300, basically. So low, single-digit hundreds. Um, well, Andrew Curran has a projection for what it'll look like. If they ship this, I think they got an absolute blockbuster on their hands. Uh, I would rock that. We're already wearing in-ear monitors. I don't know if you can see over here, just upgraded to this.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  This goes so hard.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  It goes so hard.

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  The reason I like it is because the, the computer part is actually on the back.

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Jordi Hays?

  It frees you up to just stay locked in.

• 1:23:45John Coogan?

  Super cool. And also I love that there's a display that you can't see, but everyone else can. So everyone else knows, oh, he's doing a deep research report right now. Oh, he's, he's locked in.

• 1:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's check in on John. John, can you turn around for a second?

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, okay. Three green lights. He's, he's printing. He's making money.

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says, this will be as successful as Humane, Friend, Rabbit, et cetera.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, let us know in the chat if you're bullish or bearish on the OpenAI device. Uh, a lot of risk, but a lot of resources, a lot of good people over there. Uh, anyway, whatever, whenever they announce it, you know that they're going to livestream it. They're going to get on Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Uh, in other news, we got to go to Apple Creator Studio. Tyler, can you break this down for us? What are they doing? Who's, who are they taking shots at? Apple Creator Studio.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  It seems they're basically just rolling all of their like software. I don't know if there's actually any new software, but they're just like rolling it together into some

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  subscription. It's kind of like

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Creative Cloud.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So.

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  Cause I mean, they already have the, the kind of

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  same, like there's Final Cut.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  Premiere.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  So Jaws, Jaws here says, uh, uh, meet Apple Creator Studio. It's giving creators every kind of every kind, easy access to powerful intuitive tools for video, music, imaging, and productivity, all supercharged by intelligent features that, that speed up and elevate their work. Were they previously selling Final Cut Pro separately? I think they were, right?

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, usually.

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember as a kid paying two, I was like, wow, I'm gonna spend $200 on a piece of software and that felt like

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  $200,000.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  And you got some for free, like you get iMovie for free, but then Apple, uh, but then Final Cut is an upgrade. And I, I was actually thinking about purchasing a, a Mac Mini or something. And I was going through the checkout flow and one of the options that they put right there is do you want to buy Final Cut Pro for an extra 200 something bucks? And so it seems like they may be doing away with that. Let's dig in. Uh, Apple has just introduced Apple Creator Studio, says Aaron here, analyst at Mac Rumors. Uh, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmater Pro, Motion, Kompressor, and Main Stage, plus new AI features and premium content in keynote, pages, and numbers come together in a single subscription. They have the games subscription. They have a, don't they have a health subscription as well? There's

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  music, there's news. Uh, Apple has like seven different subscriptions now that I think about it.

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You can definitely. I would love to know what the average iPhone, uh, customer spends on software monthly, like, and, and what, uh, what Apple's take is on it. Both, both.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  They're printing. Their services business is, is everything at this point. Um.

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess you could just divide services revenue.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Well, services revenue, they don't really break it all out. Whenever they talk about services, they talk about Apple TV, all the wonderful TV shows and movies that they're producing. Uh, but then a lot of the services revenue comes from the App Store, 30% cut. You're laughing. What's funny?

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Dave says, Jordan, you dork. You didn't pirate.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  You didn't pirate it.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, I, I, my father was very much like, you wouldn't, you wouldn't, you wouldn't steal from the grocery store. Don't, don't steal.

• 1:26:56John Coogan?

  You wouldn't pirate a car.

• 1:26:57Jordi Hays?

  Big computer, big Apple.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Respect, respect big tech from day one. Respect cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. I mentioned it earlier, but Dwarash Patel and Sholto Douglas did a gym workout with creatine cycle. There's a new series. He's going to hit the gym with AI researchers. This is what the modern media landscape needs for sure. I love it. Very, very fun. And Dwarash says, in his defense, Sholto was almost an Olympian. Very, very good.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  Atlus looking absolutely diced in this.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  It's insane. It's insane. Oh, quick shout out to Donnie Honig, who says TVPN is the only show I like hearing the ad reads on. They just make it so fun. Well, you're welcome, Donnie. Here's another ad read. 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. Thank you.

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about, we gotta talk about 11 Labs growth. Matty highlighted, he highlighted it yesterday. He said zero to 100 million ARR was 20 months, 100 to 200, 10 months, 200 to, 200 to 330 was just five months. So little, quite the acceleration.

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  Really, really good.

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  And he is looking sharp here on Bloomberg.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  And, and also just, it's such an interesting story because when this came out, it was, it was the textbook critique of like, the other labs are going to steamroll you. Like, they have all the researchers, they have all the compute, they have all the money. Oh, it doesn't matter what you raise. They raised 100 times that. This is a side project. They're going to be able to whip this up in a cave with scraps. You're going to get steamrolled and it just hasn't happened. And I think it goes back to the focus on, you know, pure play focus. We've seen Anthropic with the focus on code do really well. This focus on voice and the focus on taste, sort of the mid journey of audio is, is my new

• 1:29:04John Coogan?

  frame, like frame of mind here, that it's less of a commodity, more opinionated than I think people realize, when it seems like just put the weights in the bag and you're good to go. Anyway, uh, do we have our next guest here? Um, let's, let's read through this, uh, back and forth between Tim Sweeney and Palmer Lucky because they're going back and forth. Uh, PC Gamer reported that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to AI generate adult images of minors is just gatekeepers attempting to censor all of their political opponents. Tim Sweeney fired back and said, this is a vile lie by PC Gamer. I criticized a government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app owned by their

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  political opponent, deplatforming 500 million users on the pretense of stopping a small number of users from distributing disgusting content. And Palmer Lucky chimed in and said, PC Gamer loves to make things up about people they don't like. Uh, and he's, uh, going back to, uh, a report that PC Gamer put out about, this is insane headlines. Tech billionaires, including Palmer Lucky, set up dumb new bank for those who didn't get burned enough in the 2022 crypto crash. You could write a headline like that. That's insane.

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Why, why does PC Gamer?

• 1:30:22John Coogan?

  Just so hard. They literally use the word dumb. I mean, I guess this is opinion piece or something, but it's all about the stable coins and they call them a bond villain. Wow, they really don't like him. This is crazy. Palmer replied, he said, quote, "The point of SVB and thus Erebor is risky bets on fledgling startups that are unlikely to be backed by traditional finance, which has all these pesky rules and regulations. Why are you lying? The point is literally the opposite." Um, yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to recreate SVB because it didn't turn out.

• 1:30:54Jordi Hays?

  We don't want to keep our next guest waiting.

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  We don't. So before we bring them in, let me tell you about vibe.co where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. Well, we have the president and CEO of Booze, Alan Hamilton here.

• 1:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:31:13John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining.

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  Hey guys. Good to see you.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Good to see you too.

• 1:31:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  I, I love your, I want to talk about the partnership with Andreessen Horowitz, but first I want you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey because it's a classic overnight success that we love here on the show.

• 1:31:35Speaker 05

  I love it. Thank you for the special effects. I was wondering if you're gonna use some. Of course.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  I'll use a lot, as much as you want.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  So, born and raised in Argentina, came here to go to school, find my way to Wisconsin Eau Claire, of all places, loved it there. I went to grad school, joined Booz Allen. This summer will be 35 years. That was a summer intern with Booz Allen.

• 1:31:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  And here I am, you know, and thought I was gonna be here for two years. But fell in love with the people, with the work, with the culture, and I kept getting challenged. And every time I wanted to leave, they promoted me, so I stayed.

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  That's a virtuous cycle for you.

• 1:32:17Speaker 05

  It's been great.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Were there any breaks? I know that a lot of my friends who were interns in consulting or banking would leave for a couple of years, do an MBA, and then maybe come back. Was there any of that, or were you just there the whole time?

• 1:32:29Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:32:30Speaker 05

  Right through. I'm truly a lifer.

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  It's amazing. What advice are you giving to the next generation of folks who might be interns right now at Booz Allen? Is that opportunity still there? Do you see the lifer path as being one that you recommend to the new interns?

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. Look, I mean, I think you, first of all, I tell everybody, you gotta find that organization that where your personal values and what you wanna do matches the organizational values and what they wanna do, and when you find one, grab on with both hands, because that alignment is what keeps you going.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Speaker 05

  And then I say to people, look, I mean, I, early in my career, I wanted to get promoted and this and that and the other thing, and then I, at some point, I said, you know what? I just wanna learn stuff.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  And then they were like, you gotta be the CEO.

• 1:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, it's kinda...

• 1:33:22Speaker 05

  And I started getting promoted faster.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:33:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it's kinda rough, if you're really good at getting promoted, it's kinda rough to kinda, you've kinda capped out a little bit here, but...

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, not many promotions left.

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  You know, I come to work because I love what I do. I mean, and this has been true for the last 35 years. And yeah, at the beginning, you know, I was in a bit of the rat race. I got off of that, and literally, I just said... Let's go learn stuff, you know, I, what do I not know about? Let me try and go learn how to do that.

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:53Speaker 05

  And that's what keeps me here.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  How have the last few years of the AI boom been? Has it turned it more into a rat race? Has there been more greenfield projects that have been less of a rat race? Uh, how is the, how is the AI boom transformed your business? What you're working on, how you're spending your time?

• 1:34:12Speaker 05

  So this has been awesome. Not, first of all, you should know I have a background in statistics. So I was like doing early work on neural networks. And if I'd been born 20 years later, I would have been a data scientist. But we didn't have cool titles like that. Uh, but I was a big data guy when big data was tiny compared to what it is now.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for big data.

• 1:34:32Speaker 05

  And about a dozen years ago.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  We love big data here.

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, about a dozen years ago, um, I, I, I, I took the strong form view that said, you know, AI really is going to revolutionize everything. We need to get, as Booz Allen at the, at the leading edge of that. Uh, we built essentially the largest, uh, we're the largest AI provider to the federal government. Uh, most of our business is with the government. We've been the largest cyber player, uh, in, in the federal space going back now maybe 20 plus years. And, uh, I, I, I've always thought about it as AI and, right? It's, it's intersection of AI and cyber, AI and space, AI and autonomy. And that, that's what we've been trying to build.

• 1:35:18Speaker 05

  And, and, you know, Booz Allen, really, people think of us as a consulting firm because we, we were one once. Uh, that's the company that I joined.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:28Speaker 05

  But if you look at us now, uh, our business is we're in the business of taking leading edge technology and bringing it to government missions. Uh, everything from military missions to space, to, uh, payment systems, to public health. Uh, we're, we're bringing tech into all of that, which is why we build these amazing partnerships.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  How uh yeah, how has the last year changed your relationship with the government that you know, if you start 2025, I think about Doge and and a bunch of political energy around reducing cost and maybe reducing budgets and doing more with less, which of course software and technology can help with. At the same time, I saw a headline that the President Trump thinks the defense budgets to be 1.5 trillion and that feels like, okay, expand and we're in a different mode. So has that been whiplash or have, how have you processed setting up your business to deliver what you need to to the government

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  across those sorts of narrative arcs that have rolled out over the last, you know, 12 months?

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  So if you think about our business, there's two pieces to it. There's work that we do for for national security.

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Speaker 05

  That's about three quarters of our business.

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:36:50Speaker 05

  And then there's work that we do for more of the civilian agencies. Think about things like the VA, Human Health Services, Treasury, IRS, those kinds of agencies. The administration has been pretty consistent. On the more of the civilian side, they've been looking very hard for ways to reduce cost. On the on the national security side, they've been looking to reprogram against top priorities. And so this idea that that we're going to spend more on defense going forward, if you know, that obviously needs to be approved by Congress and all of that. But the president has been pretty consistent

• 1:37:33Speaker 05

  about wanting to rebuild the military, ensure that our military continues to be the preeminent one in the world. And we view bringing technology into that and working with the commercial technology providers to make their technology useful into those missions, which is not a straight translation by any means, as a big part of what we do. So we develop tech that sits on top or together with their tech, and together we build things that then neither one of us.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  So what does that mean for hiring? I imagine that you're partnering with the foundation lab companies, not necessarily trying to go up against Mark Zuckerberg and pay a billion dollars for some fancy AI researcher. Let Google DeepMind, let OpenAI, let Anthropic and other labs build the foundation models and then you can go and implement them. So what type of person is really excelling? How technical are they? Are you hiring computer scientists, MBAs, both? Who's thriving?

• 1:38:36Speaker 05

  We're hiring largely, think of it as AI researchers. We have a very large quantum

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  team where we hire astrophysicists.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:38:46Speaker 05

  You know, and so we're really at the leading edge of these technologies, working side by side with all of our partners. I joke about the fact that I knew Jensen back when he was only worth a couple billion dollars. And he and our companies have been working together on some of these things since like 2017. So we've been at this for a while. I mean, you talk about Mark and Meta. We took Llama

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:16Speaker 05

  and working with them, translated into something that could be ported on to the International Space Station. So it became Space Llama, which is made for some pretty cool memes. But now on the research side of the International Space Station, there is a, for the first time, a large language model there. So that instead of going through all of these paper manuals, every time they need to fix something, they can actually do natural language queries and do all of that. So that's the type of work that we're doing. If you think about it, most commercial tech is oriented towards the idea that you're going to be in a data center that has perfect access to energy, perfect access to fiber, you know, it's 24/7 uptime.

• 1:40:01Speaker 05

  When you start dealing with some of the missions that we support,

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:04Speaker 05

  You're at the edge, you're in the desert, you're in space, you're underwater, you have no connectivity. Uh, form factor matters, power matters. And we need to take the, all of this amazing technology and these trillions of dollars in investment and make it useful in those settings. And for that, we build an additional tech that is proprietary to us that combined with theirs uh, really does wonderful things. And we started working with some of the uh, companies that are uh, A16C.

• 1:40:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Speaker 05

  Porcos uh, and, and discover that, you know, there's a lot we were doing there for the, with the companies that were already oriented towards our market. But I know you had been on the show uh, on, on Friday. Uh, you know, they have 1100 companies or more in their portfolio. The vast majority of them are not thinking about these missions. But they're building, many are building technologies that are highly applicable.

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:00Speaker 05

  So. So if we grab their tech and our tech and put it together in a different way.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04Speaker 05

  We expand markets, create differentiation. Uh, it's all sorts of good stuff that happens.

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, you mentioned you knew uh, you knew Jensen when he was just worth a few billion dollars. When did you meet uh, the Andreessen team? How long has this partnership been in the works? And then uh, I'd love to know more about the nature of the exclusivity of the partnership, how that all takes shape. Uh, and anything else you can tell us about it?

• 1:41:29Speaker 05

  Uh, sure. So um, we've been working with, with uh, companies that are in their portfolio for years without actually engaging at the, you know, with, with A16Z directly. So uh, with Allen and Databricks, for example, have done a number of things together in the Department of Defense. Uh, we, we do things with Android. We, you know, we, we have a partnership with Shield AI.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:52Speaker 05

  That makes a ton of sense because we're building our tech and our cybersecurity tech on top of HiveMind, which is their core uh, autonomy product.

• 1:42:03Speaker 05

  And then we, about a year plus ago, I started talking to Ben and to Mark. And we started shaping this idea that there's more we could do together at their level that, you know, we could begin to think about not just the companies that are obviously playing in this market, but the broader ecosystem and thinking about, okay, how we create a way to even do that. What's that discovery process look like? How do we create opportunities? How do we vet them? How do we manage our techs so that, you know, and that's been the, over the course of the last year, we've done a bunch of stuff that has gotten us all super excited, leading up to this announcement on Monday.

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  What are some of the earliest stage companies that would qualify for this program? Are you working with like Series A stage?

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  They have an accelerator. So there's companies that come in with just one or two co-founders and they get $100,000 check. And then you have a Databricks, which is a $100 billion business. How do you size the partnerships?

• 1:43:09Speaker 05

  So we're working, you know, we're almost working problem back. So what is the problem we're trying to solve and who has a piece of this puzzle? So we even have our own little corporate VC fund and there's companies in there. Seek is a great quantum company. Albedo is doing very low Earth orbit.

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love.

• 1:43:29Speaker 05

  Satellites. Let's see. Scout AI is doing autonomy on the ground.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:36Speaker 05

  Firestorm is doing essentially 3D printed drones. And we think about, okay, so what's, what is Firestorm doing? What's Shield doing? What are we doing? If we bring all of this together, can we solve a unique problem that we know exists that doesn't have a solution today? So, so, you know, we're not so interested in the size of the company so much as we're interested in. Problem back, what can we solve and how do we scale it? So we're working with Mistral, for example, which is in their portfolio on NATO-type problems and European ally problems. As you know, Europe is beginning to spend their fair share on their defense budget.

• 1:44:20Speaker 05

  Well, they got a series of issues that we can tackle together that weren't on anybody's radar screen. So that's the kind of stuff that frankly, super excites me. And I think this is where there's a ton of energy and some really cool stuff coming along.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Jordy, anything else?

• 1:44:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk with us. Congratulations on the partnership and we're excited to hear more. I'm sure a bunch of portfolio founders will be on the show.

• 1:44:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, join us again as you guys have more announcements.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to keep talking.

• 1:44:51Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Thank you, guys.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card. Parker Conrad, the founder and CEO of Rippling chimed in on the one-time California billionaire tax. He says, "Leave before the Series B." I don't think of Parker as outspoken against the California Democrats very often, but he's quoting Jason Lemkin here, who has more context.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I can read through this. So Jason says, "My take on California's one-time billionaire tax, it's much worse than it looks. Will it pass? Yes, likely. It only needs 50% plus one voter approval. CEI, you and CTA have done this before, Prop 55 won 63% in 2016. Will it get tied up in litigation? Almost certainly. Retroactive wealth tax on a tax type California has never had equals due process challenges. Billionaires have the legal budgets for years of fights, but it's clearly only the start. The goal is an annual tax, not one time, and the target is $25 to $50 million net worth. Folks, including illiquid holdings."

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  I.e. early-stage founders raising a Series B. And the one-time framing is strategic. Same coalition is, already has AB259 written. An annual 1% wealth tax at a 50 million, at a greater than $50 million threshold with plans to go to 25 million. It's been introduced three years running. The one-time tax removes the constitutional barrier. Once that's gone, the annual version becomes a much easier ballot measure. California Policy Center said if SEIU hopes to keep Medicare spending growing, it may need to place repeated wealth taxes on the ballot, potentially lowering the threshold as billionaires flee. The risk for founders at 1 billion, you're taxing 200 people at 50 million, and you're

• 1:46:50Jordi Hays?

  taxing 23,000 households, including the most successful founders on paper, before any liquidity event. So imagine you raise a Series B, suddenly you have 50 million of paper gains, and suddenly the government's coming over and saying like, yeah, we need you to come up with a piece of that, or get on a payment plan. And so then you're effectively like, you know, just like building up a debt to the California government that, as of right now, seems like it just doesn't go away, even if your company fails, it's like you owe that to the state. So what'll happen here is people might, if this goes through, as is, people will start companies like Parker's saying, they'll start the company, and maybe they raise like a pre-seed

• 1:47:35Jordi Hays?

  round, seed round, something like that, and then they'll be like, okay, I literally have to move the company. Or maybe they won't even start it in California in the first place. And Newsom has come out in the last 24 hours and is against the tax. So he is on siding with the tech billionaires.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:47:57Jordi Hays?

  But again-

• 1:47:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, when I see names like Parker Conrad, Vinod Khosla, like, I don't think of these as like the tech right, I just think of these as like tech people. And so to see them pushing back against this is, it's less of a political issue and more and more, more of a practical issue about where companies will be led from. I saw a different angle that potentially- The super voting, like, control could be used to determine how much you have to pay. And so you could have a founder who has super voting shares. They have 90% of the voting shares, but they take on a lot of-

• 1:48:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes, if they have a $100 million company.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:34Jordi Hays?

  The bill as, the way it's written today, they'd be taxed as if they have a $90 million position in the company.

• 1:48:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:48:40Jordi Hays?

  Which is just insane. They might have a, by that point, they might have a 25%.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  They might have less, depending if they're, you know, multiple founders. So Pirate Wires has a great piece on this at Courage. Everybody should read it. It's California's tech industry kill switch from Mike Solana.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  He says it's not a tax on wealth. The union's ballot prop is designed to target the very concept of founder-controlled companies.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  And it will force the technology industry out of the state.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be very, very weird to see a situation where a company gets started. They still go to San Francisco because that's a fun place to be. That's an exciting place to be, but then slowly the executive ranks are just relocating to Incline Village or Las Vegas or Texas.

• 1:49:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which I was surprised, I was surprised that Jensen, Jensen was like, "Yeah, I don't, I don't mind it."

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  No big deal.

• 1:49:29Jordi Hays?

  It's like, were you just trying to earn points, right? With the, with the general population? Like, at what point, like, so many of his employees would be subject to this, right?

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  At, at a certain point, yes, and I don't know, it could be very complicated. It certainly seems like a, like a, yeah, but it's just very, very complicated position. Austin Allred says, "I wonder how many founders in California know that if you're making 250K a year and move to Texas or Florida, you pay $2,500 a month less in taxes. Switching state of residence will save enough to cover rent." And of course, Austin, I believe he, doesn't he believe, doesn't he live in Utah? I, I don't think he lives in California, although he is part of the Silicon Valley community, and Newsom did chime in. He vows to stop the tax. Where are the prediction markets on the tax? Will this happen? While we look that up, let's pull up Gary Tan.

• 1:50:23John Coogan?

  He says it's time for Silicon Valley to actually get involved and organize in California. One, financially tough times are ahead for California. California's government will almost certainly try to loot Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley will flee. Four, this will create a severe loss for the Bay Area and California and for the United States. Five, the only way out is for successful technologists to run and win for office at every level in the 2026 midterm elections, especially for governor. So.

• 1:50:50Jordi Hays?

  Quotes from Newsom, Newsom says, "This will be defeated. There's no question in my mind. I'll do what I have to do to protect the state."

• 1:50:59John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:51:00Jordi Hays?

  The governor has long opposed a wealth tax because of concerns.

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  All of that is just very, very complicated, but there's really good news because now you can book a hotel on the moon. A new startup backed by Nvidia NY Combinator is planning to develop the first hotel on the moon by 2032. I'm going, I'm going. It's starting at $416,000 per night. We'll see where that actually lands. You can book on their website, but we have the perfect guest to discuss because we have Glenn Fogel, the president and CEO of Booking.com. Hopefully we'll be able to book a hotel on the moon. We can ask him about it. He's in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and UltraDome. Glenn, how are you doing?

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:51:45Speaker 00

  I'm doing well, and that's so exciting to hear hotels on the moon.

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  I know, I love it. A TAM expander. You guys were looking for more, for more assets to bring on the platform. Why not go interplanetary? This thing is quite a lot of renders, so you know, fingers crossed they can turn it into reality.

• 1:52:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, but, but, but, but here's the thing. Do you remember the TV series, it was on at the theme, oh God, it was AMC, it was Mad Men. Do you remember that?

• 1:52:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:15Speaker 00

  There was an episode where the person who was supposed to be the head of Hilton, Conrad Hilton, and he'd hired, he'd hired the guy and he wanted to have the ad be about putting a hotel on the moon.

• 1:52:28Jordi Hays?

  Ahead of, ahead of their time.

• 1:52:29Speaker 00

  Ahead of their time, definitely.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  They, this company should, should go back and reference it. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's some great copy buried in there, but fantastic to have you on the show. Would love, would love just an introduction on yourself and the journey on, on how you got here.

• 1:52:46Speaker 00

  Well, I'm the CEO of Booking Holdings and Booking.com, which is the largest subsidiary of Booking Holdings. We have a number of different companies that I think many of your watchers would know, things like, not just Booking.com, but OpenTable, for example, or Kayak, or Priceline, and people who are out in Asia certainly have heard of Agoda, and a number of other companies as well. And we do travel, OpenTable, of course, doing restaurant reservations, but we've been around for a long time. Priceline.com was the first one in the States, and that went public in 1999. And I've been in the company since almost the start. I joined in 2000, so been around for a while.

• 1:53:28Jordi Hays?

  Where were you before you joined?

• 1:53:32Speaker 00

  Before I joined in 2000, I was a head trader for a guy named Barton Biggs, who was kind of a legend on Wall Street at Morgan Stanley Asset Management. And I left to join Priceline during that first internet boom period, and I joined a week before the NASDAQ peaked in March of 2000, thereby proving a couple of things. One, I absolutely should have left my job as trader, because I'd just done what's known as top-taking the trade.

• 1:53:59Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Amazing timing to leave, but then you're sitting there being like, am I gonna have a job?

• 1:54:06Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:54:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, what matters is you saw it through. Did you ever, was there any, was there ever a point that you, or any of your peers were like, okay, maybe the internet is just over? Or was it like, hey, we just, we really, it's just like, we needed to just really hunker down, and we got ahead of our skis, and this is all inevitable, but it's just not, you know, like most things, it's not always up and to the right forever?

• 1:54:34Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, a couple of things. First of all, certainly, our stock went down. I'm gonna do the reverse split number, because it went to under $8, but to stay listed, we had to actually do a reverse split. So so we'll call it what at that time so you can see on the chart it's six dollars because we get it back up. So even my mother at the time thought like gee, I do still have a job. Is the company got bankrupt yet or not? And I'd left a pretty good job to do this. But here's the thing, a long time ago, my career, I started out when I came out of college, and this is in the 80s. My first job is I was an IT guy, again, at Morgan Stanley, different time period. I was in their back office doing coding for doing a whole bunch

• 1:55:18Speaker 00

  of real exciting things. One of the exciting things was things that we're doing in terms of algorithmic trading. Now, that was back in the day. We weren't calling it AI, though that's exactly what it was. You know, go from the mid 80s to joining in 2000. I really believed in the future of using technology to make life so much better in so many different ways. Priceline at the time was using technology to make it cheaper and easier to travel. So I never doubted the concept that technology is the it's always been the future. I mean, go back a couple hundred years, go back to the Industrial Revolution. Technology is a wonderful thing for improving the human condition. So I would not doubt that. I was a little concerned about our cash position.

• 1:56:01Speaker 00

  It just survived. Since I was there. Yeah.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  How have you been processing all of the agentic commerce news? We had Harley from Shopify on the store on the show yesterday, talking about what Google's doing. Obviously, ChatGPT is interested in agentic commerce, being able to, you know, complete transactions in the LLMs, in the chatbots, in the apps. How are you thinking about your strategy in a world where people want to purchase things through text and chat?

• 1:56:38Speaker 00

  Well, look, people always want things to be easier and agentic commerce as a concept is fantastic. And we are doing a lot of work with all the frontier players, absolutely to be very hand in glove, working together to come up with solutions using agentic ways. So people can do things easier, faster, better, et cetera, et cetera. That being said, it's going to take some time for things that are very complex, like a lot of travel. Now, I'm not doubting that we're going to be doing a lot of agentic travel, uh, transactions. Absolutely. It's just not going to be tomorrow. I'm really glad with some of the deals we've already done with all the players. There's not a single one that we haven't either set a deal with, done a deal with, working with, making progress with, et cetera.

• 1:57:21Speaker 00

  But even more so is what we're going to do internally, what we're building ourselves. We have thousands of engineers. You know, one thing, I don't know if you're, uh, watchers or if you watch your show, really understand the size of our company. You know, we're a hundred and approximately 170, 175 billion market cap company.

• 1:57:40Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong, John. We got a gong here. We'd love to, we'd love to hit it on your behalf.

• 1:57:47Speaker 00

  What's even better is that, you know, that's twice as big as the next biggest player in travel. I'm talking, you know, distribution travel, I'm talking all travel, like number two, maybe it's Marriott today.

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:58:00Speaker 00

  Uh, maybe I, and, and then after that, it falls off pretty dark. The biggest airline in the world's about a third of our market cap. I mean, Expedia's a fifth.

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:10Speaker 00

  I mean, so we have the size, we've got the scale to do the work, to come up with these wonderful things that are going to be coming down the pike.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  So, uh, obviously it feels like it's advantageous to have as much experience as you have at the company for another tech transition. Uh, how are you thinking, we were talking to Harley about this, like, is this the, is this similar to the mobile moment or social moment? Obviously with Shopify, they think a lot about brands, which were very much transformed by influencers showing off some leggings or some product that you want to buy. And so you go right there and there was a debate, well, would that transaction happen on Instagram or on Facebook? It ultimately wound up happening on Shopify, but the ads platform was very valuable and there was an integration there. How are you tracking previous lessons from previous technology shifts and purchasing

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  behavior to kind of prepare for the agentic transition if it happens this year or next year or whenever it happens?

• 1:59:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, and because it's so hard to predict the future, as we all know, is making sure you're covering all the options, trying to balance the amount of resources you're putting into things that you're building now versus making sure you continue to improve what you currently have going on that's producing the cash. I mean, that's the thing is that it's always difficult when you have an ongoing entity like ours that's doing very well and our investors like seeing the cash flow that we produce, they like the growth that we're showing right now, and they are always cautious, as investors should be, is where are you putting that, you know, cash that you're producing? Is it going to be put into things that are not going to produce future increased cash? Is it going to be wasted or not?

• 1:59:52Speaker 00

  And I believe we've got the right balance set up, we've got the right people. But in terms of people want to know, I'm asked this all the time, it's two questions, it's always be, are you going to be disintermediated by something new, something different? And B, are you growing fast enough right now to prevent that? I think we have it going well right now. I like the progress that we're making, I like the numbers are showing up, and I like the new products we have coming out. So we'll see, but I, look, nobody, nobody has a guarantee. You have to every single day be working incredibly hard to keep up because the competition is very, very stiff.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  How difficult is it to, for an AI to act as a travel agent?

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  We, we, we've had this question where the AI models seem so powerful, they can build whole websites, they can write more complex code than I could write in a month, they can do it in just an hour, and yet I actually can't just say, hey, I need to get to New York, book me a flight, because I wind up having all these weird preferences, I don't want to lay over, I'm okay flying early, but I don't really want to fly late.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when people talk, every, every lab wants to build the best, you know, super assistant.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  Assistant.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Think about the moments where like a real EA in my life has delivered the most value. It's when I'm like, okay, this meeting's running late. I'm gonna miss my flight.

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Jordi Hays?

  I need a rear, you know, and I'm just firing off a text being like, you know, I need to switch the car to pick me up like in an extra hour and I'm gonna miss my flight. Find me the best flight. I don't want to lay over like I want to lay flat like all these details that today that still takes, you know, that still takes real time. And so I'm curious for you, like, where do these experience, where do you see these experiences actually sitting? Is it, is it in, you know, chat GPT or Gemini or it's, it's gonna be sitting in Siri?

• 2:01:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Or will it be sitting on booking.com and you guys want to own that experience or both?

• 2:01:53Speaker 00

  Right. Or will it be in many of the places you just mentioned? Because for example, right now, let's, let's look at what we have right now. We have some, we have sixty, approximately sixty-five percent of the people come to our site to buy something, do something, want to actually do that. They are coming to us direct. Now I'm doing that number. I'm not including our B to B business on the side there. But sixty-five percent of the people are coming in directly to our site. There's a loyalty thing. Why? Now, why? Because it's easier, because we know who they are. We already have established certain things that they like and are able to provide them with that. That's great. The thing in the future, though, with the ability of memory of L L Ms to remember what your preferences are over time.

• 2:02:38Speaker 00

  That is obviously a powerful thing. Now we are doing that within ourselves, creating our own ability to make sure. Your example, I want a flat bed. I only like to take the flight at night. All sorts of those things. Those are the things that we are putting in because what we really want is use the technology to replace what you just said. That executive assistants who knows everything about you, who loves to make sure they do exactly what you want. And you don't have to ask him or her how to do it. They know how to do it. That's what we are building, but it's even more so because your EA should know, but may not know, for example, that, oh, I forgot, I got. Stop by and buy a present because I'm going to visit my, you know, friend in France.

• 2:03:22Speaker 00

  May not know that, but we want to have it so much so that we know so much about you. We know that now we know that we know that's going to take a 10 minute delay and oops, you may not make that flight because of the delay on the highway. So we're going to switch all this stuff around for you suggests should we do this because it looks like you're not going to make it. So then you can get on a flight. You don't miss the flight and then because it's a new flight. We automatically are changing the car pickup that you have and we're changing because now your dinner reservation is going to be later. We're changing that too. And if there is no availability at that restaurant because we have open table. We're looking for a restaurant that's very similar to it right near it and we're going to put a new reservation for you and your friend there.

• 2:04:08Speaker 00

  And in addition, because we know you're going to be incredibly tired and you're going to be all upset. What we're going to do is get you a special favor from the hotel. So when you show up at the hotel, you got your favorite uh bottle of wine and all these things can be done. The technology is there. We just have to stitch it together. That's the hard part.

• 2:04:27Jordi Hays?

  How are you uh how are you processing the rise of voice agents? I get really excited about uh. You know, there's so many moments still even with the internet where you, if you're traveling, you end up having to like call a hotel or talk to somebody in person uh. Never really want to do that, right? It's just like, give me the information, et cetera. Uh but it feels like we're moving to a world where uh eventually it could just be agent to agent directly, no voice, but feels like we're going to, there's a middle ground where you have agent to human uh or voice agent to voice agent and they're just having a conversation.

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  Or even voice agent to like legacy phone tree, which is all recordings, but it's

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:09John Coogan?

  deterministic system and just having an agent be able to run through that speeds things up.

• 2:05:14Speaker 00

  Well, one of the wonderful things about right now that's already, we're already doing, and other people are doing it too, is using GNI to really speed up and make that customer service issue go away. So that's something that's really powerful, and it is the idea that you don't want to spend time talking to somebody, you certainly don't want to be put on hold, you just want to solve the problem. And what we've been able to do with some of our vendors, some of the things we do internally, is create a much better thing. When you need customer service, you can solve it instantly almost. That's great, creates a greater loyalty, because I like using booking.com because I don't have to wait, it fixes it right away.

• 2:05:55Speaker 00

  That is a really powerful thing, but I agree with you, going down, it's gonna be a commodity, everybody's gonna be doing that.

• 2:06:01John Coogan?

  What's the key to a great celebrity partnership? Hiring spokesmen?

• 2:06:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, the great thing is that it ends up with more business than what you paid them.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  What are the keys to success? What would you recommend? We've been, we noticed, we were watching the Xbox launch at CES, and Bill Gates is standing on stage, and he's next to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. And he refers to him just as Rock. It's very funny, it's awkward in funny ways, but it's cool, it's interesting, obviously everyone knows the Priceline Negotiator. But what's the key to success? What would you recommend? When is the right time to bring in a celebrity? Like, do you have a mental model for this, or have you just delegated it to someone else on your team? Like, how do you?

• 2:06:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's one of the important things, is knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know, and making sure that the person you're spending a lot of money, be the chief marketing officer, that person knows. If they don't, you have to get a different one, and that's why you're paying the money of eight businesses. But here's the truth is, this is an old saying, it's uncertain who really said it first, that half of your brand marketing is wasted, you just don't know which half. That's a problem, and that's the thing. And by the way, I love, I love it when you hit it and it goes out of the park, goes viral, like you just mentioned. I know you've mentioned that one before about Bill and The Rock. But here's the thing is, you can't predict those things. Sometimes you just hit that lightning in a bottle, a lot of the time it's just wasted money.

• 2:07:30Jordi Hays?

  What's your workout routine? You're looking absolutely jacked, I gotta ask.

• 2:07:36Speaker 00

  Well, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I do work out every day. If I'm, if I'm home, I try. Half the time I'm away from my home. And, uh, you know, there are a lot of gyms in Europe that don't have, a lot of hotels that don't have gyms. So you're doing it in the hotel room, you know, small hotel room and stuff. Always bring some pants so I can get something done.

• 2:07:56Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:07:56Speaker 00

  But, but I tell you, it's so important because, you know, one of the things when you're, you're doing all these, every single person right now in the tech world, we're all working incredibly hard and to stay healthy, it's really important to work out.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what do you, uh, have you ever, we, we've joked on the show before, we, we get frustrated at gyms having a dumbbell, a weight limit.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  We think it's because of the insurance, but most gyms, the, the weights, the dumbbells start, stop at 40 pounds, 50 pounds. They don't allow barbells.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Booking.com features like I want, I want hotels, yeah.

• 2:08:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. So first of all, you guys are big guys. Okay. Yeah. Let's face it, you know, six, eight and six, one. I mean, you're tall people, you're big people. Okay. Normal sized people don't worry about this question much, okay?

• 2:08:42Jordi Hays?

  I know, but you have a small, but, but, uh, you know, very passionate, uh, audience that.

• 2:08:48Speaker 00

  I'm not gonna tell them. You, you know, the answer to this, by the way, it's not the amount of weight. You can do more reps. You get the same impact.

• 2:08:56Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:08:56Speaker 00

  Less weights, more, more reps, you'll be fine.

• 2:09:00Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  Sometimes you just want to stack a couple of 45s on the bar and move a big number.

• 2:09:06Jordi Hays?

  How are you?

• 2:09:07Speaker 00

  No, no, wait, wait. This is important, guys. You guys are young guys, you know, young thirties, late twenties. You can do that stuff. I'm 63 years old.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:09:14Jordi Hays?

  I know, but you look 50, so that's why, that's why I asked. That's why I asked.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  Uh, book recommendations. What's on the shelf behind you? What would you give to somebody, uh, the next generation? What do you think is worth reading?

• 2:09:28Speaker 00

  Oh God, there's so many things. There's not enough time to read everything. I'll give you some instead of reading. Here's, here's the piece of advice I give all the time. I was, I was, I was actually in a classroom situation yesterday. Uh, guest, guest lecturing something. And what I really like to get across is the idea of prioritization and self-discipline. You know, there's a book out, uh, you don't have to read it. It's four thousand. It's called four thousand weeks. Cause that's kind of like the average time you have a lifetime. Okay? You get the choice how you want to spend it. A lot of that. Make sure it's on the things that matter and things are important to you. And I see too many people wasting their time. I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to denigrate social media or any, any of my partners or anything.

• 2:10:10Speaker 00

  But I'll tell you, a lot of people are wasting a lot of their time doing stuff that it has no impact in their life. And later on, they may regret not having used that time more efficiently and more effectively.

• 2:10:21John Coogan?

  That's possible. That's one outcome, but it's also possible that I'm on my deathbed being like, I wish I squashed a few more Instagram reels. I wish I scrolled TikTok just for a couple more minutes.

• 2:10:32Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, uh, I, I think the, the, the, what you're saying, there's a very real scenario in the future where people, uh, you know, are, are towards the end of their life and they're just looking at their lifetime screen time on their iPhone, just saying like, don't do this. Don't do this. Um, I, one more, one more, uh, more serious question. How are you guys thinking about the live events category broadly? There's a lot of people talking about, uh, excited about live events specifically because they feel insulated from, well, that, but also insulated, insulated from AI.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, look, obviously there's a lot of truth to that, that people really are really enjoying those live event things. Now for us in the travel business, there was a lot of talk when you had the Taylor Swift effect, it was called, where she'd be going, doing a concert and there would be an increase in travel to that location. And then all the local economy would build up a little bit on that. But for us, because we're so global and we are so, all that's doing is transferring what would be the normal amount of travel to that location. For us, we're indifferent. So for example, you know, we have this whole thing about World Cup and you know, it's a partnership between the US and Canada and Mexico and stuff. And a lot of people are really hoping it's going to build some of the people coming to the US for travel and

• 2:11:54Speaker 00

  how much is that going to help our business. And to be perfectly honest with you, I don't think it's going to make that much of a difference because all it means that if you do choose to come to watch World Cup and the state, come to the States for that, that trip they were going to take anyway, they happened to come to the States, we would have gotten that business anyway. Now, it's good for the cities that have the actual games, they'll get the benefit, but us as a company, I don't think there's going to be a huge difference.

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  One of the challenges of scale. You're like, we are the market, we're just shifting pieces around.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  I have one last question.

• 2:12:23Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  I will let you go. You travel a lot, you run a travel company. What's the secret to avoiding jet lag?

• 2:12:31Speaker 00

  And just keep doing it and then you'll know, you'll be in a normal state all the time.

• 2:12:36Jordi Hays?

  Never stop moving.

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  This is good.

• 2:12:39Speaker 00

  Just don't, just don't stop.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  That's essentially just man up, just suck it up and just disregard it, just ignore it. I love that. That's the best advice I've heard. People will tell you all sorts of, take your shoes off, do this, do that. I like that one. That's great.

• 2:12:53Speaker 00

  No, no, it's ridiculous, okay? And I've never felt jet lag per se.

• 2:12:58John Coogan?

  This is breaking. We need to put this on a headline, breaking.

• 2:13:03Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't exist. It's just a figment of your, a figment of your imagination.

• 2:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:08Speaker 00

  No, it's not the imagination. It's you're going from JFK to Amsterdam, okay? It's a six and a half hour flight. You're going to at best, because you got to wait to take all the, and then they wake you up when you're landing. Maybe you'll get four hours good? Maybe? You're going to be tired. It's not jet lag, you got four hours sleep. That's why you're tired.

• 2:13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Well, I hope, hopefully the rockets can get fast enough that when we're booking, we're booking a hotel on the moon on booking.com, it'll just be, it'll be like we just, you know, teleported.

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:13:41Jordi Hays?

  This was super fun. Come back on again soon. Really enjoyed it.

• 2:13:43John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:13:46John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Do you want to change the world? Go to the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  And raise capital.

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Just do it. Just do it. No more excuses.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's our number one piece of advice this year. To, to anyone who asks, what, what advice would you give me?

• 2:14:02Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be our advice for our next guest.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  Just raise money at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Hey, uh, next round, JD.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  Do it at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Just, just raise capital. Do a little roadshow.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  Just do it. Stop making excuses.

• 2:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  Really just stop making excuses.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, JD Ross. Is JD here?

• 2:14:18John Coogan?

  He is the co-founder of WithCoverage. An absolute dog.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 2:14:23John Coogan?

  We got some breaking news from him. JD, how you doing? Good to see you.

• 2:14:26Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 2:14:27Speaker 07

  Good to see you guys.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 2:14:30Speaker 07

  Glenn has energy for 60 whatever.

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  I know. That's why I was like, I need to know this guy's workout routine.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  Everything.

• 2:14:36Jordi Hays?

  He's like, jet lag doesn't exist. Also workout every day.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  There's a couple of these corporate athletes. Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, maker of GTA, is, uh, absolutely diced. He's in his 60s. He's on the cover of Men's Fitness every once in a while. There's a couple of people that figure out how to just keep that motor going. I'm a big believer in the 65 to 95 era of a business person's career. Warren Buffett famously had a great one.

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Everything, everything before that was a warm-up.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Everything else is a warm-up. 65 is where the real game starts.

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  The real compounding.

• 2:15:07John Coogan?

  That's where the compounding begins. But you're much younger than 65, but you have some breaking news for us. Give it to us.

• 2:15:13Speaker 07

  I just, it's all peptides. You wouldn't know.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Okay, I guess that's the news. But no, tell us about the business. Tell us what's going on in your world.

• 2:15:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, uh, we are arguably in the most boring of the enterprise businesses you could possibly be in. I think it's about the enterprise.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  Businesses.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  It's not boring to us.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  Not boring to us. That's why we're here every day. That's why we have a gong, and I know we're gonna ring it.

• 2:15:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we run insurance, we're, we're modernizing insurance brokerage. Basically, we replaced the traditional insurance broker with, uh, a ramp for risk management. Uh, wrong side.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:15:47Speaker 07

  There we go. And, uh, we just raised $42 million Series B from...

• 2:15:59Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff. Can't even get a word in. We're just stopping too much fun.

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  Hit him with the flashbang.

• 2:16:05John Coogan?

  Once American eagle love that.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Watch out JD. Watch out.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  We got you. Hit him with the flashbang.

• 2:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, once you, uh, once you get your bearings, you can continue.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Who did the deal?

• 2:16:25Speaker 07

  It's been awesome. Um, I'm keeping back up with Keith the boy, who is my co-founder of Open Door, and we've brought on, uh, Sequoia as a new investor. It's amazing.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  The PayPal mafia coming together. You're a made man.

• 2:16:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, it's, uh, I think it's the first time Keith and Ruloff have co-led a deal together. Uh, so it's the first time I've co-led something since, uh, since PayPal. Yeah.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  You're, you're a wise guy.

• 2:16:49Jordi Hays?

  Bringing, getting the, getting the band, getting the band back together.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Um, well, uh, walk me through 42 million dollar Series B. What does that actually mean? Because insurance, like, at some point you have to have reserves. There's, is there, like, are, are you acting as an intermediary? And there's a different financial institution that's dealing with, uh, the actual, uh, the capital that goes towards that. Is this capital going towards the operations, the hiring, building of the product? Or is it actually like, if there's a insurance claim, you're paying it out of this 42 million dollars? How, how does that all work?

• 2:17:24Speaker 07

  So what's cool about our business is everyone else in the industry gets paid more, the more money that you spend on insurance, right? They're, they're brokers. Um, we don't bear risk. We're just helping you be placed with the right insurance carriers.

• 2:17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:39Speaker 07

  And so what we've done, which is actually like shockingly innovative, is say, hey, uh, instead of charging you based on how much you spend, we're going to charge you based on how complex you are and how much, you know, servicing you need.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:50Speaker 07

  And how much, you know, product you need. Uh, and so we replaced it with a flat fee and then say, hey, we're, we're going to net out all the commissions from your, from your policies. You're not going to pay commission, um, as much as legally possible. And it's just one fee for us for service. And what that does is it aligns incentives.

• 2:18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:06Speaker 07

  And as a result, you know, over 700 companies now have moved over from, you know, GoPuff and Aitch Sleep, uh, to, you know, Chomps, Bombas, uh, tons of these incredible businesses.

• 2:18:16Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were saying, I, when you first said that, I was like, wait, GoPuff had a, had a, had a enterprise insurance product?

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  So yeah.

• 2:18:26Speaker 07

  So we don't do the insurance.

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, so so almost like asset light. I don't know exactly the term, but more of a media platform technology company. But at the same time, I feel like I've heard so many amazing stories about it's really hard. But once you get the insurance business actually up and running, you wind up with Berkshire Hathaway, or what's happening with Apollo, like you just have this this float and this cash machine that can go towards other things. Is that enticing to you, even if it's going to happen when you're on when you're in your 65 to 95 year old run? Is that something that might happen decades from now? Or is that just like never in the picture? Because it's fundamentally incompatible with what you're doing?

• 2:19:08Speaker 07

  I think you have to start with your customer, right? Like when you go from like the like, oh, wow, that's really enticing. You start like twisting upside down to find a way to make a bad business like decision.

• 2:19:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:18Speaker 07

  And this is kind of what I think some of our earlier competitors did in the last round of InsurTech, as they said, well, let's that looks really nice. Let's go after that. And then they were fundamentally misaligned with their customers. Our job is never to our job is to give you the cheapest insurance possible for the best coverage, right? As soon as you start selling our own book, there's no way for us to be able to do that job. And so we don't do reserves. The 42 million we've raised is for product development and sales and growth.

• 2:19:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:45Speaker 07

  Unfortunately, we haven't found a way to spend money yet as a company. We even touched a penny of our Series A when we raised this. It was kind of more to say, yeah, we were profitable last year, which is crazy.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:19:57Speaker 07

  But I'm confident we will solve that problem this year.

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:01Jordi Hays?

  How does the how does this actual sales cycle work? People are, you know, signing up with, you know, for a specific insurance plan. And then there's like, you know, it's cyclical, like, how does that motion working for you guys?

• 2:20:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, so usually it starts with an introduction or like, you know, someone saying, hey, you gotta talk to these guys are awesome. And our first conversation is they're already on board on the product. It's get them on, we'll show them exactly how it works. Instead of like going through PDFs and everything else, you see everything in one place. And we're gonna do this very strong, like in detail risk analysis thing. Top to bottom, here's your company. Here's like the opportunity for someone to get hurt slipping and falling in your restaurant. Here's what happens when someone in your manufacturing facility, you know, might get injured or if a product injures a customer. All the different cases, you might need a product recall. And running through those scenarios and saying this isn't is where you are currently covered and not covered and how we can fix it. And also here's how you benchmark against everyone else just like you.

• 2:21:01Speaker 07

  So instead of working with that sort of generalist insurance broker, we bring on this specialized team, almost like the Navy SEALs of, you know, product recall and say, here's exactly what you need to do to deal with this when it happens. And for us, risk management doesn't end with insurance products. It goes through like, what do you actually do when that happens? What's your playbook for dealing with a product recall? Who, what lawyers do you need to talk to? How do you actually like file this with, you know, the relevant regulatory bodies? There's a whole bunch of stuff and we do this for customers in kind of every single, industry that we work with from, you know, aerospace and defense to healthcare to construction to consumer brands.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  How do you think, uh, is insurance playing a factor in like these legal cases with the big AI labs? I saw Anthropic paid like a billion dollar fine for scraping some books. And it's just something that if I'm underwriting Anthropic at seed, it's like, how am I gonna predict that? They're gonna scrape books that they shouldn't and this lawsuit's gonna happen. It's gonna be this huge settlement and that feels like something that would be way out of coverage. But are people even thinking about insuring for these like entirely new dynamics that can happen only in the AI age?

• 2:22:18Speaker 07

  Absolutely, and there's really cool um new carriers who are kind of stepping in. And we see whenever there's a new innovation in kind of business. Some new insurance company that becomes a giant leader is the first one to come in and step in and say, hey, I'm willing to take a understand like really understand this and take a bet.

• 2:22:34John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:22:34Speaker 07

  And so Coalition did this with cyber insurance. It's now a five plus billion dollar company. Where no one else really understood what cyber insurance meant.

• 2:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:41Speaker 07

  They came into that. Now they're doing, you know, really well across D and O and a number of other spaces. Uh, same thing with crypto. That's been more kind of broadly adopted, but you know, it sure is like well, amazing there.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. And in that, in uh, wa- walk me through the that that cyber insurance example, like, do they have to raise money? Are they raising debt? Like, how do you, if you weren't doing what you're doing and you were just building a pool of capital to ensure uh, companies directly? What does the, what does the build out of a company like that actually look like? I've never really.

• 2:23:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, you you literally need to raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of equity. Uh, and then it's like, yeah, to collateralize the issue and then partner with, you see, you start by partner with existing insurance companies if you can.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:25Speaker 07

  But if they don't understand it and unwilling to underwrite it, you have to just raise huge pools of capital.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. Wow.

• 2:23:32Speaker 07

  I mean, this is the oldest business of all time. It's is basically Lloyds of London is a syndicate of people who were just pooling capital for these, literally pooling uh, capital for risk for ships.

• 2:23:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:45John Coogan?

  Traces all the way back to the Dawn of Venture, the Whaling and whatnot. Fascinating, fascinating. Well.

• 2:23:49Speaker 07

  You get these crazy things in insurance too, where like the words that are used don't make any sense. You're like, why would trucking be called marine? Well, it's because it's you're shipping, you're literally shipping things, you know, on ships over water and they just adapted it.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  Wait, so marine insurance refers to trucking, like physically?

• 2:24:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, like it's called inland inland marine.

• 2:24:09John Coogan?

  Inland marine, interesting.

• 2:24:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:24:11John Coogan?

  Wow, wow. What what an awesome industry. Uh, well, congratulations on all the progress.

• 2:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, where where are you guys uh? Where are you guys seeing the benefits from AI in the business, not on the product side, outside of coding?

• 2:24:27Speaker 07

  I think what's really cool is um like we we we can measure this stuff, right? And like, I think last year I would have said, oh, we get rid of data entry, we get rid of whatever. Now I can say each person in our team is writing three times as many emails today as they were six months ago.

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:24:44Speaker 07

  Like, we've scaled the business, we're breaking the scaling laws of financial services through AI. Where we're pulling in all the context and it's becoming much less human reliant on the day to day operation of the business. So the people are actually just focusing on like high end problem solving, uh, strategy, the things that, you know, people are good at. But I have no idea how sort of the, you know, entry level kind of paper pushing jobs are going to keep doing this because we just don't need them.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Hmm, interesting. Where are you building the business?

• 2:25:13Speaker 07

  So the company is based in New York. Um, I'm the odd man out in Austin.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:25:17Speaker 07

  And I think in San Francisco, if you're building a like model company.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:23Speaker 07

  You gotta be an S F.

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:25Speaker 07

  If you're building applied AI uh in financial services, it's just much easier to do that in New York. Like, the people actually understand what that means.

• 2:25:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:33Speaker 07

  And so for us, we're we don't sell software, right? Like, we're building a competitor to Marshion locked in these kind of fifty to a hundred billion dollar brokers. And we're coming in and saying, look, like, we can't sell software to you. You can't buy software. You have no idea how to even deploy this. You have like ten different factions in your order to do this. If we were to do that, we would do that maybe in San Francisco. In New York, you get to go head to head and say, look, I'm just gonna go after your clients and we're just gonna do your job better.

• 2:25:59John Coogan?

  We're gonna eat your lunch.

• 2:26:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I see your plate. I'd like a bite.

• 2:26:03Speaker 07

  Your lunch is for marketing.

• 2:26:04John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, that's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by and giving us the news.

• 2:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this just makes so much sense going in and uh, you know, talking with coverage and having them not just be incentivized for you to spend the most amount of money, but for to get the best plan and actually get the most out of it. It's just, I love, I love the alignment.

• 2:26:26John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:26:27Speaker 07

  I'm waiting for you guys to do your first like event so I can show you. You know, we'll cover all your like awesome giant conferences with fireworks and stuff. You're inevitably going to want to be there.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  Yes, if I catch on fire.

• 2:26:37Jordi Hays?

  We need, we're trying to get a-

• 2:26:38John Coogan?

  Or our intern catches on fire.

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  We want to get a fog machine. We want like a CO2 cannons in here.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  That could be very risky.

• 2:26:44Jordi Hays?

  And so-

• 2:26:45John Coogan?

  Suck all the air out of here.

• 2:26:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't think we're insured for CO2 cannons.

• 2:26:48John Coogan?

  We're not doing that yet, without good insurance.

• 2:26:50Speaker 07

  We've got-

• 2:26:50Jordi Hays?

  So we'll talk-

• 2:26:51Speaker 07

  I actually own two industrial snow machines, so if you ever need to rent one, just give me a shout.

• 2:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:26:56John Coogan?

  Well, we needed that during Christmas. Where were you when we were dressed up as Santa Claus? We needed, we, we had the fake snow going over the show. Uh, but the next year, real snow for sure.

• 2:27:05Speaker 07

  Real snow, I'm shipping it out.

• 2:27:07John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you JD, congrats.

• 2:27:10John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let's kick it over to this video by Storm Crew on YouTube. The boss asked me to take on 10 robots by myself. An individual has assembled a set of 10 unitry or humanoid robots. Got in the boxing ring and fought them. And the results are very, very interesting. We'll have to sort of click through a little bit of this video. But he fights incremental amounts of-

• 2:27:43Jordi Hays?

  We've been wanting somebody to do this forever.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  I've wanted to do this personally. I want to fight the humanoids. Look at this, so it's one on one and it's not too bad. He can just hold it off. He's just, he's just holding, can't do anything. Now, keep in mind, this is the unitry, I believe it's the G1, the, the cheaper, smaller version. Now he's one on three. Let's see what happens. He's kicked, they're kicking. Oh, he does the pole rush. That's a, I had not thought of that strategy.

• 2:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh!

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  Oh, he's pushing them over. And with these small unitry guys, once you get them down, they can get up, but they're pretty easy to pin. He starts, he starts fighting five. This is one on five now.

• 2:28:18Jordi Hays?

  He needs a flashback.

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  And he's, they are hitting him. They are hitting him. He's taking some blows. Oh, he knocks one down. That's a good hit.

• 2:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Their movement looks surprisingly natural.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Oh, we're going WWE mode. He picks it up and slams it down. Oh, he gets back up. He's got to throw it back down.

• 2:28:33Jordi Hays?

  They really, they need bigger robots because it looks like he's just bullying children.

• 2:28:36John Coogan?

  When they, when they pop up, that is, that is a scary animation.

• 2:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:28:40John Coogan?

  Picking it up and throwing it out of the ring. Oh my God. Slam knocked to the ground. Yeah, slammed onto the ground. Well, he finally.

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:28:49John Coogan?

  He's fighting like six or seven here. They're really closing in at this point. This, this is where it starts to get intimidating.

• 2:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Gets a little hairy.

• 2:28:56John Coogan?

  I feel like seven, you know, you can't keep your eyes on all of them at the same time. But if you use them against each other, yeah, creating the pile, the pile method, that's what you want to go for. You want to create a heap of, of humanoid robots.

• 2:29:07Jordi Hays?

  This is the only benchmark, the Terminator benchmark.

• 2:29:10John Coogan?

  Terminator bench.

• 2:29:11Jordi Hays?

  This is the only benchmark I really care about.

• 2:29:13John Coogan?

  Who wins, AI or humans? But then he adds the G2, which is the newer unitry robot. And this one is a little bit more athletic. And things start to get a little bit riskier.

• 2:29:24Jordi Hays?

  Do we think they're tele-operated?

• 2:29:26John Coogan?

  I imagine all of this is tele-operated. Uh, I, this seems like some sort of ad integration. There's some AI.

• 2:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're ad appreciators.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  I don't know what's going on. Let's skip to the final bit. I think we can skip ahead. I think it starts at 208, maybe. Uh, we can see robot 10x.

• 2:29:45Jordi Hays?

  That was a clean.

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. So he's boxing the big guy and he hits. Yeah. It's, it's pretty, he gets knocked on the ground. It's not looking good for humanity. Very, very rough. Uh, if we skip to.

• 2:29:57Jordi Hays?

  I think he's getting a little fatigued.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, he is.

• 2:30:00Jordi Hays?

  He's running out of gas.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  It's tiring. I think he, I think, I think the conclusion of this.

• 2:30:04Jordi Hays?

  Did you see that headbutt? Did you see that headbutt from, from a seated position?

• 2:30:07John Coogan?

  I think, look at that. That looks very dangerous. Uh, I think the conclusion of this video is that he loses, you know, who knows how scripted this is. It's a lot of fun.

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of cuts, a lot of cuts.

• 2:30:16John Coogan?

  A lot of cuts, you know, it's mostly entertainment, but uh, it's good entertainment. Challenge yourself to fight robots with difficulty levels ranging from one to 10 robots. See how many you can ultimately KO. That could be a good, uh, that could be a good sort of, you know, those VR centers where you go and do VR in person? Yeah. You could go and do this in your local, put that next to your CrossFit gym. Anyway.

• 2:30:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Next up, we have our Lambda Lightning round.

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  Yes, the Lambda Lightning.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  Nick from Sandstone, he's the co-founder and CEO. He's in the Restream waiting room.

• 2:30:46Jordi Hays?

  Get that gong ready.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  And now he's in the TBP and Ultra now. Nick, how are you doing?

• 2:30:50Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:30:51Speaker 08

  Let's get the gong going.

• 2:30:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's get the gong going.

• 2:30:54John Coogan?

  How much did you raise? What's going on?

• 2:30:56Speaker 08

  We're announcing our $10 million seed round.

• 2:31:00Jordi Hays?

  There you go. A humble 10, a humble, a humble mango seed. We love to see it.

• 2:31:07John Coogan?

  The real question, 10, you versus 10 humanoid robots, do you think you could beat them up?

• 2:31:12Speaker 08

  I, I don't think so.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:31:14Speaker 08

  But.

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  You're the CEO, you gotta lead.

• 2:31:17Speaker 08

  We all, we, we all need those robots.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:31:20Speaker 08

  In our, in our life. We're, we're going to get them in the office as soon as we can. And I think that's your first round to, to come work at Sandstone is you actually have to fight off the robots to get into the office.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  There you go. That's a good qualifier.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  You're, you're, you're building AI for in-house legal teams. I imagine if the humanoid robots get deployed and they start harassing people, the in-house legal teams will be.

• 2:31:43Speaker 08

  It's a net positive for our market. Huge for our market. Yeah.

• 2:31:47John Coogan?

  But this is something we've actually been excited about. We've been, we've been wondering where legal AI will land. There's obviously companies that are selling to large firms. You can do some stuff in the apps by yourself, but that feels a little bit risky. Sometimes the, the, the chat apps will push back on you. Hey, I'm not a lawyer. I don't want to give you this type of advice. And maybe you don't want to upload your employment agreement to an app that will ultimately train on it and maybe leak your information at some point. So how are you thinking about building the product to go to market, um, the, the, the value prop in a world where the other platforms exist and there are some DIY options?

• 2:32:26Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, the, first of all, thanks for having me, guys. It's great to be here. I think the, the, the way that we've thought about approaching the in-house market is really from sort of two pain points that we saw. And I saw this when I was serving legal teams at McKinsey and as an engineer.

• 2:32:43Speaker 08

  In-house teams have a ton of requests that come in from the business, from external users. They're basically getting bombarded with emails and slacks and Teams messages, right? And they don't have a single platform in the same way that, you know, we have Linear or Jira. If you were an engineer 10 years ago, to manage your work and who's doing what. And so that's not even yet an AI problem, but rather a data problem. And so that was the first thing that we wanted to solve, which was like, can we sit across all these systems that lawyers have to deal with and pull in all the requests into one place? So that when the AI, you know, goes to redline the agreement or answer the question or draft the contract, it already has context on, you know, the entire thread that you're working on as well as all your other business systems.

• 2:33:26Speaker 08

  So one of the issues with, you know, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT, or even some of the legal solutions out there is, you know, I open a contract and I ask for it to be reviewed. But if it's a sales agreement, I need to know like, you know, have we worked with this company before?

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:39Speaker 08

  Is it high ACV? How does it compare to our other deals in Salesforce? Does the seller have a good relationship, right? These kinds of things are like what the lawyer actually goes and like they spend admin time doing to go gather that information. We want to be the context layer that pulls that all in. So when you go open that ticket in your system in Sandzone, which has the sales agreement, all that context is there and ready for you.

• 2:34:01John Coogan?

  So how do you pull in all that data? Are you a big like Zapier customer and you're integrating with everything on day one? Are you writing MCP integrations, API integrations? Is it client by client and it's more high-touch because you're going with really big companies as starting customers? And you go to their in-house legal team and if they're using some custom CRM, you'll build a custom CRM integration because it's important to them. How do you go down the stack of integrations to get that full context?

• 2:34:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, so mostly API integrations. I think there's some MCP that we're working with.

• 2:34:38Speaker 08

  The way that we think about it is being pretty opinionated about what data from your CRM or your ERP is important for legal workflows. And so we're able to, you know, on day one, have the team come in, set up an integration and essentially tell us what are the, according to these critical fields that we need, where can we find them in your system, right? Salesforce systems are very complex. And so we ask them, hey, here's the 10 things that we're going to need. Where do these live within your Salesforce so that we can much more easily query that going forward? This has allowed us to, you know, even for some, you know, five to 10 person legal teams, we can onboard them within a week with multiple integrations. And I think one of the things that's important is like, this isn't going to be an overnight problem, right? No legal team's going to solve their data issue in one night.

• 2:35:21Speaker 08

  But if you can integrate even Google Drive and maybe your contract management tool and Slack, and that's 50 to 60% of your data, that's going to change your ability to answer questions and get legal work done by, you know, several fold. And then we can continue to integrate over time.

• 2:35:37Jordi Hays?

  What are, what's the mindset of your buyers? I think, you know, if you're, if you're Harvey or one of these other legal AI players and you're selling into a law firm, they're doing this dance right now where they're like, we're going to make you way more efficient, but we're all, you know, there's this kind of the elephant in the room is like, okay, is this going to impact billables? But if I'm an in-house legal team, that's not really on my mind. I just want to deliver great work and protect the company and keep the company compliant across a bunch of different dimensions. I imagine there could be like more pull, more excitement, more kind of urgency to adopt than maybe some big law firm.

• 2:36:19Jordi Hays?

  That's like, hey, we've done it this way for a long time and our business is doing great right now. We don't need too much AI.

• 2:36:26Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:36:28Speaker 08

  Before I started Sandstone, most of my work was at McKinsey, helping big law firms think about AI and tech strategy. And we would actually go out and deploy AI solutions for some of these big firms. And I think the hardest thing was you have to go to every partner in every practice area as if it's its own business and kind of sell, you know, a one-off solution to them and get them on board with the fact that, hey, this might have some implications on your billable hour model going forward. Within-house, it's completely different, right? When, when they see AI solutions that can take a lot of the admin work off their plate, generally the GC thinks, hey, Now my team can go focus on being in more of the business strategy conversations and become more proactive around potential risks and issues with our company rather than reactive

• 2:37:11Speaker 08

  and trying to play catch up on all the requests that we have coming in. I think this is like one of the bigger paradoxes within legal and within AI more broadly is like as legal teams get more efficient on the admin side and collecting the context which we're working on, they're going to be able to be in more business discussions, protect the company from more risk, but also have more work ultimately. And so a lot of our legal teams, I anticipate they'll continue to grow as they adopt more AI, but they'll just do it in a more effective way for the business. And we'll see a world where like, the top law firms in the future need to be AI native and AI enabled. But I think the top legal teams in the future and even the top companies will have to have like these AI native legal teams. Similar to how Ramp, I think if you're using Ramp as a smaller company and your

• 2:37:55Speaker 08

  finance team is using it, you're probably spending a little bit less on services that you typically might have on the financial and accounting side. And it's also helping your business move faster. I think historically, we didn't see that in finance. You see the same in HR with Workday. And so I think legal will get there over time. How's growth been?

• 2:38:14Speaker 08

  Growth has been great. So we started working on this five months ago. We've got dozens of companies using it today. We got dozens of companies using it today, a mix of earlier smaller in-house teams all the way up to Fortune 500s. Let's go. Let's give it up for the Fortune 500.

• 2:38:38Speaker 08

  Our team is a team of 15 engineers and lawyers in New York and Brooklyn. One of our mantras is that everyone ships. So we have four lawyers on our team, every single one of them codes. Three of them are actual full-time engineers. My co-founder was a lawyer, he became an engineer. We have a general counsel who became a software engineer for five years. And they're shipping every day. And so that's sort of how we want to build this. We want to build this like a tech company would build today. And everyone has some sort of a legal background or engineering background. And whether you have that from your experience or it's something that you've learned by being at Sandstone.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress in such a short amount of time. Congratulations. Fantastic.

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very cool. I'm sure I'm sure you'll be back on this quarter. That's my that's my bet. That's my bet. So great. Great to meet you and good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Up next, we have Rob Slaughter of Defense Unicorns. You've got to check his website out. It's fantastic.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Intense name, very cute for himself, very cute name for his business.

• 2:39:49John Coogan?

  And then intense business because he's getting software to warfighters. He's in the upstream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP on Ultra Dome. How are you doing, Rob?

• 2:39:59Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show. Look at that. Look at that. Friendly unicorn.

• 2:40:02John Coogan?

  Friendly unicorn. Please introduce yourself, introduce the company. Tell us what you're building and how it's going.

• 2:40:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, Rob Slaughter, you know, spent my career in the military. I spent about 13 years active duty. Got out with some co-founders about five years ago. Liked to joke around that I spent first half of my career struggling with with software and the back half of my career trying to solve the software delivery challenges. Started this company because, you know, we saw a real huge problem. You know, it's hard to tell because the most, most of the ecosystem, most of the industry, especially on the defense or especially on the tech side, doesn't have a ton of exposure to defense. You obviously read the big headlines. So you get the the big news. Everybody understands we had the best military in the world. You know, the recent operation in South America obviously

• 2:40:50Speaker 09

  highlights this stuff. But there's real significant tech challenges that, you know, as a company, we really strive to solve. So we're super excited to to talk about the series B and, you know, announce a lot of the good stuff that we're doing.

• 2:41:04John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 2:41:05Jordi Hays?

  How much?

• 2:41:06Speaker 09

  We have officially raised 136.

• 2:41:12Speaker 09

  So it's quite, you know, fantastic. You know, we're obviously excited to get back to building. Obviously love what we do.

• 2:41:21John Coogan?

  And you're a unicorn now, which is amazing because

• 2:41:24Jordi Hays?

  And we gotta, we gotta, we gotta do a capital allocator acknowledgement. Bain Capital is, is the, uh, leading the round.

• 2:41:32John Coogan?

  It feels like if you put unicorn in the name of your startup, you're really asking for, like you're, you're calling your shot so aggressively that everyone's going to be like, oh, they, they'll never do it. And you did it. So congratulations.

• 2:41:44Jordi Hays?

  I do, I do wonder if there was ever, you know, during the, the, the deal process, they were like, well, we want to do nine.

• 2:41:50John Coogan?

  How about 990?

• 2:41:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, I'm sorry.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  I can't possibly destroy the brand. Uh, where, where does the name come from?

• 2:41:58Speaker 09

  Yeah. So a couple of things, uh, first and more, first and foremost, uh, we hire unicorns, uh, and so it's hard to find those people, uh, that are mission focused, that, you know, typically have clearances.

• 2:42:12Speaker 09

  Uh, they typically have like clearances. They're, they're based in the U S.

• 2:42:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:42:16Speaker 09

  Uh, that's the other thing. So one of the biggest things is that we hire defense unicorns. Uh, the other thing is if we're successful as a company, uh, one of the biggest things we'd like to see in the ecosystem is like, it's not going to be just, you know, one, 10, 20 defense unicorns in the ecosystem. There's actually going to be hundreds or thousands. So just like, you know, quick back of the envelope numbers, you know, for folks, you know, you look at somebody like Nvidia, uh, and they do, you know, 200 billion ish, uh, a year revenue. You, you know, you have a department of war that spends a trillion a year, uh, that's five, five X that. And, you know, as you guys mentioned earlier on the show, you know, Trump's talking about increasing that to, to 1.5 trillion.

• 2:42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:54Speaker 09

  Uh, and so when you think about this from like a market opportunity perspective, um, what you actually find out is that there's most, most likely probably several, you know, multi trillion dollar companies. And then when you cascade that down, what you're actually going to find is that there's not just dozens, but hundreds of defense unicorns, um, that should be entering the ecosystem.

• 2:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Very cool. And, and, uh, I agree. I think, I think it'd be positive for the ecosystem. Uh, what, uh, how like, how do you, how do you guys work with other software companies? Like what, like break down the platform for us and, and how the, how everything actually works.

• 2:43:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, so first talk about the problem. One of the biggest issues is it's a combination of three things. One, these are mostly air gap systems. And to define an air gap, air gap does either fully disconnected, semi disconnected, or extremely high firewall. So think about like security policy, policy settings to where things like GitHub are inaccessible. The next issue is like the super high cybersecurity standards and a lot of the accreditation standards that the government expects. And then the third thing is that there's actually a huge skill gap delta between what you see on industry expectations and what you typically see in like military spaces. Not just the defense industrial base, but, but a lot of times the people who are actually

• 2:44:15Speaker 09

  operating these systems are actually active duty airmen, soldiers, sailors and Marines. And so a lot of the technologies that we work with are Kubernetes based. And so to just say, you know, you know, how this is really operating is you have people generally wearing a uniform that has to actually operate things that's incredibly complex. Their core day job is, is firing missiles and, and, and, you know, guns on target. Their primary day job is not IT operations. And so what we do as a company is we have an open source baseline called UDS that allows people to integrate in an open source fashion. We have the ability to take those applications and, you know, unclassified environments, classified

• 2:44:56Speaker 09

  environments, and really our bread and butter is extending those to actual edge weapon systems. So things, you know, F16s, F22s, our largest customer is the Department of the Navy, specifically the submarine community. And so, you know, really for us, it's about how do we have like a whole of nation approach? You know, if we're going to enter in a near peer adversary type of engagement, how do we actually, you know, have the ability to inject latest and greatest technology from anywhere around the country to some of these, you know, new weapon systems?

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Last question from me. I remember talking to Shom Sankar at Palantir and he told this amazing anecdote about the early days of Palantir. They built a piece of software, put a bunch of dots on a map, right? He goes to deliver it and the machine that they tried to install it on had like, you know, one megabyte of RAM or something. And so it just couldn't run the software. And I'm wondering, you know, you have this Panasonic Tough book on your website. How do you think or how do you work or do you work with your customers to understand where? Products can be actually deployed because once you're beyond the air gap, you're probably doing more things on device on at the edge. What what are the hardware constraints?

• 2:46:11John Coogan?

  I imagine that there's a ton in the age of AI. You can't just run Llama locally on some 10 year old tough book. How are you working with clients on understanding hardware and how it will enable their software to be delivered?

• 2:46:26Speaker 09

  Yeah, you nailed the problem, which is in these military systems, if you want to do a software update, you effectively have to update the hardware. And that's why the hardware is so out of date is because for the new iterations of systems, they've struggled to integrate it. It hasn't worked successfully. So that latest and greatest program that was supposed to deliver didn't deliver. So you're stuck with the legacy system. Now that happens two or three times, and before you know it, people are still stuck on, you know, Windows 95. You know, to take your, you know, true story, you know, those types of things are super common. So so how do we actually, you know, find success? How do we actually enable the warfighter? Well, if you actually make it easy enough to deliver, in many cases, you don't have to update the hardware. In your example, certainly you do.

• 2:47:10Speaker 09

  It's already gone too far. But a lot of cases, what we're doing is we're finding, you know, a certain weapon systems. You know, they've had a hardware, you know, refresh, if you will, say a year or two, you know, ago. It's not the latest and greatest, but it can actually run way more software than what was available two years ago. Can you actually do a software update on that slightly older hardware to make it mission effective? And then you also nailed, you know, key fundamental point, which is, you know, these things, you know, modern AI is a memory hog. And if you're going to war with outdated hardware, which is the reality, and you're trying to get the latest and greatest AI, you actually have to have the ability to update the software on demand. So you might be flying a mission and saying, hey, I need this specialized, you know, local AI model.

• 2:47:55Speaker 09

  And then the next day you're running a new mission and you might actually need a different AI model. The way war is conducted today, that would actually be a full reset. That'd be a whole new maintenance period. The jets or the Navy ship would actually go down. You know, it's not really viable with defense uniforms. You actually have that capability.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  That is good to hear. Well, congrats on all the progress. Thanks so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us.

• 2:48:21Jordi Hays?

  I love a business where it's so clear that you had to experience the problem as a team for a decade and makes so much sense to just, you know, keep hiring veterans that have experienced the real pain, not just heard about it on a podcast or something like that. So, super, super exciting and really congratulations on all the progress.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:48:44Jordi Hays?

  Thanks. Yeah, great to meet you.

• 2:48:45John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:48:47Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:48:47John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have the co-founder and CEO of Benchling calling in from the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. We are very excited to welcome Saaji to the show.

• 2:48:59Speaker 10

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:49:01John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:49:03Speaker 10

  I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:49:06John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on the show. First, I mean, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and Benchling. I think most people are familiar, but we'd love to get an update on the shape of the business today. And then I want to go into the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference as well.

• 2:49:18Speaker 10

  Sounds, sounds great. Yeah, I'm the co-founder and the CEO of Benchling. We make software that helps scientists discover and develop new medicines. We spent about 10 years helping bring science to the cloud. It was pretty much trapped on-premise and in spreadsheets before that. And then today, we're very focused on bringing AI to scientists everywhere by putting models and simulation directly in the workflow of scientists and building agents that automate all the toil and drudgery that's, that drug discovery is filled with.

• 2:49:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Someone was pitching me Cursor for Bio. And I said, that can't happen because there's no VS code for Bio. And did you love open source or hate it? Like, it's just, it seems like it's just a fact that if you can't fork something quickly, how are you going to spin up and grow as quickly as Cursor has grown? Has that proven true? Do you feel like you're the cursor for Bio and that you're set up structurally?

• 2:50:15Jordi Hays?

  They're the Benchling for Benchling.

• 2:50:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, really. I mean, I shouldn't even try. But walk me through that. Yeah. But walk me through what you're actually building. Yeah.

• 2:50:23Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think AI in Bio is kind of like, it's kind of like,

• 2:50:30Speaker 10

  GPT without the chat. So GPT came out and like it didn't explode until someone put the right interface on it. That's how I feel a lot of AI in bio where you have these amazing new models and capabilities for doing different tasks, but making it medicine is so hard and complex that putting it all together in the right interface and making it super easy for the scientists in the labs to actually use is a really difficult problem and that's what we're focused on at Benchling.

• 2:50:56John Coogan?

  And what's the, we've seen in coding, which I think people are most familiar with, you know, autocomplete gets better and better, then you get sort of the back and forth, the copy paste from the LLMs, then you get the fully agentic prompt systems called code. And is there something similar happening where there's an autocomplete for bio before there's an agent for bio? Like, how, what is the shape of the interaction that the scientist is having with the various ways you can interact with AI models?

• 2:51:30Speaker 10

  I think there's even lower hanging fruit than that. We have customers where they're using our AI agents to ingest all this data that's trapped in spreadsheets and PDFs and share points that's, you know, been, you know, it's six, 10, 15 years old. The people who made the data have like long moved on and they're able to understand what's been done before and sometimes not even rerun experience. We had a customer who, you know, brought 10,000 different experiments into Benchling that previously hadn't been touched and a scientist was about to run some studies that would have taken about eight months and they realized that someone else had already done the work many years ago and they were able to cut a bunch of them out. And like life science is just full of examples like that. That's going to help compress the time it takes to make drugs and get them to market.

• 2:52:14Speaker 10

  We're not even at cursor yet.

• 2:52:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Where do you, where do you think AI is overhyped in life sciences and where do you think it's underhyped?

• 2:52:24Speaker 10

  Oh, man. I think it's, I think it's, there's a lot of excitement. I don't want to say overhype, but there's a lot of excitement about these models that help you create a new hypothesis. And that's really important, but drug discovery is 9,999 steps after that, many of which are incredibly hard and, and full of toil. And there's a lot of opportunity, especially when you get to things that are regulated, or in animals, or, you know, closer to manufacturing, to make huge differences in the lives of scientists ever to get, get medicines to patients faster.

• 2:52:54John Coogan?

  How do you think about speed of token generation? We were talking to the CEO of Cerebras, and he was very optimistic about applied AI speeding up in bio specifically because more and more of the questions that scientists are asking look like deep research reports, whereas consumers might just ask, oh, you know, what's the capital of, I don't know, Illinois? And it's a quick, you know, LLM, it just fills the next word in, it takes one token. But a lot of scientists might say, for every question that I'm asking throughout the day, every 15 minutes, I'm effectively firing off a deep research report that might take a half an hour. And so speeding that up makes sense. How are you feeling about

• 2:53:37John Coogan?

  the different, different options on the silicon side? What partnerships have you done? How are you thinking about accelerating the actual workflows?

• 2:53:47Speaker 10

  Yeah, we've got partnerships with both Nvidia and Anthropic, which I can talk about in just a second. But I think life science is actually not even at the point where, you know, token speed is the rate, rate limiter. Obviously, you know, in San Francisco, AI is everywhere, your billboards are selling you GPUs and whatever. But if you go to Boston, other life science hub, or I've spent time in Europe in the last couple of months, I was just in Asia in December, visiting biotech and pharma companies, AI adoption is not going to just happen spontaneously in all these organizations. Most of these scientific organizations actually are just getting like co-pilots and whatnot turned on. There's a lot of legal, safety, regulatory, security concerns that they have. And scientists' workflows are

• 2:54:28Speaker 10

  so, so complicated. They're already jumping between a bunch of different tools with really complex data that AI is not necessarily purpose-built for. And so there's a lot of like last mile work to do before token speed even becomes a problem. And that's, that's what we've been trying to focus on at Benchling.

• 2:54:43John Coogan?

  Is the decline of Boston as a biotech hub overstated? We read a piece by Will Minaitis declaring Boston dead almost. He was very dramatic about it. How are things going in Boston? Is it still a competitive place? There's been a number of different reports around hiring, maybe weakening and softening. But what are you seeing in Boston?

• 2:55:08Speaker 10

  I think there's still a lot of like really good scientific talent in Boston and they can come out to San Francisco to raise money if they need. They're just a they're just a plane flight away. I think maybe zooming out, what you're probably hearing is like biotech went through a like, it's a pretty good vibe right now at JPM, but biotech went through a really tough couple of years. Like they, the biopharma industry went through like the dot com bust equivalent for a few years, you know?

• 2:55:31John Coogan?

  What was the driver of that? Because it feels like during COVID, there was a lot of biotech energy. And then through the GLP one boom, we're seeing more. But is this CRISPR overhang? Like what is the what is the foundational technology of the of the dot com? If the if the internet was the thing that ultimately caused the bubble of dot com?

• 2:55:53Speaker 10

  There were a lot of great new scientific technologies, but it takes a lot of time to make a drug. It takes seven, 10, 10 years. The industry, how many, how many drugs do you, do you guys think get approved a year? Can you guess?

• 2:56:05John Coogan?

  I would hope hundreds.

• 2:56:07Speaker 10

  Under 20?

• 2:56:08John Coogan?

  What is it?

• 2:56:10Speaker 10

  Uh, there's for the last 10 years, we've gotten about 50 new medicines approved per year. Just 50. And how much do you think the industry spends on R and D?

• 2:56:18John Coogan?

  Is it like $10 billion a year?

• 2:56:22Speaker 10

  The industry spends almost $200 billion a year on R and D. And you get, and you get 50, you get 50 new drugs a year and it takes 10 years to figure out if you're right. Okay. So like. And by the way, though, like, drugs, drugs are amazing. Like, we want more drugs.

• 2:56:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:39Speaker 10

  And drugs get cheaper over time. They become generic. Hundreds of millions of people take statins and all kinds of other drugs that they don't even think about how cheap they are and how impactful they are. So we get to, get to add 50 to our stockpile every single year of new life-changing medicines. We should want more of them. We should want them faster. We want them to be better. And I think because it takes so long, though, and it's such a difficult artisanal process, like, I think everyone got excited with mRNA and COVID, and I think a lot of money went in, and I think science takes time to become durable and turn into businesses and have medicines get commercialized. And I think some people, a couple of years after COVID, also got impatient. And there's other things to invest in, and so the money kind of went back out. And so it was a really difficult

• 2:57:22Speaker 10

  couple of years for the, the industry. And, you know, interest rates, geopolitical things. If there's any industry that doesn't like uncertainty, it's biotech. You know, you're underwriting something that's going to take 10 years to see the results of.

• 2:57:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. How should people think about JP Morgan Healthcare, like, the conference? Is it, is it an opportunity to raise money? Is it an opportunity for companies that are thinking about going public? I know the, the financial profile of a lot of drug companies is very different than startups. At the, at the same time, there's a lot of companies that are now taking a more traditional Silicon Valley path in, in growing their business and raising money. What's the purpose? Why do people go to JP Morgan Healthcare?

• 2:58:00Speaker 10

  Yeah. It's actually really funny. A lot of people are here for JPM, but they don't actually go to JPM. It's like, every, every conference kind of has their ratio of at the conference versus ecosystem around it. JPM might be the most lopsided. We're like, 90% of people here are not going to the actual conference. It is a banker conference for CEOs and CFOs to raise money, but it's, it's like this barometer for the industry. And most people are actually here for all of the ecosystem around it, all the events. Like, we're having a event in our HQ tonight that's like an AI and bio panel with, you know, Eli Lilly and Isomorphic Labs and Profluent and Anthropic. But you know, people are here to to get customers, to fundraise, to see their friends and to their pharma companies that have alumni reunion parties here.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:58:43Speaker 10

  And so it's like, it's just the gathering to kick the year off. And and the mood is good, by the way.

• 2:58:48John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 2:58:48Speaker 10

  Like, the XBI has been trading well. There's been a bunch of M and A in biotech, which has sent a bunch of money back to investors.

• 2:58:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:58:54Speaker 10

  I think some of the tariff and MFN stuff has

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:58:57Speaker 10

  settled a little bit for now. Eli Lilly, as you said, becoming the first trillion dollar pharma company. I think that's raised everyone's ambitions a bunch. And then, you know,

• 2:59:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:07Speaker 10

  there's there's optimism for AI to

• 2:59:09Jordi Hays?

  Benchling next.

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, Benchling next. It's easier now since, you know,

• 2:59:12Jordi Hays?

  It's already been done.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  the fast fall or

• 2:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:15Speaker 10

  Exactly.

• 2:59:16John Coogan?

  I'll be back on

• 2:59:16Speaker 10

  Exactly.

• 2:59:17John Coogan?

  when when you hit the one T. But I'm so glad to hear things are going well. Thank you so much for stopping by

• 2:59:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 2:59:23John Coogan?

  and talking on the show.

• 2:59:24Jordi Hays?

  We've been wanting to make this happen for a long time.

• 2:59:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 2:59:26Speaker 10

  Thanks. Thanks for having me. You guys need more biotech on the show.

• 2:59:29John Coogan?

  We do, please.

• 2:59:30Speaker 10

  Who's going to be the TPN for biotech?

• 2:59:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you're new. You're our new correspondent.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  You'll be our correspondent.

• 2:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Our experts. So tell us the companies that we should have on.

• 2:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love that.

• 2:59:37Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, enjoyed this.

• 2:59:39Speaker 10

  All right. I'm here for a vibe check anytime you need it.

• 2:59:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:59:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good to meet you. Cheers.

• 2:59:44John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Well, we have a very special guest in the TPN L3DOM live in person. We have Scott Nolan from General Matter.

• 2:59:58John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 3:00:01John Coogan?

  How have you been? How was the holiday party? How was your New Year's? Is 2026 off to a good start?

• 3:00:08Scott Nolan?

  It's been great. Yeah, thank you guys for having me on.

• 3:00:10John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Just look. Look at the headlines, you know?

• 3:00:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's it's long overdue. I'm so glad we get to catch up. Take us back. We've talked many times, but take us back to the process of of finding this category, finding this opportunity. I think most people will know that you were at Founders Fund in as in an investing role for over a decade, I believe.

• 3:00:34Scott Nolan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:35John Coogan?

  But talk to me about the process Overnight success. of deciding to. You didn't hear it, but he just played the overnight success. That was the sound. Sound cue. But talk to me about the process of actually finding an opportunity, picking this one, and then making the move.

• 3:00:50Scott Nolan?

  Yeah. And for people who aren't familiar with the General Matter, we're the American nuclear fuel company.

• 3:00:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:56Scott Nolan?

  Enriching fuel here in the US using US tech.

• 3:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:59Scott Nolan?

  So, the whole background was, you know, finding it overnight took about a decade.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:05Scott Nolan?

  And there was certainly no intention of starting anything. Really, this was in response to a huge market need.

• 3:01:10John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:01:11Scott Nolan?

  So, like you said, you know, I'd foundered some for a decade, meeting a wide range of advanced reactor companies.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:17Scott Nolan?

  All of them had the same message, which was, we have no, we have no fuel. We have no source of HALU.

• 3:01:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:01:22Scott Nolan?

  And we've got to depend on Russia and China for that, for that fuel that we need.

• 3:01:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:27Scott Nolan?

  And so I said, why don't the US fuel companies make that fuel? And they said, there aren't really any.

• 3:01:31John Coogan?

  Oh, you say depending, depending on Russia and China. Is it true that the HALU, the, the nuclear fuel that comes from Russia is, they actually take it out of a missile that's nuclear? Does that happen? Or they take it out of a, of a nuclear submarine?

• 3:01:45Scott Nolan?

  Or is that an old wives' tale?

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Where are they getting it in Russia? Why do they have it? Why don't we, why don't we?

• 3:01:49Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, not, not a wives' tale, but, you know, they have their own enrichment capability in Russia.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  They do.

• 3:01:53Scott Nolan?

  They do. Yep, they're actually the world leader in enrichment. More than half of world market, you know, capacity is in Russia.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:00Scott Nolan?

  You've got Europe number two and China quickly growing as number three. US used to be number one back in the eighties. We were about 85% of global enrichment. Today, less than 0.1%. So, we went from first place to basically last place. And what, what were the catalysts for that? It was exactly what you're saying of the downblending. Back from pre-Cold War, obviously, there was, you know, post the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was mutual disarmament goals, and there was trade. And so it was called the, the megatons to megawatts program, where the US worked with Russia to downblend weapons into fuel that could be run in reactors.

• 3:02:34John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:02:34Scott Nolan?

  That was the start of it. And then with the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think the US basically said, hey, free trade. Let's go get our fuel from other countries who do this very affordably and consistently. And maybe we don't need to have this outdated capability of gaseous diffusion, which was running at a few sites in the US. So, over time, we basically outsourced it.

• 3:02:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:54Scott Nolan?

  Other countries were better than us at it, and we allowed that skill to atrophy.

• 3:02:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. When you look at the S-curve of nuclear power growth, we went through this exponential period, and then it basically flatlined.

• 3:03:06Scott Nolan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  For, I don't know, 40, 50 years. How much of that is due to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, like fear mongering? How much of it is due to just? The oil and gas companies being elite and just compounding and compounding and they're just so big that they can hire all the best talent, do all the best lobbying. What are the different factors that go into the plateau that we've seen in nuclear power generation?

• 3:03:30Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, on limiting nuclear power, I think everyone lists those things. People will also mention the regulator.

• 3:03:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:38Scott Nolan?

  I think it's none of those things.

• 3:03:39John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:03:40Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, so if you actually look at the data, nuclear has been the safest, cleanest form of baseload power.

• 3:03:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:47Scott Nolan?

  But it hasn't been the cheapest.

• 3:03:48John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:03:49Scott Nolan?

  And so, you know, that S curve followed a period, and maxing out the S curve really was at a time where costs were just rising dramatically.

• 3:03:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:58Scott Nolan?

  On nuclear builds.

• 3:03:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:00Scott Nolan?

  They were run like huge construction projects.

• 3:04:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:02Scott Nolan?

  So, most of nuclear, all the way through the 90s, was classic light water reactors. You know, billion, $10 billion projects, overschedule, run just like highway projects, like other things that just were not done efficiently. The move you now see towards advanced reactors is all about changing that. So, all the advanced reactors basically have two goals. One is often increased safety. The other is decreased cost.

• 3:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Glad they're care about safety.

• 3:04:29Scott Nolan?

  Often passive safety, so not relying on active measures.

• 3:04:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:33Jordi Hays?

  But essentially. And the goal, the goal here is like you have a private company who has somebody, they have, you know, potential customers that will pay for power or even help them fund the CapEx, and they're heavily incentivized to stay on schedule and deliver it at a cost or deliver effectively the system at a cost that, whereas like a government, you know, funded project has maybe less of an incentive to actually hit cost, you know, stay within budget.

• 3:05:04Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, I think the key dimension is that they want to be factory-built. And so, if you're factory-built, okay, we can get these coming off an assembly line. We can have the parts made with extreme, you know, consistency and bring costs down over time. And then those pieces can be deployed out to a site and installed and turned online.

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:20Scott Nolan?

  And that's what the, you know, the acronym SMR is, small modular reactor.

• 3:05:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:05:25Scott Nolan?

  Where the small part. Is small enough to be built in a factory. So that's the whole point. Now, if you go that small.

• 3:05:29Jordi Hays?

  And how, how is that, is that plane size that the?

• 3:05:33Scott Nolan?

  Think of like extremely wide load size. So highway transportable.

• 3:05:37John Coogan?

  So Doggett Radiant is, is shipping container sized one megawatt. So replacement for a diesel generator usually.

• 3:05:44Scott Nolan?

  Exactly.

• 3:05:45John Coogan?

  And now people are talking about, well, what if we get a thousand of those together? We get a gigawatt, maybe we can power an AI data center. Is the AI boom and the AI narrative changing anything for you? Is there more, maybe about your business, but also just about regulatory openness, excitement about the category, just getting real about a transition to a different fuel source?

• 3:06:07Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, I think you've seen a few tailwinds.

• 3:06:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:09Scott Nolan?

  In the nuclear space, AI has certainly been a huge tailwind.

• 3:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:12Scott Nolan?

  And the hyperscalers have always wanted baseload power.

• 3:06:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:15Scott Nolan?

  And they want it to be clean.

• 3:06:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:06:17Scott Nolan?

  That really points you towards nuclear.

• 3:06:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:19Scott Nolan?

  Where the missing piece has been cost.

• 3:06:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:21Scott Nolan?

  And so they're turning towards SMRs as the way of reducing the cost.

• 3:06:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:25Scott Nolan?

  Whether it's one megawatt, a thousand of them together to make a gigawatt.

• 3:06:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:28Scott Nolan?

  Or maybe it's 20 megawatts. People are coming up with different formats.

• 3:06:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:31Scott Nolan?

  To solve the need in AI.

• 3:06:33John Coogan?

  And there's even companies that are bringing old nuclear facilities back online, just building, okay, I'm gonna go get a Westinghouse. But that was not an option a while ago. And so, I mean, just this week, didn't Meta partner with Oaklow to bring some nuclear power online? The timelines are depressing in AI world. I think about AGI next year, and then you see that they are doing a deal that won't come online until 2032.

• 3:06:57Scott Nolan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:57John Coogan?

  Uh, but at the same time, better than than never.

• 3:07:00Scott Nolan?

  Right.

• 3:07:00John Coogan?

  Uh, how are you thinking about timelines? Imagine that, since this is a big step, moving into this role, you're thinking in decades or longer. How do you think about, like, when to hit certain milestones, how to grow the business, what you can do in a 12 to 18 month cycle?

• 3:07:16Scott Nolan?

  Right. So for us, we're online by end of decade. That is our goal. That's our line in the sand. Late last year in August, we announced a lease with the DOE in Kentucky to re-industrialize a site that used to host enrichment in Pudukka, Kentucky. That's right. That's right. So, we are now breaking ground and preparing that site to build on. Yeah. That'll be online by end of decade. So, that's roughly our timeline. That timeline is dictated by construction and by licensing. Okay. Basically, those two things. Yeah. The scale of construction and the scale of actually bringing it online on day one will be increased through this award that we received last week. So, that's the main way it impacts us, is it actually brings commercial scale, domestic

• 3:07:58Scott Nolan?

  scale, satisfying all US needs forward a few years earlier.

• 3:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Are you a dependency or are you going to be a dependency for some of these other projects that are saying like, okay, we're going to build all of this infrastructure, but ultimately, we're going to need fuel, otherwise, the whole thing doesn't actually matter?

• 3:08:16Scott Nolan?

  That's right. Yeah, so after the decade of meeting different reactor companies, I realized none of them had a good source of fuel. And if you take a step back, fuel is upstream of everything. So, if energy is upstream of all economic activity, fuel is upstream of energy. And if you can't make your own fuel, you can't do all the other things that you want to do. So, within nuclear, there's this missing step of enrichment in the US. And so, to answer your question, yes, we think that enrichment is the key bottleneck for nuclear energy. Yeah.

• 3:08:47Jordi Hays?

  How on earth have you approached hiring? Like, who's the oldest person on your team?

• 3:08:53Scott Nolan?

  Oldest, let's see, oldest person, I'm not sure, I mean, north of 50.

• 3:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay. I was saying, maybe there's some 90-year-old who's like, I still...

• 3:09:01Scott Nolan?

  He's like, I was at Chernobyl. Well, in the industry, you will see this, what's effectively a bathtub curve, which is a lot of young people that are very excited about nuclear.

• 3:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Getting started.

• 3:09:11Scott Nolan?

  And a lot of people that were in it at the very beginning, when it was exciting and new and growing very rapidly. Yeah. And in the middle, you have enthusiasts, people who really believed in it even when no one else did. But the number of people seems to follow that curve.

• 3:09:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:24Scott Nolan?

  And so we've had consultants on our team who are in their 80s.

• 3:09:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I figured. Right, which is like, they're maybe not like, sign me up for a new W2, but I'll be around the table and help you guys think through how to actually do this.

• 3:09:36John Coogan?

  On the young side, how, where are you hiring from, and how much retraining can you do? Can you take a great engineer and bring them up to speed on all the particulars of nuclear? Or do you want to go with someone who knows more about nuclear broadly and teach them something specific about refinement? Like, how do you think about training and building like, the next generation up?

• 3:10:00Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, so one misconception of team composition is probably that it's all nuclear engineers. The reality of an enrichment facility or a refining operation is that there's actually no nuclear reactions.

• 3:10:10John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 3:10:10Scott Nolan?

  So, there's actually no chemical reactions.

• 3:10:13John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:10:13Scott Nolan?

  All there is, is taking a material and separating it. And so it's a sorting operation, it's a refinement operation. So you do need some nuclear engineers, but it's not the bulk of the team. What we really need is, you know, the team today is comprised of aerospace engineers, like, applied physics, electrical, software, chemical engineers, mechanical, all these classic engineering disciplines, and then a few nuclear engineers.

• 3:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:35Scott Nolan?

  So, we're really just looking for the best from every discipline.

• 3:10:38John Coogan?

  And then the facility in Paducah, can you give me an idea of what scale we're talking about? We've seen Crusoe building these gigawatt campuses, they're massive. Are we at that scale, or are we smaller? Like, is this a mega project, or they're, you know, can one, can you hop in a golf cart and drive around, or can you hop on the bulldozer and push the dirt around? Or is it like, you know, those huge, those huge, you know, dump trucks that you see going into mines?

• 3:11:04Scott Nolan?

  Not that.

• 3:11:06John Coogan?

  Okay, not that big.

• 3:11:06Scott Nolan?

  So, all above ground. So to set the stage, Paducah, Kentucky, over 3,000 acres, used to host enrichment, the number one enrichment site in the US. It's what made the US the world leader in enrichment back in the 80s, 90s. That site was a DOE site that was then fully shut down in 2013. So the town still remembers when there was enrichment there, they're very supportive of it. The reason we picked Paducah was actually the local community being extremely supportive of enrichment and nuclear operations there.

• 3:11:35Scott Nolan?

  Through conversations with the DOE, we found 100 acres at the south end of the site. So to answer your size question, it's really 100 acres inside the DOE fence, where they are currently taking down the old gaseous diffusion plant and planning to reindustrialize that. So our partnership with DOE was around reindustrializing that site and potentially using some of the depleted uranium that's already there to help produce new fuel. So we're talking ballpark a million square feet of building on 100 acres.

• 3:12:05John Coogan?

  Got it. You talk a big game about being upstream of the nuclear energy generation, but what's upstream of you? Does America have uranium in the ground? Do we have deposits? Do we need to mine this? Are we mining it?

• 3:12:20Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, I heard you guys have a whiteboard somewhere.

• 3:12:22John Coogan?

  We do. Please, let's get the whiteboard out. I would love to have you wipe this out.

• 3:12:26Scott Nolan?

  For you.

• 3:12:27John Coogan?

  Whiteboard out for us. This is a live demo, which is always risky, but you are an expert in this.

• 3:12:32Scott Nolan?

  Let's see how this goes.

• 3:12:33John Coogan?

  We have them on the light.

• 3:12:34Scott Nolan?

  Locked on.

• 3:12:35John Coogan?

  So explain to us, what is this? The nuclear fuel reaction process, refinement process?

• 3:12:42Scott Nolan?

  This is, yeah, this is just the five steps to make nuclear fuel.

• 3:12:45John Coogan?

  Okay, great.

• 3:12:45Scott Nolan?

  So it's pretty simple. Step one is milling and mining. You get it out of the ground. That's U308, often called yellowcake.

• 3:12:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:12:56Scott Nolan?

  You then convert it into a gas. Once it's converted into a gas, you can enrich. Once it's enriched.

• 3:13:04John Coogan?

  And is that a centrifuge process, basically?

• 3:13:06Scott Nolan?

  There's a bunch of processes. We are not yet sharing our process. Maybe I'll come on later this year and share that one. But there are a few different processes. Everything from centrifuge, gaseous diffusion, laser, aerodynamic, aqueous.

• 3:13:20John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:13:21Scott Nolan?

  Once you enrich, you then can deconvert back into a solid. And once you have a solid, you make. Fuel pellets, that's fuel fabrication.

• 3:13:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:13:30Scott Nolan?

  So in the US today, we already have US mining.

• 3:13:32John Coogan?

  We do.

• 3:13:33Scott Nolan?

  In a few different states.

• 3:13:34John Coogan?

  And do we have the deposits here too? Is America rich in this natural resource?

• 3:13:38Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, we have plenty of uranium in the US. Our deposits are not as rich as some other countries, but they're still economical to mine.

• 3:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:13:45Scott Nolan?

  And so you see new, new mines coming online in Texas, in Wyoming.

• 3:13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, but if someone throws at you, do we have enough fuel to power, you know, 10 gigawatts of nuclear power during the next wave of the AI boom? You're not blinking at that.

• 3:14:02Scott Nolan?

  This is not the issue. So plenty of US mines.

• 3:14:04John Coogan?

  Great.

• 3:14:05Scott Nolan?

  US conversion is actually right across the river from our site in Kentucky. So there is a US conversion facility run by Honeywell.

• 3:14:12John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. And that's, and that's going well as well. That's working.

• 3:14:15Scott Nolan?

  That was mothballed last decade.

• 3:14:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:14:17Scott Nolan?

  Bringing it back online now. So that production's coming back.

• 3:14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:20Scott Nolan?

  And Richmond is the one step where there's no capacity, less than 0.1% of global capacity.

• 3:14:25John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:14:25Scott Nolan?

  So effectively out of the game here, there is, you know, R and D scale in different locations, but nothing that's commercially relevant for either our existing reactors in the grid or the advanced reactors coming soon.

• 3:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Is that the hardest step in the process?

• 3:14:38Scott Nolan?

  I think it's the step with the most technology leverage.

• 3:14:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:41Scott Nolan?

  That's part of the reason we thought we can make a big difference here.

• 3:14:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you said you're not sharing your process there. I can think of a lot of reasons for that. Is...

• 3:14:49John Coogan?

  Jordy, quickly grab the mic.

• 3:14:51Jordi Hays?

  Is, is there any risk with this business of like, like fast follow risk? People see, you know, the business has traction.

• 3:14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it seems so easy. I imagine like every YC founder will just be, I'm doing that.

• 3:15:01Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I think to me, it looks like the business with the least fast follow risk is you'd have to be insane to go after this opportunity, especially because like, feels like pretty quickly you'll have a talent vortex and a lot of the people that are the enthusiasts, the people on that, that sort of bath cup, bathtub curve you talked about. Why would you want to work at the, the sort of, you know, second or third, you know, horse in, in the race?

• 3:15:25John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Or how do you think about that? I mean, as a, as a former FF guy, I imagine like you want the, you, you want to build a business with the lowest possible fast follow risk.

• 3:15:36Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, the main, the main goal here is just bring this capability back.

• 3:15:41Scott Nolan?

  Your intuition is right, though. It's not an easy thing to start. So to build a facility like this is over a billion dollars, multiple billions at full scale. You know, obviously, it's a sensitive technology. So a lot of the people on the team, almost all of them have to have security clearance who are working on tech. And so, yeah, there's a lot of different hurdles to get started. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, we want there to be multiple US players in the space. We think this is a lot like, you know, there's so many parallels to space launch, where I started my career at SpaceX. SpaceX did become the place that a lot of aerospace engineers wanted to work. They moved fast. They did innovative things. They were making a real difference in the industry. But ultimately, even SpaceX wanted there to be many players because the ultimate goal wasn't to build a business.

• 3:16:26Scott Nolan?

  The ultimate goal was to make human spaceflight happen. And for us, it's really about making nuclear energy, not just, not just the safest, not just the cleanest, but the cheapest form of baseload.

• 3:16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the SpaceX thing is so interesting because, you know, obviously, the Blue Origin team's worked very hard, but you have to wonder, would Blue Origin be as dominant as is without SpaceX? Probably there's like some knock on or competitive effect, just like, oh, he's going, I gotta go. And now, America has the two best space launch companies. It seems like, it seems like China's.

• 3:16:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody to build a viable competitor, you might need to spend a decade at the company and actually learn, learn the process.

• 3:17:05Scott Nolan?

  And with Blue Origin, people forget, Blue Origin started before SpaceX.

• 3:17:08John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right.

• 3:17:09Scott Nolan?

  So I think the big difference was that Blue Origin had someone that everyone on the team knew would just fund it continuously until it succeeded. SpaceX was do or die, basically. And so their whole mindset was always, we're bringing the cost down. We're commercial. We have to stand on our own two feet. That's our mindset as well.

• 3:17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, every penny matters. Interesting. Talk to me about the fuel. You said fuel pellets. We've had Doug from Radiant on the show before. He talks about Trisofuel. What is Trisofuel? Are you able to make it? Are you solving his problem? Or are you just a one piece of the puzzle for him when he needs fuel?

• 3:17:47Scott Nolan?

  We are this middle step of enrichment. So downstream of us, people take. Take the gas that's converted one step ahead of us, turn it back into a solid, and then turn it into fuel pellets. TrisO is one type of fuel pellet.

• 3:17:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:17:59Scott Nolan?

  So TrisO is typically used for halu, the more enriched fuel.

• 3:18:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:18:02Scott Nolan?

  And the basic idea is that it's additional containment for the fuel.

• 3:18:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:18:06Scott Nolan?

  So not only is it containment, but it also has a negative reaction coefficient with temperature. So as things get hotter, it slows down the reactions.

• 3:18:13John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:18:14Scott Nolan?

  And basically self-regulates.

• 3:18:15John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:18:16Scott Nolan?

  And so a lot of people like TrisO.

• 3:18:18John Coogan?

  Safer.

• 3:18:18Scott Nolan?

  Safer, adds a little bit of cost.

• 3:18:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:18:22Scott Nolan?

  Reduces packing density inside the core.

• 3:18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:25Scott Nolan?

  So there's some drawbacks, but overall net positive.

• 3:18:28John Coogan?

  But if TrisO becomes a massive industry, you'll be part of the supply chain.

• 3:18:32Scott Nolan?

  That's right.

• 3:18:33John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Okay, got it.

• 3:18:34Scott Nolan?

  So there's really two form factors people are thinking about a lot. One is halu inside of TrisO pellets.

• 3:18:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:18:39Scott Nolan?

  Second is traditional LEU cylinders, ingots.

• 3:18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What are you seeing in terms of timelines to bring new reactors online? Obviously, we talked to Doug about going to the dome and testing a new reactor design. There's a constant line I hear repeated about the regulators having to approve new designs. It feels like there's a lot of energy to change that. When do you expect sort of a blip in the graph, an uptick in the growth of nuclear power generation in America?

• 3:19:14Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, we really expect to see that growth curve really getting steep at the end of the decade. So you've probably talked to a few reactor companies.

• 3:19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:22Scott Nolan?

  Beyond Doug. A lot of people are aiming for this year for first.

• 3:19:25John Coogan?

  Tests.

• 3:19:26Scott Nolan?

  First criticality, first tests. You then would go through a licensing process that now, under NRC.

• 3:19:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:19:31Scott Nolan?

  Executive orders is meant to only take 18 months. And so, you know, that puts you at, let's say, 2028 for really having the ability to go build and deploy a lot of reactors. I think we then see that really curve up early 2030s.

• 3:19:46John Coogan?

  Got it. Yeah.

• 3:19:49John Coogan?

  And I imagine that even if you get a Radiant or any of these other companies to produce a few units, it takes a while until it actually puts a dent in the curve, right?

• 3:19:57Scott Nolan?

  That's right.

• 3:19:58John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the relationship with the White House. I love seeing you in the Oval Office. It's amazing. It's such a tangible example of the work that you're doing. But how do the other energy players think about nuclear today? You could imagine a world where big oil is saying, "Yeah, it sounds good, but let's just not do that. Let's keep doing what we're doing because it's our core business." Or we could see what we're doing in AI where Google jumped in on the AI boom immediately. And so, do you think the oil and gas companies will become partners?

• 3:20:31Scott Nolan?

  They created it, I guess.

• 3:20:33John Coogan?

  Maybe it's a bad analogy, but you get what I'm saying. Like, you could see a world where oil and gas companies become very synergistic. They're partnering with you. They are excited about the new technology. Or maybe it's more just competitive till the end. How do you see that playing out?

• 3:20:47Scott Nolan?

  I don't worry about the competition piece.

• 3:20:48John Coogan?

  Really?

• 3:20:49Scott Nolan?

  I think, yeah, I think one microcosm of this is really looking at the Department of Energy and its, you know, Secretary Wright comes from the oil and gas industry, yet he's been one of the biggest advocates for nuclear energy.

• 3:21:01John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:21:02Scott Nolan?

  And so, a lot of people will ask the same question around, is the oil and gas industry an enemy of nuclear? Has it been an issue for nuclear? I'd say not at all. The oil and gas industry has been trying to increase US energy production by whatever means are available.

• 3:21:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:21:17Scott Nolan?

  And that's the lever that they have. The nuclear industry has not done the same thing for, I think, a variety of reasons, but people blame outside parties. I think, you know, in the principle of just taking ownership for things, I think it's the industry needs to take ownership for why it has not grown. And I think the advanced reactor vendors are trying to solve that by bringing down the cost while increasing safety and increasing deployability.

• 3:21:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:21:40Scott Nolan?

  Jordi?

• 3:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Where, how are you setting up the company geographically? I'm assuming you're spending a good amount of time in Kentucky, but you know, where's the team mostly?

• 3:21:50Scott Nolan?

  Part of San Francisco. Yeah, yeah, right downtown. Kentucky is where we're really growing the team aggressively, but engineering is also in LA. Yeah. So two pieces, engineering headquarters, G and A, really primarily California. And then the facility itself, construction, production, primarily Kentucky.

• 3:22:13John Coogan?

  Talk to me about solar. You worked at SpaceX, Elon's a bit of a solar maxi, at least it seems like he's a solar maxi. It's always hard to read the tea leaves from his posts, but solar seems like a similar opportunity. It's a big scale, it's unlimited, it's the fusion reactor in the sky with unlimited energy. And a lot of folks have painted sci-fi solar punk futures. You obviously looked at those companies too. How do the two technologies play together? Why did you think nuclear was the real bottleneck? What are the benefits of nuclear relative to solar? When do you pick one over the other? What does the blend look like over the next couple of decades?

• 3:22:51Scott Nolan?

  Yep, yeah, so the solar AI data center in orbit concept is a new thing. You know, it's probably the last few weeks that's really become something people are talking about.

• 3:23:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:01Scott Nolan?

  If we rewind a couple of years ago and we're talking, okay, data centers on earth.

• 3:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:05Scott Nolan?

  And do you want to do solar or do you want to do nuclear? Solar obviously takes a lot more area on the ground, but there's, there is plenty of area.

• 3:23:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:23:13Scott Nolan?

  For that in general. The missing piece was really storage.

• 3:23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:16Scott Nolan?

  So solar is inherently cyclical.

• 3:23:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:23:18Scott Nolan?

  You need to smooth it out.

• 3:23:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:23:19Scott Nolan?

  To smooth it out, you need very cheap grid scale or at least gigawatt scale storage.

• 3:23:23John Coogan?

  Batteries.

• 3:23:24Scott Nolan?

  Batteries. Batteries or other forms. We haven't had that yet.

• 3:23:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:27Scott Nolan?

  At a cost point that I think can compete with nuclear.

• 3:23:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:23:30Scott Nolan?

  That could change.

• 3:23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:31Scott Nolan?

  And that would be great, but for now in the foreseeable future on earth, it's nuclear.

• 3:23:36John Coogan?

  And that's what you mean by baseload? Nuclear power plant, once you fire it up, you're getting whatever it says. If it says one megawatt, you get one megawatt 24 hours a day. Doesn't matter if it's sunshine, rain, snow.

• 3:23:47Scott Nolan?

  That's right. Versus turning off at nighttime and having to go off the batteries that were charged up during the day.

• 3:23:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:52Scott Nolan?

  And now when we talk about in orbit, it's a whole different ballgame.

• 3:23:55John Coogan?

  Because you can be in sun synchronous orbit, you get sunlight like 99% of the time, correct?

• 3:23:59Scott Nolan?

  That's right.

• 3:24:00John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:24:00Scott Nolan?

  So if you have very cheap launch capacity.

• 3:24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:03Scott Nolan?

  If your GPUs don't weigh very much, which they don't, and they're high value.

• 3:24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:06Scott Nolan?

  You could potentially. Put all of that in orbit.

• 3:24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:09Scott Nolan?

  Have your solar panel completely in sun sync.

• 3:24:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:24:11Scott Nolan?

  Solve the battery issue. The one remaining piece is you've got a lot of incident solar energy. You're going to run those GPUs. How do you cool them?

• 3:24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:20Scott Nolan?

  And I think that's, that's the piece that people are going to be working on for the next few years.

• 3:24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the material science question. So you're saying, put the solar panels in orbit, keep them off the earth. Earth is your domain. We're going to do nuclear down here.

• 3:24:30Scott Nolan?

  That works?

• 3:24:31John Coogan?

  Of course, we'll do both.

• 3:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Until, of course, you know, the 2040 pitch for General Matter. We're putting a, putting a reactor on the moon.

• 3:24:39John Coogan?

  On the moon.

• 3:24:40Jordi Hays?

  Moon reactors.

• 3:24:41John Coogan?

  There, there, uh, nuclear does have applications in space though, right? Didn't the, what was it? The Mars lander, the Mars helicopter that we put out there had some sort of nuclear fuel in it? How does, how do you get energy without putting a full nuclear reactor there? Do you understand how that works?

• 3:24:55Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, typically you'll have a fuel source.

• 3:24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:58Scott Nolan?

  That has a shorter half-life.

• 3:25:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:25:00Scott Nolan?

  And can emit a lot of energy more quickly.

• 3:25:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:25:02Scott Nolan?

  Uranium has a very, very long half-life.

• 3:25:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:25:04Scott Nolan?

  Um, some of these other ones have much shorter. So you can harness heat off of that and charge batteries continuously.

• 3:25:09John Coogan?

  So it's basically just a hot rock?

• 3:25:11Scott Nolan?

  That's right.

• 3:25:11John Coogan?

  It's not actually a full reactor with rods going in and out. It's not Chernobyl or anything like that. It's just a hot rock.

• 3:25:16Scott Nolan?

  That is, yeah, that's right. If you're talking about lunar reactors, that would be a different story.

• 3:25:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:25:21Scott Nolan?

  If you're talking about, you know, interstellar things from science fiction.

• 3:25:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:25:25Scott Nolan?

  More like a reactor.

• 3:25:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:26Scott Nolan?

  Is what everyone's always talked about, but the things that have been deployed so far are usually radioisotopes.

• 3:25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, what are the biggest bottlenecks, uh, leading into the end of the decade? The 2030, that seems like an important moment for the company, obviously. Job's not finished then, but, uh, talent, money, approvals, regulatory, uh, anything else? What, what else is going on?

• 3:25:49Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, our, the way we think about it is, is the primary bottleneck to get online by end of decade and to be at huge scale with the world's lowest cost of enrichment is all about the team.

• 3:26:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:00Scott Nolan?

  So it's all about recruiting. It's all about engineering. It's not just engineering of what goes into the building. It's the construction of the building. So out in Kentucky, we're building our own EPC and general contractor in-house to run that, just like was done at Tesla Gigafactories.

• 3:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:14Scott Nolan?

  In LA, we're doing the engineering on all the components that go inside to, to cost and scale optimize those.

• 3:26:19John Coogan?

  How do you balance the desire to run quickly with not swinging at every pitch when you get a new applicant? It feels like. It feels like hiring is maybe similar to investing. You don't want to just say, oh, I have to make one investment every quarter because my fund is X size. You also might not want to say, I need to hire one engineer every month.

• 3:26:41Scott Nolan?

  Right.

• 3:26:41John Coogan?

  How do you, how do you stay sane in an environment where you have to hire people?

• 3:26:46Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 3:26:47John Coogan?

  It's lumpy.

• 3:26:47Scott Nolan?

  Yeah, you know what your open roles are. You know what you want to have on the team. If we look at that, we're hiring over 100 people this year at 12 sites.

• 3:26:54John Coogan?

  Oh, we gotta hit the golf with that.

• 3:27:00Jordi Hays?

  How's it feel in person? It's like you feel it, really feel it in your bones.

• 3:27:04John Coogan?

  It's louder in person, right?

• 3:27:05Scott Nolan?

  I can feel it, yeah. That's great. But like you said, you have to, you know, the key thing for scaling a company is keeping the bar high. I think Naval has said this a bunch of times, the team you build is the company you build. And so we're trying to find people that are just extremely passionate, great engineers, great operators who are aligned and just want to work on this problem and solve it.

• 3:27:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the biggest lesson from working with Peter on the board, on the team, like with, you know, your career that you're taking through this business?

• 3:27:34Scott Nolan?

  I think for this business, it was, it was really the lesson of, you know, a lot of people want to go after a trillion dollar market and own a tiny percent of it.

• 3:27:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:27:43Scott Nolan?

  We're trying to solve first the HALU shortage in the US that's going to prevent all reactors from coming online if they can't have the fuel that they need. That's arguably a small market today, but you want to start, it's okay to start in a small market and then grow into a bigger one. And so our markets are really HALU, which you could say is maybe a hundred million dollar market today, something like that. And then LEU enrichment, which in the US alone is a couple billion dollar market. And then you go from there. So I think probably the best lesson is the zero to one lesson of start small, solve a real problem for some known customer and go from there.

• 3:28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great, that's great. Jordy, anything else?

• 3:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:28:20John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:28:21Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate the full breakdown.

• 3:28:21John Coogan?

  For coming on the show.

• 3:28:22Jordi Hays?

  The whiteboard moment. We appreciate a whiteboard.

• 3:28:24John Coogan?

  We love a whiteboard moment. Well, we will leave you there. Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com. See you tomorrow.

• 3:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.

• 3:28:39John Coogan?

  Goodbye.