Windsurf Chaos Aftermath, NVIDIA Back in China, Richard Mille Deep Dive, Apple Buying $500M in Rare Earth Magnets | Zak Kukoff, Brian Venturo, Tyler Cowen, Austin Hughes, Kris Fredrickson, Dick Lucas

(00:27) - Windsurf Chaos Aftermath Breakdown (15:17) - Dwarkesh Patel Article Breakdown (27:17) - NVIDIA Back in China After Trump Meeting (30:20) - Zak Kukoff, a recurring guest on the show, discusses the U. S. government's recent decision to allow Nvidia to resume exports of its H20 AI chips to China, following previous restrictions that had significantly impacted Nvidia's revenue. He highlights the strategic implications of this move, noting that while it represents a substantial economic win for Nvidia, it also raises national security concerns due to potential military applications of the technology. Kukoff further explores the broader context of U. S.-China trade relations, emphasizing the delicate balance between economic interests and security considerations in the evolving landscape of AI and semiconductor exports. (53:31) - History of Richard Mille (01:16:20) - David Protein Launches Boiled Cod Flavored Bar (01:28:31) - Brian Venturo, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of CoreWeave, discusses the company's evolution from a cryptocurrency mining operation to a leading provider of GPU-based cloud computing services tailored for AI and machine learning workloads. He highlights CoreWeave's commitment to delivering scalable, high-performance infrastructure that meets the growing demands of AI developers and enterprises. Venturo also emphasizes the company's focus on customer-centric solutions, enabling clients to efficiently scale their computing resources and accelerate innovation in their respective fields. (02:01:16) - Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, faculty director of the Mercatus Center, and co-author of the economics blog Marginal Revolution. In the conversation, Cowen discusses the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, noting that current AI systems can perform intellectual tasks as well as expert humans, and emphasizes the importance of human adaptability in integrating these technologies into various sectors. (02:31:12) - Austin Hughes, co-founder and CEO of Unify, a go-to-market technology platform, discusses his journey from leading the growth product team at Ramp to founding Unify in early 2023. He highlights Unify's recent $40 million Series B funding and explains how their product streamlines sales processes by automating research and data collection, allowing sales teams to focus on engaging prospects. Hughes also addresses the evolving role of AI in sales, emphasizing the importance of human creativity and personalization in outreach strategies. (02:43:12) - Apple Buying $500M in Rare Earth Magnets (02:45:58) - Kris Fredrickson, a seasoned investor and co-founder of Curology, discusses his new $175 million investment fund, emphasizing a concentrated strategy with 8 to 10 core positions to ensure each investment significantly impacts his limited partners. He highlights the importance of aligning with founders' visions and providing substantial support, drawing from his extensive experience in various investment roles. Fredrickson also touches on the evolving venture capital landscape, noting the resurgence of mergers and acquisitions and the potential for multiple winners in expansive markets like AI. (02:59:16) - Dick Lucas, a software developer and entrepreneur, is running for California's 51st State Assembly District, encompassing areas like Santa Monica and West Hollywood. He emphasizes the need for competition in California's political landscape, expressing concerns over the state's one-party dominance and its impact on governance. Lucas identifies housing affordability as a primary issue, advocating for streamlined building processes to increase supply and reduce costs. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, July 15th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Lots of guests, lots of news. The big one is, we are doing a postmortem on the windsurf chaos. I was saying that I liked this post from Pavel Asperuhov. I think he sort of nailed the postmortem, but we can debate this. It, I mean, if you leave someone for dead, but someone else calls in a helicopter, that doesn't really change your moral positioning in the situation. And Delian says this 100%. The windsurf founders in Google thought they could pull a fast one, and that the broader community slash windsurf employees are somehow

• 0:44John Coogan?

  R-worded enough to not catch on that their leave the Shell Co. with cash plan was totally morally bankrupt. Everyone will remember. And so, I don't know, I'm perhaps ready to put on the steel man hat and not go quite as far as Delian. I think you might agree with the Delian and Pavel take a little bit more.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  I still think it's important to debate because we want to avoid this kind of situation in the future. There's probably going to be more of these deals. John Ludig had some good commentary on this, basically saying, if you are a big tech company, it is much easier and faster to do something like this. It's not just the FTC sort of like climate around antitrust. It's just that it's much easier, much faster. And oftentimes, these companies are just buying the team and the talent. So if they can license the tech and get the team, it is, that's just capitalism doing capitalism. In this case, the answer to capitalism doing capitalism was more capitalism.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  But it got kind of wild.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Scott Wu coming in hot, working over the weekend to get a deal done. So anyways, fantastic outcome.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Scott Wu looks like a hero.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Scott, we looks like a hero. I think cognition is going to be stronger for it. They got a world-class, you know, GTM sales, marketing engine.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  What John Ludig said here was big tech's AI talent shortage means with means these M and A choices. A, you get the talent only, but you get it today, or B, you get the talent plus the business plus the product, but months after regulatory scrutiny. And he says they will pick every time. Thankfully for Windsurf, the product lives on. But A, as the default is existentially dark for startups. And so I think what's interesting is like, we were debating how much of the blame goes to Lina Khan. And I don't actually know that there's all that much on Lina Khan specifically.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  But it's fun. It's fun. It's fun to point the finger.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  It is, but I think

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  The boogeyman.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  I think in general, like the FTC has always, has always had some sort of approval around big public company buying a small company. They're going to review it, even if they would have approved it. It would, they wouldn't, Google would not have gotten the talent actually in the door, actually working at Google for six months.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Months after regulatory scrutiny. And so that time

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  And the other comp here, the other comp here that we have is Figma.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Who was slated to get acquired by Adobe.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Took forever.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Adobe had to pay a $1 billion breakup fee. Now Figma is going to IPO.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  And I would be shocked if they end the first trading day below the price that Adobe was going to pay.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  And the company is doing better than ever, has launched a bunch of new products and, and so

• 3:37John Coogan?

  Not financial advice, but I will give you product advice. Go to Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Can't say anything about the stock, but great product. We do love it. Anyway, Varanam Ganesh had a good take here. Windsurf employees over the weekend. And it's the, it's the, we're so back, it's so over. We're so back, it's so over. And I think the underrated take on this, like, yes, it's funny and it's a good point, but this has a real economic cost, like losing sleep. We're sponsored by Eight Sleep, as we put out a video today.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  We did.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Sleep is valuable. And if you make me lose sleep, that does have an economic cost. That does have a moral cost. You shouldn't do that. And so you should, as a founder, try and land the plane, not just

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Save everyone's life, but actually not have a super rough landing. Yeah, make it a win for everyone, but make it smooth for everyone.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  And there was a good post Pavel Pavel was on a tear.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  He was.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Last few days defender of the founding engineers.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  But he said, I hope these guys smoke Google at AI coding. Imagine the chip on your shoulder after this, if you're a windsurf employee.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  And Sandeep Shah over at Windsurf, he's a vice president there said it's bigger than a chip. We are coming for it.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  For it.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  And so love the energy.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  He was left behind in the remain co. Is that correct?

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  He did not go over and.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  On the ghost ship.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Ready, he's on the ghost, yeah, the ghost ship. The ghost ship and Augustus is go off the king and well diffuse his LFG. Lots of lots of support for Sandeep in the AI coding and the AI IDEs war that's continuing. Anyway, Signal has a post here startup comp used to be confusing because it was complex. Now it's confusing because it might be worthless, even with a large exit. The founders can dip anytime last chopper out of Saigon vibes, except they're flying private while you're holding the bag. Good best. Yeah, my, my, my take here was that Scott Wu looks like the hero, not Varun Mohan, the founder and CEO of Windsurf,

• 5:39John Coogan?

  who should have gotten an amazing outcome for his team in any other situation, like in any other situation. I say, hey, join this fast growing company. We're just post pivot, we're second in the market, we're doing some cool stuff. I'm raising some money and we're growing, but we're only doing 40, 80 million ARR. And I get you liquidity at 2.4 billion. You should be like, I am ride or die for this guy forever.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  And I think that a lot of these, a lot of these employees aren't going to feel that way in, in five years, even after all the dust settles, they're going to remember that this was not, not handled as well as it should have been. And so they're going to be like, nah, I don't want to work with them.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  Which is rough.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  It's rough. Sure. When, when the muzzle is, is removed, he'll be able to.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully call every employee one by one.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  That would be good. Yeah.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Sorry and make up.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  And so I still put some of the blame on FTC stuff, just FTC stuff broadly, some of the blame on Google comms, some of the blame on Lena Khan and what, and how she changed the FTC.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing is speed, like this was happening really remember, remember the.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  The sort of exclusivity period that OpenAI had on the deal expired. And I think this got announced like the very next day. So I'm sure it was in the works, but they definitely were moving quickly. And again, it would have been a good outcome if they all ended up at OpenAI. But I also think this is a good fit going forward as well.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  So I'm excited to see what each branch of the team.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Rune here has some pushback on Signal. He says, this has always been true, the idea that startup comp is confusing and complex. Investors and founders screwing over early employees during an M and A is a time honored tradition in Silicon Valley. I don't know how true that is. There's a lot of examples where that didn't happen, but of course it has happened. If anything, the abundance of capital has made things better for early employees. And so, you know, kind of, you know, people, people taking both sides. We didn't get to this post, but it was funny. Connor saying, Wind Surf is the Soham Perique of startup acquisitions. They got acquired by OpenAI, Google, and now Commision Labs all in one month. You'll love to see it.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Swix has a six way parlay. He said, I want Mistral founders to Apple, Mistral team to Meta, character remain code of perplexity, core to perplexity, ideogram to Figma, gamut of notion, read it back. There was rumors that Apple was, was interested in, in picking up Mistral.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Taking a look at it. The funny thing though, is that if you're France, do you want your national champion to, you know, the luxury AI?

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Mistral should go to LVMH for sure.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Should be home with the Arnos.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Didn't we, didn't we post a joke post around that? I think we did.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  I think we did.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  I think. I want fine luxury language models from the Arno family.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  I think some of the Mistral folks were like, this is hilarious, but also like complete misinformation. Anyway, Sandeep says, it's bigger than chip, we're coming for it. And Rob says, let's talk about a reboot for HBO Silicon Valley. And it's funny because when you see the Wind Surf tag right in the name, you're like, oh, okay, this is hilarious. You think this is ridiculous and at least you're having some fun with it.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  Can we talk about our upcoming guests?

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're gonna have. One of the co-creators of HBO Silicon Valley on the show. He has been working on Barry for a couple of years, kind of out of the Silicon Valley parody world, but we're gonna drag him back in.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna try to bring him back. We're gonna explain to him.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  What's going on in Silicon Valley.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Line by line, what's been going on, and I think once he really processes it, he'll be interested in making a reboot.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, you can reboot your finances with Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. I like this post.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I threw this in. Kind July Brand Ambassador says, "The business I stood on was operating at a loss."

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Forty K likes. Love it. So good.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  Perfect.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Business I stood on.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Perfect intersection of Thin Twit and Justin Bieber.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember we put up that, when we talked about the Justin Bieber launch, you were like, "You're so offline, John." And it's like, "I'm extremely online, but just in one narrow bubble of the internet?"

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  And so I somehow missed the entire Justin Bieber saga and the meltdown.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  The new number one album in the world.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  It's the new number one album in the world. See, I'm learning this again.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Wow. We listened to some of it. We should do some, I don't know if we're in the music group.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  We actually listened, we were saying we should listen to this on the drive home.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  As research.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  And we made it two songs.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  It wasn't really hitting for us, but congratulations to him on the comeback. I mean, it seems like a great launch. Do you think the viral moment was staged, or do you think it was organic and then he just leveraged it later?

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  It seemed like a legitimate crash out.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. I mean, it seems like, you know.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  But it was extremely well played.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Even the best of us in technology have gotten frustrated with a journalist from time to time, so who amongst us are above that, right?

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If the misinformation caught me outside of Nobu like that.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. You might crash out.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  I might crash out.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  And then drop an album at number one, a new, a number one livestream. And so Kyle Jeong, I think from the browser company or browser base has kind of a hot take here.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  Browser companies.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Kind of a hot take.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  Soy boy versus Giga Chad, Varun Mohan, left his company for big tech, screwed over employee equity. And then of course, Scott Wu can solve any math problem imaginable, giving wins for employees accelerated vesting and cliff's wave.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  I like that it's math problems.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  Scott basically, Scott basically came in and was able to run the playbook that a lot of CEOs have run. Who was it from, from Matrix, Ilya?

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Ilya Sukar.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  From Parse.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  Who did the same exact thing with his employees.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Back in the day.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  With Facebook.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Didn't actually have to.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  And he revested, which is pretty common. And I, I, I would believe that, that the team that went over to Google is revesting to get that multi-billion dollar.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  I don't think it's just cash and you can just quit immediately because the whole point is a talent acquisition. So it's got to vest, right? But yeah, I mean, crazy situation. And I, I do wonder, I do wonder like what, what the price would have been to say, hey, Google, I'm, it's all or nothing. What price will you pay now? Because there's a price to wait for Google. Google would have to pay a price to wait to actually bring over the whole winsurf company, right? They need FTC approval for that. Let's call it six months. What is Google's cost?

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  Send our pitch AI doesn't maybe feel like he has six months.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  He would miss six months of pitching.

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  If you want to, if you want a real shot at, at meaningful traction in code gen, another six months feels like a long time.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  So what billion dollar cost? Two billion? Is it a zero?

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, it could, it could be the difference between winning or having a, you know, a horse in the race or not. Because, you know, plenty of people are leveraging Gemini broadly across their companies. Haven't heard it a ton from engineers on the show talking about using Gemini in their.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  Coding stack.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Yap seen was a big fan.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but uh, doesn't come up a ton. And they know that there's, there's billions of dollars being printed in, in code gen. And uh, I'm sure that Google wants a piece of it.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Well, if you need to review that.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Very few, very few business lines that, that they, I imagine they can see a through line of, we can get this to a billion dollar run rate. And that's kind of the bar at Google.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, if you need to review some code, head over to graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Um, and speaking of artificial intelligence, I want to go to Tyler and get the update on the new Gorn piece. He read it on the treadmill this morning. Is that right?

• 13:53Tyler?

  This morning on the treadmill. Yeah. I, I realized that there's Google on the treadmill. So I was like, oh, I'll read the new.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 13:59Tyler?

  There's like, there's.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  The treadmill has a, has a browser?

• 14:02Tyler?

  Yeah. So, so usually they have like.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Wow, that's the real browser wars.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  That's the real browser wars. Wait, is Comet available?

• 14:07Tyler?

  Just Google. But yeah, that's actually good.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  Wow, break it up. Break up the treadmill market.

• 14:12Tyler?

  Yeah.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  This is ridiculous.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  It's a monopoly.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Google, Google's Chrome is probably paying to be on all the Equinox.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  Treadmills.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Probably. Okay. So, uh, you, you, uh, so Gorn wrote this piece and it kicks off with, uh, Dwar Kes Patel. Uh, what was the, uh, what was the actual inciting, um, tweet that I saw? I saw Dwar Kes posting about it and he was saying, uh, uh, he was saying, really interesting new Gorn essay, LLM daydreaming. It's a proposal of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty. By the way, I know it's a big cringe, it's a bit cringe to delight in, but if you had told 19 year old me that a Gorn essay would open like this, I would have found it hard to believe. And it is a huge milestone for Dwar Kes. So congratulations to Dwar Kes. He deserves it.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Uh, so Dwar Kes Patel asks why no LLM has apparently ever made a major breakthrough or unexpected insight. You would expect this, given the incredible IQ that is on display for 15 minutes as you use an, an LLM. No matter how vast their knowledge or how high their benchmark scores, while those. Are by definition extremely rare. Contemporary chatbot style L L Ms have now been used seriously by tens of millions of people since Chat G P T, November in two thousand and twenty two. And it does seem like there ought to be at least some examples at this point. This is a genuine puzzle. When prompted with the right hints, these models can synthesize information in ways that feel tantalizingly close to true insight. The raw components of intelligence seem to be present, but they don't. What's missing?

• 15:46John Coogan?

  It's hard to say because there are so many differences between L L Ms and human researchers. So Tyler, take me through the piece. What did Gorn have to say?

• 15:53Tyler?

  Yeah, so basically the question is like, okay, why have they not produced new research?

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:57Tyler?

  He basically gives two reasons. So the first is like, they don't have continual learning, right? Which is like, you train an L M, you put it to inference, it's like the weights are fixed. They don't change. There's sure there's like test time inference, but it's not really learning like, you know, between your chats, right?

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, unless it's in the context window.

• 16:17Tyler?

  Yeah, but there's some kind of like privative ways to do memory you're starting to see, but it's really like not super great so far.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:23Tyler?

  So he kind of, there's analogy, it's like, does a person who has like permanent amnesia, have they ever like produced novel research? Like probably not, right?

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah, this is the PhD amnesiac. Like we bring them in, they're genius, but every time they go home, they forget everything that they've learned about running our business. And could they even figure out how the printer works? They would have to start from first principles every single time, just to print, you know, a stack of tweets for us. And all of a sudden, we'd have a genius who couldn't really add value at our company.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  If you can't print tweets, you're gonna have a tough.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  You gotta operate the brother printer.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  Under this roof.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  At this company. Anyway, continue.

• 17:00Tyler?

  Yeah, okay, so there's continual learning and then there's continual thinking, right? Which is kind of like, um, the model is only producing tokens when you prompt it, right? So it's not like, like an average person is like daydreaming or they're like normally dreaming. You kind of are always like passively thinking about stuff. So it's like, sometimes you wake up in the morning, you just have this like new solution to a problem that you're working on. It's like, oh, how did that happen? I wasn't like thinking while I was.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how many great ideas have been shower thoughts?

• 17:28Tyler?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  It's really true.

• 17:30Tyler?

  So, so basically the, the solution is he has this like system where you basically just draw like two totally random like concepts, ideas. And then you just prompt the model, you say.

• 17:43Tyler?

  Draw a connection between these two things. And then for like almost everything, it's going to be like total nonsense, right? It's like two random things, there's not going to be anything. But if you do it enough times, you'll eventually get like, oh, this is actually like an interesting connection between these two things. It's like a new concept. It's like a novel idea. You can use it for research, stuff like this.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you're just randomly drawing like, like almost words, like cow, ethernet cable, like no connection there. But if you iterate, you might wind up with like cow and Fitbit. And then you come up with the idea for that company Halter that's making like a trillion dollars and is doing really well. And I never would have thought of that. But if I just like iterated enough to be like, wait, does a cow need a Fitbit? Maybe, okay, is there a business here? And you can kind of trace through that.

• 18:27Tyler?

  Yeah, basically, and then so you have this like, you have like two sides, right? You have this thing that kind of tries to make some non-obvious connection. Then you have this other like half of the model that basically says, is this like an interesting idea?

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Tyler?

  And then basically, so if it is an interesting idea, it like saves it to this kind of like memory bank. And then you use that memory bank to, to keep pulling new ideas like from that and from kind of everything else.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Tyler?

  So you're like building on top of these ideas. And then eventually you're gonna like slowly, very slowly build like these really interesting ideas that are totally novel, that you'd only get from basically passing in like millions and billions of totally random concepts.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Tyler?

  Yeah.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  I feel like, yeah, one of the things that he highlights is like, this would be incredibly compute intensive, right? Like you're talking about like running all the data centers all the time to kind of think about this. And it feels like it puts me back on Kurzweil timelines of like 20, I think he says singularity in 2045. And so it's like, this is an interesting idea. What if it, what if it takes a thousand times as much compute as we have now?

• 19:34Tyler?

  Yeah, I mean, you're basically like brute forcing research, which like kind of doesn't make sense in a way. But if you have these models that are like small enough, you can kind of distill them down.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, think about a scenario where founder exits their company, they do their earn out, they want to start something new. Instead of spending two years lost in the woods, you know, think. Trying to come up with a decent idea, they just spend five million dollars, five minutes and just like generate like a bunch of different ideas.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  You still then have to like pick an idea and it might seem good on the surface and then you talk to people in the industry and they say, well, oh, well, like here's, here's kind of the issue with how you're thinking and then maybe you gotta do another run.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  But I think the, I think the interesting question is like five million feels like the point at which we would say, like if someone built this system and they actually said, hey, we've, we've designed the algorithms such that you can, you know, tell it to go and it will come back with a good idea, but every time you hit go, you get a five million dollar OpenAI bill. Like people would push that button for sure. Uh, and, and it would be venture backed and stuff, but what if it's five billion? Or what if it's five trillion? Like there is a point where it just won't, no one will push that button.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  Ideas, guys, would be so thrilled if it costs like five billion dollars to come up with a good idea.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  I think it actually does right now. I think it might cost more. I think the current paradigm is that even if you, even if you ran this algorithm, you ran this strategy, like the current models are so, uh, like, uh, what's the word? Like they're, they're not great at like compressing and they're not efficient. And so you might be able to brute force it, you're brute forcing research, but the level of brute forcing might, might, like when you math it out, might be like in the billions of dollars to get an insight. I don't know.

• 21:22Tyler?

  I think it, it also like, it doesn't maybe make sense if you're like a random person, you're gonna pay five million dollars for an idea. But it maybe it makes sense if you're a big lab and you need, like you're hitting a data wall, you need new data.

• 21:35Tyler?

  I think then it kind of makes sense.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes sense.

• 21:37Tyler?

  And then also, he also brings up this, this thing, which is like, um, if you like kind of distill the model, even if you like open source it, you're not really giving away the new ideas, right? Because. Like, say that you have some like weird concept that you find, it's baked into the model. But like, the only way to access that is to like specifically query for it.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:56Tyler?

  So if you're not actually like giving away these new ideas, even if you're giving out the model.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 22:01Tyler?

  That's another kind of interesting.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  So you actually have to like inference enough to pull the insight out of the model, even if they're. It's literally the, there's a hundred million dollars in your laptop and your job is to pull it out. Like, there's a billion dollars in the weights of GPT five or four point five. But, you know, to get the insight out of it might cost another billion dollars.

• 22:20Tyler?

  Yeah, it's basically like the monkeys typing on the keyboard until they get Shakespeare.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:25Tyler?

  It's like the same thing, but for like research.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Do we have a monkey sound effect yet?

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  We gotta get one of those.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Get on it.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  What's your reaction to Chris Best, founder of Substack, friend of the show? He said, he's quoting this, contemporary chatbot style L L M's have now been used seriously by tens of millions of people since Chat G P T. November twenty twenty two, and it does not seem like they're, it does seem like there ought to be at least some examples of novelty at this point. And Chris says, potential answer, there have been, but the human users hogged the credit. So, so maybe these chatbots are spitting out novel ideas, but people are just like, I'm not telling anyone that I got my idea for, from Chat G P T because that's like a bad signal.

• 23:11Tyler?

  Yeah, I think that could be plausible. I think it's also just like, like, the way that L L M's work is like you, you're querying for a specific thing.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Tyler?

  So like, if you have, it's more of like, you have a hunch of like, this could be an idea and then the L L M like really gives it to you. But you, you never really see like, L L M just like, here's a cool idea, right? Which is what this is kind of.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  And this is the.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  The other, the other thing is a lot of, a lot of business ideas, like good business ideas end up being simple. And they don't, they don't always feel like, oh, look at this novel insight.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  It's just obvious.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  Like, other people will see the idea and they'll actually be, if they're this kind of founder type, or maybe they're looking for their next thing. They will legitimately be annoyed because they think, oh, I, I could have thought of that.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Bit bit for cows? I could have thought.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Anduril for dogs.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  I love that business.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  No, so that's the other thing is, is at least in, in our world, in the private markets, a lot of, a lot of ideas that end up being worth a lot.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  It's not necessarily the idea that's worth a lot, but it's the having the idea at the right time and then the execution against that idea.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  For, for a very long time.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  And I, I, I think that kind of gets to, you know, my silly Coogan's eval, uh, which is tell me a joke. That requires novel insight because if you just tell me a joke that's already been out there that I've heard, it's not funny. So it requires novelty. It requires insight. It's actually really hard to come up with a new joke that's never been told before. Uh, because it requires putting multiple things together, see realizing something. And so I think that, um, even though I'm not going to chat GPT regularly and asking for like mega scientific discovery or like, give me a genius business idea. I think the tell me a joke is, is in the same vein of like hard problem for LLM.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  And I think that if, if they get to the point where you can ask it for a novel, new humorous joke insight, like joke with insight. That's actually new. It should be able to do the other things. And I think that is some sort of fundamental restraint. And it's, it's, it's what we're talking about when we talk about spiky intelligence. It's like very good at certain things, but it's missing this one human capability. Uh, is there anything else from the post that you think we should highlight?

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think that was, that was mostly it.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Quern is on an absolute tear. We love him.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  He's back in the bay.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. He's back in the bay. That's great. Um, well, we have, uh, four minutes until our, uh, first guest of the show.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So let's cover a little bit of the story.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Let's cover some ads first. Let's tell you about Vanta.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Good idea.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And then should we kick off with some Nvidia backgrounds when we have Zach on?

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  I just want to say congratulations of Vanta for picking up Scott Holden.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  He entered the trade portal. They picked him up.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  We love some personnel news on this show.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  From Brex over to Vanta to lead marketing efforts at Vanta.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  And, uh, wait, do we have the, do we have the post?

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  The traded post?

• 26:26John Coogan?

  Not, yeah. Uh, no, Christina's post, which was hilarious.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull it up.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  I didn't know she had this in her. It's great.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  I got it.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got it.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  She says, "Big day at Vanta after a couple of days in the transfer portal. Scott Holden commits to the Purple Lamas."

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Purple Lamas.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  "Looking forward to working with you, Scott. So, love to see it."

• 26:49John Coogan?

  That's a great photo of him, too. Wow. I wonder what the context was for that photo.

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  Just looking like a Chad.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, but like, you know, you see a lot of LinkedIn, like, just like headshots. This is like the full body shot. Really nice soft lighting, teeth looking extremely white. Fantastic.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Just...

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Nice tan.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Full breakdown.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  Full breakdown. Looking diced.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, let's get into the story before Zach Kukoff joins. So, the news today out of the Journal. Nvidia can sell AI chip to China again after CEO meets Trump.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Jensen Huang's case proves persuasive as the US agrees to grant licenses for the H20 chip.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia said it has received assurances from the Trump administration that it can sell its H20 artificial intelligence chip in China days after chief executive Jensen Huang met President Trump. The administration's move marks a turnabout after the Commerce Department restricted sales of the chip in April, costing Nvidia billions of dollars. The news came during a visit by Huang to Beijing, where he was meeting senior officials. "I'm very happy," he told reporters.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Shares in Nvidia rose more than 4% in early trading on Tuesday. So, big, big turn of events.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  The... also coincides with girlies in China right now. We got to have them on to give us a breakdown of what's happening on the ground there. But, yeah, a bit of a surprise. This also feels like something that Saks would have been heavily involved with as the AI czar.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  So... It's good, you know, whatever people, you know, a lot of people have have their feelings about sex, but I do believe he is a patriot and would have had a lot of different people around the table.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Working on this decision.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  So, obviously, China Hawks in shambles. Very upset about this, I imagine. Not all of them commented on it, but I imagine that with people who take the vanilla view of like, sort of like zero sum competition between US and China, they're going to be upset because they say, hey, just restrict the Nvidia chips, they won't be able to train AI. And for a variety of reasons, AI is dangerous, it's going to be super intelligence, we need a democratic, a capitalist, super intelligence. We don't want a communist authoritarian super intelligence that's controlled by a single person. We want it to be controlled by humanity or controlled by the American voters, something like that. On the flip side.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  We want it to be freedom pilled.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  For sure. And I, and I agree with that to some degree. The question is, does this, is there a, is there a potential world where selling Nvidia H20s into China actually hurts Huawei more than it hurts America? And so it's somehow advantageous for us to get the entire world standardized on the CUDA stack and the Nvidia stack? And then, and then we are able to have like more leverage over the Chinese AI ecosystem? And that gives us more control to basically shift the overall amount of America pilledness in AGI generally? I don't know.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  There are multiple sides, but we're going to talk to Zach Kukoff, our first guest of the show. He's been on multiple times now. You know him, you love him. Zach Kukoff.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  There he is. He was almost the first guest to do a three-peat, three days in a row. He made it two, but.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  But we got bored.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  Depending on how.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  Not with you.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  We got bored of the swamp.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  We got bored with the swamp, sorry. It happens.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  That's all right. But, but.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  We want to talk about trade deals.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Today gets a little bit, you know, if this week gets more chaotic on this topic, maybe we'll run the.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  You'll get the

• 30:39Zak Kukoff?

  It's a really perverse incentive. Like, I'm really hoping for horrible things to happen.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:44Zak Kukoff?

  And complete the three feet here.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Take us from the swamp to the TSMC

• 30:48Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Clean room. It's the swamp meets clean room segment of the show. So kick us off. What? How would you characterize the news? Exactly what's happening? And then we'll go into some analysis.

• 31:00Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah. So I think everybody knows the H20 chip was specifically designed by Nvidia to meet Biden era restrictions on what chips could be exported to China, right? So if you zoom out, you go back to April, the beginning of Trump two, what you have is basically a little bit of regulatory uncertainty where Nvidia spent a lot of money producing chips that are specifically designed to go to China. And the admin comes back in April at the last minute and says, "Sorry, you can't export the chips. We're putting in export controls. We have a licensure requirement." Nvidia takes a huge, like $8 billion revenue impairment, basically on the cost of producing and not selling this huge swath of chips. By the way, at the same time, huge domestic market for H20s,

• 31:42Zak Kukoff?

  lot of demand, even though they're weaker, lot of demand from startups domestically for the same chips. Last night, basically between April and last night, you've seen a full court press by Nvidia for the last X number of months, where Jensen has been doing a winning campaign, a successful campaign, of influence in Washington, trying to make two points exceptionally clear. The first point is, "We need to export these chips because, same reasons John just said, the stack, American dominance, we want everyone to standardize, so on and so forth. We're losing the biggest market besides America." And also, he's made the point of, "Look, we can also comply in a more regulatory aggressive way," right? So there's the Chip Security Act was introduced in Congress in May. It's working its way through the House. It's moving through the Senate right now.

• 32:27Zak Kukoff?

  Basically Nvidia's helped shape that act aggressively. And it says, "Look, we have to make sure that there are ways to track the diversion of these chips, track where they're going." And, and this is still up in the air, "Is there going to be a kill switch built into these chips?" This is all to say, last night, huge win for Nvidia. Admin comes out and says, "Okay," or really Nvidia comes out and says, Admin has told us we are going to be allowed to export these chips to China for the first time with some checks on them, but almost in unfettered way. Markets are up, obviously Asian markets are up quite a bit. Nvidia is up quite a bit on this news. Huge economic win for Nvidia, huge question mark from the national security folks to say, look, there's some real risks with these chips going out.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Is there a horse trade going on? Is this part of a larger bargaining discussion where we, even if it's not explicitly Nvidia chips for rare earth minerals, something else might be happening behind the scenes and this just looks like a little bit of a give from the United States and we might be expecting something, or maybe we already got something. Talk to me about kind of the trade imbalance and just the overall deal making that might be happening.

• 33:41Zak Kukoff?

  It's a really good point. This is the backdrop of all of this is the trade war between the US and China. And as much as it is to you and to me and probably to most of the TBPN folks, the most important question is AI. It is one of many questions the admin has to work through. Rare earths, by the way, is a huge one. Obviously tariffs on a number of American products are a second one, right? So the big question is, look, in April, the reason we stopped and we actually put in, the admin put in, these export controls on Nvidia chips to begin with is in large part because of their ratcheting tension with the United States and China. And now, part of the reason they're reducing some of these is because the Chinese market is opening up. We're having great progress. Ironically, Japan has been difficult to negotiate with. China's been a good negotiator on trade.

• 34:23Zak Kukoff?

  And China really wants these chips to come in because even though they want to wean off Nvidia and go to Huawei as quickly as possible, the H20s are a bridge to get to Huawei's ascend architecture, right?

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is the meme, is the meme that we're going to get China dependent on US chips? Is it really just a meme? Like the idea that, the idea that That they would just play, basically Jensen makes a good point, which is like, we want them to be dependent on our infrastructure.

• 34:54Zak Kukoff?

  Totally.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  The Chinese government and industry will likely just say, okay, great. We're happy to depend on these for another few years while we ramp up our own.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Did they promise not to reverse engineer them this time?

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  That's the question.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  This time, not this time, you know, we've done it. We've done it thousands of times now, but this time will be different.

• 35:17Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. Lucy promises this time Charlie Brown can hit the football for once.

• 35:21John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  So I guess, you know, some of the pushback was somebody yesterday, when this news broke, Walter Bloomberg, you know, prominent journalist who always follows, you know, journalistic standards, says Nvidia CEO Huang expects Chinese military won't use AI chips, which is a good thing to expect, but probably unlikely. And then somebody quoted it and said, "The increasing willingness of Jensen Huang to boldly play both sides makes Nvidia one of the most serious threats to US national security and global technological dominance currently running."

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  So very dramatic, but, but, you know, valid point of view for this person to have. How do you think, have you been surprised at how Jensen can effectively go, you know, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily play both sides, but you know, the first thing he did when the chip, when the initial H20 ban happened is he flew over there and he started working on a new R and D center in Shanghai.

• 36:27Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  So, so he, he's definitely a capitalist, but, but it's been interesting to see. The other factor here is like, you're running the most valuable company in the world. So.

• 36:40Zak Kukoff?

  Correct.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  You do have quite a bit of leverage and he almost, in some ways, he's sort of like holding up the, you know, the entire global economy, right?

• 36:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like.

• 36:49Jordi Hays?

  A couple of bad quarters and everything.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  It does feel like the good ending that I'm hoping for is like, this is a stabilizing force for the world in general, and it's not, it's not escalatory. And even if it's like, okay, we're going to be competing more on chatbots and tech companies and stuff. It's like, this moves like the potential for Taiwan invasion down. And like, I care a lot more about that than did, did Huawei ship a lot of?

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  Does it?

• 37:23John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 37:24Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  But what's your take?

• 37:25Zak Kukoff?

  I don't know if I, I don't know if I agree with that. Well, I'll say a few things. You guys had the Apple in China offer on, right?

• 37:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Zak Kukoff?

  And so a big part of Apple in China was the whole shtick of Apple comes in, says, we're going to teach the Chinese how to do what we do domestically in America. And then they do it, they get better at it, and they no longer need Apple, and they have a domestic market that can produce in the same way.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Zak Kukoff?

  That's the risk of this export, right? Which is that there's no dependence. I think Jensen's a really talented operator. And by the way, the evidence for that is there's a big letter that went out critiquing his trip to Beijing. Only two senators signed it, right? It was Banks on the right and Warren on the left. And if you think that they didn't try to get other people in Congress to sign that letter too, you would be shocked at how few people were willing to go on the record on the anti-Nvidia side of this, right?

• 38:07John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 38:08Zak Kukoff?

  The other thing I would say to you is if you think these chips aren't going to get diverted to CCP use, right, to military use, to PLA use, I think that's a little bit of a naive perspective, right? It's impossible to prevent them.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Yes. But my question is, if Apple-

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's just not use them for the thing that's most critical to national security.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it would be great, it'd be great if, it'd be great if they could, you know, set up a local instance of XAI's new, uh-

• 38:34Zak Kukoff?

  Wayfubu.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  Crazy mode and really ramp that up in China, but-

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Okay. So if, uh, the slight difference that I'm, I'm kind of steel manning here is-

• 38:46Zak Kukoff?

  No, please.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  If Apple goes into China and teaches a bunch of CNC engineers how to mill aluminum to make iPhones and they explicitly demand that those manufacturers have other clients like Huawei for smartphones, like they are building up an internal capacity. If you're just selling in GPUs that are fully assembled, yes, you could tear them down and rebuild, but maybe there is enough lock-in in the CUDA ecosystem that you can't just swap out and just shift off.

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the issue, John, is here's another headline from the Journal just a couple of months ago, Nvidia to set up a research center in Shanghai. So they are setting up and investing in R and D locally. That's right. And all of that, whatever they know how to do there, whatever they learn how to do there, it will all disseminate broadly into the Chinese economy. And that's correct. And that's just a fact. And if somebody disagrees with that, I think it's...

• 39:54John Coogan?

  And I guess we are seeing like cracks in the CUDA ecosystem lock-in right now with AMD and ROCM and RockM. And so people and the TPU and Tranium and, you know, Amazon and, you know, I'm sure I'm sure Meta is thinking about custom silicon and on-device inference at Apple. So it's like, yeah, if you can go and train a frontier model on these H20s and then distill it down and run it on Huawei Ascends, like that does pull their capabilities forward.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  How, what is the mood in DC around the idea of like AI as being a really impactful military technology right now? Because...

• 40:41John Coogan?

  For most people, it's knowledge retrieval with ChatGPT and code gen with Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, Devon. And beyond that, it's like, okay, my B2B SaaS company is a little bit more efficient and I have some AI agent stuff in there. But like, people aren't really saying like, you know, oh, it's transforming everything yet. They're not showing those examples, even though that's kind of the narrative. Concretely, besides like, you know, prompt, defeat America, you know, like, get me from where we are here to there, and walk me through the mood in Washington around AI as a military technology specifically.

• 41:21Zak Kukoff?

  Think people on the military side are probably some of the earliest to realize the value of AI for a couple of reasons. One, there are already real battlefields today. There are theaters of war where automated decisions are being made that are life and death decisions. And putting aside perspective of any of these wars, you know, whether you're looking at Russia, Ukraine, or whether you're looking at Israel in the Middle East, there are already real instances today of AI deployed on frontier live to operate things like drones, to operate things like targeting infrastructure. Like, that's, that's happening today. It's not happening in America, but that is happening today. And the military is very good at keeping abreast of what our compatriots are doing overseas. That's the first thing. Second

• 42:03Zak Kukoff?

  thing I would say to you is the big unlock for a lot of this is the decreasing influence of humans in warfare, right? Like, in 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you were an Air Force pilot, that meant you were actually sitting in a plane doing Top Gun shit. Today, if you're an Air Force pilot, pilot means you're in Arizona in a cooled warehouse piloting a drone that's like remotely dropping bombs on things. That unlock, there's no reason that should just be the case. We take them out of the cockpit, put them into the warehouse. The next step on that is why have the human piloting at all, right? Why not have the autonomous pilot of the drone making those decisions effectively and actually fighting the frontier of war for us? So there's no risk at all domestically to our people going into war.

• 42:45Zak Kukoff?

  So there's a lot of enthusiasm, maybe enthusiasm is not the right word. There's a lot of awareness of the value. AI in warfare. I think the double edged sword of that is if you're looking at, if you're concerned about an invasion of Taiwan, it's far more concerning thinking about a China, the PLA army is not an up to date army in many respects. It's far more concerning thinking about a PLA army that has access to supercomputer clusters built by H20s or other kinds of American ships, I mean H20, that is able to more effectively fight in Taiwan, rather than a PLA army still fighting conventional warfare where it's never been able to excel.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess my, my pushback or like question is just around, um, like, I, I hear you that AI is being used on the battlefield. When I think of AI on the battlefield, I think basic image recognition, look at a satellite image, pick out the missile silos, or if you're a drone, like, it's a very, very small neural network. I'm not, I, I haven't heard a lot of concrete examples of like, yeah, we're running a large transformer based AI system to make wartime decisions, but at the same time, like, that feels like a year away.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but who, who's gonna, you know, what, what government is that, is that good PR for any military or government in the world? Hey, by the way, we're big, we're building the biggest super cluster ever and it's for killing. It's a killing machine.

• 44:06Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  Like, who, who wants to go out and say that?

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess you're right.

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  One, one question I have is, uh, is, uh, the, is part of why Nvidia has been so effective on lobbying? You mentioned not being, only being able to get, uh, if you can only get Elizabeth Warren to sign your doc, you're in a, against, uh, you're in a rough spot. Uh, but I saw, so in 2023, they spent about half a million on total on lobbying. 2024, they spent.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  This is Nvidia?

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they spent 640,000, but then in Q1 of this year, they spent nearly a million. So they clearly ramped it up. But how much do you think they benefit from just being the largest company in the world and everybody being an Nvidia bag holder somewhere or another, right?

• 44:51Zak Kukoff?

  I mean, success, I guess, success. You know, if you're the largest company in the world, people want to be a part of that. Also, look, the number of dollars you spend is not always the proxy for lobbying, right? Like, the hard thing to understand is Jensen is spending more time than probably any other of his peer CEOs.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, his travel budget is probably bigger than his lobbying budget, right?

• 45:12Zak Kukoff?

  That's exactly correct, because why would you need to have thirty registered lobbyists running around when your CEO has a personal relationship? This is the new thing, this is the sort of unique aspect of this admin relative to other admins, which is there is a retail politics relationship based components of a lot of this work that did not exist before. And if you're Jensen and you can have the great relationship with POTUS yourself, you don't need thirty lobbyists running around, you can fly to Mar-a-Lago.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  He's in founder mode, and let's not forget Donald Trump, Vacheron-Histoire's owner, watch guy.

• 45:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Jensen recently spotted with a one million dollar Richard Mille, so.

• 45:51Zak Kukoff?

  God, I've never felt more poor in my life.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  If you, if you go to shake a hand in Washington and you got a bare wrist, you might be getting booted, but if you pull up in a hitter, you're going to the moon.

• 46:01Zak Kukoff?

  What are you guys, what are you boys rocking today?

• 46:03John Coogan?

  I actually forgot to put on my watch.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  Bare, bare wrist today.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  But, but I typically, I typically wear Vacheron Constantin Patrimony.

• 46:13Zak Kukoff?

  Wow, very nice.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  And Jordy wears the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, anything else we should be looking out for this week?

• 46:22Zak Kukoff?

  Only thing I would say to you, look, just, John, to your point on who's using actually sophisticated AI, it's not going to be today, at least what's declassified today is not going to be, hey, we blew up this thing. It's a lot of cyber warfare, right? Like, and as more and more things are about, hey, I want to disrupt the infrastructure of my opponents, their water infrastructure, their electrical infrastructure, their banking and financial infrastructure, that's where LLMs are increasingly being used. What you should look for is, look, do the chips get exported? Does this actually happen? Or does it get flipped again, right? What are the gunks in the works, the requirements on licensure that enter? And then also, what happens on Ship Security Act? Does it make it through? Does it actually get through House? Great momentum, Senate, TBD, truly to say.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Okay, that's a great take, because I feel like, right now, today, I would be more worried about a

• 47:11John Coogan?

  CCP controlled, large language model transformer based, large model, just spamming the United States internet and social networks with a bunch of AI slop that's slightly anti-capitalist. Then

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  Which is happening.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Then Xi Jinping querying, please invade Taiwan. I don't think that the, I don't think that the

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  Xi Jinping is in, is in

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Don't make any mistakes.

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  He goes, please invade Taiwan. Don't make any mistakes.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Don't lose any troops.

• 47:42Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, make it better.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  Make it better. But yeah, I, I, I think that that's maybe even, even, it's more of a clear and present danger today.

• 47:51Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. That's right. And by the way, that's TikTok. That's TikTok today. If you're opening up TikTok, it's not AI, but it's the soft power component of China's influence over America.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Yes. And being able to, and being able to train that model, which is large and is probably the next version does require a lot of Nvidia chips, was probably trained on a lot of Nvidia trips, doesn't have the same quantifiable, you know, oh, this many parameters, this many gigawatts, this, this many tokens went in. But if it gets 1% better and you have control over it, it is, it is a risk and it should, and it should be considered.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  Last question, any, any chatter on the ground in DC about the windsurf Google deal? Or are they going to find out next week on LinkedIn?

• 48:36Zak Kukoff?

  So funny. I had a conversation over the weekend with somebody who's part of this like Neo Brandeisian movement, which is to say a very sort of Lena Khan orientation. And I asked her, I said, what are people waking up to this? Like what's going on? Why is nobody talking about it? And her only answer to me was stay tuned. So my only answer to you is stay tuned.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm. Ominous.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Uh, last question on the TikTok sale. Polly market has TikTok sale announced in 2025 at a 35% chance right now. And TikTok banned in 2025. I guess it was already banned, but it's just like been

• 49:11Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, enforcing it.

• 49:12John Coogan?

  But, but have you been hearing anything on, or do you have any, any, any interesting takes or insight about what might happen to TikTok since we just landed on this topic? randomly. I don't know.

• 49:21Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  You didn't prep this.

• 49:22Zak Kukoff?

  I mean, there's no political demand for it. There's no constituency who's making the argument of because if you were pro TikTok ban, you got what you wanted in theory, not enforceable, but you got what you wanted in theory and you've now taken the win and you've gone home. And if you're anti TikTok ban.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  What about, what about my American flag toting Mag7 CEO Mark Zuckerberg? Is he not a constituent that wants TikTok banned?

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  I think it's too, if he comes out to publicly pushing for that, it's like an antitrust nightmare.

• 49:50Zak Kukoff?

  That's exactly right.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, like the, the whole TikTok story proves that you potentially can build a new social app if you're willing to spend, or at least you could in the rise of vertical video, you could in that moment create a meta competitor. If you're willing to spend $20 billion, you know, incinerate, you know, incinerate $20 billion or whatever they did to, to just spend money to acquire all the users and build your own.

• 50:14Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah. That's exactly right. And there is nobody on the ground in DC who's using their limited lobbying dollars for the TikTok ban. What Zuck wants is better data construction, better data center construction, right? Fix the energy policy in this country. And it's, by the way, it's a, it's a zero, negative sum system. You can only work on so many things during every congressional term, every admin term.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  Wait, negative sum, not zero sum?

• 50:37Zak Kukoff?

  It's even worse. It's even worse than zero sum. It's, everybody's got to lose. It's even worse. Zero sum system. That's right.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Whoever loses the least wins.

• 50:44Zak Kukoff?

  That is unfortunately true in politics.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Welcome to the swamp. Uh, Zuck says, uh, he's building a one gigawatt cluster, aiming for a five gigawatt cluster.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love, this should count as a three-peat because you've told me three, three times now. Last, uh, last question.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Last question. This is fun.

• 51:01Zak Kukoff?

  I appreciate it. I'll, I'll take the three-peat.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Um, uh, uh, he said, he said five gigawatt cluster, uh, in a few years, in several years. That feels further out than most of the AI hyper accelerationists. Uh, is that an energy policy thing? What are his clear asks? Like what, what, what, what would, what would he want to change in Washington around energy policy?

• 51:21Zak Kukoff?

  This is a huge energy policy problem. Energy policy is annoying because it happens both at the federal level, but also at the state level and even at the local level. You get things like zoning. If you guys read the abundance book, you get things like zoning that impact you at the very local level. And the critique on the left right now for a lot of these questions, it's a hard one for these folks to work on is, gosh, look at all the environmental problems of building the data centers near communities and so on and so forth. And I would expect that in an Ocasio-Cortez administration or a Buttigieg administration to be a big problem in, you know, four years. What Zuck wants today is make it easier for me to build, right? Reduce regulation at the state and local level for me to actually construct data centers. Let me bring new nuclear reactors online,

• 52:01Zak Kukoff?

  right? Bring new sources of energy online faster in this country and set one federal standard to regulate many of the rules such that you don't have different states and different localities who all have patchwork systems. Because if you need multiple people to coordinate all at once, that's where you get these long timelines and complexity.

• 52:19Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be the Delta smelt versus super intelligence. That is really the battle to watch.

• 52:25John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  Great having you on, Zach.

• 52:28Zak Kukoff?

  Thanks, my boy.

• 52:29Jordi Hays?

  Hope to have you on again very soon.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Zach. Have a great day.

• 52:32Zak Kukoff?

  Take care.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking to pick up a hitter and you're heading to Washington, go to getbezel.com.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  Do not visit the swamp with a bare wrist.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Is available to source you any watch on the planet. You can go to your Bezel Concierge and say, I'm heading to Washington DC. I'm talking to the big dog, talking to the big man and going to Mar-a-Lago and I need a hitter and they will hook you up. Go to getbezel.com.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  And don't, if you get a meeting with Jensen, show respect in where an RM.

• 53:00John Coogan?

  Where an RM. I want to talk about the history of Richard Mill. It's fascinating. There's a, I found a good thread. I also did a ChatGPT deep research report. I found an interesting conspiracy theory.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  By the way, little note in there. I forget what the line was, but we said, it's the cold emails, the warm intros, the deep research.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  The deep research, yeah.

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  And the deep research for the show in some instances.

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Is literally deep research. So the watch business here says, Richard Mill has no history, no tradition and looks like a Happy Meal toy. So how did it become a $1.7 billion brand in 20 years selling watches that cost more than a Ferrari? Here's the wild story. And so.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Very, very interesting story. Most, the thing that popped out to me was that there is a

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  So that does not look like a Happy Meal toy to me.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  I think it looks fantastic. So it's the global juggernaut of ultra luxurious watchmaking. They, they call it the billionaire's handshake in elite circles. And so he was born in the south of France in 1951. Richard Mill is the name of the, both the founder and the company. He became obsessed with precision machinery and fast cars at an early age.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  As one does.

• 54:17John Coogan?

  As a teenager, he was such a motorsport enthusiast that he would take the train to Monaco for Grand Prix weekends, even sleeping trackside to snag a prime view of racing legends like Jackie Stewart.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  That's probably not possible anymore. If you try to sleep.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, you'll immediately get, they're like, you can't be homeless in Monaco. Are you crazy?

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  Where's your, where's your $50,000 wristband?

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  That you.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, back in the 50s, I mean, racing and even F1 was a total like, it was just like a bunch of dudes being guys, basically. It was not, it was not, it was not like heavily sponsored, heavily organized. Like, I don't even know if the FIA existed at the time. Anyway, so Jackie Stewart called the Nürburgring the green hell because it was so demanding and it stands to this day. It's a great quote. And so in 1967, he is 16 years old and he is, Richard Mill is there and he witnesses this famous crash. Ferrari driver Lorenzo Bandini's car burst into flames right in front of him and the incident left a vivid impression of the extremes of engineering and danger in racing. So he

• 55:27John Coogan?

  winds up joining the, in 1974, he joins a small watchmaker, Finhoor, and then in the 90s, he'd become the head of watchmaking at the Parisian jeweler, Ma Bouson, where he successfully launched a watch line for the firm. And so he had extensive experience handling luxury jewelry and fine chronographs, but he was dissatisfied. In Mill's own words, working with others meant he was often held back from creating timepieces that could break boundaries. He felt the watch world was too conservative, too boring, and too self-centered, as he later put it. And he longed to push design and engineering far beyond the status quo. By the late 1990s, with decades of industry know-how under his belt, he was nearing 50

• 56:11John Coogan?

  and facing a now or never moment. He decided to create his own watch brand as a sort of 50th birthday present to himself, one that would realize his wildest ideas without compromise. So in 1999, he co-founds his company. He has a trusted friend. They establish this new firm and Audemars Piguet, they partner with the R&D firm, the R&D arm of AP, which is Renaud et Papi, A-R-R&P. And they get this legendary engineer, Giulio Papi and Fabrice de Chanel, to help turn sketches into reality. So AP got a small stake in the venture, but otherwise to this day-

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  They own about 10%.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, they own about 10%. So they own like pretty much everything. So the whole idea was to apply the cutting-edge materials from Formula One aerospace and other advanced fields to high-horror.

• 57:03Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, this is the opposite of an outsider's story. This is an extreme insider leveraging every possible advantage that he has, but then winning on a massive scale and effectively doing the impossible.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Jordi Hays?

  Because for most people, for most people today, if you said, "I want to start a luxury watch brand," you could raise a billion dollars and it would be very difficult to do it. And that's why Rolex and Pottec and RM and these brands actually end up being very valuable is the amount of money that you would need to incinerate to try to recreate a brand with legacy like that, a brand that could be 200 years old. The other thing is time, right? So you can create a luxury brand, but it's not that appealing as an investor or founder if it's going to take you 100 years because you won't be around to see, to see your, you know, really achieve your goal.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  I was texting with Sean Frank from The Ridge Wallet, CEO of Ridge Wallet today this morning, and- And I was kind of explaining to him in this piece that Richard Mill is considered like an overnight success, like the startup, like the massive quick winner in watches. And he's like, only in, only in fine watchmaking is grinding for 20 years to become successful, like an overnight success, because every other firm is hundreds of years old.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  Basically. And so they, they, they struggled a ton to actually build the first watch because they wanted to build a three dimensional object showcasing this extreme technology. And they wanted to create a racing machine on the wrist.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  And they did.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  And they did. And so there were blood and tears in the startup phase, innovations that took a long time to become reliable, resulting in years delay for the launch of the first model. It took them two years from the company's founding to perfect their inaugural watch.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  Which is not even actually that much time.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  It's a long time. If you think about, I raised money and, and the seed investor is like, so when are you guys launching? You got 12 to 18 months of runway. And you're like, it's, it's gonna be two years.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think true R and D, true product development can take, easily take,

• 59:07John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  even if you're moving really, really quickly.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  OpenAI, Tigma, plenty of other companies.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Tigma was like four years to build a piece of software.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  Plenty, plenty of great companies took a long time to build like, and actually deploy the thing. But it's certainly a narrative violation around like the, like, okay, I got into Y C, I'm launching my company in three months, launch early, get feedback, you know, it's just like.

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  Rora, Rora was a similar story.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it probably was 18 months. And it took, you know, an incredible amount of back and forth with the design firm that we work with and Charlie, who really led the product development. And yeah, and then you have a certification process. And, and again, I think good things take time. So 18 months doesn't, doesn't really sound crazy at all.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  24, bro.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  24.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Two years. But he was prepared for this. He'd plunged into the project knowing it would be exhilarating, exciting, challenging, fun, and a lot of hard work. Finally, in 2001, the Richard Mill brand unveiled its first creation, the RM 001 Turbion. And immediately sent shock, sent shockwaves through the conservative Swiss watch industry. Only 17 examples were made. But that was enough to make history. It wasn't just the bold tonneau shaped case. I was looking for the word of the shape. It's the tonneau shaped and the skeletonized dial exposing futuristic guts that grabbed attention. It was the audacity of the whole package. This high complication had a manual turbine on which is the little spinning thing that

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  keeps the time more accurate when your wrist is moving around. It packed with technical innovations, a base plate of reinforced carbon fiber, a torque indicator and a dynamometer to monitor the movement's performance. Dynamometer. It sounds like some American dynamism. I love it.

• 1:00:56Jordi Hays?

  How American dynamism pill are you?

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Extremely. I'm seeing it everywhere. Dynamometer. Yeah. If you don't have a dynamometer on your wrist and you call yourself an American dynamism investor, get out of here.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  I just did the math. They've averaged making 2,500 watches a year since their founding.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:13Jordi Hays?

  So, low volume, but extremely high margin.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  Of all time. Yeah, crazy. And also, the engineering stuff really comes through. Most watches have 48 hour power reserve. RM went with 72 power reserve and there are some crazy, crazy stories here. So, this is where the conspiracy theory comes in. So, the price tag.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  John, I gotta tell you, one of our dear friends, who I will not name, who is a size lord and capital allocator, in real time, just sent me a picture of his RM on his wrist while a helicopter is taking off in the background.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, what a beautiful, beautiful piece.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  It's a fantastic piece. Okay, so, anyway. So, RM launched and it was $135,000 for the first watch this guy will ever launch this in 2001. $135,000. This is twice as expensive as the next most expensive turbine. So, just take the most... Turbine watches are already really expensive. It's incredibly complicated. Take the most expensive one and just double it. And so, there is a... So, people are protect fans. They're shocked. They're bluntly asked Richard Mill why he thought anyone would pay such a sum for his newcomer watch. And Richard Mill said, "Very easy, because we are not competing with Patek Philippe, nor anyone else." In other words, he's playing in the league of his own.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  So that that line doesn't typically work on a pitch call.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  At least in the software business.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  We're not competing with cursor.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  You're charging, you're building this database company, you're charging twice as much as a full enterprise snowflake deployment and you're going to win because you say you're not competing with them?

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And so orders came in as soon as the first watches went out the door. But there is this interesting conspiracy theory, which is that there was a mistake. And the reason that they are so expensive is because the, someone.

• 1:03:23Jordi Hays?

  He was doing a print ad.

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  Yes. And so, okay, so a rumor has floated around that Richard Mills' first advertisement, which was in the Financial Times, baby, you know it, you love it, in the pink sheets.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  In the, so he buys an advertisement in the Financial Times and the advertising department misprints the price.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  They added a zero.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  They added a zero. He wanted to sell the RM001 for $13,500. They printed in the ad $135,000, 10 times the price. And what's interesting is that, so the ad goes out, according to legend, the RM team is like, you guys botched it. Like, who's going to buy this? It's only a $13,000 watch. You're trying to sell it for 135. This is crazy. But then they start getting calls, I gotta have it. I gotta have it. $135. I have $135,000 burning a hole in my pocket right now and I would love this watch. I want it on my wrist. And so Mill received so many inquiries at that price, he decided to stick with the higher number.

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  And so this is why it's a conspiracy theory is because Richard Mill as a brand denies that this ever happened.

• 1:04:37Jordi Hays?

  It would be obviously terrible.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Terrible.

• 1:04:40Jordi Hays?

  If it came out that, yeah, they wanted to make a $13,000 watch and then they accidentally. Charge 135 and then they look around, the orders are coming in.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Wait, we just, you know, 1,000 X are, you know.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but this is a classic example of what's called a Veblen good. So with, in economics typically the, as price increases, so, uh, demand decreases if supply is constrained. So, um, if you raise the price, people buy less. With a Veblen good, a higher price actually increases demand. Um, and it's, it's reserved for perfect examples of this, like luxury goods where it is a status symbol. And now, when you see, uh, the billionaire's handshake going on, you know, that's a hundred thousand dollar watch at least, potentially much more.

• 1:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Pricing is a intimately tied with, uh, the, the way in which people feel about a product, right?

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, you know, for, for a good example of this is the, uh, GT4 RS.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  It's incredible to drive, but people want it maybe like, I know very few people that can honestly say if, if price was, was no.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, wasn't part of the equation, would you want a GT3 RS or a GT4 RS? And there's like an aesthetic component as well, but, but even though many people, if they just drive both cars, find that the mid-engine version is, is, is fantastic and enjoyable, they'll still.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  Well, the GT3 for the, for the status, uh, an even stronger example in the car world is probably like the Lamborghini Raventone or the Lamborghini Veneno. Are you familiar with these?

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:06:25John Coogan?

  So these are extremely limited Lamborghini releases and they're built on the existing platforms. So they take a Huracan, uh, and then they restyle it and it looks way more extreme, way more, and they tune it and they improve it as much as they can. But these limited Lamborghinis sell for millions of dollars and really like you're buying it because it's signaling that you have that much money. Uh, I mean, and to some extent a Lamborghini is a, is a Veblen good to begin with, but this is like the most extreme. And of course a Veblen good is not purely binary. You can be more Veblen than the other and more, more of the, more of the decision-making can be driven by the higher price than, than others.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, uh, Richard Mill's conviction proved infectious despite industry skepticism, the RM.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  001 found buyers almost immediately. Orders came in and a GQ later observed Richard Mill's very existence knocked some of the stuffiness out of luxury watchmaking by showing that expensive watches don't have to be staid or classical. And so

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've always been controversial, but for what for what RM does, they do it extremely well.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:07:39Jordi Hays?

  It is, they they own their category. They truly don't have competition.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Any other watch that I've seen that that tries to emulate what they do, it does look like a cheap knockoff.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, it is true. You know, they basically, anytime you have a situation where where insiders come into an industry and have every possible advantage, but then absolutely hit like such a grand slam. You've just got to appreciate greatness.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  Totally. And I think that what matters with the story of the actual watches, like the RMs, is that it's not just a knockoff Nautilus with twice the price. It's differentiated on price, yes, but it's also differentiated on shape. There's no other major watch that looks exactly the Tonau shape, in my opinion. The putting skeletonized so forward doesn't exist anywhere. So that's like the fourth, the third or fourth point. And then the last point that's interesting is that every luxury watch brand, they're not telling you this is a rugged watch. And Richard Mill was all about ruggedness. So there's an interesting point in here. He says, uh, one of his breakthrough

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  strategies in establishing credibility was to demonstrate the ruggedness of his high tech creations in a way that bordered on outrageous outrageousness. Um, at watch fairs and presentations, he would literally take a prototype and throw it on the ground to prove it wouldn't break. This stunt wasn't just for shock value. It was making a point that a Richard Mill wasn't a delicate museum piece, but a luxury watch that could withstand anything. The company engineered every component for durability. Cases were curved for strength and comfort. Movements were torture tested with massive G-forces. Stocks, as one company monograph described, prototypes were subjected to simply brutal trials, including a device nicknamed "The Goat's Foot", a heavy pendulum hammer that smacks the watch from all angles.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  If a part failed, Mills team iterated until it survived. The result was that these extravagant watches could truly be worn during intense activities.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, this is why people see somebody playing tennis in an RM, and they're like, "Oh, I can't believe they would, they would, they would be, you know, playing, you know, doing some sport with a watch like this." And it's like, "No, it actually was designed to do this, and it does it very well."

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  Yes. The tennis thing is a very interesting example. The first athletic ambassador was F1 driver Philippe Massa, who joined the Richard Mill family in 2004.

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  Related to Massa?

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, the last name has two S's.

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  He flipped it. It was so powerful, he flipped it.

• 1:10:21John Coogan?

  And so, in practice sessions and races, he wore a prototype RM chronograph to see how it held up under high G-forces and vibration. So even if it's not going to destroy the watch, it still might throw off the time. And actually having a watch that could hold up, maybe it's not, maybe it's not, you know, remarkably important for a watch, but it's a cool, cool stat. It's novel. It makes it special. It makes it different than everything else. But this partnership paid off dramatically. During a violent crash at the 2004 Hungarian Grand Prix, Matt Moss's car was wrecked, but both the driver and his Richard Mill RM006 Turbion walked away unscathed. The watch's carbon nanofiber movement proving its toughness in extreme conditions. And then, the other, the other tennis example that I wanted to get to was,

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  in 2010, after years of experimentation, the brand introduced one of its most famous collaborations, the RM027 Turbion with tennis icon Rafael Nadal. This watch became legendary for its absurdly low weight, under 20 grams with the strap. Achieved through lithium alloy movement and skeletonized design. Nadal, a fierce baseline player, put it through its paces in Grand Slam matches. In fact, Nadal reportedly broke five different prototypes of the RM027. That's probably like $2 million worth of sales.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  It's not like the prototypes actually cost the retail price, but yeah.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Remember, these things have 99% margin apparently, if the rumors to be believed. But, and so this allowed them to test it and the engineers perfected it to withstand his powerful swings. The finalized watch accompanied Nadal to victory at the 2010 US Open. Visibly strapped to his wrist as he hoisted the trophy. The sight was astonishing. A $525,000 tourbillon on a sweat soaked wristband, surviving every smash, every serve. It sent a clear message that wearing a Richard Mill was compatible with even the most intense athletic pursuits. A perfect melding of luxury and performance.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Another perfect example, our friend who sent us this video is actively heli skiing.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Really putting it through its paces. Is he actually?

• 1:12:32Jordi Hays?

  Not at this very moment in time, but a recent video.

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  That's hilarious, okay. And then, of course, once Richard Mill became kind of dominant in sports, they wound up, you know, breaking out slowly. So in 2011, this is over a decade after, into the buildup of the business, they partnered with Hollywood actress Michelle Yeoh and co-designed the RM051 Tourbillon that featured a diamond set phoenix motif. They did a collab with Natalie Portman on the RM1901 with a dramatic spider design. And they're just doing all these, like, anything they can do to create something that's extremely unique, identified with like equestrian polo players, yachtsmen, extreme skiers. So just really focused on this brand and willing to do anything, even if it means

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  building something from scratch, like a PC unique. Uncompromising functionality under real world stress, which is just, it's a promise that no other brand is even trying to make.

• 1:13:32Jordi Hays?

  They own their category.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  They they found a new category and then they dominated.

• 1:13:37Jordi Hays?

  It's absolutely beautiful. I'm pissed there's no Harvard case study Harvard Business School case study on the business yet.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  There are some GQ articles, there are some Hodinki interviews.

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  I need a I need a proper SWAT analysis.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Guess we should go to Grok for heavy and say, write a Harvard Business School case study on Richard Mel.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Please include a SWAT analysis.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Be good.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Don't make any mistakes.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  That's kind of what I did with the research. I basically asked for that, but.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  No, it's such such an incredible story because it's effectively it was incredible execution all the way from founding until today.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:18Jordi Hays?

  But still doing something that most people would have said was completely impossible.

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, no discounts ever. 5,000 watches per year, only sold in elite boutiques Dubai, Monaco, Beverly Hills, partners with athletes in rich sports, F1 tennis golf.

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  To be clear.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  There's a certain podcaster that we really want to get and want him to start, you know, because he gets really into his shows. So having having, you know, an RM on the wrist.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  Makes sense because of the weight.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  And the performance, yeah.

• 1:14:47John Coogan?

  The performance, yeah.

• 1:14:48Jordi Hays?

  He's putting up five, six, seven hours in the studio.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  But it gets it gets hate. They call it a Happy Meal toy. They call it the rich man's Invicta. They say it looks like plastic. They say it has a lack of heritage. It's only 24 years old, but it doesn't matter. RM is here to stay. It's redefining luxury in real time. Anyway, fun story. If you're planning to build a new watch brand, get on Linear, linear.app. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Start building at linear.app.

• 1:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Linear really is the Richard Mel of of product management, you know, platforms and tooling.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  People have been saying it.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  We've been saying it since about 10 seconds ago.

• 1:15:32John Coogan?

  And when you go to sell a watch online. Got to use Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance at numeralhq.com. Anyway, David Protein, crazy stuff happening there. I have

• 1:15:46Jordi Hays?

  I still don't know what's going on.

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  I don't really know what's, I have some people texting me with their theses. I want to hear yours, but let me kick it off with some basic background. So David Protein announced yesterday, "Our commitment to protein has led us to a strange place. Boiled cod, we're selling it now." And a week ago, it seems like Peter Rahal, the CEO, friend of the show, was teasing this by saying, "What should we make next? We will make what wins?" And he said, "Cookies and cream, salted calmer, caramel, key lime pie, frozen cod." And cod lost by a huge margin, but they made that. And Ryan Harmon says, "Cod lime pie." So maybe he's in on this stunt. I'm sniffing a stunt here. We'll figure it out. We'll get to the bottom of this.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  So Andy Rosenberg says, "David teased the boiled cod product on its website months ago because 75% of the calories from David come from protein. And the only thing that's higher is boiled cod, which has 85% of its calories coming from protein. The Built Bar is at 52%, the Quest Bar is at 47%, and the Bearbells, which is delicious, but it's more like a candy bar, is something like 40%."

• 1:16:57Jordi Hays?

  That's your dirty little secret.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, if I'm picking between David and Bearbells, it's like, you know, how hard am I going today?

• 1:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's be real, you've been known to have three in a day. So you might do two Davids and then a Bearbell as a little treat.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Also the Bearbells, there's some that like, they get you down the funnel of like, this one's like actually a protein bar. And then you get like, well, like I tried them all and like the one that's just like pure caramel tastes the best. So I'll stick with that. And then you read the back of the label for the Bearbells caramel one. And you're like, wait, this is actually just a candy bar. But it's delicious and it does have some protein and they have a great product. I think Bearbells is fantastic. But there's a time and a place for everything. Sometimes you gotta eat boiled cod, apparently. But there's a big question. So they put up an out of home ad campaign. Hopefully they did that on adquick.com. Out of Home Advertising Made Easy and Measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I don't know if

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  they went with Adquick. They should have. But the ad says boiled cod. It has a picture of the cod and it appears to be in New York with a gray. Is that a Boxer driving by?

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  So I think they're actually selling cod.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  You can just buy it.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  You can just buy it.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  Okay, so first off, my reaction. This sounds gross. I don't like this. I don't care how high protein it is. I'm not into it. So what's going on? They bought a billboard, hopefully Mad Quick, and it feels like maybe a stunt of some sort, but they are such a young company, this might actually confuse people because people are still just learning about David. But I was talking to a friend of the show and he was saying to me that, you know, at a certain point, a little inside scoop on boiled cod, view from perspective of an earned media, earned discussion, as opposed to paid media slash ads, a segment of TBPN, like this one, proves that. If people are talking about a company, that's usually

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  a win, especially when the convo is about cod having the highest protein to calorie ratio of any food. David Barr's are second only to boiled cod. Can't beat them, join them. And so that's an interesting take, is that, hey, all earned media is good media, but if this gets out of control and all of a sudden people think of David Barr's as cod flavored, and when they go to grab the next David Barr, they're like, that could be a risk, but it seems like it's going well.

• 1:19:21Jordi Hays?

  If I order a pack of these, will you?

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  I will eat one on the show. I will test it for sure.

• 1:19:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we'll work on it. And we're holding you to that.

• 1:19:29John Coogan?

  And then the other question is like, it seems like they're in a battle with some other brands over their supplier. David Barr, it seems like they acquired their supplier. The key ingredient supplier makes EPG or esterified propoxylated glycol, a fat alternative developed by Epigee and made from modified plant-based oil. It's a controversial ingredient choice because it's less natural than raw meat like boiled cod. Boiled cod seems like the other end of the barbell. But I need to know more and I'm curious to know how this played out, how this is working, and are they seeing results from this campaign because it's exciting stuff. It's cool.

• 1:20:10John Coogan?

  Anyway, if they do wind up buying that EPG supplier and they need to get some new clients, they got to get on.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they already did.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  Okay, well, then they got to get on Adio, custom relationship magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level and gets started for free. In other news.

• 1:20:30Jordi Hays?

  What else we got?

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  We got a bunch of stuff. We got Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  You were on a.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive makeups, number one ranking on G2, fin.ai. High Yield Harry says this is going to end in tears. He's quote tweeting Jim Cramer, a new acronym for the meme stocks that just won't quit.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  It's time to park.

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  Park your money.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Palantir, AppLovin, Robinhood, and Coinbase, the four wolves of this bull market.

• 1:20:57John Coogan?

  They are the four wolves of this bull market.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  How's AppLovin doing? I haven't, you haven't seen people posting charts, but.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  Well, there was all that conspiracy theory that like they weren't making any money, but we talked to Sean Frank and he was like, I'm using AppLovin. It's like, it's maybe not the best, but it's pretty good and I'm actually paying them. So it is real.

• 1:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Year to date, they're flat, but they're still a $118 billion business.

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Well, that's pretty good. Interesting. In other.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, their 2024 revenue was 4.7 billion. We'll see what they put up this year. We had, there was an interesting post here. So this founder that has been beefing with.

• 1:21:38John Coogan?

  Yes, Sean McGuire.

• 1:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Sean McGuire, creating a bunch of websites about him emailing his boss, emailing his LPs, things like that, has been going around claiming that he's a portfolio, a Sequoia portfolio founder, when in reality he got a 10K scout check and then his company shut down. So kind of throwing stones from a bit of a glass house there. But yeah, if you get a scout check from a venture scout from a fund that does not qualify as getting an investment from that company.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. This is a violation of the social contract in Silicon Valley. And Sean clearly looked this up and was like, wait, did we invest in this guy a long time ago and dug through it?

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the whole thing with the whole thing with Sequoia is like, they, at this point, they have a lot of companies in the portfolio, but I think if you, if you actually look at the stats, it's like, like 99% of companies that they've done are like still operating. And so he would know, he would know if they had done the deal.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  So Sean really roast him. How much did Sequoia invest in your company? What partner led the investment? And what happened to your company? Can you please enlighten me? The answer is Sequoia invested zero. Sequoia Scout invested 10K and the company failed. Rough. Well, don't get in the mud pit if you don't want to get muddy.

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  If you hate mud wrestling.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  If you go in the mud pit of X.com with Sean McGuire, you're going to get muddy. He's gonna, he's gonna roast you.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Brian Singerman has a new fund.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  PT is a big backer. The TechCrunch is reporting, so.

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  Interesting strategy. Did you read this?

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was going to get into it. So former Founders Fund GP Brian Singerman and co-founder and managing partner of Quiet Capital, Lee Linden are seeking over 500 million for a new fund called GPX. Love the name. Three people familiar with their strategy told TechCrunch, so it sounds like TechCrunch is scooping them, which I'm sure they're not happy with. But it makes sense that these kinds of things get out. So GPX uses a two-pronged strategy. The firm will invest approximately 20% of the capital into funds managed by emerging VCs who are targeting pre-seed and seed-stage startups, and the remaining capital will go towards partnering with emerging managers, the same emerging managers you would imagine on leading later-stage investments, most likely at Series B of their breakout companies.

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  So oftentimes, let's say a pre-seed focus or early-stage fund does a pre-seed round for a company, they end up growing really quickly. GPX can come in and basically provide the capital in order to help that manager actually lead later rounds versus that manager going, having to raise an SPV from 50 people.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Which is what constantly happens. And it's kind of like, it's awkward.

• 1:24:32Jordi Hays?

  It's harder to win, it's harder to actually win the deal because it can take a lot of time. The capital's not actually fully ready to deploy.

• 1:24:39John Coogan?

  I've been in that situation where the early stage seed fund, seed fund is like, you know, yeah, would love to lead this for next round. Just give me six months to like, you know, actually close all the money. I'm going to go around and then you have this weird like, I gotta talk to this person, then I gotta talk to you, and then I gotta talk to this person, I gotta talk to you, and I gotta talk to this person, and it's just so much back and forth. So if you have this fund of funds backer who just lets you stretch one round further, really, really cool concept, and I think it could work out really well. Um, yeah.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Brian Segman, great, uh, great investor, great person. I always had a fun chat with him when I was at Founders Fund, so excited to see him, uh, uh, launch this fund and kind of, um, get it going with a new strategy because it seems really cool. Uh, anyway, we should talk about Eight Sleep. We launched a

• 1:25:28Jordi Hays?

  New ad today. Let's play it. Let's play it.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  And I want to play our, uh, our advertisement for Eight Sleep.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  This is the big challenge for our production team is just playing videos on the show. They can do everything else.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  It's pretty complicated.

• 1:25:39Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, it, it's not easy. It's no joke.

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  We got this. So let's play the ad and then we will tell you more about Eight Sleep.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  People see the three hour streams, the hundreds of guests, the thousands of clips.

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  For us, it's the work that happens off mic.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  The cold emails, the warm intros, the deep research.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Sleep is the edge.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Whether it's tracking down a viral poster

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Or interviewing a Fortune 500 CEO.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  Staying sharp is non-negotiable.

• 1:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Podcaster sleep on Eight Sleep.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  It's so funny that we did the white suits that day because it was just complete chance that we were in white suits that day.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Complete chance. Um, it's, it's funny. So some backstory on this. Uh, Andrea was on X saying, this is what you get when you're allowed to have creative freedom with advertising. Can't wait to see more of these. Well, more are coming, so, uh, you can look out for that. But the cool thing here with the Eight Sleep team, we didn't tell them the concept for the shoot. We didn't get them notes on the shoot. All we did was actually send them this final cut that we posted, and they were like, this is awesome. Rip it. And so, and that's part of, part of what we're doing. I mean, we, we, we make these for fun and, and, uh, it's a good creative process for the team.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  And it's

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  But it was, it was cool.

• 1:26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's also like an homage to the other Eight Sleep partnership announcement between Charles Leclerc and Eight Sleep that they clearly spent a lot of time concepting and shooting and we were just like, let's match that one for one and it'll be a lot of, it'll be cool and it'll also be funny. And so we had a lot of fun shooting that. So you can go to eightsleep.com to get started. Five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Code, tbpn.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  Dot com. In other news, reindustrialize is this week.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  Happening tomorrow.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  Happening tomorrow, yes. And they have been on an absolute tear posting interesting things. They said, we exist to reverse this.

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Pull this chart up.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  The top employer in each state back in 1990, you can see the map is almost entirely green because almost every state, the top employer in each state was manufacturing. In 2024, the top employer is healthcare. And there's a few states that are holding on to manufacturing. A couple that are, Utah's in retail, Nevada has been in hospitality the entire time. Surprise, surprise. Staying strong. Hawaii is the top employer is hospitality. That makes sense. It's a tourist destination. But you know, for a long time, America was a manufacturing powering powerhouse. And this is a really striking chart or visualization of what can happen in 34 years of neglect, essentially. So if you're headed to reindustrialize,

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  let us know how it goes. We couldn't be there because of travel schedules and whatnot, but I hope it's a fantastic event.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  And we'll get the recap.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  For everyone who's over there. Well, our next guest is ready to join us. This is Brian from CoreWeave. We will be talking about the NeoClouds and AI training and

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  What it's like being a public company.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. So good to meet you, Brian. How you doing?

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

  Pretty good.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:28:45Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  Congratulations on all the success. Can you just take us through like a brief introduction and kind of maybe a little bit of history on the company, but then kind of where you are today? Because I imagine we can jump into a bunch of stuff. Most people are probably familiar, but.

• 1:28:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. So first off, my name is Brian Ventura. I'm one of the founders. I'm the chief strategy officer of CoreWeave. I started out as CTO until they found me out. I've been demoted to chief strategy officer. So.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Promoted. It's gotta be more fun, more fun.

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  No, it's demoted, dude. Definitely demoted.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, I'm just saying like, you know, day to day, I imagine you're, you know, you still have the stress of, you know, running the business and all that, but, uh, but, but maybe you're not on call, which would be nice.

• 1:29:27Speaker 04

  Nothing's, nothing's changed. They just don't let me write code anymore, um, which is probably better for everybody. Uh, but you know, I'm the chief strategy officer. I, I run, um, a lot of product strategy, infrastructure strategy. I work with clients on big, uh, big deals.

• 1:29:43Speaker 04

  You know, probably half the company indirectly reports to me. Um, so I'm on the board of directors, et cetera, et cetera. So I've been, I'm, I've been involved in pretty much every aspect of the business. But I'm happy to talk about whatever you guys would like today.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  I want to talk about naming every strategy. I want to talk about the overarching strategy. Um, walk me through how you would think about defining the current strategy. What is the highest priority relationship with hyperscalers, new companies, creating a fluid compute layer? All the different like government incentives, like what, what is top of mind for you? Day on a day to day basis in terms of positioning core weave against competitors or just broadly solving a problem in the market. Like, how do you actually break down these problems?

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  So, um, it's two things, right? The, the first is, um, serving the customers and partners that got us here, right? That's the big AI labs is the hyperscalers. It's the people that have an insatiable need for compute infrastructure. They're the ones that are blocked from delivering to their next customer and from growing their user base because they don't have any GPUs. Um, that has been,

• 1:30:56Speaker 04

  it's been insane to be a part of, right? It's because every time it increases in order of magnitude, you're like, it can't go again. And then it goes again six months later.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  And, you know, I was listening to the show before you're talking about, uh, you know, Metas, five gigawatt data center campuses, et cetera. Um, you know, it's, uh, like we're headed there. Right? And I think that right now it's a question of, you know, everybody's in a race and how quickly you can build that like that large. Uh, but it's also understanding what are the local constraints? What are the actual grid constraints? What are the supply constraints to be able to get there? You know, you run into things like labor constraints, you know, there's not enough electricians in the world to go out and build these things in the timelines these people need. How do you modularize the data center construction? Um, you know, everybody's kind of solving this as the plane's in the air already.

• 1:31:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  Right? Um, and you know, it it's it's a race, you know, I I always say internally, like I can always, I can solve any problem with enough time or capital. Right? And a lot of the times you don't get both.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:53Speaker 04

  Um. So it's choosing, you know, what's the right path to go, you know, how are we going to solve this for them? Um, so that's, that's kind of one side, right? It's like, okay, how do we build to everything that they need? How do we understand what their demand's gonna be? And when you look at um, the, the thing that I think the world misses is that everybody on the hyperscale side and like in our seat as well, like we're looking at it going, we need to build X number of gigawatts data center capacity. Right? Like, we know the demand signals are there, but the capital and the speculative capital isn't there to do it.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:32:23Speaker 04

  Right? Is I can go out and I can build X gigawatts of capacity for the next two or three years. Right? From my balance sheet, but any more than that, and the demand doesn't show up and I put my entire company at risk.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  Right? So we're, we're basically having to haircut the demand signals that we get. And only build to a certain extent of it. And then by the time we get out there, we're in the same constrained position we're in today.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  Got it. Um, talk to me about.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you, um, real quick, how, how do you think so? So it was 2019 that you guys decided to focus more on AI and, and cloud infra broadly. Is that correct? Roughly?

• 1:32:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  And the reason, the reason I, the reason I asked this is because I saw a company as, you know, there's been a bunch of companies that were uh, effectively came to the conclusion that you guys did, but maybe six, five, six years later in terms of hey, we're going to sort of pivot away from, you know, Bitcoin mining into AI because that's where the real growth is. And it feels like a lot of those company from, from an outside looking in. Uh, you know, it feels like those companies are going to be at a massive disadvantage, but I don't know if I have, if I have the right read there.

• 1:33:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we, um, when we started out in 2017, we made the decision that we were never going to be as good as the ASIC producer. And mining Bitcoin.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Speaker 04

  Right. And the idea there was, you know, there's always going to be something they don't release. It actually wound up being true. They had released like their low power mode. I forgot what it was called in 2018. And everybody found out that they were hashing 30% better power efficiency. The world lost their mind about it. And it was kind of like the, okay, we were actually right. Like we were kind of were paranoid about it, but we never actually knew until then. Um, so, you know, we said, we're not going to do it as good as them. Where is there a level playing field? And we thought there was a level playing field in GPUs.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:34:13Speaker 04

  And we also thought, okay, if crypto goes to zero, the GPUs are repurposable. They're used for gaming. They're used for graphics rendering. Like, we could either sell them on the open market, or we can build another service with them.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  Um, what we were most surprised by is when we first launched our, you know, let's say first non-crypto product in 2018, 2019. Um, it was a rendering service for an open source, uh, uh, 3D, uh, graphics platform called Blender.

• 1:34:42Jordi Hays?

  Blender.

• 1:34:43Speaker 04

  We had like a thousand, a thousand people sign up in the first day.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:34:46Speaker 04

  And I was just like, oh, boy, like there's a market here. People need this stuff. And like, we had never expected it to be that large. And people would come to us and they'd send us like, uh, support tickets saying, hey, just want to tell you, it's so awesome. I was able to do so much more work because I got access to GPUs I've never had before.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Speaker 04

  Right. And that was like signal number one. And we're like, okay, we convinced our early investors. Like, we're going to go all in on this thing. We're going to use crypto to pay for it as we're building out more, uh, compute. And, uh, we set it up so that as we didn't have, uh, actual cloud or compute workloads, it would turn back to mining. And the mining would cover all of our fixed and variable expenses and all of the cloud stuff was just upside.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Speaker 04

  Right. So we were able to show over time, this like constant penetration or kind of constant growth of our margin. Um, which was really easy to grow, right? We were able to lever the cryptocurrency into a massive resource base. So the, the timing played a lot, a lot into our success there in that we had that permissionless crypto revenue to lean back on.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but also just having, having, I think, incredible foresight to some degree, uh, which, which, uh, you, you're being a little bit more modest about it. But the fact that companies, you know, even I, I saw. A company that was getting pumped on X last week that is still in the process of transitioning from Bitcoin mining to, you know, something that will look like a NeoCloud. And the idea that you're going to come into this market six years late and really be a key player feels like a long shot.

• 1:36:22Speaker 04

  It's, um, so I think it's even worse than that. I think it's even worse, it's even worse than that because the talent pool is so small.

• 1:36:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Speaker 04

  And to be successful as the technology has gotten more sophisticated and harder to run, you have to be the best in the world. Right? And, you know, we have some of our low level hardware engineers, they're amazing. Like, I've seen them, you know, solve problems that nobody even knew existed. They, they identify the problem, they're able to say, okay, this is what, this is what the problem is. They go back to Nvidia and they jointly develop a solution for it. Right? That, that's really important as you're building at scale. Right? You know, anybody can run 100 or 500 or 1,000 GPUs, but if you're running hundreds of thousands of these things, like, it's really, really hard to do, especially at high quality. Right? So, um, people think that there's folks that are 12 to 18 to 24 months behind us.

• 1:37:17Speaker 04

  Good luck.

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  Really quick question. I have to ask, what's the story with the wheels behind you?

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  All right. So, um, there are F1 wind tunnel tires.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Speaker 04

  And we just did a, so we're, uh, we just did a sponsorship with Aston Martin. And we also, and we also executed a computer agreement with them. I'm so excited about this one. You know, when I talked before about like the, the way that we think about our first cohort of clients, it's the AI labs. The second is the enterprises.

• 1:37:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:50Speaker 04

  And I feel that if we can walk into Aston Martin and help them modern our, modernize their AI and ML stack. In the most hyper competitive sport in the world with so much data and so many eyeballs already on it, we can do it for anybody.

• 1:38:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  So, so being more concrete there, you have an F1 car, you need to simulate how air flows over it, that's a particle simulation, and that's perfect for accelerated, parallelized computing, GPUs, they're probably doing it on premise at some point, they're going to take it to the cloud, they're going to take it to your cloud.

• 1:38:22Speaker 04

  It's so much, yes, but it's so much more than that. It's not just the CFD workloads, it's also things like taking radio data from other teams and trying to decipher what their strategies are in real time. I mean, it's running tire degradation simulations, like how does track temperature change with cloud cover, how does weather come in and actually impact this stuff? It's helping them make better decisions on track in real time.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:46Speaker 04

  It's like, it's the coolest confluence of the technologies that I can imagine, and I'm like, I'm totally into it.

• 1:38:53John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Yeah. Translate all of Ferrari's columns from Italian into English.

• 1:38:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, good luck with Ferrari's strategy.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Talk about sort of data center build out timelines. I think Colossus and the XAI team were getting a lot of credit for bringing a lot of compute online very quickly, a lot of energy online. How much was that an outlier or are they just really good at marketing?

• 1:39:23Speaker 04

  Um, I think it's both. Right? You know, one of the things that I admire about Elon is, you know, he sent an email a couple of years ago on Thanksgiving, and it was like, the biggest problem that we have right now is there's nobody to turn a screwdriver on the line, I'm going to go turn a screwdriver in the line. Right? And he is so good at identifying what the bottleneck is and breaking through it. And if you're the richest guy in the world and you don't really care about the consequences, you can do that a lot more than you can as a director of a public company, is what I've learned.

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  Is, you know, they're able to go, and I think some of what they've done is a bit of the, you told me I can't build it, but I already built it, it's already there, and they're like, no, you can't build it, no, no, it's there. Right? And when you're in a race like this, that bravado matters.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:12Speaker 04

  Right? I don't know, I don't think anybody knows the truth of what's actually there, but they've definitely been incredible in how they've been able to execute.

• 1:40:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, the that data center seems like it's performing very well. But what I learned from Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis with the ClusterMax ranking is that not all clouds are created equal. And 100,000 H100s is not perfectly substitutable for another 100,000 H100s over here. And CoreWeave did extremely well on ClusterMax. And I'm interested in peeling back a layer deeper into understanding, first, how do you think you did so well? Like, what concretely makes CoreWeave stand out as a NeoCloud on the features level from a customer perspective?

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  And then internally, what's the secret sauce? Like, is it just great employees? Are they aligned? Are they working harder? Is there key insight? Are you like, how do you actually deliver that product at a higher level than, you know, competitors that Dylan Patel reviewed?

• 1:41:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, so let's not get off the XAI thing yet. I'm going to transfer into that. You know, if they have 100,000 GPUs and they get 60,000 of them running and they don't care about the other 40,000 of them, it's kind of enough.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:41:37Speaker 04

  Right? And if they're looking at it saying, I don't care how much this costs, I have to win. And they're in the position to do that. And if you're Elon Musk, you are, right? That's a powerful position to be in.

• 1:41:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:49Speaker 04

  Now, the clients that we serve are typically going to be more cost-conscious and are going to look to optimize, you know, their spend, make sure they get whatever they need out of their investment. And what we found is that, you know, these jobs and this infrastructure, it breaks all the time, right? And when you accept that something's going to break all the time and you design for it... Your solution is going to be very different than if you're just kind of, you know, square peg in a round hole after the fact saying, I have to go deal with these failures.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:22Speaker 04

  Right. So what we did initially is we built with a incredibly high level of observability at the bare metal layer. Right. And the bare metal visibility is really important because things do fail and you know, you have memory failures, you have thermal failures, you have all these things that impact your jobs. But if we're able to help our customers identify what's happening, triage it for them and explain to them why something failed, you know, they don't have to go back and say, oh, was it my code or was it one of the 700,000 connections in my cluster? Right. They can immediately point to our software stack and says, oh, it was this length flap over here. We took it out of service. You restart your job, you'll be totally fine. That's been very, very, very powerful. And it's not just that visibility layer. It's also the storage and networking

• 1:43:07Speaker 04

  and the quality control that we put around those things. You know, I have to give credit to our new, our now CTO, Peter Solanki, who used to work for me until they found me out. He is, he is incredibly focused on the low level visibility and quality and drives a lot of that culture throughout the company. Right. Of like, if one of 500,000 things is going to break, I need to know immediately so I can go in and fix it to make sure my customer is back up and running like three minutes later. So it's, it's building from that low base and understanding what the problems are going to be. And then culturally,

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  you know, we have people that are here that take so much pride in being first and being best.

• 1:43:55Speaker 04

  Right. And you know, if we're not first to market with a new release, like they're like, they're going to cry for a week. Kind of thing. So when we did GB 300 a couple of weeks ago, or maybe it was just a week ago, like people went out to one of our data centers, like all of our low level engineers went out there and they delivered for like two weeks to get it done. Right. Like they go and they, they work from 8am to 4am every day and they love it and it's a cultural thing. And I think we're really lucky to have that.

• 1:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Bit of a tangent, were you an H20 buyer at all over the last few months?

• 1:44:27Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:44:28Jordi Hays?

  Or not needed?

• 1:44:29Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  And there was H20 sales happening in the United States from what we heard? Who are the kind of players that are, that were making use of that?

• 1:44:41Speaker 04

  I don't know. If that did happen, I don't know who it is. But for us, you know, if we had any power available, we're going to buy the best, you know, the best accelerator we can.

• 1:44:52Speaker 04

  You know, there's no reason for us to buy the cut down accelerator if we have power available.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned that one of the key things is like the insight into what's happening in the data center. What, if a specific chip is failing, you want your customer to be able to know, you want to be able to, I mean, we talked to Dylan Patel, he was saying like, sometimes you just need to turn it off, turn it back on. Or like, there's a whole bunch of different things that can happen in, that feel very abstract when you're looking at it from the outside, but are very concrete when you're on the inside. And that's actually what separates great data center performance is just like the hand to hand combat that happens on an inside day. My question is like, we've talked, we talked to some people who were like, we're going to put data centers in space. Or we're going to put data centers like on the moon or on a boat.

• 1:45:40Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't seem to align with it, with your framework of being like, we need to build it in a way, knowing that it's going to break often. We're going to need to fix it and hard to do that if it's, if it's.

• 1:45:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think space is the right place for a data center.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:53Speaker 04

  But you know, to the point there of sometimes you have to turn it off and turn it back on to solve the problem. We don't find that to be true.

• 1:45:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:00Speaker 04

  Right. Is if you, if something needs to be turned off, there's a reason why it needs to be turned off.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:05Speaker 04

  And that like, that one comment may be what separates us is, you know, our engineering team, if they're like, I'm not going to reboot the system. That doesn't solve problems. I want to know exactly what happened there because we have to go solve it. Because if it happens one time, it's going to happen another time. Like the scale that we run at these, like these skeletons come out.

• 1:46:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:24Speaker 04

  Right? And you know, making sure that the data center is on earth and is acceptable by, is accessible by like human technicians is really important.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:33Speaker 04

  Because sometimes you have to make judgment calls on like, what's actually causing this? And you know, how do you fix it?

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  So. The one kind of, I mean, there's a few things that the space data center folks will tell you about like, you know, free energy or free cooling or something like that. We don't need to go too deep into that. But I guess the question that I'm more interested in is, how are the recent results from different training runs? We saw this with Grok 4, that the reinforcement learning post-training was 50% of the overall cost. That's kind of the rumor. And there's been kind of mutterings about, hey, maybe in the future, you'll need a whole bunch of distributed compute all over the place, generating reinforcement data,

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  and doing rollouts and bringing those back. And you won't need as much of this hyper-concentrated compute in one place. And so maybe having 10 1-gigawatt data centers is better than one 5-gigawatt data center. It's just power and compute all over the place. How do you think like, the the shape of distribution of of compute clusters will evolve over the next few years? If you have any insight there?

• 1:47:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so great question. Let's, let's put it into perspective, because you said 1 5-gigawatt or 10 1-gigawatts. Those are insane, by the way.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 1:47:59Speaker 04

  Like, even building a gigawatt data center and its impact on the local grid, like, that's, we'll see.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  I mean, you talk to people and they're like, and they're like, there's going to be 100 gigawatts data centers in three years. Like, the crazy AI people get crazy. And so I'm, maybe I'm a little bit on, you know, like, out in space here, literally. But bring it back to earth.

• 1:48:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, people definitely want to build at that scale, right? When you think about 100-gigawatt data center or a 10-gigawatt data center, the capital required to build these things and to install the compute inside them, like, that's country-level capital. Right? And you know, I don't think that um the broader market understands the investment required to get to do this. Right? Um. But you know, back to the question of is it going to be more distributed? It's going to be more centralized? I think that right now, while the ability to centralize it exists, people would prefer to do that because the optionality of having it all together is, you know, is worth more than having it distributed.

• 1:49:00Speaker 04

  Um, I think that as you have workloads that become more latency driven. Right? So, you know, we're starting to see customers to say, hey, I need something that's actually local to a metropolitan area because I'm running. Um, you know, a agentic AI for one of my customers or for a banking customer. Um, I I need to make sure it's there. That's a very different story than 12 months ago where people didn't care where inference was because your first response wasn't for like two or three seconds.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, you actually wanted on the other side of the world, ideally where it's low load.

• 1:49:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, then then you're managing to optimize for cost.

• 1:49:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:31Speaker 04

  Right? But there there's a group of people that are going to optimize for costs is a group of people that are going to optimize for performance. Um, you know, for us, one of the products that we're really excited to develop is um, you know, almost like a global load balancer product that helps people choose what they're optimizing for, right? Um, and you know, we've been thinking about that for a long time now. Uh, because like you said, you have to have that compute distributed and it may not be be because you're trying like. If you could choose, you'd always have it in one place. Right? But when you build it distributed, then you have to have the software services that can intelligently say, okay, where am I going to run this? What am I optimizing for? Uh, where's the data that I need?

• 1:50:12Speaker 04

  Right? And that's where um, you know, we've been investing in, you know, we've built a massive global uh, network backbone. We have a ton of our own dark fiber. Um, to be able to move workloads around and have our customers.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  What does that mean? What does that? What does that exactly mean?

• 1:50:25Speaker 04

  Um, so. We've leased dark fiber between a bunch of our data centers across the United States and in Europe. That allows us to install our own optical optical optical gear. So that we can, you know, flex up bandwidth as we need to. You know, we have some customers that need things like 64 terabits per second between sites. Like crazy amounts of bandwidth. And the idea there is that they're they're moving synchronization data or they're synchronizing models between sites.

• 1:50:51Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:52Speaker 04

  So, you know, that's where, you know, we have to make these big capital investments, knowing what's coming. Right? So when our customers start asking for it, it was like, oh, yes, we already have it there. So, you know, some of that is just, it's the focus that we have and the specialization to know, hey, like, we better start investing in this because a year down the road, like, we're gonna be screwed if we don't.

• 1:51:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. How how has it been, you know? What are some of the differences been in building out data centers in Europe? I know you guys have Norway, Sweden, Spain, and the UK. Is that correct? What's it been like developing new data centers there versus what you've done in the United States?

• 1:51:33Speaker 04

  Um, not so different, actually. Right? You know, everybody was initially saying, oh, it's gonna be so hard to work in Europe. You know, are people gonna show up and work as hard? And the one of the things that we've done, I think that we've done really well in our onboarding process for employees, is we've actually brought all the European teams over to work with our Tiger teams inside of our data centers. And

• 1:51:56Jordi Hays?

  You just flare the Star Spangled Banner just loudly.

• 1:51:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you blast music continuously, all of a sudden, like, they have, yeah, well.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  And, you know, the the culture is infectious. And what's one of the best things about the company is that all of our, like, the company's so young that there's been no real attrition, right? Nobody's left.

• 1:52:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16Speaker 04

  So the people that are running the data center started as data started as data center techs a couple of years ago. Like, everybody's still fired up. They still have, like, the same drive. They want to be first, they want to be best. And when you have new employees that walk into that environment and those people are genuinely happy to teach them, it transfers pretty well. Right? So I think our European investments have done a lot better than I thought they were going to. Which I attribute largely to our people.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  A couple of years ago, I feel like everyone in tech had to learn about Nvidia. And then everyone in tech had to learn about TSMC. And then everyone in tech had to learn about ASML. And now people are kind of getting familiar with SK Hynix. What do you think the next big company in the semiconductor stack? Or data center stack, or even networking? Like, what is the next big theme or or subcategory of important foundational technology? People are starting to dig into the the rare earth materials and what's going on? Like, what is on the horizon in terms of like, underexplored or misunderstood?

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  As important as having a role as we try and build out these 1 gigawatt, 10 gigawatt data centers? What are we going to be hearing about?

• 1:53:31Speaker 04

  That's such a such a good question. And the kind of question, oh, man, I don't even know. I'm not sure I have an answer for you.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe maybe it's networking gear. I mean, you mentioned you're putting optical gear at and and just hearing, what was it? Forty two terabits a second? Like, that seems like something that could be become very important. Not if you have to call it a single company, just like the the the overall industry is interesting to be like, oh, you know, everyone's going to be thinking about this industry.

• 1:54:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, that's definitely one of them. Fiber capacity between metros is going to be an issue.

• 1:54:09Speaker 04

  I don't know that it's an issue that's insurmountable. There are definitely some gotchas that I can see coming down the the line at people. I don't want to say it because then I'll give them I'll give them warning. And since we've already identified what they are, I feel like I'm in a better position.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Sorry, I don't mean to put you on the spot too much.

• 1:54:28Speaker 04

  No, no, it's okay.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  What about electrical? What about electrical transformers? I've heard a little bit about like, there there is sometimes there's a shortage, they're very complicated. Like, is this is this like, big technical thing that's a big piece of hardware? Is that like, an important thing for people to be aware of going forward? Or like, an important industry to understand?

• 1:54:49Speaker 04

  So, um, a bit of a tangent off of that.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:55Speaker 04

  Everybody talks about how there's no power left in America.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:59Speaker 04

  And if you actually look at the data, there's a tremendous amount of power available from baseload and load following generation.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  That's great to hear. Thank you.

• 1:55:06Speaker 04

  And the, the problem exists on peak days. Right. And like what solves peak load problems is solar. Like solar and batteries will solve peak load problems. Like you're worried about, you know, five o'clock on the hottest July day when everybody gets home to turn their air conditioning on.

• 1:55:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:22Speaker 04

  That's, that's the thing.

• 1:55:25Speaker 04

  And, you know, everybody wants to talk about how they want to use demand response as a way to, you know, bring supply back to the power grid from data centers.

• 1:55:35Speaker 04

  You know, this stuff is really hard to bring up and bring down. It's, it's not really intermittent load. Right? You know, I think that a lot of this shortage narrative from a power perspective is coming from the fact that everybody and their brother has become a data center developer in the past year. And there's a lot of people out there squatting on power, right? Or squatting on power rates. And I don't think that the uh, local regulatory commissions understood what they were signing up for when they started doing load studies for free and giving power allocations.

• 1:56:06Speaker 04

  You know, but it goes back to my point earlier that the biggest constraint is speculative capital to build out to meet demand that we expect.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:56:14Speaker 04

  Right. So like, yeah, transformers are a problem, but they're not outside the lead time window. You know, UPS is, everything's a problem if you need it tomorrow.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:23Speaker 04

  But if you're able to plan and make the investments in like in a reasonable period of time and you trust your demand forecasts and the market is there and believes in it. Like this is all fine.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:33Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you still, uh, I, I feel like the chart that people have been tracking is like China bringing on, you know, you know, basically like copy and pasting, um, nuclear reactors. Do you think that the US should be seriously, you know, uh, there, there seems to be enough people uh, now from tech to Washington that care about nuclear. So.

• 1:56:56John Coogan?

  It used to be very contrarian. It was very, very edgy to say, oh yeah, nuclear. It's like, it's, it's safe and we should do it. And people are like, it's, it's still scary.

• 1:57:04Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, in, in your view, would you like to see more focus on more attention on nuclear or more attention on, on solar if you had to pick?

• 1:57:12Speaker 04

  Uh, I mean, so nuclear, they solve two different problems. Right? Nuclear builds your base load and you're in like, it's not, nuclear is not load following. Um, it's really hard to bring those things up and down. They have long outage cycles. Um, there, it's a base load solution, right? So as your data center demand is going to increase so much and you're shifting your base load requirements up, that's the solution. Particularly if you wanna retire old coal or you wanna retire some of the base load natural gas. Um, nuclear, I believe, is the solution there. But as you're dealing with peak loads, right, you're looking to match that load profile and, you know, solar is a great one to do it.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46Speaker 04

  Um, you know, wind doesn't necessarily solve that problem during peaking, like wind doesn't peak during the afternoon, it peaks overnight.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:53Speaker 04

  So you, you just have to match, like, what's the load profile you're trying to match? And which part of the curve are you trying to solve for?

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  Is the load profile for AI not perfectly matched with nuclear? And, and is that because of inference demand from actual customers? Like, I've heard people use ChatGPT during the work week, but they don't use it when they're sleeping. So there's actually maybe it follows more of like the solar load profile. Because when I think of training, I think of, we're gonna run this entire data center for months. I don't know how far off I am on that, but like, that feels like perfect, oh, build a nuclear power plant right next to the big data center. Run it continuously, just keep training, and then when you get done with one model, train the next one and just keep it running perfectly matched forever. Um, but, but how, how are we actually like, like the actual AI workloads? How, how do they match to different load profiles?

• 1:58:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so i- if you're in a global constrained environment, right? You're serving as much load as you can around the clock from anywhere.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:50Speaker 04

  Right? So I, I don't think that you have any load shape right now. I think it's just flat load and it's like, it's pinned to a hundred percent.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:58:56Speaker 04

  As.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Bullish.

• 1:58:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes, it's insane.

• 1:59:00John Coogan?

  You're like, it's stressful, stop talking.

• 1:59:02Speaker 04

  It's, it's incredibly stressful, but it's, it's a good problem to have.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:07Speaker 04

  I have people yelling at me every day, like, where's my stuff, where's my stuff, where's my stuff? And I, I might have promised I'm doing everything I can. But I, I think that as that, like, as you have the investments where things are more latency sensitive, um, you'll see. The load curve may not change. It may still be pinned at 100, right? But the types of workloads may be more, may be more shaped. I'm not sure how it plays out.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  Right? I, I think that, you know, the, the problem that you're trying to solve there is not necessarily data center load shape. It's residential and commercial load shape. Right? Because you're not running, like, your big, commercial buildings in New York aren't running at 3 a.m. They're running at 3 p.m. That's the problem.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Makes a ton of sense. Well, this was really fun.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  I hope that we see you at the track soon. One of our other, uh, one of our sponsors is also an Aston F1 sponsor.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, public.com.

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully we run into you on the paddock.

• 2:00:07Speaker 04

  I'll be there soon, actually.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:00:09Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Great having you on. Let's make this a regular thing when you guys have news. It was awesome to get all your insights.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 2:00:17Speaker 04

  Yep. Thanks, guys.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 2:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:00:19Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  And since we're mentioning public.com, investing for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Our next guest will be joining us in just a few minutes, but first, we can tell you about Wander.

• 2:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 2:00:36John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds,

• 2:00:39Jordi Hays?

  I really tried to hit that one.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 2:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I got an update from a friend, a friend of a friend, which says that his friend, no, no, no, sorry. Our friend says that he has a buddy that owns some RM boutiques and has not heard of the conspiracy.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Which is interesting.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Maybe it was hallucinated. It might have been completely hallucinated. I don't know. I need to find the source for that. Where, where was that actually? In here? I will figure it out. And we will get to the bottom of the conspiracy theory. But we will do that later because our next guest is here. It's Tyler Cowen. How are you doing, Tyler?

• 2:01:22Tyler Cowen?

  Which conspiracy theory?

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  So this conspiracy theory is that?

• 2:01:25Jordi Hays?

  You'll actually, you'll actually like this one.

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  Okay, so, are you familiar with the high, the ultra-luxury watch brand Richard Mill?

• 2:01:34Tyler Cowen?

  Only by name.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:36Tyler Cowen?

  I don't have one.

• 2:01:37Jordi Hays?

  You may have seen it on a sailboat or something like that.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  Yes, so Richard Mill is famous for selling watches at 10 times the price of other luxury watch brands. So, a Richard Mill, the first one was $135,000 for a single watch. And at the time, $13,000 would have been more appropriate for that kind of tier of watch. And the conspiracy theory is that when Richard Mill went to promote their new watch, they took out an advertisement in the Financial Times. They sent over the copy for the advertisement saying, "Please, uh, please promote Richard Mill. Our new watch is available for purchase." And the price is $13,500. And there was a mistake in the newsroom. And they added an extra zero.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  And they printed $135,000. And what happened was, instead of getting no offers, they got flooded with offers because people had to have it. A classic example of a veblin' good. And, uh, and the rest is history. And to this day, the brand denies it. Uh, but what do you think?

• 2:02:43Tyler Cowen?

  Well, it sounds like the opposite of a conspiracy. Just an innocent mistake. And then it worked out well for the company and bad for the buyers.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:51Tyler Cowen?

  I believe it.

• 2:02:52Jordi Hays?

  The, the conspiracy is that the brand now obviously denies it because it would, it would not be a good look for them now to, to be like, "Well, we actually wanted to price it at 13,000 and then we actually, you know, uh, now that you're willing to pay 135, well, good deal. Let's do it."

• 2:03:09Tyler Cowen?

  It'll be a deathbed confession on that one. One way or the other.

• 2:03:13John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:03:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's great to have you here. It's great to have you on video. Superintelligence.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. We had some technical difficulties last time, but I'm glad. Uh, you look great. How are you overall? Let me take your temperature on, uh, the last time we talked, you said AGI was around the corner. Later, two days later, uh, O3 released. We now have O3 Pro. How are you feeling on artificial intelligence progress, um, overall? Do you feel like we're accelerating, decelerating? Are you happy with the products? How are you using them? Take me through kind of the State of the Union.

• 2:03:47Tyler Cowen?

  Everyone has a different definition of AGI, but the definition I grew up with, which is that it can pass a Turing test and do at least as well as expert humans on most endeavors, intellectual endeavors, it clearly passes. If you want to call it AGI, you can. I don't insist on the term. Maybe it's more misleading than useful. But O three, O three Pro, I use them every day. I ask them questions about history or music or travel. My wife and I did a trip through Europe, France and Spain. We asked it about our hotels, our restaurants, the churches we saw, everything. It just keeps on working. It's amazing. Much better than having, you know, a historian guide with you. So to me, it's like AGI. It's better, in fact.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  Are you, what is your prior for hallucination at this point? Because that, that Richard Mill conspiracy theory that I just relayed to you, that comes from, from a ChatGPT O three Pro deep research report. And we're getting text messages that many people hadn't heard of it. I haven't checked the sourcing yet, so I'm not sure if it's real. I haven't gone down and done all the fact checking. But just in terms of your prior, how likely would you believe that it's, that it's a hallucination?

• 2:05:06Tyler Cowen?

  Well, just ask it, right? If it's something important, you double check with another AI and/or you ask and you find out. So hallucinations should not be a practical problem. They end up one because people are silly. Or they'll ask it questions where there may not be any answer at all. And that is by far when it's most likely to hallucinate. They'll just make something up to please you. But if you know in advance, that's when it's most likely to hallucinate. Again, you take countermeasures. So it's a way overrated problem.

• 2:05:36John Coogan?

  I agree, I agree. And I just fact checked this and it does come from a 2021 GQ report, which again, might be wrong.

• 2:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Hallucinated by the.

• 2:05:45Tyler Cowen?

  But GQ never hallucinates, right?

• 2:05:48John Coogan?

  Take it up with Benjamin.

• 2:05:49Tyler Cowen?

  Gentlemen do not hallucinate.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  No, gentlemen, do not, do not hallucinate. What do you think of Dwarshish Patel's new formulation? That there's sort of a, a two axis diagram between you and him. AGI is here, AGI is not here. The impact of AGI economically will be massive in his, in his mind. And the impact, and the impact of AGI will be more muted in, in his assessment of your assessment.

• 2:06:16Jordi Hays?

  And I think I think your general stance, which is we should hold ourselves accountable to the definition that we set out to achieve, you know, to achieve, you know, decades ago when this work started and not constantly just be, you know, pushing out the sort of requirements, the goal, moving the goalposts is important.

• 2:06:37Tyler Cowen?

  And then there's this new definition, superintelligence.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:40Tyler Cowen?

  I'm waiting for super duper intelligence, right?

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  Gigga, gigga intelligence.

• 2:06:44John Coogan?

  Ultra intelligence. We already, we're already past it. Everyone, folks like us, we know what superintelligence is. We already have it. We're waiting for the next one.

• 2:06:52Tyler Cowen?

  Maybe the best measure is how much of people's time are they spending with this thing? And that's rising steadily, right? So that to me is quite impressive. Dwarkeesh understands my views perfectly well. He and I use the term AGI in different ways, so it all ends up being confusing. I just think the human bottlenecks are so significant that it's not going to be fast progress anytime soon. That's my core view. It's not based on any kind of bearishness about AI. It's that I've spent my whole life working in human institutions and there are plenty of much simpler developments, like don't be a jerk, that would boost productivity immensely, but we still haven't gotten around to really implementing.

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I mean, on the, on the topic of superintelligence, I think what people are kind of getting at is that it feels like we have 15 minute AGI. It feels like we have spiky intelligence. It feels like we have intelligence that can, you know, memorize every book in the English language and yet not tell you a funny joke or, or put a novel connection together between two disparate disciplines.

• 2:07:58Jordi Hays?

  And potentially more important is this idea of, of intelligence with amnesia, right? It's like, you know, we've been talking about this on the show and Dwarkeesh talked about it last week, which is this idea of PhD level intelligence that, you know, can't remember what you told it, you know, yesterday, right? And so it's difficult to sort of build real momentum and real agency.

• 2:08:22Tyler Cowen?

  I think it can do all those things. Now, it might require a little smidgen of work from you. Like, you might need, for one thing, you can turn on memory. That's maybe not as much memory as you'd like. But you can just reinsert the dialogue you had with it. And tell it to start from there. So, okay, it's a slight inconvenience. But my goodness, people, they're so unhappy, like, it's incredible what we have. And with modest effort from you, it does all these things.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  So I completely agree. I, I love these systems. I, I enjoy spending time with them, even if they're not directly providing economic value. I find them entertaining. I find them just interesting. I, I learn things. It's fantastic. I guess the, the, the, the question is like, yes, you can stuff the context window. But increasingly, folks are saying that there's some sort of fundamental limitation with the size of the context window. That, yes, you can do needle in the haystack analysis with a big context window. But even if you have, you know, pages and pages of all your best practices, the current systems are more likely to forget some hard-won lesson early in working with you than just an average employee.

• 2:09:34John Coogan?

  And that feels uniquely unhuman.

• 2:09:39Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know. I've worked with a lot of employees. This is one generous way I would put it. The things are not perfect. If you compare them to smart humans on intellectual tasks, they're basically ahead. They can't dribble a basketball. They cannot do most jobs, that's for sure. It's a big reason why progress will be slow. If nothing else, those jobs intersect with the physical world. Robots are far away. And there you go. I think it's a pretty clear prognosis. I don't really get why anyone disagrees with it.

• 2:10:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, if you need to raise a billion dollars, it's not super convenient truth if robots are far away, for example.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  And specifically, economic growth is far away. This is the Satya Nadella, uh, uh, position, which I think he agrees with you on the economic impact that we're currently seeing and potentially the economic impact for the next few years. And so he is underwriting a very different investment strategy in artificial intelligence.

• 2:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it says a lot in our view that everywhere you look, there's just blaring top signals in the market, both like literal all-time highs, but then just other more indirect signals. And at the same time, Satya is like, you know, doing layoffs, being seemingly, you know, very pragmatic. And I read that as more aligned with your view, which is transformative, impactful, incredible, wonderful, magic, but also potentially incremental and, you know, going to be transformative in the fullness of time, but not next quarter.

• 2:11:14Tyler Cowen?

  Forgive me for not sounding like a complete capitalist, but this is all so important. People should just be doing it. And to some extent, they are. The labs are working very hard to make progress. You can debate how much the motive is profit, but look, these are driven people. They get how important it is and they're doing their best. I think that's amazing.

• 2:11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:37Tyler Cowen?

  Are they all going to get rich? I'm not predicting that. I don't know.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the trade-off that people are debating broadly in the market is if the next training run, that's a little bit of a stretch for the market. We were just talking to the co-founder of CoreWeave and he was saying that like, the capital markets just aren't really ready to absorb what it means to 10x data center construction. And at the same time, if AI researchers are saying that the, that by 10x-ing data center construction, we will lift ourself off of the GDP baseline and we will see breakout economic growth. And we will get through some of the problems that you've identified about actually, you

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  know, restructuring the economy and speeding up economic growth. All of a sudden, like that question and that, that how much should humanity as a whole invest as a portion of GDP? That becomes a very important question for the overall market to solve.

• 2:12:39Tyler Cowen?

  Well, let's go talk to United Arab Emirates. They can either buy some more parts of sports teams or do this. I think they're going to do this.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:12:47Tyler Cowen?

  The growth rate, I think, will go up. I've offered the very speculative estimate of half a percentage point per quarter. But that's an enormous sum of money.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  That's massive.

• 2:12:56Tyler Cowen?

  Now, you know, is it captured by the capital markets, the shareholders and so on? No, just the free time liberated by ChatGPT and the other services already is enormous money. So remember, Satya had that challenge. When will it earn a hundred million dollars? Well, it has many times over. It just hasn't earned it for him. So people get their work done more quickly. You add up those valuations of time. I'd love to see a study in the number, but it's way, way above a hundred million right now.

• 2:13:24John Coogan?

  Well, on that point, there was a study last week about does, uh, does, uh, AI code generation tools, do these tools actually improve developer productivity? And they did a, I believe, a double blinded trial with, or, or maybe just like a split up trial, uh, based on talented software engineers working on open source projects, kind of trying to work on some of the harder problems in software engineering, not just build me a new webpage, um, actually advancing open source projects. And they gave half of the developers, uh, access to tools like Cursor and Windsurf and Claude Code. And, and then the other half didn't have these, uh, AI driven, uh, development environments.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  And they said that the AI enabled engineers expected a 20% speed up, but they in fact experienced a 20% decrease or 19% decrease in productivity. What is your take on that? Do you think that, uh, there's a world where we're fooling ourselves into believing that we're actually sped up by these tools? Or do you think that that's completely ridiculous and it's obvious that this, that these tools speed us up?

• 2:14:34Tyler Cowen?

  BS that paper. First, only 16 data points. Second, only one of those people had experience working with AI already. And that person's productivity went up. It's the other fools who were just trying to get a handle on it at all where the productivity went down. So we need to throw that out, get it out of our minds.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:52Tyler Cowen?

  It's obvious for marketplace tests that AI speeds up developer productivity. Of course, you have to do it right. You need to learn some things, but it's working. Overwhelming real world evidence to that effect.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  Do you think that there are particular tasks maybe that you've encountered where you've gone to AI and then afterwards realized like, well, for this particular task, not just planning a vacation or trip or something, I was actually slowed down?

• 2:15:22Tyler Cowen?

  Sometimes I like giving stupid dogmatic answers. I'll just say no. I think it's a correct stupid dogmatic answer. No, it's never happened to me.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  I love that because it's definitely happened to me when I've said like, generate a generate a two by two chart and I'm like seven prompts deep and I'm like, I could have done this in Excel or I could have done this and just taken a screenshot or I could have done this in Photoshop faster. It does, it does happen to me, but I agree on net. I feel sped up and I, and I feel very happy to use the tools and I'm, I'm enjoying them.

• 2:15:52Tyler Cowen?

  I use it to prepare for podcasts.

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:54Tyler Cowen?

  It cuts my prep time in half.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:56Tyler Cowen?

  No real doubt there. I don't use it for charts. I just tell a human, maybe the human uses it. I don't even know. I get the chart back. It's great. I love the world.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  I love it. What is the, what is the labor economist in you think about the AI talent wars? Has, have AI researchers been historically underpaid? Are we in some sort of odd intellectual property theft ring where we're paying for trade secrets to trans, to change hands? What does your read on kind of all the talent moves that we've seen at staggering numbers by comparison in what's historically happened in Silicon Valley?

• 2:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then specifically, do you think that an AI researcher in the year 2030 will be getting a hundred million dollar signing bonus? Or do you believe that things will maybe normalize and, and researchers will go back to being paid well, but maybe not more than Fortune or Mag7 CEOs?

• 2:16:55Tyler Cowen?

  Probably normalized. Now, I'm an NBA basketball fan and what I observe is the top teams need some time to gel. So you look at the Miami Heat, they got LeBron, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, the first year, they lost. You look at, you know, Chicago Bulls, Jordan and Pippen, it took them a few years. You look at the Lakers, what they had Karl Malone, Gary Payton, was it Shaq and Kobe Bryant? They didn't win a title. So it's not as easy as you think. Not that those aren't great, great players, but there's something about how it gels and the process and what part of people's trajectories you get them at that all has to fit together. I think it's a fascinating experiment. I'm dying to find out how it's going to work.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  What do you think of the missionary versus mercenary debate? A prior guest on the show highlighted Tom Brady in the sports world, taking a lower salary in order to build a better team around him. Bit of an economic sacrifice for greater performance, longer legacy, ultimately reap the rewards economically. But a lot of people have been saying, you know, you can't buy great missionary talent that will stick with you during the hard times and really advance the frontier of artificial intelligence.

• 2:18:13Tyler Cowen?

  In the case of Brady, you know, he has these contracts for shoes, jerseys, footballs, other things. He probably made a lot of money from that pay cut by staying more focal. So maybe for some of these AI companies, you know, we need more endorsements, a line of tennis balls or something. It'll be cheaper to hire talent because the outside market will pay them. We're not at that point yet. Maybe we'll get there.

• 2:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want a game worn jersey.

• 2:18:41Tyler Cowen?

  Here's what Ilya wore when he, you know, built the key parts of GPT-4.

• 2:18:45John Coogan?

  Exactly. I mean, we've, we've been putting out these little trading cards, sports, you know, whenever, when any AI research, whenever an AI researcher moves from one firm to the other, and I mean, it seems like an insider joke, but they're, these posts are getting millions and millions of views. Like, it really is turning into, into sports in terms of the attention of the entire tech industry on these trade deals. And maybe it's just the big numbers, but I think it's also the fact that this is an important technology and people are excited about the developments and they, and they want to know who, who will win. What, what product will I be using in five years? Will it be OpenAI? Will it be Meta? Who knows?

• 2:19:24Tyler Cowen?

  All of the above, I hope.

• 2:19:26John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 2:19:26Jordi Hays?

  How did you, how would you try to value the Dutch East India Company? And the reason I bring that up is Nvidia crossed a $4 trillion market cap. Everybody's calling it, you know, one of the most valuable companies ever. But I think a lot of the people that run the kind of valuation analysis and inflation calculations and things like that believe that the Dutch East India Company was worth somewhere around, you know, 2X of that. Have you spent much time thinking about, about that business?

• 2:20:03Tyler Cowen?

  I look at all the numbers in general. I don't feel I can outguess the markets. So the market is a better estimator there than I am. But look, markets are always wrong. That's why the price changes all the time. So the fact that Nvidia is priced so high shows the market is paying attention to AI, which is good. But the fact that everything else is priced more or less normally, I think is evidence for my thesis of slow takeoff, that it will matter a lot over time, but not that much right away.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting, something, we just had one of the founders of Core Weavon, which is now a $70 billion public company. And I was thinking about the advantage that he has as a public company, where he doesn't have to raise capital from the private markets that are, and tell the story, this like 10 year story. He can kind of focus on the next quarter and just say like, how do we deliver more compute to our customers? And it's like this interesting change where a lot of the companies today, let's say you're a lab with a $10 billion valuation and you need to raise billions of dollars, you kind of need to tell the story around superintelligence. Meanwhile, if you can just get out in the public markets and have billions of dollars of revenue, you can kind of go back to telling the story of, yeah, we're hoping to bring

• 2:21:18Jordi Hays?

  more compute online, more data centers online, and just actually focus on, on the business.

• 2:21:25Tyler Cowen?

  That can cut either way, but look, if you're selling socks today, public market is fine. But as you well know, fewer and fewer companies want to go that route. So that does suggest to me the public markets are somewhat broken, overregulated, too much disclosure required, too much bureaucratization. Shareholders themselves can be kind of nutty. So, you know, it's good to have the two compete, but I'd like to see us make the public markets easier to be in.

• 2:21:50Jordi Hays?

  What about Delaware? We saw Andreessen Horowitz moving to Nevada. We've seen some other high-profile exits. Do you think Delaware will try to turn it around? I know about a pretty meaningful amount of their budget comes from franchise taxes, things like that.

• 2:22:08Tyler Cowen?

  I say get out, send them a message. They're not feeling enough pain yet. Let's make it really tough for poor little Delaware. What do they call it? Small wonder? Well, small wonder that they haven't gotten their regulatory apparatus into better order.

• 2:22:22Tyler Cowen?

  Wow, that's a great thing.

• 2:22:24John Coogan?

  Roasted. What about in this? I want to talk more about the public market distortions versus private market. It feels like Elon has kind of run an A/B test with Tesla and SpaceX. They're like within an order of magnitude of each other, maybe within like 2X in terms of valuation. And now Elon seems to be building some sort of a Japanese-style keretsu between all of his private market and sometimes the public market companies as well. Like, would a hallmark of a well-functioning public market be that there is just one ticker for Elon, Inc., and all the companies are under one umbrella? Or is there a val- is there value in the public markets to having like pure plays? I hear some public markets hedge fund investors are like, I just want a pure play on the robotaxi.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  I just want a pure play on humanoids. And I don't know if that's actually like an economically valuable thing for our society to have, or what would be best for Elon or the shareholders. I'm just kind of struggling with all the different stakeholders.

• 2:23:22Tyler Cowen?

  I suspect the pure play idea is useful. So you get a market price signal, what's working, what's not. So Elon obviously has become less popular. So the value of Tesla goes down, you see that quite directly. If they're all bundled, the signal is far more muddled. So I think it's better separate.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  So ideally, if it was easy to operate in the public markets, we would, we would just see SpaceX and, and companies would be going public once they hit like 5 billion or 10 billion, something like that.

• 2:23:54Tyler Cowen?

  I'm not sure if something like Neuralink would be. That's just weird to begin with, non-legible.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:00Tyler Cowen?

  Who are the customers? What are the products? Yes, the disabled, but after that, that I would think should be in private markets.

• 2:24:07John Coogan?

  Wait, are you sure about that? Because I feel like it's also, in many ways, like a classic biotech drug, you know, FDA approvals. Once it's approved, it goes out to everyone. It feels like that's one place that the public markets are particularly functioning as they always have, where new drug comes, goes through phase one, phase two trials, but goes public very early. We're not seeing the stripe of biotech hang out in the private markets for two decades.

• 2:24:32Tyler Cowen?

  What am I ever going to buy from neurotech? No insult intended, by the way, but it's not transparent to me. I think it's amazing. I'm all for it.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:41Tyler Cowen?

  Maybe it has to be not so legible to public shareholders, and Elon wants to do it. That's great.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  But you might not buy a particular cancer drug. I would hope that you'd never have to buy any of them, but that particular drug for some certain indication, some certain illness, could be taken through FDA trials, they could go public, their stock price could trade on the basis of the FDA results, and then when they, when they, when they get approved, they start selling that drug, maybe they get acquired by a bigger drug company, but then they live or die by the market size of that particular illness.

• 2:25:14Tyler Cowen?

  Well, if it was a cancer drug, sure, I'd buy that, but a brain-computer interface? I don't know. I don't want one. I'm happy with it being there. And again, it seems to me that's probably not a good matter for public shareholders.

• 2:25:28John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm more just think, I mean, yeah, I guess if you're thinking about valuing it as like brain-computer interface for the masses, that's a different story than it is a, it is a treatment for the, for the illness of being a paraplegic. Or if you are blind, it can cure blindness, and that is a medical diagnosis, and it is a medical product. But obviously Elon's telling a much broader story about that, so that's a different thing.

• 2:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Were you surprised to see Uncle Sam put up a surplus in June? Are we expecting that?

• 2:26:00Tyler Cowen?

  I wouldn't say I expected it, but you know, month to month fluctuations can be so severe. Nothing like that should surprise us. The debt and deficit, they're still out of control.

• 2:26:10Jordi Hays?

  It's like a startup. It's a startup that that's like, yeah, we're profitable. Because they had one month of free cash, one month of free cash flow, or one day annualized.

• 2:26:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes that makes sense. How about stable coins? There's there's been new regulation. We have a issuer that's that's now public. There's a massive amount of excitement. It seems like a lot of the use cases outside of, you know, being, you know, as a

• 2:26:47Jordi Hays?

  value transfer to facilitate investing in the US, but then the potentially, you know, more interesting use cases internationally. But but how are you thinking about adoption? And do you believe that the US, and specifically the traditional dollar, will be a major beneficiary of the tech?

• 2:27:06Tyler Cowen?

  It's been great. The rest of the world wants access to dollar-based systems. Our government makes it hard for them. Stable coins are a workaround. I'm not sure what their long run fate will be, because keep in mind, and regulations can change, and other payments methods can innovate as well. But they're going to pass the Genius Act, it looks like. I'm all for it. It's not perfect legislation, but it will give people a chance to experiment with these things on a legal, transparent basis, and let it rip. Right?

• 2:27:37John Coogan?

  Why do you say that our government makes it hard? I always thought it was an authoritarian government that, or just a foreign government, that wants the ability to inflate away their own debt. And so they're keeping dollars out of their economy. They're trying to avoid dollarization.

• 2:27:54Tyler Cowen?

  They don't always avoid it successfully, but you look at the US government, know your customer laws, for instance. It's a pain in the neck to deal with an American, say, who wants to open a bank account in Germany. I've tried to do this. That's because of the US government putting reporting requirements on the German bank. They don't want your money. So, a lot of the problem is USG, not, you know, Argentina, Russia, whatever. It's both. But in fact, if people just told dollars, that is usually tolerated. And it's a workaround for both.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  I want to talk about Google's acquisition of Windsurf. Google paid a licensing agreement. They acquired 50 or so engineers from Windsurf. The CEO and the preferred shareholders got paid out by Google. Roughly 400 or something employees were left in a ghost ship in the Remain Co. They also had $150 million roughly on the balance sheet, and so they were scooped up by Cognition. I'm not sure how closely you follow the drama, but my question was, is this a Pareto improvement or a Calldor Hicks improvement for Windsurf stakeholders as a whole?

• 2:29:06Tyler Cowen?

  It raises the cost of capital, and we're going to need more covenants to limit this happening. Like, say I start a company, raise money, and then just pay myself a huge dividend for all the money. Well, that's typically against the law, because there's a covenant in the contract saying I can't do that. So, we need new covenants to cover these cases. Those will be harder to write, but the market will respond. In the meantime, it's a problem.

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  Do you believe that the problem should be solved by employees demanding a new covenant? Employees demanding more strict employment contracts? Where will this solution sit?

• 2:29:47Tyler Cowen?

  It depends how you're doing the financing, but very often in other settings, it's done by the bondholders. The bondholders want a covenant that you can't just drain all the resources out of the firm. The more the firm is based on human capital, the easier it becomes to do that, because human capital leaving is not monitorable in the same way that a big cash dividend is monitorable. But we'll figure out ways of doing it. Maybe it will require arbitration, but this absolutely needs addressing. Otherwise, you just keep on starting up companies, ship the talent out somewhere else, and S and sell it twice. Bunch of different people are screwed over. For the next person who tries it with no intent of doing that, the cost of capital is too high, and that's the longer run problem. But again, markets are very good at solving problems like that with covenants.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  So this is, uh, this will be solved by the market. This is not an FTC issue?

• 2:30:38Tyler Cowen?

  I would not involve the FTC. I don't like them. I don't trust them. Their previous boss, their current boss, they're both bad news. Neither knows any economics. My goodness, they're a nightmare. Why would you call them on the phone? They're gonna make it worse.

• 2:30:54John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for the, for the, for the solid breakdown and being very clear about your opinion. This is fantastic, Tyler. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the update and your wisdom.

• 2:31:05Tyler Cowen?

  A pleasure. Good luck with the rest of the day.

• 2:31:07John Coogan?

  We appreciate it. Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Always a great segment. And we have our next guest already ready to join the show. Austin, welcome to the stream. Let's play that. I want to play that intro song a little bit. I like that intro song. Oh, maybe he's already here. Maybe you just get the Ashton Hall.

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  We got an issue with the soundboard, but we're gonna make a sound for you, a handcrafted sound.

• 2:31:34John Coogan?

  Kick us off with the news and an introduction and yourself.

• 2:31:39Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me, guys. Honored to be here. Everybody, I'm Austin, co-founder and CEO here at Unifi. Today, we just announced a $40 million Series B led by a battery vendor.

• 2:31:53John Coogan?

  Led by who?

• 2:31:57John Coogan?

  Doesn't matter.

• 2:31:57Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't hear.

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  It does matter. Congratulations. Awesome firms. Awesome firm. Leading awesome firms along for the ride.

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. A bunch of questions, but give us a quick history on yourself. You said earlier, was it the proudest day of your father's life was when you signed an offer to work at Ramp? And then the second proudest is today?

• 2:32:19Speaker 06

  It was. Yes. It's been a big couple of years for me with me and my dad. Took a lot of years going through college to get to that point, but quick background story. So originally joined Ramp back in 2020 on the growth product team. Really attracted to just like the talent density that existed even back in that period of time. Spent a couple of years there working on the growth product team with a bunch of incredible folks that I know you all know well, including Sam Buck, you know, folks like Pavel you had on the show, the Crosby eyes, et cetera. So ton of great folks. Spent a couple of years there and spent a lot of time thinking about distribution from an engineering light perspective.

• 2:32:58Speaker 06

  And so joined, saw everything that was happening with OpenAI in 2022 and it felt like the nexus of go to market and AI was starting to happen. Didn't know that ChatGPT and things like that were about to drop, but ended up starting Unify beginning of 2023. Pretty quickly raised a seed round from a combination of OpenAI, Thrive, Emergence, and we're off to the races. Fast forward two and a half years, we're a 50 person team today, serving a bunch of incredible companies like Courser, Perplexity, you name it. And so just grateful, grateful to be here.

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Explain the product like I'm a new grad SDR.

• 2:33:37Speaker 06

  So if you're a new grad SDR, the pitch of the product is you used to have to push a million buttons just to get to the place where you could actually do something that was valuable to talk to a prospect. We take care of all that on your behalf. So example is you might show up in the morning, you're going to make your list of the 25 people that you want to reach out to based off of, okay, this person started a new job. I reached out to John in the past and he's now at this new thing, started a new job or he got a new promotion. We'll make that list for you. We'll automate all that research. We'll also deploy agents to go get 50 other data points for you. So you can start from the 90 yard line and then you can just be polishing the messaging and the actual work that we've done for you.

• 2:34:14Speaker 06

  But you don't have to, you don't have to start by just like manually combing through LinkedIn or manually combing through a database like Crunchbase. So we'll do all that work for you.

• 2:34:23Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. What is the sentiment like among sales leaders all the way through kind of the entry level roles, SDRs, BDRs, et cetera, just around AI broadly? I think the, there's been a lot of dialogue recently around, you know, the core challenge with a lot of AI tooling right now is this amnesia. So the, the, the model is really smart, but it can't remember sort of lessons from at any point in history. You know, there's some memory, but not the sort of hard one lessons that you get from going out and doing a hundred phone calls with customers, things like that.

• 2:35:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a really great question. So the evolution of the sentiment has changed over the years. So 2023, we started the company. There was a lot of aversion to using AI to do the end-to-end job because it just wasn't there, wasn't remotely there. Agents could sort of, you could see them coming, but we weren't in a place where it felt like that value was tangible. And so it was really in early 24 where it started to feel like the world started to believe that even as a seller, the best thing for me to do was to adopt AI to try to automate a bunch of, a bunch of what I'm doing. But to your point, exactly 24, it's been this like version 1.0 of AI where products are done. They, they can do basic research tasks for you. They can do them over and over again, but they have no context that they've done that task four times in the past. One of the things that we're really excited about that we launched a couple of months ago is something we call

• 2:35:47Speaker 06

  our observation model, which is actually this underlying primitive that looks very different than anything else that's existed. Basically, it looks like you have a memory associated with every person you've ever talked to. And that memory is not a database. It's actually a flexible set of contexts, just a big text doc, basically, that is every interaction and every piece of notable information between you and that prospect. And so as an example, let's say we're talking about perplexity. Perplexity has maybe reached out to, I don't know, Ford, Ford Automotive in the past. And they've got some record of all the sellers that they have and they've contacted them. They've gone back and forth. They may be like, maybe exchanged a few ads. All this sort of data has usually existed in a hundred different silos, but we actually built this observation model to join all that together. So you actually have one clear set of contexts. And then when Unify wants

• 2:36:32Speaker 06

  to understand, hey, what should I do next? It can ask that set of contexts. What do I know? What's the most relevant thing that I can surface right now? And let me go ahead and hit on that. And so we really see that as being the evolution of where these AI products are going to go to just make them that much, that much smarter and more powerful.

• 2:36:48John Coogan?

  It feels like one of the really like just layup use cases for artificial intelligence in a sales context is just data hydration, cleaning up the CRM. But I'm interested to hear about how high the walled gardens are in a business context. We've heard stories about Glean getting pushback from different big tech companies. And it's one of those weird things where every company says, yeah, it's your data until I want to give it to their competitor potentially that's overlapping. So what data sources are particularly like AI friendly these days? And what is the shape of the garden and the walls of that garden these days?

• 2:37:30Speaker 06

  It really depends on, I think, the overall data strategy for the company and just like what their strategy is built on. And so to give you one example, Salesforce, historically, their advantage is built on being a fairly open ecosystem. So Salesforce, the app exchange launched, call it like 10, 20 years ago at this point, has been building moats around Salesforce as people have connected tens of applications into the product. And that's sort of built the stickiness. You have 25 different products that all integrate through Salesforce that happens through this open ecosystem of connectivity. My gut says that the platforms that are built much more on open-endedness like something like a Salesforce are going to continue to remain open as that's the core value prop of the product. And that's the reason why they have a mode itself. But I think products that have historically been a little bit more walled off until you

• 2:38:15Speaker 06

  know Slack is an example of that will probably continue to stay that way and trend even more in that direction. Generally speaking, people haven't been super privy to give out Slack information. They wanted to keep that in, especially within an organization. And so I imagine we're going to see those things clamp down even further in case of point is the Glean example you brought up.

• 2:38:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you have a thesis around sales copilot type products? You can imagine this is a sales call and you're, you know, running an LLM in real time to give you the next answer. I don't think you guys have one of those in your suite of products, but I'm curious how you think about that category.

• 2:38:53Speaker 06

  It's definitely super powerful. I mean, you see what's happened with with Chloe right now, right? And what's going on?

• 2:38:57Jordi Hays?

  That's a great question.

• 2:39:01Speaker 06

  Let me just real quick. It's wild, though, and I think we're only at the beginning of that period of time. And I think the way in which people absorb information is going to dramatically change over the course of the next couple of years as we get more and more used to these products. Today, the closest that we get to that in our product is that we've got a composer for for emails and for anything you want to do in Unify. And next to that, you've got all these AI content, all these AI nuggets and AI research tidbits that we've done for you alongside that. We're generally speaking believers that the faster your product is, the more real time it is, the more addictive it is to users, the more helpful it is to users in that context, especially in a work context. And so we're going to keep pushing

• 2:39:43Speaker 06

  the product in that direction. Something like a clue is like the far flung example of that. We're not quite there yet, but I imagine the world is going to keep moving that direction.

• 2:39:51Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 2:39:52John Coogan?

  I want to talk about, I mean, your, your, your, your website's tagline is scale your revenue team's creativity. And I'm wondering if there's any sort of like, just like really creative sales solutions. Like I was talking to Sam Blonde a while back. He was working with Parker Conrad for a long time and said, like, one of the best campaigns he ever did as a sales guy, he's like a SDR for a long time, was and head of sales was like sending bottles of champagne to people because like they just open it, then they have a phone call, they have this nice thing.

• 2:40:28Jordi Hays?

  It becomes incredibly rude not to respond to the email.

• 2:40:31John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so I'm wondering about these like weird squishy, like the handwritten note. And in many ways, I feel like these creative, these creative deal closers, like the the unexpected text message from a friend who's already using the product is the thing that gets you to actually go and say, yep, I'm ready to onboard fully. I get my company on this new product. But is it, is there, are there any, are there any like world, I feel like a lot of the creativity in, in, in. Sales is specifically showing the client that I'm not using software for this. I handwritten that note. I I I sent your I got your address. I sent you a bottle of champagne.

• 2:41:12John Coogan?

  And so is the goal to more just like remove all the barriers to let the humans do the creative things? Or do you think there's a world where we can use AI tools to uh speed up those creative? Out of the box solutions that might be uniquely tailored to just this one company strategy. They're the only one that does this weird thing, but it's working and they found this alpha and they stick with it for a long time.

• 2:41:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, big fan of of Sam's and he's done a bunch of incredible outbound campaigns over the years. My thinking is that what will happen is what always the the thought behind all these things and the reason why it matters. This all comes back to taste, right? I think people and more and more are talking about taste in the world of AI. And it's all about knowing what's relevant at the time, knowing what's going to resonate with someone personally and being able to do something that feels really delightful. So it's an example, like one thing that we did as part of our fundraiser announcement today. We put out about twenty five cameos that we had custom built for everyone. We've got one for you guys on the way right now, so we'll have a tea later. But like things like that that are based off of someone's personal experience and show that you thought about it. Doesn't really matter if you use chat GPT in the brainstorming process, right?

• 2:42:17Speaker 06

  What matters is that you got the idea that originated from something special. And then the actual end delivery is the same quality you put out as a human.

• 2:42:24Speaker 04

  What the person feels.

• 2:42:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:42:26Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly. But I think ultimately today AI doesn't feel, and so it can't really use that judgment. There's a reason why, like in the world of content and in the world of the stuff that we do here. It's like you just can't AI that. It just feels bland and generic. And I think that's going to continue to be true in a sales context. What you need is a human behind the scenes who's providing that little touch of like what it means to be a person and what it means to be a friend. And so we'll continue to lean into experiences that make it easier to stay on top of those friendly experiences. But um but just get easier over time to actually execute.

• 2:42:56John Coogan?

  It's great. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I got a bunch more questions, but we'll save it for another time. Thank you for joining.

• 2:43:02John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:43:03Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the new raise.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  Get back to work, get back to the grind.

• 2:43:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you guys have a bunch of people to hire to deploy that capital.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later.

• 2:43:10Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having us, guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Cheers, Austin.

• 2:43:13John Coogan?

  In other news, Apple is reportedly planning to invest $500 million in a rare earth magnet startup. This is MP Materials. They're going to build a new recycling facility in Mountain Pass, California. Currently, they recycle rare earth, they take recycled materials and they make rare earth magnets in Texas. There's a huge Wall Street Journal profile on MP Materials and now there's news that they're working with Apple. My takeaway is that this, it shows that Tim Cook is actually thinking about long-term supply chain strategy. And it's this, it's this funny thing.

• 2:43:50Jordi Hays?

  How much do you think MP Materials is up in the past five days?

• 2:43:53John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 2:43:53Jordi Hays?

  Eighty-five percent.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Let's go. Ring the gong. Five hundred million.

• 2:43:57Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Let's do it.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Hit that gong.

• 2:43:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to warm up the gong properly.

• 2:44:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. We've gotten some notes that you must warm up a gong before you hit it. Also, hit the gold part, not the center.

• 2:44:07Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  Yes, that's what, that's what somebody said in the comments.

• 2:44:11John Coogan?

  Is that better? It's about the same. I don't know. I'm not, I don't know enough about gongs. I'm sure I'm going to be an expert in 20 years when we're still doing the show. But I thought this was interesting because, you know, Apple's a huge company. Tim Cook's a legendary operator and

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  That's correct.

• 2:44:29John Coogan?

  There's just something about being a big company that even if you're seeing, oh, the current thing on X today, everyone's talking about supply chain in China being a risk. It's going to take years to actually build up another supply chain. So this kind of tied to the reindustrialization story. There's like, you can start a new company, you can actually build something like before Apple can really like turn the massive cruise ship that is the, or the battleship or the aircraft carrier that, that the company is. But it seems like it's happening and this seemed like a huge white pill. So I was excited to talk about it. And we should, and we should dig into MP Materials more deeply soon.

• 2:45:13John Coogan?

  They're up 22%, I guess just the day that this profile came out. And it seems like a very, very exciting company. And honestly, when we were talking to the co-founder, Corey, I, you know, there's, there's this, you know, we all learned about chips and then ASML and then SK Hynix and memory. And I feel like rare earth minerals and rare earth magnets are going to be the next thing where everyone's learning about it at the same time. And a lot of people already have and they've done pieces on it, but I want to learn more.

• 2:45:45Jordi Hays?

  I could see AP doing a rare earth Royal Oak.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  That would be incredible. Yeah. Like instead of the, what was meteorite dial?

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  On the bezel, yeah.

• 2:45:53John Coogan?

  The meteorite dial, you get the rare earth.

• 2:45:55Jordi Hays?

  The rare. Go through some timeline. I'll be right back.

• 2:45:59John Coogan?

  Well, we have our next guest.

• 2:46:00Jordi Hays?

  We'll welcome Chris into the studio.

• 2:46:01John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll go through some stuff. I'll, I'll just welcome Chris in and, and get the intro from him. So, welcome to the studio, Chris. Good to see you. It's been far too long. What has it been? Over a week?

• 2:46:12Speaker 07

  Over a week. I think that sounds right. I'm excited to be here.

• 2:46:15John Coogan?

  I'm glad to have you. Kick us off with an intro and, and a little bit of an overview of the news today.

• 2:46:21Speaker 07

  Well, look, before I get started, I should say that if at any point during this interview, Windsurf gets acquired for a fourth time, cut it off and I will, there will be no hard feelings. Quick intro on me though. I've been in the valley for 15 years, working with tech companies the whole time and kind of every stage and variation and just about any role that you could think of. So I, most of my career was as, as an investor. I worked at Benchmark, working with early stage companies. Co2 focused on some later stage companies. Before then, I founded a healthcare company called Curology. And before that, I was an investment banker, working with big tech companies and helping them, taking them public and, and do M and A transactions and all that kind of stuff.

• 2:47:00John Coogan?

  Okay. We'll get into the news in a bit, maybe when Jordan gets back. But the, the question I have is like, as an investor, as a board member, there is generally a, you mentioned Windsurf, there's generally a duty to be like founder friendly. But what do you do when the founders and the employees are misaligned? Like, are you, as a board member, are you supposed to vote in favor of what's best for the whole group of founders plus employees as a class? Are you supposed to back the founder if they want to do something that's less employee friendly, vice versa? Like, this feels like the modern Debate that we're having in Silicon Valley is like the social contract is is reevaluated. How have you processed the windsurf news? What? How do you think this changes going forward?

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  What? What are the next questions that you think venture capitalists and founders need to be talking about? To make sure that, you know, when amazing deal happens, everyone's happy about it.

• 2:47:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, I think your first goal as an investor, you know, we rarely have a lot of power. We have sort of in the best case influence, but I think your first duty is to try to help the founder. Understand that what's good for the employees and what's good for everybody. Is sort of the right thing for everybody over the long term and the ecosystem and your reputation. All that stuff is really critical. And so I, I was delighted to see that everybody got to a very good outcome on this one. And I think that's, that's where it should have landed. It feels like a one plus one equals three kind of thing.

• 2:48:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it seems like, I mean, when the cognition news broke, we had been talking about like, oh, where could the remain co wind up? Maybe it lands at like a more legacy tech company like the humane team wound up at HP. And people were kind of memeing about like AI printers and stuff. And that seemed like, you know, it probably would have been a fine outcome financially, but it would have been like, okay, a lot of those people kind of need to restart their careers. And kind of get back into the high aggressive Silicon Valley, high growth startup world that they probably fell in love with. And that's why they wound up at windsurf six months ago, or 10 months ago, or 15 months ago. But with cognition, it's just a complete continuation of that aggressive takeover the world, build something new mindset.

• 2:49:06John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I agree with you. Amazing outcome for everyone involved. Obviously a tumultuous weekend, but we're glad that the plane landed.

• 2:49:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's get into some better news.

• 2:49:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49:15Jordi Hays?

  We got to talk about the new vehicle. It broke in Forbes this morning, but we're happy to have you on here today to talk about it. Give us, give us a story, give us the number, and I'm going to stand up and get ready to.

• 2:49:25John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 2:49:26Jordi Hays?

  Do something back here.

• 2:49:27Speaker 07

  So the $175 million debut fund.

• 2:49:31John Coogan?

  Let's go. Congratulations.

• 2:49:33Speaker 07

  You guys, is the gong like individually miked? Because that sounds incredible.

• 2:49:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about miked. It's got its own camera.

• 2:49:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:49:40Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, we're always working on the fidelity of the gong.

• 2:49:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49:44Jordi Hays?

  It's really important to the.

• 2:49:46John Coogan?

  Congratulations. 175 million?

• 2:49:48Speaker 07

  175 million. Stage agnostic, sector agnostic is the idea.

• 2:49:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:49:53Speaker 07

  I'll make a very small number of investments, so sort of eight to 10 core positions. A normal venture fund might have 30 or 40 positions or something like that. And the idea behind that was, my favorite part of my career was when I was just making my first few investments that were going to matter a lot for me. And because it felt like there was sort of a symmetry between what I cared about and what the founder cared about. Like for the founder, this company is their whole life. It is everything. They live and die with it. And I think one of the problems, as you get more senior as an investor, you naturally have more companies that you've invested in. Every individual company is going to matter a little bit less. And so with this vehicle, the idea was create a vehicle where structurally everything will matter to me. It's eight to 10 core investments. Every one of them is going to matter. And I'm going to work really hard on each of them.

• 2:50:35John Coogan?

  Stage agnostic, sector agnostic, still, I imagine, not an RIA, not playing in the public markets, not putting more than 20% of the fund into secondaries. Is that roughly correct? It's crazy I even have to ask that question, but we are in crazy times. Is it even possible to start an RIA at this scale? Or is that something that only the mega funds are thinking about?

• 2:51:00Speaker 07

  No, it's definitely possible. It just eats into some of your management fees. And it requires some various compliance obligations that you have to get used to. You probably have a second phone and some things that are like you hire some compliance consultants and all that kind of stuff. I had looked at it because I do like buying secondary from time to time and just decided against doing it. There's also some additional rules around how you can market the fund and stuff like that. You have to be a little bit more careful when you're in RIA. And so I decided to go the ERA route. It's a flexible vehicle, so I'll do things just kind of of any stage. I will often not be leading rounds. I'm willing to lead rounds. The idea was because I'll be so selective on the company quality, I think I have to be flexible about everything else. And so I'll try to just show up in a way that is useful and easy to work with.

• 2:51:44Jordi Hays?

  How is the concentrated strategy resonating to founders so far? I imagine it's a very real differentiator of just saying, hey, you can be one of 40 bets, or you can be one of 10, and I'm going to do everything in my power to help you win. Can see how that would resonate, but what's it been like on the ground?

• 2:52:06Speaker 07

  I think so far it's working well. You know, I have founders who text me 10 or 20 times a day. I also have founders who want to be left alone for the most part, and I'm happy to do that also. But I think so far it resonates. I like, you know, I tell every founder when I make an investment, I just want to be along for the ride, and things will be good, things will be bad. A lot of the time, they'll be difficult. You know, building companies is mostly pain, and I will just try to be someone who eases that along the way and helps you navigate the difficult moments and all that kind of stuff.

• 2:52:34Jordi Hays?

  Is there an alternate world where you launched this fund prior to Curology? And I think it's sort of funny, because if you were in that situation, you would have said, I had a non-traditional background for venture capital, and it's HBS and Co2 and Benchmark, and sort of a traditional background, but you went and did the hard thing and built a big company. But was it, did you have it in mind that I'm going to go be a founder, do this, and then come back around to venture? Or was it all just kind of an accident?

• 2:53:10Speaker 07

  I think I was always built to be an investor. I enjoy it, and there's a lot of sort of features of investing that are well-suited to me, but I just think it's kind of a rite of passage. If you haven't operated inside of a company, if you don't know what it's like when things are difficult and bad, I think it's kind of difficult to give good advice to a founder. And so I think it was an important thing for me to develop some empathy. Like, I try to understand that this is, it's one of the hardest and loneliest jobs in the world. You'll have weeks where everything is going wrong, and there's sort of, you know, playbooks for navigating each of these things that go wrong. But I think you have to have been through them before to understand how to do it, and who to call, and what the footfalls are, and that kind of stuff. And that's sort of how I thought about it.

• 2:53:48Jordi Hays?

  What was the fundraise process like? 175 million for a first fund? It's a big number, but I heard from a little birdie that you got some pretty insane LPs in this one, so it sounds like you were doing something right.

• 2:54:02Speaker 07

  I think that's, well, thank you for that. And I think it's right. The, I, it went relatively quickly. I was real lucky because I had a few LPs who were just fast and early believers and everything else sort of ended up forming around that. And so I ended up sort of many times oversubscribed and ended up with a group that I'm very, very happy about. I think most of them, I'm not allowed to say their name, but the ones that I can say are Adam Street, Common Fund, Northwestern University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a bunch of causes that I'm very excited to be working for here.

• 2:54:34John Coogan?

  That's really cool.

• 2:54:34Jordi Hays?

  It's exciting. What do you think, how do you think about investment kind of time horizon? If you have such a concentrated fund, very possible that you'll meet five companies in the next six months that you'll invest in, but it feels maybe unlikely. Maybe it's more like one a quarter, but it's hard to plan these things.

• 2:54:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, when I was raising, you know, everybody says they're going to deploy the fund in three years and then they go, they end up going a lot faster than that. And so maybe this ends up being two years or something like that, but I just don't have that many amazing ideas every year. And so I, part of the reason for the way the fund is structured is it's kind of how I like to work, that I develop a lot of conviction around something over a period of time. But then I like to have a bet that matters. I think the single most painful thing for me is if I, I find a company and I sort of am able to persuade the founder, I'm able to win the right to invest and it ends up working and it still doesn't matter in a material way for my limited partners. That's, that's something that I think is, is something I don't want to deal with. And so I, that's the reason for the sort of bigger bets, the concentrated strategy.

• 2:55:39Speaker 07

  And that, that requires, I think, going a little bit slower also because there just aren't that many companies that, that will meet the bar.

• 2:55:47Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 2:55:48John Coogan?

  I have a question about venture markets generally loosely in the context of, of windsurf, but I'm wondering if It feels like right now the labs are on a buying spree, not just OpenAI and Anthropic, but DeepMind, and you could see acquisitions happening all over the place. And it, one framework to think about it is that they're all just buying call options. Anyone who's got a unique technical direction or unique technical talent, the labs are just happy to pay any price because maybe it's 1% of infinity if you solve superintelligence, or maybe it's, hey, we already have, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has a massive business in, you know, delivering ads. If you make that 1% better, you've added $10 billion

• 2:56:33John Coogan?

  to the market cap. So what's a couple billion in acquisitions going out the door? Totally makes economic sense. But my question is, is, does this change venture capital underwriting at any particular stage? Like, it feels like you really want to be backing, I guess, teams that could be, you know, aqua hire talent because it gives you this like liquidity option, but then maybe the real alpha is finding the

• 2:57:02Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, very

• 2:57:03John Coogan?

  founders who are on missions or something.

• 2:57:04Jordi Hays?

  If you look at the capital deployed into Windsurf,

• 2:57:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:07Jordi Hays?

  obviously, the majority of the capital didn't get a tremendous return, despite it being a big headline number.

• 2:57:14John Coogan?

  Is that just because Green Oaks was the seed and they

• 2:57:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm just saying like, the majority of the capital came later, and then I think it was probably at somewhere around a billion.

• 2:57:24John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. I don't know. But yeah, I mean,

• 2:57:26Speaker 07

  I think on the underwriting question, I think in the history of our industry, there was always like a hard and fast rule that you always backed one company in a space. There was always going to be one winner. And then I think as the markets have gotten progressively bigger, and you know, there's like one winner in search for a long time, and one winner in operating systems. And as the markets got bigger and bigger, you started to have like two-player markets. Like you have iOS and you have Android, and then they got bigger, and you have three-player markets, and you have, you know, the cloud, AWS, and GCP, and Azure. And I think AI is going to be the biggest market of all of these. And I think one of the ways that it changes underwriting is that there's probably going to be more winners in each space than we expect. And I think you see this a little bit with Cursor and with Windsurf, and you see some like really high-quality companies.

• 2:58:10Speaker 07

  I also think it changes underwriting because it feels like M&A is coming back a little bit. And I think there's sort of some, a cause for optimism around that.

• 2:58:17John Coogan?

  It's great. Anything else?

• 2:58:18Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. No, join any, join any boards recently? I don't know if you can talk, talk about that kind of thing?

• 2:58:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Joined the board of perplexity recently.

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:58:28Jordi Hays?

  There we go. I wanted to give you an off ramp there in case you weren't ready to talk about it.

• 2:58:34Speaker 07

  The product I use 20 times a day and a half since it came out for investment research and everything else and one of the best executing teams I've ever been around. So I'm very excited to be a part of the effort.

• 2:58:44John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, we love Arvind.

• 2:58:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I find myself using it every time we record.

• 2:58:49Speaker 07

  Yep. You guys got to try the browser if you haven't.

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  We, we, we demoed it live on the stream. Tyler, our intern, used the perplexity comet browser. Had some good feedback for it. It was good.

• 2:59:00Speaker 07

  Amazing.

• 2:59:01Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, congratulations, I would say to the full partnership, but you are the full partnership. Is that correct? Are you going to be, are you going to be adding anybody to the team?

• 2:59:09Speaker 07

  Just me and head of operations.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:59:11Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Bet on yourself. Love it. Awesome, Chris. Well, congratulations. Thanks for coming on. I'm sure we'll have you back.

• 2:59:17Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me. We'll see you guys.

• 2:59:19John Coogan?

  Good seeing you. We'll talk to you soon. And we have our next guest already here in the waiting room. Dick Lucas.

• 2:59:27Jordi Hays?

  He had a video going viral today. There he is.

• 2:59:31John Coogan?

  Wow, look at that background. How you doing?

• 2:59:35Speaker 08

  I'm good. I'm good. How are you guys doing?

• 2:59:37Jordi Hays?

  Looking sharp in the suit.

• 2:59:38John Coogan?

  You look like you haven't changed since the viral video.

• 2:59:41Speaker 08

  I, I know, I know. Actually, I, my shirts are, my shirts are dirty. This one's not. So this is the same outfit, same pin as well. So congrats on the success of the show. It's been awesome to watch you guys cook. So thank you for fitting me in today. Appreciate it.

• 2:59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for hopping on.

• 2:59:56Jordi Hays?

  I saw your name for the first time this morning when you started going viral. Great silhouette on the video. You look like you're in the Palisades somewhere. Where, where are you, just give, give us the full history on yourself and, and maybe what, what inspired you to get involved in politics or mud wrestling, as we call it?

• 3:00:16Speaker 08

  Awesome. Well, I think it really starts in, uh, it starts in high school when I got my first computer, in the dig.com days. That's when I got really into technology, um, and got really into software and saw this whole boom taking off. I was like, this stuff's really cool. Um, I didn't think computer science, I thought that was only for smart people. So I didn't declare my major for CS until sophomore year of college. Like, it was allowed, I was a history minor. I was like, you know, I'm gonna just do the CS thing. It kicked my ass, but, but I, but I got through. You can get a bachelor art of arts in computer science, if you can believe that. And that's what I got. Um, so I have a long belief in, in, in, in technology. And then from there, um, started doing software stuff. I was an Android developer for several years. So I was in the code mines, um, started in agency with, with a homie, uh, with Sawyer.

• 3:01:00Speaker 08

  And now we're, um, uh, yeah, we're cooking on that. And what inspired this really is, is I was creating voter guides. I was like, okay, California's obviously run, run horribly. If, maybe if I just read all what the candidates are saying and go deep on like, you know, who's running for water board, who's running for this, who's running for that. And actually, no one even knows what a state assembly person is. I'm running for state assembly. Most people don't even know what that means. So I'm like, okay, if I go and like, look at these candidates, there's gotta be people that are out there that are good. Um, and I'm going through these campaign websites and I, they don't even, they barely even say what they believe. There's no competition. There's not even debates at these local levels. And I'm just like, there is a huge opportunity here for someone that is willing to just get themselves in the game, put a couple of videos out there, say some common sense stuff and

• 3:01:45Speaker 08

  shake things up. So, uh, that's, that was really the inspiration. Um, and, uh, uh,

• 3:01:51Jordi Hays?

  So what, tell us what, uh, tell us what running for state assembly means. What, what is the role that you would like? What does that look like? And then what are the, what's the process to get there?

• 3:02:02Speaker 08

  Okay. So the primaries in June, it's in June of, uh, June of 26, excuse me, June of this year. Um, and, uh, excuse me, next, June of 26. So there's 80 assembly members, right? In, in California. Each state has something different, but it's basically like a mini senate and a mini house of representatives, just like the federal government. So you have 80 assembly people and you have 40 state senators. And unlike, uh, you know, in California, there's 80 districts. I'm in the 51st District, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Westwood, other parts of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and each district has Assemblymen and then each, and then there's also state senators as well. So, same thing in federal government, there's stuff that comes out of the Senate, state senate, there's stuff that comes out of the state assembly, and that's how legislation

• 3:02:45Speaker 08

  gets passed, that's how the machine works. And right now, what we've seen is, it's basically one-party state. Now, I'm not, I think the left has good ideas, I think the right has good ideas, I think that there's opportunities on both sides. The problem is when you lack competition in a system, which is what we have in California, it becomes sick, it becomes ill. I mean, we see this in every single institution or system since the dawn of time. You need to compete, there needs to be pressure on the system, or it collapses from within. And that's what we're seeing in California. We're starting to see a small shift, I'd say, but you know what, what really broke the camel's back for me was, fires happened, and people wouldn't even hear about the wildfires in the Palisades, the eating fire out where I grew up. People wouldn't even hear, they wouldn't even want to listen if you said,

• 3:03:28Speaker 08

  "Yo, maybe we could have done some things better." Like, the Santa Yanez reservoir that went dry in the Palisades was down for eight months. I talked to, I talked to a state senator, I went to a meetup with him, I was like, I was like, "Bro, what happened there?" He said, "Well, it's unclear how much that would have actually helped." It's like, dude, if it helped 5%, if it helped 10%, if it helped 50%, like, you couldn't even really have a discussion about it. And I said, "Okay, this is, the, the system itself is, is, is completely sick." Where, where we had a whole bunch of stuff burned down, our mayor in Los Angeles was gone on a trip, we had fire hydrants go dry, and, and people, even in my network, people didn't even want to talk about it. So, I guess the only way to talk about it, you gotta run.

• 3:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, I love it, taking action. We, we covered the fires, we, John and I are both here in LA. Uniquely, John lives in Pasadena, I live in Malibu. We both had to get out of town for a while. I missed a show, John was covering one day, it was really the only show I missed this year. But yeah, but the, the, my reaction to the fires, it seemed like there was a lot of excitement around clearing PCH, because that was the thing that was most obviously a reminder of the competency of the government, and so, but that's only- Very small percentage of what the overall response should look like.

• 3:04:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious, do you know who your real competition is?

• 3:04:53Speaker 08

  Yes, I do. Yeah. A Democrat, he's been in the machine for several years. And that's the other thing, looking at these people, what they've done. A lot of these people.

• 3:05:04Speaker 08

  With, I'll have this audience, if you are considering running, you should run for office. You should look at who your local person is and you should run because, not you two, all your listeners, but you two as well. Because you look at their website, you look at their CV, you look what they've done. A lot of these guys are community organizers. I still don't know what that means. And also people, they're lawyers, or they're people that haven't built anything or created any job. So it's like, this, all my smartest friends, no one even thinks, and I'm sure it's the same with you guys, no one even thinks about going into politics. So it's like, if you, if all the people that are smart or driven in your network aren't going in to politics, who is going into politics? Well, we see players, basically.

• 3:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 3:05:41John Coogan?

  What's at the top of the stack in terms of low hanging fruit? You get in, what do you want to push on? What do you want to change? What are the most exciting or like tractable problems that you think you could?

• 3:05:53Speaker 08

  I think the biggest thing that is resonating right now is the cost of housing. You know, there's the phrase, it's the economy is stupid and obviously we need to work on that too. But housing in California is 100% the national average, same with our, same with our gas prices. Our gas, utility prices, gasoline is the highest in the country, as you know.

• 3:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Which is not a, which is not partially due to the market, but also due to just massive taxes that the government has voted to apply to every gallon.

• 3:06:23John Coogan?

  Oh, for gasoline, yeah.

• 3:06:24Jordi Hays?

  So you drive across the border, it's not like a supply and demand thing as much as it is.

• 3:06:29Speaker 08

  Or a top eight oil producing state, it had the highest, the highest gas price in the country. It doesn't make any sense. There's obviously, there's also some good things that we want clean gas. So California puts a lot of, you know, restrictions on refiner, refiners. You know, they want to pay for the top quality clean gas. So we don't have, we don't have, you know, Smoky Valleys and it doesn't look horrible like it did in the 60s. So I get all that, but it's completely out of whack. So the other but housing, we need to, we need to make, we need to make it easier to build. They did just pass, the Dems did just pass something and I tried to understand it. You can go read the, you know, alleged, you can read these bills and like, they, they talked about it as a big win, but it's, it's, it's difficult to even understand what's going on like, in terms of what they got done, you know, they, they're making it easier to build now recently as of like July 3rd,

• 3:07:14Speaker 08

  near transit areas. And you go read the bill and it's like, 30 pages of, is like, is this making it easier? Why isn't it just say, like, you can build here. If you own the land, you can build here. Like this is, it's completely out of whack. So, um, we have a supply problem here. We need to just make it a whole lot easier to build. And, you know, there's people talking about freezing the rents. We can do better than, the funny thing is, is the people that lie to you will say, oh, we're going to freeze the rents for everyone. That's not even that good. We can do better than freeze the rents. We can actually lower if you add supply. And we've seen this in Austin. We've seen this in other cities. And my view is there's 50 different experiments going on everywhere in our country. Every state, you just look at what works. Where are prices coming down? Where are businesses going? And you just follow. Yeah. So it's like, we have the tools right here. I, I,

• 3:07:58Speaker 08

  I don't, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I know that I have a lot of respect for people in technology because I think they're epic. I think they're smart. I think they, they raise the standard of living for everyone. And I'm not going to, you know, invent the next nuclear reactor, whatever. So I'm looking at this. I'm like, this is an opportunity that I can actually, you know, I'm smart enough. And it's like, we have 50 experiments. Let's follow what works and let's just do it.

• 3:08:18John Coogan?

  How can people support you? How do people, like who, who are your constituents? Who will actually be voting for you? So it doesn't sound like it's just everyone.

• 3:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you cover, are you going to be covering the gundo or is that out of range?

• 3:08:30Speaker 08

  No, it's out of reach. It's out of reach. Unfortunately, I'm going to be, you know, to represent those guys, but, um, dicklucas.com, uh, my biggest following is on X. Damn, you got me sweating, boys. I'm fired up. Um,

• 3:08:42Speaker 08

  yeah, dicklucas.com stoked on that. Um, uh, yeah, I'm not taking any money right now. We're just going to see what noise we can make. The people that will vote for me are the people, like I said, in my district.

• 3:08:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:51Speaker 08

  And I don't, I think very few of those people have seen this viral video. So, I want to do two things. I want to get the word out with you guys and with technology people, the people in my network. And the second thing is ground game. I gotta knock on doors. I gotta, I gotta talk to people. Now that I have a website, my video up, I'm gonna just go door to door and be like, yo, let's, let's talk. Let's, I, I actually want to hear what, what people, obviously, what's their biggest concern.

• 3:09:12John Coogan?

  When you say knock on doors, do you mean literally knock on doors?

• 3:09:15Speaker 08

  Yes. Yes. Door knocking is very effective in these local races. You just have to, you just have to do it. Like, yeah.

• 3:09:21John Coogan?

  How many, how many doors? Yeah. Do you have to, you have to quantify how many doors it is? Break it down, I guess.

• 3:09:25Speaker 08

  Well, I think there's a hundred, there's a thou, I think my district's 490,000 people, something like that, or eligible voters, something like that. So it's pretty big.

• 3:09:32John Coogan?

  Couple hundred thousand, you do, you know, uh, yeah, I mean, you got what, 300 a day? Okay. You can, you can go through a bunch of those. You do the math.

• 3:09:40Speaker 08

  I mean, it's huge. And I'm gonna be working while I'm doing this. So it's like, I'm gonna do, and I have a kid coming in November. So I'm like, let's just see what kind of noise we can make. And, uh, yeah, I'm excited to, uh, to start knocking on doors. And let's just see what we can do. Technology is the only, technology is the only way you get more for less. There is nothing else. Yeah, you can make processes better, but fundamentally, that's the only thing that you, where you get more for less. It's the only thing that raises standard of living for everyone. So I don't know why people have such an aversion to it. I'm just trying to be like, this isn't left or right. Let's just, let's implement things that make our life better and make everyone more rich and prosperous. I love it.

• 3:10:12Jordi Hays?

  I love it. Yeah. California, despite, uh, you know, shooting ourself in the foot over and over and over for decades, it's still amazing place to live. So, uh, let's just, you know, uh, stop shooting ourself in the foot.

• 3:10:25Speaker 08

  Hundred percent. I think we can, I think we can have a bigger economy than China. I mean, straight up. We can be, let's go second. Everyone, Newsom, fourth. We're top four, we're top five. And yeah, we are. Not because of you. I think we can, let's just, let's do this. It's possible. Let's do it.

• 3:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, have you met Gavin Newsom?

• 3:10:39John Coogan?

  You gotta get on the pod.

• 3:10:40Speaker 08

  No, I have, I have not. I have not.

• 3:10:41John Coogan?

  You, you gotta reach out to him, get him, get on his podcast, because he's had all sorts of people. So that probably.

• 3:10:46Speaker 08

  I know. I don't think I'm big time enough for him yet. But I think now that I've done this, I'll send you, I'll send him this link and he'll say, okay, I, I know it. I know what Jordi and John are doing. Okay. Yeah, come on.

• 3:10:56Jordi Hays?

  It's time. It's time. Well, thank you for doing this. It is truly a sacrifice. It is, uh, it is gonna be an absolute slog, but it's worth doing. And, uh, somebody's gotta step up and do it. And it can start in your district. And, uh, we'll have to have you back on as, as the campaign gets closer.

• 3:11:11Speaker 08

  Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for having me on. Really, really do appreciate it. Thank you so much.

• 3:11:16John Coogan?

  Well, thank you. Good luck.

• 3:11:17Speaker 08

  Bye.

• 3:11:18Jordi Hays?

  What a sign of respect, joining with a suit with the flag.

• 3:11:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:11:22Jordi Hays?

  He checked both boxes. A lot of people bring the suit, they don't bring the flag.

• 3:11:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:28Jordi Hays?

  And he should get a California flag up there, too.

• 3:11:30John Coogan?

  That'd be great, yeah. The bear, we love the California.

• 3:11:32Jordi Hays?

  What else we got? We got some timeline?

• 3:11:34John Coogan?

  So, Michael Truell, the founder of Cursor, released a very cinematic, kind of like a podcast conversation with Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe. And it's very cool, for a few reasons, but it has the aesthetics of the Johnny Ive, Sam Altman video.

• 3:11:55Jordi Hays?

  So you just immediately assumed?

• 3:11:57John Coogan?

  Immediately, I was like, oh, there's a deal, they're acquiring Cursor. And I don't, that's not the news, I don't even think there's a rumor, but there's something about when you film two CEOs walking into a coffee shop with cinema cameras, I just permanently think acquisition now, thanks to Sam Altman. But I didn't get a chance to listen to this whole thing, I'm definitely going to, it's gonna be, it's like a full hour, 45 minutes or something. Seems very cool, I love these kind of conversations. And I think this is like, an interesting untapped media product, where it's not Cursor starting a podcast, it's just a one-off, really cool thing between two CEOs and they're...

• 3:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're not making a commitment of putting out a video like this once a week.

• 3:12:41John Coogan?

  No, it's just like...

• 3:12:42Jordi Hays?

  You know, a couple of times a month.

• 3:12:43John Coogan?

  They're, yeah, they're just like both technical CEOs, and so you look at the list of topics, it's like, writing your first startup in small talk, Lisp, chatbots, Brett Victor and dynamic land, Coinbase's, Codebase's Big Bang moment, and MongoDB, rewriting Stripe, how do you, Patrick Collison, use AI? Changes to GDP, slash total factor productivity, unexpected beneficiaries of AI. So they're just having like, the conversation that they probably have when they just hang out and get dinner together, but they're just recording it with cinema cameras, and great audio, in a coffee shop, and then just putting it on the internet. And I think this is a very interesting new, new form of like going direct.

• 3:13:26John Coogan?

  It's like, it really helps me understand who Patrick is, and who Michael is. And it's in this like, they're both insiders, they can just have the conversation they want to have. I feel like this is great for both of them for recruiting. I don't know. I was just like, I haven't watched the full thing, but it just felt like a cool new modality of like, content in the startup world. So, aside from the confusion about potential acquisition announcement, it seemed really, really cool. And I was excited to see it go out. So, go give it a watch if you're looking to spend 45 minutes hanging out with two absolute,

• 3:14:06John Coogan?

  amazing CEOs talking about AI and coding. In other news, Andreessen Horowitz managing partner Scott Kapor has been traded to the US Office of Personal Management.

• 3:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Potentially poached.

• 3:14:20John Coogan?

  Potentially poached. No.

• 3:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Of course not. This, I'm sure had been in the works for a while.

• 3:14:25John Coogan?

  This was leaked or announced. I think it was announced. I think he passed confirmation or something. But very exciting news for Scott. Congratulations.

• 3:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Going to the government is not very sexy. It's not high status. But like Dick just said, it's important. Smart people have to step up and make sacrifices to serve their city, county, state, country, etc.

• 3:14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. We applaud him. The AI war has opened a new front on Wall Street. We've talked to a number of founders that are building AI tools for Wall Street. And today, AI giant Anthropic announced the launch of Claude for financial services. Finance is a natural fit for AI, given the reams of structured data, says Nick. The industry processes, the big platforms are focusing more and more on fintech products. Anthropic already signed Bridgewater and S&P Global. It's here for Anthropic. And we saw earlier that Devon got hired at Goldman Sachs. He loved to see that.

• 3:15:25Jordi Hays?

  At Citi. Was it Citi?

• 3:15:26John Coogan?

  Both.

• 3:15:26Jordi Hays?

  And Goldman?

• 3:15:27John Coogan?

  Both. And yes, so Kaplan, the president of cognition, I believe that's his title. He said, like, this was the news that we were hoping to launch on Monday. We had this all queued up that we did this big deal with Citi. We're very excited about this, but no one saw it because we were, you know, acquiring the current thing. And that became the story, but that was very exciting. So all the big AI companies are figuring out how they can plug in to the big Wall Street companies.

• 3:15:54Jordi Hays?

  And there's some more, there's going to be some big launches and announcements this week from some of these labs. And we will be covering them as soon as they're ready to share more.

• 3:16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:09Jordi Hays?

  TBPN was in the ringer this morning.

• 3:16:12John Coogan?

  Thank you to Katie Bakes.

• 3:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Talking about the AI trade wars and tying them into sports, which we know nothing about. But it was cool to see Katie break that down. And then in other news, Shane Copeland over at Polymarket says, eight months ago on election night, we were on top of the world after Polymarket called the election. Eight days later, the FBI broke down my door at 6 a.m. and took all of my computers and phones, looking for anything that could imply foul play. While traumatic, it etched the story of Polymarket's accuracy and ensuing resistance into the history of American politics. And today, I'm happy to announce that this chapter of the story is over. After cooperating and engaging, we've been cleared of any wrongdoing. Justice prevailed. God bless America.

• 3:16:58Jordi Hays?

  And of course, Polymarket probe ended by Department of Justice and win for crypto bets under Trump. So.

• 3:17:04John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Very cool for Shane. I think we were live recording when the news broke that he'd been raided. But we were not live yet. Like, we weren't actually live. So we were recording.

• 3:17:17John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:17:17Jordi Hays?

  And we got off the show and we looked and we were like, wow, that's insane.

• 3:17:20John Coogan?

  Well, I have one last post. Do you have anything else you want to go through, Jordy? Or can I close it out? A councilman has been charged with petty theft. After allegedly removing a Palantir advertisement from the baggage claim area at Friedman Memorial Airport, Tripp Hutchinson pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he will face up to one year in county jail and a $1,000 fine.

• 3:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so did he take this because he wanted it for his garage?

• 3:17:42John Coogan?

  Game worn. It's a game worn out of home ad. And he must be an out of home ad fan.

• 3:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Maxi.

• 3:17:47John Coogan?

  He must be a huge Palantir fan. And I think it's a, I think it's probably a, just a honest mistake. But I, I, I think all these great out of home ads, they should find a resting place with, they should be auctioned off and you should be able to get them.

• 3:18:02Jordi Hays?

  We should put them on our walls.

• 3:18:03John Coogan?

  We should be able to adorn them on our walls. So if you run a great out of home ad, put it, put it up in the airport, you're, you're, you're taking it down. Send it to us.

• 3:18:11Jordi Hays?

  We'll throw it up here in the Ultra Dome.

• 3:18:13John Coogan?

  In the Ultra Dome. And we will see you tomorrow in the Ultra Dome.

• 3:18:16Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait.

• 3:18:17John Coogan?

  At 11 a.m. Pacific sharp.

• 3:18:19Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for being here.

• 3:18:20John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And thank you for watching today.

• 3:18:23Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:18:24John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye.