OpenAI Acquires TBPN

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:14) - OpenAI Acquires TBPN (21:42) - Artemis II Reactions (30:29) - The One-Man $1B Company (41:50) - Timeline Reactions (46:39) - Best Quarter for Big Deals Ever (54:26) - Private Credit's Evangelist Under Fire (01:03:47) - Apple at 50 (01:24:48) - Marc Lore, an American entrepreneur and investor, is renowned for founding Diapers.com and Jet.com, both of which were acquired by Amazon and Walmart, respectively. In the conversation, he discusses his journey from investment banking to launching these e-commerce ventures, highlighting his innovative approaches to logistics and customer experience. He also shares insights into his latest venture, Wonder, a food delivery startup aiming to revolutionize the industry by integrating technology and culinary expertise. (01:54:33) - Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike and host of the Adversary Universe podcast, discusses the recent surge in software supply chain attacks, emphasizing the role of developers in securing their code and the importance of multi-factor authentication to protect against identity-based threats. He highlights the increasing sophistication of adversaries, such as North Korean groups targeting developers to steal cryptocurrencies for funding weapons programs. Meyers also underscores the necessity for organizations to monitor suspicious behaviors at endpoints and during build processes to detect and prevent potential security breaches. (02:07:16) - Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, has a background in founding and leading technology companies, including Allaire Corporation and Brightcove. In the conversation, he discusses the expansion of Circle's platform beyond its stablecoin USDC, highlighting the development of the ARK operating system and the company's focus on simplifying payments and providing infrastructure for developers. He also emphasizes the growing role of USDC in agent-to-agent economic transactions, noting its dominance in this emerging market and the potential for exponential growth as AI agents increasingly engage in financial activities. (02:32:05) - Justin Levine, co-founder and CEO of Shepherd, an AI-native insurance company focusing on large-scale industries like construction and renewable energy, discusses the current construction super cycle driven by AI infrastructure, highlighting a $400 billion infrastructure spend this year alone. He explains Shepherd's role in providing insurance solutions to developers and contractors involved in building data centers and energy assets, emphasizing their innovative approach to underwriting and risk management. Levine also details Shepherd's recent $42 million Series B funding led by Intact Private Capital, underscoring the industry's recognition of the transformative impact of AI on underwriting processes. (02:40:27) - Gaurav Misra, CEO of Mirage, discusses the company's recent $75 million funding round aimed at expanding their AI-driven video editing app, Captions, into new markets, particularly in Asia. He emphasizes their unique approach of combining user-generated media with AI-generated content to create cohesive narratives, catering to small businesses and individuals seeking to market themselves effectively. Misra also highlights plans to broaden the app's use cases beyond simple captioning, focusing on automating various video editing tasks to attract a diverse user base. (02:49:46) - Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, discusses the company's recent $170 million Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, making it the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history. He outlines plans to build a constellation of 88,000 satellites, aiming to deploy 20 gigawatts of compute capacity in space, and highlights collaborations with Nvidia on space-optimized chips and the development of deployable radiators for thermal management. Johnston also emphasizes the potential of space-based data centers to alleviate terrestrial energy constraints by harnessing continuous solar power. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBPN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, April 2nd, 2026. We are live.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  It is 364 days until April Fool's.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  Yes, that's right. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have some huge news. This is from the OpenAI blog. OpenAI Acquires TBPN, Accelerating the Global Conversation About AI. This is not an April Fool's joke. April Fool's was yesterday. We didn't do anything for April Fool's Day. This is real. This is a very interesting deal. I think a lot of people will be interested in this. We're very excited about this. We have a bunch of context and information to share about how this changes things, what changes, what doesn't. I'm sure there's a million questions. We're gonna try and get to them all. But then we also have a huge normal show.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Normal show. We got Mark Lor.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  That's the first thing that's not changing. TBPN's not going away. We're gonna be live every day, three hours, as long as we want. We have a lot of flexibility. We're gonna do a lot of interesting things. We got Mark Lor, the LeBron James of e-commerce. This is from his Wikipedia page. We can pull up the, if you are calling me right now, I can't pick up because I'm live. And I think you know-

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it might be time to turn off the phones.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  I think, yes, it might be time to turn off the phones.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very strange. I think this is maybe the first time in history there's been a deal like this, and then two people that are a part of it have to go and talk for three hours straight. But it's technology, business, as usual, over here.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  We have a fun show for you today. We'll get into the news in a second, but we have Adam Meyers coming on from CrowdStrike-

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  -to talk about all the recent hacks-

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Axios hack and-

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  More. We have Jeremy from Circle coming on-

• 1:43John Coogan?

  In person.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  In person, which is exciting to talk about.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Third time on the show, talking about stablecoins.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Justin from Shepard, Garav from Mirage, and then Philip from-

• 1:51John Coogan?

  StarCloud.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  StarCloud.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Lots of space news.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  The week.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  We're very excited about the Artemis 2 mission going successfully. Hopefully you all watched it. It was a lot of fun. We were watching it here on the, on the screen, and we were gripped as the rocket took off because-

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were, we were so locked in, we were joking around that it should have, it felt like it should have been a pay-per-view.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Like, could we turn space into a profit center for the government?

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Somebody was saying that it was not entertaining. I was extremely entertained. I don't know.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  Maybe they could do more, but.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  NASA has a decent e-commerce business too. We were watching, they were selling like 10,000 patches a minute or something like that.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we were, we were doing the back of the envelope just from the main call to action at the bottom of the YouTube stream. They were selling a patch for, I don't know, tens of dollars and they'd sold like hundreds of thousands of them. So as we were watching, they were selling like something like $10 million worth of merch. Um, so maybe go get some for yourself. Anyway, let's go over to PGC Mo's post on the OpenAI blog. Uh, she shared this message with the company earlier today. She says, I'm excited to share that we've acquired TBPN. This acquisition brings a team of strong editorial instincts, deep audience, understanding and proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business and culture. That's.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm still gonna be hitting the soundboard.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, you are. Um, uh, TBPN has built something pretty special. It's one of the places where the conversations about AI and builders is actually happening day to day. A lot of you already watch it and rely on it to stay close to what's going on. As I've been thinking about the future of how we communicate in OpenAI, one thing that's become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us. We're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift and the mission of bringing, uh, and with the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes a responsibility to help create a space for real constructive conversation about the changes AI creates with builders and people using the

• 3:47John Coogan?

  technology at the center. And that's exactly what TBPN has built, which is what I was gonna say is the next line. Um, that is a huge part of the show is making sense of what's going on, how these tools are actually being used. All of the implications, we've gone all over the place and we will continue to go all over the place.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And over the last, over the last year, like, you know, multiple years, there's just been so, there's so much uncertainty about AI. I don't think we can change that.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but there's also a lot of fear. Just talking through it with the people that are actually helping diffuse AI through the economy across every single industry is something that. We've enjoyed a tremendous amount and is exactly what we're going to continue to do if you want to continue.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, so she says, so rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense just to bring them in, support what they're doing and help them scale while keeping what makes them special. A core part of this is editorial independence. We can say whatever we want because we're live and we don't need to run anything through anyone.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  It's not possible.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  It is. It would be very difficult to have somebody here. Can we say this? I'm about to say a sentence. TBPN will continue to run their programming, choose their own guests and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility and it's something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. And also, we were never in the scoop industry. People were kind of asking like, is this journalism? Is it commentary? I think we've always been like, hey, we like to talk to a lot of people, have a conversation, bring in people.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and even when companies have approached us and said, we'll give you the exclusive. We don't.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll say, give it to somebody else.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  It's like, hey, you can come on the show.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  We got a golden scoop.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  But we actually want you to go talk to the Journal.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Or the Times.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Or Bloomberg.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Or wherever, Bloomberg, et cetera.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  Wherever you want to go.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  And then come and contextualize it with us and let us dig in and understand more about the strategy. And so, TBPN will continue running their programming, choose their guests and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility and something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. We got lots of ideas and we're very excited for this. They've helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed. Did you see about me? I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show to innovate on how we bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology on their daily lives.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  TBPN will sit within our strategy organization, reporting to Chris LaHaine. Really excited to welcome Jordy, John, Dylan and the broader team. And here's a statement from you. Do you want to read this? What did you say?

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  Over the past year, we've had a front row seat, not just to OpenAI, but to the entire ecosystem, covering the daily news announcements and launches in real time. While we've been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam, Fiji and the OpenAI team, what stood out the most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right. Moving from commentary to real impact and how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us. So.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  I contextualize it a little bit more shared. You know, a lot of people are like, is this an April Fools joke? I've been saying expect the unexpected. This is a plot twist. I'll give you that. It was unexpected. It was unexpected to me. But I'm really happy about it. And when I reflect on my career, it's, I think it makes a lot of sense. And I can walk you through some of my career and my experience with OpenAI and with Sam Altman. The, I've known Sam for maybe 13 years. He invested in my first company in 2013. And then we got in a really serious log jam during a financing. And I wrote him an email. I told this story in Bloomberg a couple of years ago. I wrote him an email and said like, hey, like this is getting really rough. I'm a first time founder.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  I don't know if we're going to be able to get this done. And he called me and we hopped on the phone for like five minutes and he was able to completely resolve everything and everyone walked out of the deal feeling pretty good. And so that always left this impression on me that like he was founder friendly. Obviously, he didn't. In this particular case, it was to my benefit, not particularly to his benefit, the way the deals, the way the deal like wound out. And, and he was just a great, a great addition to the, to the negotiation and really.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  And you were very young at the time.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  You were just a wee lad.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  I was.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  You were about 23, 24, something in that range.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then when I took my second company through YC, he was president at the time. And then when I joined Founders Fund, the very first deal that I saw in motion at Founders Fund was the post ChatGPT round in OpenAI in late 2022, early 2023. And so I sort of had this like front row seat to all of this. And then, once we actually started growing TBPN, he was one of the first people that I texted to, you know, say, hey, do you want to come on the show? And he was the first lab lead to come on the show. And we're excited to continue having him on the show, hopefully have other lab leads on the show, have other people from all over the industry. And just generally, I think that.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  When I was at Founder's Fund, I was not particularly in the weeds of intra-venture capital fights. I was much more interested in the conversation around technological stagnation, not funding companies, not making great companies happen. I never was in a situation where I was like, oh, like if a different VC firm backs a great company, that's bad, you know? And I think that's the same philosophy that I have always taken forward and will continue to believe in, which is that like the American AI industry is the most important thing and that will continue to be the case. And I'm excited for all the different competition and everything that's happening in the industry to continue

• 9:31John Coogan?

  and yeah, push further. Jordy, did you have anything else to say?

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  I just wanted to say some thank yous because a lot of people have been a part of this journey to date. It's been, I think, something like, let me do the math here.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  496 days, roughly 16 months since we put out the first episode. It was just the two of us and Ben, sitting in a room, couple cameras, a couple microphones. And I will just say, I didn't know this special of a business relationship was possible between you and me. Like, I think like, if you look back on that almost 500 days, we've had disagreements around strategy or approaches or things like that. But we have like, almost universally stayed perfectly aligned on everything that matters every single day, every step of the way.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  And I think that's somewhat of a miracle, given that we went into this not really knowing what it would become.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, we did like one side project together and it took like eight months and it was like not, it was like successful, but it was not like, oh yeah, like, okay. We were, we were working together daily for months, you know? It was a lot of just, just jumping and leap of faith, right?

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think we've got this question so many times, like, do you guys get sick of each other? You know, you just have to talk to each other for three hours a day and like, I've said this before, I'll say it again. And it is actually hilarious, the second that we leave the office, we both get in the car, we call each other, we end up talking for like another hour. On the way home and so it's just been, it's been the privilege of a lifetime to just build this business with you and the whole team. The team has been absolutely incredible. You guys are all truly amazing and this very much is a, this very much is a team, like

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  a team sport, like business is a team sport, but this is like a live team sport. We come in here every single day and the show doesn't happen if we don't all come in and make it happen. And so the consistency of the team has been just incredible and watching everyone's individual talents just flourish has been incredible. A lot of people came into this, you know, having done a thing or two in the past, but learning new things. Brandon has been absolutely incredible, just an absolute rock in the organization. Brandon, if you're

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  not familiar, writes our newsletter every day and is just remarkably consistent and has like, you know, helped us shape our editorial approach and it's been incredible. Dylan, who joined us, I guess technically Q4 of last year, you know, I'd worked with him at my last company, but is truly, truly one of a kind, remarkable. I never want to, I never want to do business without him. And he has just done such an exceptional job working off air. It's like, you know, challenging when you're building a company and you're also having to put on a live performance for three hours every day.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  He wrote the newsletter yesterday.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  The op-ed, he wrote the op-ed.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Ben, Ben, who's been here since.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  Since before TBPN, he was working with me on my YouTube channel. When did we start working together?

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  I was here before Jordy.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Maybe like, uh, wait, mid 2024, maybe, something like that?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Sounds right.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  I understand videos.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we traveled a lot, a lot of Pelican cases.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's been, it's been absolutely incredible to watch you grow, uh, from, from an, an extremely talented individual into a very capable, uh, and talented manager and, and building out a team of people that are so hardworking and wonderful and, uh, you know, Michael, Scott, Jackson, you guys, uh, you know, are so, uh, you know, such a joy to, to work with, even though what we do is, uh, is not easy and it's changing, you know, day to day.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, to all the guests, seriously, it's been, it's been so much fun. Like, uh, if, if you went back and rewound to the beginning of, of the show to, to, we, we started with no guests. We did something like 50 episodes without any guests. Uh, we thought that, uh, there was a time that we thought we would just do that forever. Cause that was the only thing that was, you know, really unique about the show.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Like, that's the reason I started creating content in 2020, because it was during COVID. There were no, uh, events. There were no places to meet other founders, meet other business people. I wasn't thinking of it as like a media business. I was thinking of it as like a way to just have conversations and meet other people who are building companies. And now we get to do that all day long, which is just a dream come true.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so many, so many guests have turned into, to dear friends.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, the, the Joe Weisenthal's, the Dylan Patel's, uh, there's, there's really too many to list, but we will have you all back on the show. So I can't wait. Uh, to everybody that's tuned in, whether you've watched, you know, the RSS feed,

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  uh, the live show, uh, the clips, the newsletter, anything.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Hard.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, you know, we've strived to, to create the right product regardless of how much time you have. If you have two minutes a day to read the newsletter, great. If you've got five minutes to watch some clips, if you want to watch the entire podcast, if you want to watch diet TBPN, the daily cut down, uh, uh, thank you. Thank you for tuning in. Uh, and, uh, fortunately, pretty much everything is going to stay exactly the same. Uh, to our, to our one and only Tyler.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, you are truly, truly incredible. One of the brightest young people I've ever, I've ever worked with and you have such a bright future. You know, we always, we always, we always knew that I've felt from the very beginning that you would go on to start your own company and we cherish every single minute that we have with you and we're going to do our very best to retain you for decades, but thank you for everything you've brought to the show, everything you've built. Tyler, if you're just tuning in now, has built all of the internal software that we use to run the show. It's insane stuff.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  It is a, you know, fully custom, you know, content management system, CRM. It helps us edit all of our videos, is the backbone of the show. It's a, it's a tool that the entire team uses on a daily basis and truly the show would not be possible without it. And yeah, your, your contributions on air as well. It's amazing. It's so much fun to be able to cut over, cut over to you. And so it is with great honor that I give you this soundboard. Thank you. And our sponsors. Yeah.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  We can start with, with the Ramp team, Eric, Eric Kareem and the whole, the whole team over there has just been incredible. They allowed us, you know, at the, at the beginning, sorry, the end of 2024, when we had started doing the show, we really loved it. They were, they committed to sponsoring the show for a year and that allowed us to do, to do so much in terms of investing in all, in all the equipment that we use, hiring people. They, they made it possible and have been truly, truly exceptional partners and, and you know, watching Ramp's growth over the last, over the last couple of years has just been phenomenal and they deserve all the.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  All the success and every other sponsor that has been a part of this.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Truly. Shout out Nick as well.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Oh, did he not get one?

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we gotta get a direct shout out for Nick.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  We gotta get a direct shout out for Nick.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  We don't know what to call Nick.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  We can't give his name on air because he'll get 10 times more emails. He, the lineup every day is crafted by Nick. He is our liaison to 99% of the guests that come on the show. Sometimes it starts with an interaction over X or a text message or there's other intermediaries involved. There's a lot that goes into actually getting someone into the waiting room, into the show, making sure that they understand how the show will work. It's sort of like, you know, you're hot dropping into this live show that's new for a lot of people and Nick does a great job communicating and parsing all the noise to understand what the best news of the day is, how we can contextualize it best with the optimal guests and he's done

• 18:37John Coogan?

  a fantastic job and will continue.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor. David Senra.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  One of a kind.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  He literally inspired us to grind harder.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, David was our very first listener that I'm aware of.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  He gets sent a lot of.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  We sent him a link in a Google Drive.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  And he listened and from that first episode, even though it was very scrappy, he said, "Take this, take this, you know, 100 times more seriously than you are right now." And we did and it's the best advice that I've ever gotten and he has been.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  And we have a picture of him framed.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  Picture of him here.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  We couldn't print it full size and it appears that it was printed on a black and white photo printer. But it's a black and white photo and he's a black and white brand. So, thank you to David Senra who's been the podcast godfather, truly.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  And the gong.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  The gong. The chat is asking us to hit the gong. We have to, we have to.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  The gong will remain.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  The gong will remain. Uh, Will Manitis has already chimed in with his take. He says many guy, many people are saying we're in the deal guy yoga. Many are saying, and it means a lot that Will Manitis, the only, he is the only guest who has co-hosted a full show from start to finish with us. And if you want to go back in the archives, you can, uh, you can watch that episode. It's a wild one. It was in a hotel room. We had yet to figure out the remote shows fully. Uh, the team worked really hard to make that one happen and

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Very chaotic.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Good time. Very chaotic. Um, and, uh, yeah, where, where else should we go? Should we go to, uh, is there anything else to say about OpenAI? I mean, of course, we'll be in conversation with you, uh, forever, you know, uh, anytime on the show, you're welcome to leave a comment or chat in the, uh, chat is asking, where's Will Manitis right now? I don't know. Probably, uh, sailing a boat. I don't know.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's an, it's an honor.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, to, to partner with OpenAI and, and every single person on the team that we've had the pleasure of meeting. We've been, uh, impressed by. They are, uh, ridiculously talented and, uh, every single person is committed to, uh, getting, getting this AI thing right. So

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're very excited.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  We're incredibly excited.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Uh, great. Well, let's move on to the Artemis 2, uh, pictures and images and news. Uh, very, very exciting. It made the front of the Wall Street Journal. And NASA aims to orbit moon for first, uh, for first time since 72 to boldly go, the crew of NASA.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  Chad is asking, is that three Diet Cokes? Yes.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  I got four now.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, you gotta thank, you gotta thank Diet Coke.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  Thank you to the Coca-Cola Corporation for making this possible.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to the, uh, the human team.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  The Matteina.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  For the, for the Matteina, your Maté's, the podcast in a can.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, wouldn't be possible without you guys.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  And thank you to Tailors and suitmakers, there's a lot of people that make this possible. The horse, the prop department, there's a million things here. It's been, it's been a great time. So, the crew of NASA Artemis 2 head to Cape Canaveral launch, launch pad Wednesday for the first human spaceflight to the moon in half a century. John Kraus hosted a incredible photo. Is he, is he someone who actually, yeah, he, he, he

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  Special comms assistant.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Special comms assistant. He actually goes to the launches and brings special photography gear to get the best possible photos and man, did he deliver with this one. What an incredible moment. We talked about it a little bit. There's an article on the watches of NASA Artemis 2.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  John, we have to thank our lovely wives.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  How could we not?

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Our families. Did you get a text?

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  Maybe. We, we, we don't talk about them a lot on the show.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  This is a show about technology and business, but they have been, they are the back, they are the, truly the backbones of the show and have put up with.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  A lot of travel.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  I think like a lot of travel.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Late nights, a lot of phone calls.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  Incredible hours.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  A lot of early mornings.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  A lot of early mornings, I think, out of the last, out of every single day that we've done the show, I haven't, I've, I've left the house past 6 a.m. Maybe twice, right? It's been, it's been a long, it's been a long road and, and the good news ladies is it's, nothing's going to change.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  No, thank you to both of you for supporting us and allowing us to do what we do.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Can we pull up this picture, Ben, of, in the production chat of the first episode that we recorded in the Jonathan Club in downtown, showing a little

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I put it up earlier.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Oh, you did, yeah, behind the scenes. This is, yeah, such a, such a wild time.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Remember that?

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  Remember that, Jordan? Suitless.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Suitless.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  We had the flag.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  But no suits.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  It looked, it looked, it looked pretty good on camera. I was, I was happy with the way it came out, but.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Ben can cook. Ben can cook.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Well.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Where should we go next? Artemis 2?

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Yesterday, the long awaited Artemis 2 mission took to the stars en route to the moon for the first such manned mission since 1972.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  The chat asked for a flashbang.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Flash out, okay.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  Yes. The flashbang has been a highlight, for sure. Both literally.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the soundboard, it's truly a character on the show.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  And I have some too now.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Its members all had Omega Speedmaster X33 models strapped to their flight suits. Danny Milton just wrote a full article on the site now detailing the watches worn on the wrists of the four astronauts throughout their time as part of this mission. Watches have a longstanding history with spaceflight, most notably through the Omega Speedmaster Moon Watch, but there are countless others that have cemented their place in the cosmos. Head to the site to learn more about the watches of Artemis 2, from the Speedmaster X33 to a surprising Breitling. You won't want to miss it. And this is from Teddy Baldasar, who's a great watch creator.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  So we can pull up this video now of the astronauts working on what looks like some type of tablet. This was...

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Do you think this is an iPad? I don't think so, right?

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's an iPad. Looks like it's running some Windows. They seem very committed to the...

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Are they running Outlook or something?

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So here he is typing in...

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Most secure password known to man.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  What is that, 9393 or something? 393?

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  3939.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  9393?

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Powerful. Powerful.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Well, we're going back to the moon. Apparently that video we played yesterday was a little bit of fake news. The young man, the adolescent who swears and says, "We're going to the F-ing moon." The real line, I believe, in the community note is that, he says, "We're going to the frickin'..."

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  And it had been altered to add the actual F-word.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  But the sentiment is still the same.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  It's very exciting, very inspirational.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  And Jared Isaacman on launch day says, "Oh, this kid is definitely getting a bag of NASA gear."

• 26:03John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  There is some, there are some wrinkles with the launch, right? Fortunately, nothing disastrous or catastrophic or anything, but the good news is that we're on our way back to the moon. The bad news is that the toilet's broken, apparently. And I believe this is from the live blog from the New York Times. "The NASA associate minister said there is a controller issue with the toilet on the Orion capsule, and it would take a few hours to troubleshoot. We're just getting started," he said, when addressing that some, that and some other glitches with the spacecraft. "The spirit of Apollo 10 lives on," they said. 135, they told us that. Here's another, it seems like this is not the first time that this has happened, but we're hoping for the best here.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like there were some other issues with Outlook as well. We can pull up this video from Tom Warren.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, so there's audio with this, too?

• 26:56Speaker 03

  We can remote in and take a look directly.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, go for it. And then I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working. If you want to remote in and check. Why do you have two? Like web and desktop? Or you think it's like two separate desktop installations?

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Join in on your PCD, and we'll let you know when we're done.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, this is the best possible failure scenario is Outlook, not the rocket itself.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Can they vibe?

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a good outcome. There were so many amazing images coming out yesterday.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  Peyton Alexander says, "This is the real reward for Artemis. This is who we are actually doing this for. They will grow up knowing they can one day work in their country's bases on the moon and Mars. We are not just abstractly hoping for a better world for them. We are going there." And two kids here watching the launch from Orlando. Just beautiful.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, my five-year-old said it was boring, which is not what you want to hear, but we'll have to give some more context to him about how big of a deal it is. He was like, "Yeah, I don't know, maybe he wants more flashing lights on the screen."

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  We were, we were driving for the actual launch, and it was so funny listening to the audio feed and sitting in traffic and just looking out at everyone.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  And, and realizing that...

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  It felt like the majority of the world still wasn't paying attention or or or didn't care.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like rockets do launch like every day now.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  I know SpaceX has normalized it to such a degree.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Isn't there isn't there some sort of subplot on the Apollo missions that by the by the third or fourth Apollo mission, there was no like the the actual viewership had dropped off and like the American population had gotten.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  2.6 says, put subway surfers on it.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  On the NASA feed.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Crazy that you actually need to maybe need to do this. Ed Ludlow was was at the launch, but.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Yes, he was. Let's pull up this this video of of legendary tech anchor.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  I mean, it's it's an emotional moment, so I guess it makes sense to capture his result, but everyone's saying you should turn around and actually watch it. It's very funny to do this selfie video. I mean, it contextualized the moment perfectly, but it is. Oh, he was live on the air. He was alive on the air. Okay, so I mean, if you're live, like you, you, you don't want to necessarily turn around, I guess. I don't know. There's that famous clip of what?

• 29:23John Coogan?

  It's it's a wild video. There's that amazing clip of from that documentary where the the host is giving this monologue and then the monologue ends right as the launch happens, like he timed it up perfectly and it's very cinematic. Anyway, I don't know. Dalian shared the the coolest orbital animation he's seen of Artemis 2. It looks a lot less fishy when you see it this way. It's fascinating how close they have to be. That's.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  And by fishy, John means one of the other animation actually was shaped like.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Shaped like a fish, but this one is a little bit more of a straight shot, but it really emphasizes how short that window is where you're actually next to the moon. It really, Dalian says, really, just really shows you how far away they're flying today and how precise they need to be to go to the moon. Yeah, remarkable. I'm very excited to.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Following this.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  New York Times article, How AI Helped One Man and His Brother Build A $1.8 Billion Company Who Needs More Than Two Employees When AI Can Do So Many Corporate Tasks. It's Super Efficient and a Little Bit Lonely. Aaron Griffith has the story. People are calling this the.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  The prophecy.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  The prophecy, the one man, one billion dollar company.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you're in tech and you're in the business of making predictions, no one wants predictions. We want prophecies.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Prophecies.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  You need, you need to be prophesizing for sure. So the article, how AI helped one man and his brother build a 1.8 billion dollar company. Who needs more than two employees that when artificial intelligence can do so many corporate tasks, it's super efficient and a little bit lonely. So Aaron Griffith tells the story of Matthew Gallagher, who took just two months, $20,000 and a more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his startup off the ground. From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used AI to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created AI systems to analyze his business's performance and he outsourced the other stuff he couldn't do himself.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  His startup, MedV, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained more than 1,000 more. In 2025, MedV's first year in business, the company generated

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Full year.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  The first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales. Mr. Gallagher then hired his only

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  This is absolutely insane because as GLP-1s were starting to take off, I had, I remember distinctly talking with somebody that was like, I want to start a telehealth company for GLP-1s. And at that time, I was like, okay, there's a lot of telehealth companies that are at scale. And they're well aware of this. They will immediately introduce this product and other, you know, similar products to their customer base and it's going to be incredibly difficult to be, to be competitive. And it turns out there's just such overwhelming demand for these products that you could come in as a new company and scale. You know, I'm sure this guy, Mr. Gallagher is incredibly talented,

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  but the market overall is just growing so quickly that it didn't matter that every other telehealth company was also getting into the game. There was just such an incredible You know, volume of sales coming in.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So like one year in, maybe he hires his only employee, his younger brother Elliot. This year they're on track to do 1.8 billion dollars in sales. A 1.8 billion dollar company with just two employees in the age of AI. It's increasingly possible, says Aaron Griffith in the New York Times. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, predicted the rise of a new breed of super efficient company in 2024. A one-person business worth $1 billion would have been unimaginable without AI, he said on a podcast. And now it will happen. Now as AI tools spread, entrepreneurs are harnessing the technology to expand their startups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed with very few humans. Big companies, especially in tech, are getting in on the disruption too.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  Pinterest, Block and others have cut thousands of workers in recent months, citing efficiencies enabled by AI. Mr. Gallagher, who formerly formerly ran a startup that sold wristwatches, said he thought Mr. Altman's prophecy of a one billion, one-person, $1 billion company would be a firm that built AI. He was excited when he realized he may have done it, taking the old, taking an old idea, being a middleman for weight loss drugs, and using AI to turbocharge it. I am interested to know, and we're going to try and get him on the show, the like what the margins are on this. I imagine that the revenue is, you know, like a lot of this needs to accrue, a lot of the value needs to accrue to the, the companies that actually designed and.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the one-person, $1 billion companies at a billion dollar valuation.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, at the same time.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  At a billion dollar run rate.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  I would imagine that even even a reseller would trade around like 1X revenue, maybe. I have no idea, maybe way more.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Does this count? Does this count yet, though? Like, I feel like to be the one-person, $1 billion company, you gotta be able to log, you gotta be able to log into your payroll tool and you're the only person there.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Oh, so.

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  And he's got his brother in there.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Sorry, bro. Take a walk. He's got, he's got to let his brother, let his brother go.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech CEO friends over when such a company would appear and said that he would like to meet the guy who had done it.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  Medvee is technically not a one person, one billion dollar company since he hired his brother and some contractors. The startup, which has not raised outside funding, also has no official valuation, but many highly valued tech companies can only dream of hitting one billion in revenue with so few workers. Medvee is also profitable. That is great and important if you're bootstrapped.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Jordi Hays?

  Can't, can't get very far.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Is this a wrapper company? It's, it's like a GLP one wrapper, but it's AI enabled, but it's not wrapping the AI foundation model. It's like using the tool to wrap another industry and just create the efficiency between the manufacturer and the actual distribution. It's, it really is remarkable that they were able to hoover up so much revenue in such a competitive space because you would, you would assume that, that the other telehealth providers would have significant ad operations and that the margins on customer acquisition would be very, very tricky to crack, but he must have found some unique insight into how to distribute the product, get actual people to the website because like the, the,

• 35:52John Coogan?

  the AI certainly can build the website and write the copy, but it not, it can't necessarily get people to show up and actually put down their hard earned cash for the product.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just to put it into context, Hims did 2.3 billion in, in full year 2025 revenue.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  For 2025.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Jordi Hays?

  This guy started in 2024 and got to 401 million in sales.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  I, I want to know more about, yeah, the strategy here, how this, how this built up so quickly. As a teenager, Mr. Gallagher began building websites for local businesses. He always had a hustle, including selling candles and samurai swords on eBay. This is the classic founder journey, selling something on eBay.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  He studied the blade.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  That's how I, I was selling DJ equipment on eBay back when I was a teenager. At 18, after building a web hosting business, he sold that business for $6,000. He briefly attended the University of Cincinnati in northern Kentucky. University but did not graduate in 2010. He moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. He eventually returned to coding, bouncing between tech jobs. Uh, in 2016, he built Watch Gang, a startup that sold Ritz watches via subscription. Interesting. Is that, is that like a buy now, pay later for watches? Or are you renting them?

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  You're like, you got another watch?

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, you're just subscribed to like new watches?

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  I didn't realize I was getting a subscription.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Oops, it came in the mail again. Uh, it had fans but never turned a profit. Watch Gang, uh, even as Mr. Gallagher chased revenue growth and hired 60 people. So wildly different business outcome here. Wow.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'm not doing that again.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  Uh, OpenAI's release of ChatGPT 2022 inspired Mr. Gallagher to start tinkering with AI. Two years later, he met, uh, Jitan Chabra, a co-founder of Carevalidate, a medical startup in Atlanta. Carevalidate offers what is essentially telehealth in a box kits. Companies, employers and retailers who that want to sell customers prescription drugs can use Carevalidate's technology and network of online doctors to set up a business. The company's software connects patients with doctors and pharmacies, which write, fulfill, and ship the prescriptions. Carevalidate charges fees for its software. So you have to imagine that there's, that there's like a fairly decent cost structure here, but it's, that's not to diminish it. It's incredible amount of revenue. Like you look at the comps and you're blown away. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's just, it's just interesting to understand the, the.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other big, the other big question here is like, how much are you spending on ads?

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Like it's very possible that, uh, you know, the, the company is profitable.

• 38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  But if you're spending 60% of every dollar you bring in unpaid acquisition plus COGS.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  And then any other expenses that actually go into fulfilling and actually getting prescriptions.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  Public by himself. He's like, I don't need an investment bank. I'm just gonna like vibe code the, the, the, the roadshow and.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  100% retail allocation.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, I, I, I think, I think like taking a company public is just technically a bunch of SEC filings. And if the investors sign up and the emails are sent and everyone agrees, it can happen. So who knows? Maybe he takes his company public with, with two people. That would be a, like, it's just the, the New York Stock Exchange bell ringing. And normally it's like 20 people and it's like only the executive team and bankers and they're all the employees are, you know, outside or on the trading floor. And he's just standing there being like, oh yeah, I did it like by myself. Wild. Gallagher saw an opportunity for his own telehealth business. He could use AI to do the branding and marketing and let care validate. And a similar platform, Open Loop Health, Health, uh, which is another

• 39:23John Coogan?

  interesting company. And someone was posting about handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance. He planned to start with GLP-1s. He was entering an established market for nearly a decade. Him's and hers, Health, Ro and other companies have sold drugs for erectile dysfunction and hair loss online, using an online network of doctors to write prescriptions. Him's, which went public in 2021, has, uh, 2,442 employees and generated 2.4 billion in revenue.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. This is what I, this was what I was explaining to my friend who wanted to do something in this space. Yeah. Uh, like, hey, you're, you're, you're going to be going up against a company that has billions of revenue already. Yeah. Thousands of employees. Yeah. That already has all the infrastructure to prescribe these drugs. Yeah. But again, the market is just growing so quickly.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. He, he really used everything. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, uh, 11 Labs, Midjourney, Runway to create media assets for his, uh, website and ads. Um, he spent $20,000.

• 40:17Jordi Hays?

  That's definitely a notable, uh, something quite notable, uh, out of any, any time we're seeing these stories where, you know, the guy who is making, uh, a cancer drug for his dog. A lot of people are picking, uh, if, if you can think of LLMs as like digital, digital guys or girls, like people are working with multiple digital guys to do, to like complete these projects. And so.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  One model's better at writing, one model's better at coding, one model's better at marketing or strategy or. Anything else? Interesting. He said, "From the beginning, growth was insane." He became, he quickly became one of CareValidates and OpenLoop's top clients. Companies were blown away by startup speed and scale. You're like, "Do you have an army of people behind you somewhere?" And he's like, "Nope." Wow. Well, you can go read the full, the full article on the New York Times at NewYorkTimes.com. It's Aaron Griffith's latest piece. You can also listen to it. There's an audio version. There is some commentary on this. Just a lot of people having fun with it. Clayton Petty says, "Who has two thumbs and wants to know what the ad spend is?"

• 41:23John Coogan?

  This guy. Yeah, I'm very interested to know. I mean, I would still be shocked if this is not a fantastic business.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at that scale, you can have truly terrible EBITDA margins and still be printing.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's like, even if, even if, like, it's impossible that it's negative margin because he hasn't raised money. And so like, where would the losses come from? So you can't be losing money.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  And you're gonna lever it up.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  I don't think so, though. I think everyone's gonna be shocked by how much cash flow this business is producing. But it is, it is a very exciting, exciting moment and story. Let's, let's go over to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. The, yeah, he just shares this. Sam said, "One person running a billion dollar company, but if two are closely genetically related," Tyler Cowen's still counting this, this as, as a correct prediction, and some people in the comments.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  Huge opportunities for, for other siblings to fulfill the prophecy.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. So people are moving the goalposts already because technically he had agencies that had humans that worked there. And if he works with a marketing agency and then there's a bunch of people there, it's more just like the disaggregation of the, of the different institutions and the different organizations.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  I think the, the real goalpost we gotta move is just, you can't talk to anyone the entire time.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  You can't talk to your human at all.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't say.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  You can only be on the command line, basically, and prompt box. But you can tell the agent or the LLM to go and, and, and call someone.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's fine. Yeah.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:53Jordi Hays?

  Then you're not interfacing with someone, right?

• 42:55John Coogan?

  Do you have to be truly a shut-in? That's the prediction now? Absolutely ridiculous.

• 43:02Jordi Hays?

  Chat is asking for John Exley. John?

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:05Jordi Hays?

  Get in the UltraDome.

• 43:06John Coogan?

  Get back here. We didn't know how to unplug Exley.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  The technology brother. He's somewhere.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  We'll get him back in.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Jonathan Ross is talking about the petrodollar. There was a story about how there has been an interesting flight to the dollar. The dollar is very strong even amid all of the geopolitical uncertainty. Jonathan Ross, the founder of Grok, now the chief software architect at Nvidia, said, "The petrodollar defined the last 50 years of American economic dominance. The token dollar, the currency AI compute, is bought in and sold in will define the next 50. Oil is priced in US dollars. That means every country on earth needs dollars to fuel their economy. That single fact has been the foundation of American financial power since the 1970s. Now, consider AI. Training runs cost tens of billions.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  Inference is scaling to hundreds of billions. The companies that are selling compute are American. The currency it's priced in is dollars. The petrodollar had oil. The token dollar has compute. Same structure, same leverage, new resource. Countries aren't just competing over AI talent and chips. They're competing over whether AI remains a dollar-denominated economy. That's the game nobody's naming yet. And so, he is coining it. He says, "The token dollar is the concept."

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a cool positioning.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, it'll be interesting to talk about Circle with Jeremy, about how stablecoins fit into all of this. Also, yesterday, talking to CoreWeave about compute-backed credit lines and all the different financial products that are popping up related to debt issued against GPUs that have essentially a flow of business that will be expected to come in against them. Very interesting watching the larger AI economy, you know, mature. Brexton says, "Compute-backed credit lines are the next..." Frontier for fixed income and will quickly turn into one of the largest asset classes on the planet. People are going back and forth. No shade trying to learn isn't compute as an asset depreciating quickly due to innovation scale economies.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Hence, bad collateral. Brexson says, no shade taken. You're right, but it's still a couple of notes. Supply constraints on chips right now makes older chips still valuable in secondary markets. Because of the above, capital markets care more about revenue produced from chips rather than resale value. And chips are only a subset of the total cost of compute, heterogeneous builds, the rack, powered shell, interconnect, cooling. It was interesting when we were talking with CoreWeave about the, that I was, I was really expecting the answer to be chip constraints. And he was saying powered shells, powered shells, which is what we've heard from Satya Nadella.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I, and I, and I think it makes sense, given their business. It's like, it's, it's, it's hard to get chips, but think about all of the logistical complexity to actually get the location, the energy, the shell, everything built together. And navigating all those regulations, it's just like one of the, it's an incredibly complex infrastructure project that you're trying to compress onto timelines that America has generally not done infrastructure projects at in a long, long time. Right? And so this was, this was always some of the, you know, one of the exciting things about the data center build out. Among, among the fear has been that

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  Ameri, like a bunch of people are learning how to build complex things fast, right?

• 46:41John Coogan?

  Well, the year is off to the strongest start for big deals ever. Corporate mega deals flourish despite turmoil. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Large corporate deals had their best quarterly showing ever as companies forged ahead with tie-ups and investments despite the Iran war rattling markets. So far in 2026, 22 transactions valued at 10 billion or more have been announced globally. A record quarterly number, according to LSE. G data. The next closest quarter was the fourth quarter of 2015 when 21 such deals were announced

• 47:19John Coogan?

  in that year. This week alone, Unilever unveiled a more than $65 billion deal, including debt, to combine its food business with spice maker McCormick. And Cisco, which we talked about a few days ago, agreed to buy Jetro Restaurant Depot for over $29 billion, including debt. Uncertainty due to oil growth rate, growth and rates isn't going away, but major deals are still getting done, said Ben Goodchild, a partner in the M and A group at law firm Paul Weiss. The M and A market is focused on the long term fundamentals, right deal, right price and right strategic rationale. There's more.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  The total value of all deals announced globally jumped roughly 29% in the first quarter from a year ago, but the number of deals is down more than 17% as smaller deal activities slowed. The mega deal tally includes a handful of big equity investments in AI companies, such as Amazon's $50 billion investment in OpenAI announced in February. A number of other big transactions are in the works. Estee Lauder has been in discussions to acquire Spanish beauty group Puig Brands, a deal that would combine two of the world's biggest beauty companies. And there is a number of others.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Absolute is buying Jack Daniels. Tillman Ferretta is buying Caesars Entertainment. There's another heist on the Caesars Casino, referencing Apollo. Many companies see a moment to pounce on bigger deals that would normally face prolonged antitrust scrutiny. The Justice Department's top antitrust official departed in February after clashing with Trump allies, who at times favored more lenient oversight of big deals. All this all comes as US stocks deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years, led by a 7% drop in the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index. That makes it harder for buyers and sellers to agree on price, to agree on prices. The Iran War has sent crude prices above $100 a barrel, which could keep interest rates higher for longer to combat rising prices and make funding deals more expensive.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  There's a very interesting chart. I don't know if we can pull it up in the journal. Big deals have big first quarter number of global deals valued at 10 billion or more. There we go. And it's just

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  Look at 2020, 2021, if you

• 49:34John Coogan?

  2021, what was going on?

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  This is another chart.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  This is nine. Oh, if you want to scroll down, you can look at the smaller deals. These are deals valued between 1 billion and 5 billion. And 2021 was huge. What was going on then? It was Zerp era, right? Post COVID, lots of

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if when interest rates are near zero, you may as well lever up.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  I guess that's, yeah, I guess

• 49:56Jordi Hays?

  Buy some assets.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  Bankers and lawyers say smaller deals are less of a must have. Buyers are more willing to put them on hold, but the big deals, they have to have it happen regardless of what's going on in the economy. Also, private equity firms are sitting on a record number of portfolio companies they need to eventually sell or take public, including many software firms threatened by the rise of AI. But many are hesitant to strike deals at today's depressed prices while deal making activity in the software industry has stalled. There has been plenty in other sectors, including financial services and healthcare. Eli Lilly struck a deal for Cantessa and Biogen bought Appelus. Deal makers have high hopes going into 2026.

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  Couple, couple of questions in the chat and a special arrival. John Exley has entered the chat.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Let's go. Welcome back.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  Chat room general.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for actually

• 50:47Speaker 04

  John Exley.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  John is missing out so and it's an honor to podcast with you, John.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  Another question, who is blacklisted from TBPN now? No one.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  No one.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  We've never, there's never been any, anyone blacklisted from the show. In fact, the evidence of this is every single one of our sponsors ever. We've had

• 51:12John Coogan?

  The competitors.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  The competitors on the show and all of that will continue. We want this to be a place where

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Convergent is going to happen about anything.

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  So. And there's also just a broader trend of this. I don't know if you if you watch like the broader podcast landscape, people from like, you know, quote unquote, like rival firms or different firms go on each other's shows all the time. Not not uncommon these days for crossover content to happen all over the place.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Jim Kramer says, if private credit is so horrendous, how is KKR oversubscribed so easily on its $20 billion fund? They raised 23 billion. Some kind of disconnect here, boys. Boy, are these firms ill advised in how to tell their story.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  This was the this was the early confusion about private credit. People were seeing a whole bunch of private credit deals during the AI boom. And and then when the when like the the nervousness matured, it was much more when we talked to

• 52:13John Coogan?

  carried no interest, for example, the the the worry was much more around software companies, not hard assets. It was not, oh, in this private credit fund, there's a data center that Meta is going to pay their bill on. It's some other company that maybe is not going to have as high of dollar retention going forward. And so I think that the the different private credit firms have a messaging problem of like, what is in the fund? Because it can be a lot of different stuff and KKR clearly did a great job explaining why their particular strategy will endure for the long haul. There's other news about.

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up. Let's pull up this video quickly of Kramer talking about our friends at Semi Analysis.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this is great.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  There is a company that I regard. It's the it's the absolute. It's the gospel, Semi Analysis. And I've got this guy Dylan Patel.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Look at that picture.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  Semi Analysis is the arbiter.

• 53:12Jordi Hays?

  What a stud.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  The semis.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  And when they do, when they bless something, it means that it's the benchmark at the best.

• 53:19Speaker 05

  They are the most honest guys I've come across and I I've always been reading them, but Jensen plays really praised them at GTC. So I reached out to this guy who I regard as is genius, is genius.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 53:34Speaker 05

  Wait to talk to him.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  That's that's that's a promo. Yeah, we'll see you tonight.

• 53:36Speaker 06

  That was a good promo.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  At 6pm. It's awesome.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Dylan says, can I short myself?

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  And some people, some people were saying like, yeah, come on, dude. Like, he's complimenting you and Dylan and Kramer.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  This is the meme. Everyone knows the meme.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  And I've always said that Kramer having this thing where no matter what he says, people say like, they'll take it.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  The inverse is true.

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  It is the best engagement hack ever for a content creator, a personality, because it just means anything you say, you get a million impressions from people saying the opposite.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  And the fact is, like, Jim Cramer is, he's an entertainer. He is incredibly, you know, fun to listen to. And we'll be, we'll be having another conversation with him in the next, in the next month or so, which I'm excited about.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Let's head over to Cliffwater and Stephen Nesbit. He brought private credit to the masses. Now the masses are fleeing. This is more context around the private credit story. Cliffwater is racing to calm investors after steep withdrawals. So Stephen Nesbit is private credit chief evangelist. His investors and industry are having a crisis of faith.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  Nick says, "Hope this still means my invite is open."

• 54:51John Coogan?

  We'd love to have you, Nick.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Of course, Nick. Your family.

• 54:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're always back.

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  We're a positive sum.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  As long as, as long as we keep it positive, we can say, and, and we keep the camera roll smiling and we, and we maintain that occasionally we are back. It's not always over.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  Very frequently, we're back.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Very frequently.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  And Nick, Nick will admit that.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  No, we had a great conversation with him when he came on. For more than a decade, the 72-year-old championed the hottest asset class on Wall Street. His firm, Cliffwater, went from managing no money to nearly $50 billion on the back of impressive fundraising and big gains, turning Nesbit into a billionaire. Now, many of the wealthy individuals who powered Cliffwater's rise are itching to leave as investors rethink their views on private credit. After a handful of high-profile defaults, investors are pulling so much money out of industry funds that managers are restricting withdrawals. We've talked about this many times on the show. Shares of big firms are dropping. Few are like Cliffwater, which until recently was an investor darling, but now finds itself in the hot seat. Its top executives aren't lending specialists themselves. Instead, the firm invested alongside and sometimes in other funds. So it's a fund to fund

• 55:59John Coogan?

  strategy, a feature that is now being treated as a vulnerability. Investors asked to pull the equivalent of 14% of its biggest fund in the first quarter. Wall Street skeptics, who long questioned Cliffwater's growth, are now calling it a canary in the coal mine and a turducken of problems. Turducken of problems. That is such a weird phrase. Nesbit's ability to qualify the fears will be a test of his funds and the industry's future.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  Are they calling it a blue owl in the coal mine?

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just joking. Of course, Blue Owl capped private credit fund redemptions at 5% after steep request levels. This was the other news from this morning. I think they got something like 21% redemption requests outstanding during the first quarter. So they had to cap it at 5%.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Well, you know what this guy did before he started a, what, $50 billion private credit fund? He was a gravedigger. I'm not kidding. Yeah, he grew up near Rochester, New York. He worked as a gravedigger in high school. He spent a quarter century at Wilshire Associates, consulting for pension funds on private equity and hedge funds. Nesbit was a soft spoken presence in a business of outsized egos, says Greg Williamson, a longtime pension fund executive. He didn't preach like others, Williamson said. He spoke about his clients' needs. In 2004, Nesbit started Cliffwater. After the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, he began recommending private credit, just as banks were pulling back from lending to riskier companies, giving

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Blackstone, Ares, and others the opportunity to make high interest rate loans. Nesbit became a private credit advocate. Cliffwater launched an index tracking performance. The firm shared research and Nesbit wrote two books on the topic. In 2019, he shifted to managing money, launching Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, or CCLFX, with Blake and Phil Hasbrook, a then 30-year-old executive. They marketed to wealthy individuals through independent financial advisors, the kind of clients Hasbrook worked. It was built as an interval fund, offering to buy back 5% of its assets each quarter from investors and provide daily updates on its value. It charged lower fees than some rivals and allowed clients to avoid the messy tax filing requirements of traditional private funds.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  By February, the net assets totaled about 33 billion. Cliffwater made 375 million in fees from the fund in the first 18 months that ended in September. A 54-person crew researched and managed the portfolio of 4,100 or so underlying loans. Along the way, Cliffwater wrangled with rivals when an executive at Bond Powerhouse PIMCO said the returns of private debt didn't compensate investors for its growing dangers. Nesbit sent investors a letter saying PIMCO had a failed track record of predicting market changes. After J.B. Diamond used a cockroach analogy to warn about looming defaults, Nesbit declared there were no cockroaches in private debt.

• 59:01John Coogan?

  Others criticized Cliffwater's marketing, especially when it boasted of hedge fund-like returns with minimal risk, citing industry metrics like Sharpe ratios and standard deviation. Critics said private loans rarely change hands, so they lack the volatility that funds face. Anyway, it goes into the trajectory problem.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of Jamie Dimon, the Axios show. Jamie Dimon, I's Post, JPMorgan Media Venture.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  He's potentially launching a podcast? Is that what this is?

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  Matthew Zeitland, friend of the show, former guest, says, "The desire to post is the only force in the universe that holds a candle to compound interest."

• 59:36John Coogan?

  It's actually true. Everyone needs a pod. People have been talking about him running for president. A lot of presidents and media people have podcasts.

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  Acting very presidential.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Well, there isn't all that much news here, but Dimon said that if he were to start a media venture, it would be something different about policy. He said, "I think media is critical. Media teaches everybody. Media is the great influencer. A lot of bad policy, he believes, stems from people in the media doing a bad job of explaining issues." And so, we talked about this yesterday or the day before in the Wall Street Journal. He has the new plan, the Dimon Plan, for the American dream, wanting to lend to more small businesses. That seems more important than ever in the world where you have a one-person, $1 billion business. More people should have shots on goal. And if you think about the...

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  The $20,000 that that gentleman was able to marshal to get the business off the ground. If you have more people that have the opportunity, that's probably a good thing. But we'll be tuning in when Jamie Dimon launches his show. Should we go over to Apple?

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Should we? I think it's time.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  They really dominated this entire week. I mean, it's spring break, which is perfect timing. This must happen all the time.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  I think they probably planned that 50 years ago. They knew the 50th would be during spring break in 2026.

• 1:00:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  And so it would be a good time to, you know, really celebrate the anniversary.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. We had a great, great conversation with Eddie Q yesterday. You can go listen to it on Apple Podcasts, which he created. And, but there's more reflections and stories about Apple from all over the place. Ben Thompson wrote a great retrospective. The Wall Street Journal got access to rare Apple archives that even Tim Cook hadn't seen before. It's very cool because, and you think about it, it's like, that's crazy. He's the CEO. Should know all the archives. But then you think about like, how busy his day is, and he probably doesn't have that much time to just like, go reminisce.

• 1:01:37Jordi Hays?

  Obsess over every small decision or prototype.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's like so much work to be done. He doesn't have that much time to go look at like, the original patent for the Apple II, or whatever he, you know, is in that archive. So the Wall Street Journal took the, took the viewers through that in a video. We have a big read from the Financial Times here. That's very interesting. Talking about the roots of a tech revolution. So Winston Churchill called it, quote, "the most daring and courageous act of the entire war." On August 30th, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed in Atsugi, southwest of Tokyo. He wore aviator sunglasses, a corn cob pipe

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  dangled from his lips, and he was unarmed. A man of war was arriving to make peace. Over the next six years of Allied occupation, MacArthur would demilitarize Japan and franchise women.

• 1:02:31Jordi Hays?

  And by the way, you know, you guys know AGI will be very close when Tyler is smoking a corn cob pipe himself, because.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  AGI, of course, should be able to one-shot, you know, any sort of lung issues that might come from using a corn cob pipe. So, some people skip sunscreen, other people, you know, indulge.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  In 2012, I lived in a hacker house in Sunnyvale, and the best engineer I still, one of the best engineers I've met in my entire life, the best engineer in the house, was completely straight-edged, would not drink or use caffeine or anything, but he would smoke a literal pipe. It was a very odd thing, and he just...

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  That's so Lindy.

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. He was like, "Yeah, I just enjoy this."

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  I would actually, I would actually expect it to make a comeback, right? People are, you know, a little nostalgic, right? It's clear that vapes are maybe not something that people should be using, but the corn cob pipe, who knows?

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  There's a chance. Tyler, what do you think about corn cob pipes?

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm super Lindy. I think I'm...

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  You're in?

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're probably like one, one or two models away, and then start ripping pipe.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  I'm into it, I'm into it. So, over the next six years, he enfranchised women, oversaw the writing of a new constitution and a decree of democracy. But first, he faced a more prosaic problem. Japan's communication industry was in such shambles that he could barely issue commands. This is MacArthur. "Solving this challenge turned out to have enormous consequences, not only reshaping Japan in the 1940s, but upending global manufacturing in the 1980s, and by the 2000s, revolutionizing..."

• 1:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Handel in the chat says Gandalf, Max.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Thank you. "Revolutionizing the way products would be built at Apple, a company that did not exist at the time." So, Apple, which turns 50 years old on Wednesday, is arguably the world's most iconic company. It is also notoriously opaque and secretive in virtually all accounts of how Steve Jobs transformed Apple from near bankruptcy in 1997, which we talked about yesterday, that EQ, to the world's most valuable company by his death in 1999. 2011 product vision and design all get the credit. But what actually makes a $1,200 iPhone possible at global scale with vanishingly few defects is a manufacturing philosophy that traces back not to Silicon Valley or Southern China, but to war devastated Japan.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  And it took all my energy yesterday to not use the 20 minutes we had with Eddie Q for kind of like a tech support session.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm having this issue where-

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  You seem to be having like particularly weird iPhone issues right now.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  I think I need to like return the iPhone.

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  I think you are having some weird issue because there are weird UX UI issues that you can learn and adapt and change it. I would say that they are skill issues. Like if you can't use the camera roll effectively by now, you are needing to like-

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  You're lost.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should just throw off some search prompts and figure it out.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  My issue, I don't know if anyone in the chat has experienced this, but when I open the messages app or the phone app, I just get a blank white screen and then the app crashes like a bunch of times.

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  You have something weird.

• 1:05:52Jordi Hays?

  And then I just, doesn't matter what I do, I can do a hard reset or anything like that.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  I wonder if we were pushing it to the limit too hard yesterday because we were on a FaceTime call together and then also watching the Artemis 2 launch on YouTube. And then I was, I was watching it on my phone and I was streaming Jordy My Screen via SharePlay and I think that might have, the phone was really hot. I can tell you that much. I don't know. Anyway, by and large, the products are flawless and I have enjoyed my Apple journey the whole way.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  So in the, in the decades after the Second World War, Japan's economy grew rapidly. This is a story of how ideas travel across oceans and factory floors and sometimes through a single person changing jobs. It is a story about how America invented a manufacturing philosophy, exported it to Japan, forgot it, re-learnt fragments of it through a handful of companies and then re-exported the whole synthesis to Asia. The story leads us to the present moment with the US spending vast sums to bring it all back, Southern India investing to be the next global tech hub and China fighting to hold on to its manufacturing dominance. It is above all a story underscore- That what Apple started to build in Shenzhen, China, a quarter century ago, is not merely

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  an assembly line. It is the endpoint of a multi-decade chain of civilizational knowledge transfer, a feat of enormous complexity that cannot be replicated with tax breaks

• 1:07:19John Coogan?

  or ribbon cutting in Texas. Tax breaks aren't going to be enough. You need civilizational knowledge transfer. The whole chain begins with a question. In occupied Tokyo, a 33-year-old engineer named Homer Sarason stood before a group of Japanese executives and asked, "Why does any company exist?"

• 1:07:38Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  When the telegram arrived from General MacArthur, Sarason initially thought it was a prank. A physicist by training, the paratrooper-turned-radar engineer was working on a transcontinental microwave relay system.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  This is Tyler. A physicist by training, a podcaster slash vibe coder.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  That's true. He dismissed it, only realizing his error when an indignant Colonel called him back a few weeks later. Then he was dutifully off to Tokyo for what was supposed to be a nine-month stint. Sarason's mission was to reestablish and rehabilitate the communications industry, but he found there was nobody to work with. American bombers had devastated industry and MacArthur had abolished the Zibatsu, the powerful pre-war corporate cartels. "We had to start from scratch," he recounted in 1988. "When we looked around, not only did we see no facilities, but we could find no managers. We had to find lower-level people, second-level managers. And I said, 'As of today, you're going to start up this new

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  company and you're going to run it.'" The quality of manufacturing in Japan was shoddy, even before the war. But as Sarason began learning the language and immersing himself in Japanese culture, he realized the root of the problem was not technical, it was managerial. When he asked a group of employees how they might improve quality, they murmured among themselves about what answer would please him, rather than answering directly, sort of the opposite of like the Elon walking the floor and like, "I'd want to..." To first principles, they're really like, what do you think he wants to hear? When will this plant be online?

• 1:09:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  I think he's expecting it in June.

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Tell him June.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  Lie. Yeah, this is not, not good. Everyone understands this now, but that was not the case in Japan in the 40s and 50s, I suppose. They had been taught to be deferential, he concluded, to not, not to question authority. So Saracen set out to teach them a philosophy of management. Despite initial opposition from MacArthur, the need for economic stabilization meant that Saracen got his wish. He and another engineer, Charles Protsman, went off to an Osaka hotel for a month to write a textbook on industrial management. They designed a rigorous eight-week course and made it compulsory for top managers. The seminar began on the importance of quality as, quote, "a guiding state of mind, a devotion and dedication."

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  After asking, "Why does any company exist?", Saracen encouraged his disciples to draft a mission statement by invoking a motto from a shipyard in Newport, Rhode Island. "We shall build good ships here, at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships." It's a good line.

• 1:10:29Jordi Hays?

  That's a good line.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  Good line. Manufacturing, he taught, had to be considered a total system. It's disparate parts orchestrated with such repetitive precision that defects could approach zero. He inculcated his students, in his students, a sense that quality was foundational to the whole enterprise, empowering workers close to production and telling managers they needed to understand the details. "Quality control is not a Band-Aid," Saracen later recounted. "To be effective as a control, the total process to which it is applied must be well-designed to begin with." So when Saracen left Japan in 1950, he recommended his successor be the academic W. Edward Edwards Deming, an advocate of statistical process controls.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for statistical.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Let's also give it up for. Using the first initial of your first name and then your middle name. That's an under, that's sort of a lost art. You don't meet a lot of people that produce themselves that way, but J. Alexander Coogan, I think that sounds pretty cool. Maybe I'll rip that at some point.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  That sounds very regal.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it sounds good. Well, what would you be?

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  That'd be J. Tyler Cosgrove.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  That's good. Yeah, because Tyler's the middle name. So J. Tyler. That's good. Okay. Well, J. W. Edwards Deming would prove so influential that the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers.

• 1:11:53Jordi Hays?

  And says, "Sometimes I get emotional about manufacturing."

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  It's true. Yeah.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  And says, "They're good ships, sir."

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  The ships quote is so, is so good. I'm sure it's already been printed and hung on many of the, you know, new defense tech and American manufacturing companies, but it is a good reminder to always build what is of high quality and aim for profit.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Justin says, "Chat is on fire today, of course."

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see all of you. Someone asked, "How are we going to celebrate?" I think we're going to have lunch with the team later. Excited about that.

• 1:12:30John Coogan?

  Yeah! We're excited for that.

• 1:12:32Jordi Hays?

  But I, but I think funny thing is just really our lives aren't, aren't changing. It's business as usual.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  Chop wood.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  We're going to go hang out with our families and I'm, I'm already excited for next week.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  We, we do have a holiday tomorrow. The, it's Good Friday, so the New York Stock Exchange is closed. The market is closed and so we will not be streaming tomorrow, but we will be back on Monday. But just so you're aware, don't be shocked. Oh, like this, this OpenAI deal happened and then they stopped streaming. That's not what's going on. This has been on the calendar for a long time. We haven't been booking guests for, for, for months because we know that this is a, a holiday coming up, which we are very excited about. And everyone will be enjoying the long weekend. So Saracen recommended the work to, of Joseph Jaron, a consultant who during the war had managed a program shipping war materials to allied nations. Jaron's work in Japan would go on to earn him the highest honor from Emperor Hirohito.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  We don't have a ton of time. I want to tie this into Apple.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's uh, let's go.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Just go on this insane tangent.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  We used to do crazy long reads. We'd spend like two hours on one New Yorker article. And then, of course, the the show got much more complex. We talk about a lot more topics. But I like, I like, I like going through a long read. But of course, you can pick this up in the Financial Times, which you should go and subscribe to.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Alex asks, how long did the acquisition take from start to finish? I don't remember have the exact number of days, but it was incredibly.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  It was incredibly quick.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly quick.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, part of what enabled that was we had been having people from OpenAI on the show, having interactions with them. We had spent 100 hours talking about OpenAI. I didn't have like, you know, we didn't have a lot of questions.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  The assets on them.

• 1:14:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, you know, just, just given how much time we've spent. And so that that enabled a quick process. Also, you know, your, your long history with Sam.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, just like you give your acquire like years before.

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in this case, 13 years before.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  It's crazy. Okay. Where, where, where, where do we go to close this? It was the early 1990s. We're flashing forward. And Jobs was a half a decade into leading NeXT, the startup that he had founded after being ousted from Apple. NeXT's first product, a cube-stated workstation from costing $6,500, had already been a much hyped flop. The team's goal had been to make a computer their friends could afford. By the time it shipped, the joke goes, the only friends that could afford to buy it were Steve's. Japanese quality ideas had been all the rage for a decade. The superiority of Japanese production had become a clear, had become clear in March 1980, when Richard W. Anderson, a Hewlett Packard executive, famously discovered that the best

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Japanese memory chips performed 1,000% better than their American equivalents at initial inspection and 50% better over time. The so-called Anderson bombshell made HP start to obsess over quality. Its Japanese joint venture, Hewlett Packard, Yokogawa, won the Deming Prize in 1982 and became the foundation for rigorous standards applied across the whole company. HP aspired to improve quality tenfold within a decade. And when that looked to be failing, it adopted, it adopted a Japanese step-by-step approach to quality known as plan, do, check, act.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Let's see where else.

• 1:16:01Jordi Hays?

  Jobs was clearly taken by the ideas of qualities of quality Silicon Valley was beginning to import from Japan, having set out to build a computer company that would create better products. He commissioned an automated factory in Fremont, inspired by the plants of Japanese electronics manufacturer Alps Electric.

• 1:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we can, we can continue, but, but.

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  We have our next, we have our next guest, Mark Lor joining in just a few minutes. Let's run through some of the timeline posts.

• 1:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was cool. Taylor, Taylor Johnson said, nothing gets me hyped like a re-accelerating top line.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  This is the definition of a company, right?

• 1:16:40Jordi Hays?

  Sharing, sharing, or, or just a founder mode company.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Jordi Hays?

  But really both you can see, this is data from Sakura.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  Sakura shared. So funny, people calling me right now.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  I know, I know. If you have called me, if you have sent me a text message.

• 1:16:59Jordi Hays?

  We are live.

• 1:17:00John Coogan?

  I'm sorry. I will get back to you after the show.

• 1:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Feeling, feeling a lot, but anyways, incredible chart here. You can see Plaid ended, they, in 2023, they went from 308 to 390 million of ARR, and then jumped up to over half a billion in 2025. So Zach and the team are on an absolute tear.

• 1:17:24John Coogan?

  You know who else is on an absolute tear? Taylor Lorenz, apparently she spends 17 hours a day in screen time. I guess that means phone, but maybe phone and computer.

• 1:17:35Jordi Hays?

  She has to spend a lot of time because she's defending big technology.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  There's some incredible quotes in this story. I think she said if she could put the screen in her brain, she would.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  That's wild. That's a very unexpected.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  She's got to get, got to get set up with the Neuralink team. Get me. A true timeline merchant.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, it's. Well, yeah, extremely online is the name of her book, and she certainly lives, uh, lives her brand. Uh, Elliot Udkowski had an interesting post here. He said, "Today I learned that Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT, but not Grok, are told that today," he was referring to March 1st, April Fool's Day yesterday, "is March 32nd? Because if you tell LLMs it's April 1st, the conditional text predictions downstream become less reliable for obvious training dataset reasoning."

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  The model's like, "Okay, understanding April 1st. How do I understand?"

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  It would be very, very confusing. I mean, we were confused all yesterday because you see so many news announcements go out and you're like, "Is this a joke? There is news?"

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but if you're told it's April 32nd or March 32nd, like-

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  You should be more confused.

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be like, "That's clearly wrong."

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how real this-

• 1:18:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would think they would just keep it March 30th or something.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. We'll have to ask some people. Uh, Rune says, "The AI doc reminded me mostly of Coney 2012 documentary Slacktivism, selling the feeling of 'we need to do something' as a product oddly centering the filmmaker." Uh, when is the embargo lifting for the AI doc? Because I did see it with Tyler and a bunch of other folks from the team, uh, and enjoyed it, but I would love to talk about it. I believe we're gonna have the-

• 1:19:14Jordi Hays?

  I think it already came out.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  It came out?

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, March 27th.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it was interesting. It was the biggest gap between the, the AI doc and his, his like, you know, the press tour that the creator is on now, is that, uh, he seems like he doesn't believe AI is, is real at all, I guess. He, he was very worried about doom in the, in the movie, comes away sort of like, "Oh, there's an optimistic scenario here. It's a very nice ending." Uh, but then, uh, he came away being like, "Ah, this stuff is not real," which is a very funny like conclusion, because he's not really asking about any of the financials or economics or business applications. Like, he's having a much more philosophical debate and then came away with like a financial conclusion? I don't know. It's interesting.

• 1:19:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, Google has released Gemma 4, the best overmodels in the world for their respective sizes. Demis has excited to launch Gemma 4.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Available in four sizes that can be fine tuned for your specific task. 31 billion dense for great raw performance, 26B MOE for low latency and effective 2B and 4B for edge device use. Happy building. Excited to see what people do with it. They're available now under the Apache license in Google AI Studio or on Hugging Face and some other platforms. So massive launch.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Very exciting.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  What else do we got? There's more on the Merkle leak. Very unfortunate. Gary Tan says incredible amount of state of the art training data is now just available to China thanks to the Merkle leak. Every major lab, billions and billions of value and a major national security issue.

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Jordi Hays?

  I'm just feeling, I'm feeling, you know, the national security issue is one thing. I'm feeling really concerned for individuals that not only gave PII as part of onboarding, but maybe now there's like live video of them tied to that PII. So it feels like there's some real deep fake risk.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  I'm very glad that we have Adam Myers from CrowdStrike coming on today to explain the surface area, what the trends are in cybersecurity, because things do feel like they are ramping up significantly. Very, also just very odd that there's a, there's now a leak of, of data that could be used to RL models. There's new open source models. There's also the leak of the, of the Claude code harness. And so you, if you piece all these together, you get pretty close to the frontier. And that's something that we're certainly going to have to like contend with. The fact that there's, every time that there's a leak.

• 1:21:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  You probably shrink the gap between the frontier and the open source community a few, by maybe a few months or something as they catch up, even if they're doing it like sort of above board. Anyway, Lewis.

• 1:22:06Jordi Hays?

  Lewis, he found a public company with 99% of revenue coming from one customer.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  You've heard of the one employee, one billion dollar company. Now we found the one customer, one billion dollar company. I actually don't know how big this company is, but.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  We need to figure out what company this is.

• 1:22:25Jordi Hays?

  This is TSS Inc.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  The ticker is TSSI.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  And they said, we derive a substantial majority of our revenues from a single OEM customer. Revenues from this customer comprised approximately 99, 99, and 96% of our total revenues for the year ending December 31st, 2025, 2024, and 2023. So they actually had more revenue diversity in 2023. And then the revenue concentration increased over the last two years. Although we provide services across multiple business units and divisions of this OEM, and have entered into a long-term AI rack integration agreement that includes minimum monthly payments, our overall financial performance remains highly dependent on the continuation and scope of this relationship. Well, you know.

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they're they're trading very reasonably. They're at something like a $240 million run rate as of Q4, at a market cap of like 366 million.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah.

• 1:23:20Jordi Hays?

  It's priced, seems to be priced in.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Buko says, imagine being a software company with like 250,000 customers, 1 billion of revenue, growing 20% and the market says you're worth 3.5 billion. And then Rigatoni Computing has generously five customers and basically no revenue is worth 4.5 billion. It's a cold world.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah. I mean, this is the, this is the, the reality of like working on a, on a sci-fi technology is that if it works, the value is really, really big.

• 1:23:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Essentially.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Prepared remark says, but those five customers might go to six, so you have to get in before that.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  What is, what's going on with Scott Wiener's BASED Act? Did you see this? Probably the most radical bill ever to degrade tech products. It bans Amazon Prime, stops iPhones from having FaceTime, strips travel, shopping, shopping local and AI results out of Google search results. This feels like a stunt almost. I, I, I, I don't know. It must be a commentary.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Adam's.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  This feels like something that's like, sort of being misinterpreted almost? I don't know.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  Adam sent out an update to the Chamber Progresses Group. He said, the BASED Act is likely the most radical proposal to regulate and direct technology product design ever advanced in California. Legislature, the bill dictates how core products must function from search results to app stores. E-commerce marketplaces.

• 1:24:48John Coogan?

  We have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Mark Lor from Wonder. How are you doing, Mark? Good to meet you.

• 1:24:56Speaker 06

  Hey, how you doing, guys?

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:25:00Speaker 06

  Great to be here.

• 1:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, we couldn't give you much warning or our news. It's kind of a wild, wild day over here.

• 1:25:06Speaker 06

  I just saw it. Congratulations.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Thank you. I'm sure, I'm sure we can get into M and A war stories and whatnot, whatever you want to talk about. But why don't you, since it's the first time in the show, sort of take us back in history and give us a little, little background on yourself for, for the viewers.

• 1:25:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. Started my career in investment banking. And then in the late 90s, did a first startup, sold it to Tops, the baseball card company. Then started diapers.com.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:36Speaker 06

  And then sold that to Amazon in 2011.

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 06

  For 550 million. And then worked inside Amazon for a couple of years. Started Jet.com, which is another e-commerce site.

• 1:25:49Speaker 06

  And two years later, sold that to Walmart for 3 billion and then became the CEO.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  That's why they call him the LeBron James of e-commerce. It's on the Wiki.

• 1:26:03Speaker 06

  Became the CEO of Walmart's e-commerce business and did that for about four and a half years.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, now I'm the founder and CEO of Wonder.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Speaker 06

  Food tech startup.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  Maybe take us back to diapers.com. I'd love to know like how you were thinking about that business when you started it. Was, was there a thesis that sort of vertical focused e-commerce was, was going to be a trend? What was the ecosystem like? What was the competitive landscape where VC is saying like?

• 1:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Or did you just snap up a great domain and think I gotta make some money?

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. How much was just organic versus strategic?

• 1:26:39Speaker 06

  The way it started, I was just searching on Google what search terms people were searching for a lot. And doing it at night, searching, searching, searching. It would tell you how many times it was searched and I saw.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so they didn't even have, so did they even have like Google Trends at that point? Or you just had to search and they had, they would show you?

• 1:26:56Speaker 06

  It was Alexa, I think it was called Alexa maybe or something. You can type in a search term and it would tell you how many times it was searched on Google.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Speaker 06

  And diapers, I remember was 200,000 times a month. And so I went online and I saw the price of diapers was like $10 more expensive and I thought. I mean, I had a baby at the time. It was a pain to go get diapers. Why aren't diapers delivered like everything else, like books and all this other stuff? And I thought, yeah, diapers.com, you know, and that was, actually, 1-800-DIAPRERS started because I couldn't afford the diapers.com domain.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so the 1-800, uh, there must have been a moment where like the 1-800 was like more expensive than the dot com though? And then did it flip at some point?

• 1:27:39Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, it was very, like, when I was there, it was very cheap. It was like, you know, I don't know, just tens of thousands, whereas the diapers.com was like a half a million or something, so.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  What was it like building an e-commerce website back then? Like, we, I mean, we just, we just, uh, read a story about a one-person, or I guess, two-people company, uh, two-person company that's at a billion dollars in revenue. And that feels unthinkable, but like, what was the team like? Were you racking servers? Was there cloud?

• 1:28:10Speaker 06

  We were racking servers, we were racking servers, yeah. And nothing was in the cloud. It was just, you know, eventually transitioned to it.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16Speaker 06

  But yeah, no, it was servers in the server closet and, uh, yeah, we had, um, you know, designers, you know, designing the website and building it out and like it was, yeah, old school.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  And then, uh, I mean, how were you thinking about fulfillment, vertical integration, what you want to do, what you don't want to do early on with that journey?

• 1:28:37Speaker 06

  I mean, the, the, we had very little capital, so everything was, you know, uh, hand-to-mouth. There was, we would sell a diaper online, a box of diapers online for, let's say, forty dollars, and then we'd go to the wholesale club and buy it for forty-two and ship it to the customer.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:28:54Speaker 06

  So, it was like that kind of thing. So we're actually losing money on every, on every box we sold.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, uh, and then what, what was the, uh, the integration with Amazon like at the time? Where was Amazon as a business? Where was the vision? What was the, what was the thesis and like the, what you saw was, was going on at Amazon? Like, why was it an exciting opportunity?

• 1:29:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I mean, it was still early days. Amazon was actually crushing it in 2005 when we started diapers.com, but they were mass. They weren't focused any one category. It wasn't a great experience. Like if you're like me, a new parent going on to Amazon and wanting to buy like your stuff for your baby, you're like all over the place. It wasn't a great experience. Um, the diapers were actually more expensive on Amazon than in the store. They just weren't, they weren't getting the sort of whole diaper thing. And saw an angle to create a specialty site that focused just on that vertical. Everything the parents want, everything they need all in one spot. Um, and it was really working, you know, we also, um,

• 1:29:57Speaker 06

  were able to ship the diapers and all this stuff out of the same fulfillment center with two day delivery, uh, which wasn't being done on Amazon at the time in that category.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07Speaker 06

  Um,

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  And is that, is that more important? Is that more important in that particular category because parents need diapers for their kids. It's a more urgent, like it's, it's a fast, like you might wait for a book or you might wait for a TV or something.

• 1:30:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. You realize I'm running out of diapers. I need them tomorrow, you know, that sort of thing. So, um, definitely. I also think there's a lot of, you're buying like a lot of different things and it's expensive to ship them from multiple warehouses. So wanting to get them all in the same box.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 06

  Like getting the wipes, the diapers, um, the baby formula, you know, bottles and things like everything in the same box because they're low margin.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:43Speaker 06

  And so it's too expensive to ship them separately. But we were also the first ones to, uh, bring in Kiva Robotics into the warehouse.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:30:51Speaker 06

  Um, and Amazon ultimately bought Kiva Robotics. We were the first ones to, to use robotics in the warehouse. And again, uh, all, all in the name of the margins are low. We have to, we have to figure out how to automate. We create this software that told the people in the warehouse exactly how to put everything in the box. So we can get all the things in the smallest box possible.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:13Speaker 06

  Because FedEx a lot of times would charge you for the box size.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:17Speaker 06

  And so we tried to like, we had 23 different box sizes. So like, we were very advanced when it came to the logistics and, and trying to pull costs out of the system.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Speaker 06

  And, um,

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  What, what, uh, what elements of the internet boom? Like what are the ways in which the internet boom feels similar to the AI boom and, and how does it feel different?

• 1:31:40Speaker 06

  I think it feels very, I think it feels very similar. I mean certainly, you know, just there's people on both sides of the fence. This is good, this is bad, what's it gonna do, like a lot of uncertainty.

• 1:31:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were, we were looking back on, on how people, all the fears people that had about the internet are almost mirrored one to one with AI. Like every single one kind of matches up. You know, the job displacement fears, Y2, you know, Y2K, things like that. It's pretty remarkable how, how humans feared the internet in the exact same way.

• 1:32:18Speaker 06

  Humans fear everything. You go back to when they, trains, okay? I don't know if you guys, you know.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  I wasn't alive.

• 1:32:26Speaker 06

  When trains, when trains were a thing, they strongly advised people not to go on trains because at that speed, they don't know the long-term effects it'll have on your brain. And they told pregnant women, do not go on a train if you're pregnant. Because of the same reason. Like, any industrial advancement that's ever taken place in history, there's always an incredible amount of, of fear.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Can you tell me about the process of the idea for Jet.com? It, it, when, I remember that process happening and it felt like, okay, at this point, you know, with diapers.com, like there's a niche, there's a, there's a landing zone, like it makes so much sense, it's complimentary to Amazon. Jet.com felt much more like, okay, this is like a direct competitor. Was that the correct framing? Were you thinking about that? Were you just thinking there needed to be more options in the market that you could differentiate? What was your thought process going into launching Jet.com?

• 1:33:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I think there's just a massive market and there was no number two to Amazon and we had an angle. You know, Amazon at the time was, you know, shipping stuff from multiple warehouses. It was very inefficient from a logistics standpoint. They were burning a lot of money, but they had no competition, so. They could do it and the idea was very simple. Let's empower people and teach them how to shop smarter so that they can save money. And so we built this smart card technology where, you know, when you started adding items into your basket, it would reduce the prices of the items that could be fulfilled from the same warehouse in the same box.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:05Speaker 06

  As an incentive to get people to save money because if you shipped an item from two different warehouses, you had to pay, you know, at least five dollars per shipment.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 06

  And if you shipped it in the, from the same warehouse, the marginal cost to ship might be 15 cents. And so that was the idea of teaching people how to shop smarter to save money.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the fundraising environment like throughout that, throughout that journey?

• 1:34:32Jordi Hays?

  I doubt you've had a hard fundraise.

• 1:34:35John Coogan?

  At the same time, it's like, you know, you're going up against Amazon during this time.

• 1:34:39Speaker 06

  I mean, I tried to raise money in 2001, 2008, 15, some really tough years. I've been through it all, been raising money now for 30 years. I've done probably as many venture capital pitches as anyone. You know, probably over, over a thousand pitches easily now over, over the career. But the fundraising has changed in the early days of Diverge.com. If you were to raise a hundred million dollars, that was like a huge deal.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Speaker 06

  And, and then today, you know, it's raising billions, tens of billions, you know.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:13Speaker 06

  Very different environment today, but back then it was, it was much harder to get private capital.

• 1:35:18Jordi Hays?

  What drew you to food? We had, we had Travis Kalanick on a few weeks ago and, and we were sort of joking around is like you do, if, if you've done, food feels like the hardest possible, you know, massive opportunity, but it's like probably the hardest food tech, probably one of the hardest categories. And so if you've mastered, you know, at scale logistics and these, you know, incredibly, you know, capital intensive things like e-commerce or rideshare, it feels like the final frontier, an incredible challenge. But what, what brought you, what drew you into it?

• 1:35:55Speaker 06

  I mean, first of all, I think the margins in food are just so much better than e-commerce. And I felt like it is a restaurant sector was ripe for technological disruption. Restaurants haven't changed fundamentally in a hundred years. They're still capital intensive, labor-heavy, difficult to scale, and they're places. And we wanted to challenge that and ask the question, what if restaurants weren't places? What if restaurants were just ideas? What if you can build a restaurant and scale it across a network like software? Without any incremental capital or incremental labor with robotics in the backend? And if we're able to do that, then we're able to bring, you know, make great food more accessible.

• 1:36:37Speaker 06

  We can bring restaurants to places that currently don't have access, at times of the day that don't have access, and at price points that are really unfathomable today. That was really the sort of the thinking there. And, you know, we managed to, today, in 2,500 square feet, have 25 unique restaurants across 20 different types of cuisines. Everything from a high-end Bobby Flay steak, to Jose Andreas, to barbecue burgers, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Middle Eastern fried chicken pizza, all in one 2,500 square foot kitchen with no gas, all electric, no open flames, with very lightly trained labor. So it's very systematized.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:18Speaker 06

  And we see a future where we'll have a thousand or more unique restaurants offering out of the same 2,500 square foot kitchen.

• 1:37:28Speaker 06

  And so...

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  Wild. Have you read any of those like old stories about the automats in 1950s? Have you heard of this? It's like this, it's like this restaurant, I think it was in New York, and basically there was like a wall of cubbies where the food would be prepared in the back and then you would just sort of open the cubby and take your food and there was no interaction. And they were like, they were heralded as like the future in sci-fi. But they never really took off in like the 50s, I guess. And I've always wondered about like, how important is the, the... The online interaction, like the delivery point, because there's been a number of attempts to make like robotic restaurants work.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  But it feels like if people are going to a restaurant, they want a particular experience. But if they're ordering food online, they want, they're okay with a different experience. And I'm wondering how, how separate those are, even though we think of them as like, it's the same name. It's, you know, this pizza place in person or this pizza place in, in, on delivery. They're actually maybe much more different experiences and like, and like experiences, delivery, like what the value prop is.

• 1:38:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're, I mean, we're focused, it's primarily delivery first, so 70% of revenue is delivery. About 25% is pickup.

• 1:38:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:50Speaker 06

  And then less than 5% is sit down. So we have 10 to 20 seats.

• 1:38:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:53Speaker 06

  In the front. So it's like, it looks like a high end fast casual in the front, but it's a pretty small front of house.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Speaker 06

  But being vertically integrated, so we block the wrap ups, so we own the delivery.

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:04Speaker 06

  We own, and we also own all the restaurants. So we own all the restaurants, we do the cooking, we built all the technology. And so the vertical integration, combined with a very tight delivery radius.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:15Speaker 06

  Allows us to offer an incredible experience, like faster, more on time, hotter food, great quality. And of course, everyone in the family could order from a, from a different restaurant and it all gets cooked and delivered at the same time. And we can do that in ex-urban, even rural areas where restaurants can't typically go. And that's one of the advantages of the model. And then recently, we just added drone delivery in New Jersey. And that'll be a big part of the, of next year's.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Is it flying or, or road going with wheels?

• 1:39:45Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm sorry, flying.

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  Flying.

• 1:39:47Jordi Hays?

  And who did you guys partner? Did you fully verticalize?

• 1:39:51Speaker 06

  Uh, yes, fully. No, no, we were partnered with a couple of different drone companies to do it. But, but we're live, you can order from drone in New Jersey, uh, in this one location and Texas for next year.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  What are the challenges with doing prepared food delivery via drone? Like I've seen some of these videos where a package will fall, you know, 10 feet out of the sky. And, and obviously that's not going to work if you're ordering, ordering a nice meal.

• 1:40:15Speaker 06

  No, it comes down with a tether.

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Speaker 06

  It comes down with a tether and very gently puts it on the ground. But the advantage is no tips. It's more on time. You can service a bigger area. And then you could also deliver to, if you're on a boat, on a lake, on a beach, a field, you could be camping. So the idea of being able to deliver it to the point as opposed to somebody's residence is really cool. And it's really at an inflection point now. I know we've been talking drones for 10 years, but when we go to Texas next year, we fully expect half of our deliveries to be done via drone.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:40:49Speaker 06

  So just to kind of put that in perspective.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  We've had Keller from ZipLine on a number of times and we've been feeling the acceleration with every interview we have. How do you?

• 1:41:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, one of the things that.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 1:41:02Speaker 06

  Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  How have you approached everything on the supply chain side? Actually, because I imagine some of that is out of your control, but that, you know, you need, you're heavily reliant on those inputs, no matter how good your whole technology stack and process is, the food's got to arrive at each of these kitchens.

• 1:41:25Speaker 06

  That is absolute most important. I'm glad you called that out. We have, you know, 40 culinary engineers on staff. We just hired Victoria, who's the head of global supply chain at Cisco Foods. So we have a 700 ingredient library. We source everything from a number of different purveyors. It brings it to our distribution center and then from distribution center every day, we replenish every location. Today, we have 118 locations open. Next year, we'll have 400. So growing, growing very fast.

• 1:41:56Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:41:56Speaker 06

  But the food quality is the most important.

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming it would never have worked to work with third-party like food distributors. Like you need to control it. You can have them come into the central hub, but you need to actually understand.

• 1:42:11Speaker 06

  You want to have specialists. So if you have everything from pizza dough to barbecue to sous vide steaks to veg, like everything comes from a different supplier, in some cases co-manufacture. But yeah, the food quality is most important. But the 700 ingredient library is fixed. All the equipment is fixed. Think of that as like a data center. Once you have the data center and piping in the ground, anybody can create a restaurant using the platform and launch it across, instantaneously across all locations. So at the end of this year, we're launching Wonder Create. Where anybody in the world with just an AI prompt can create their own restaurant

• 1:42:53Speaker 06

  and launch it across all Wonder locations for $10 a month. So we think it's going to fundamentally change how people think about restaurant creation.

• 1:43:02Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, walk, walk, walk me through this. I come in, I want to prompt, I, I start prompting or even just typing out what I want to make. And then your guys is are base using robotics are you, you can just make it on the fly. Like what is the lead time? Can you actually like open up the floodgates here? Like how, how limited will it be?

• 1:43:23Speaker 06

  In December, yeah, in December, you'll be able to go to Wonder Create homepage and say, create me a fast casual Mexican concept for Gen Z. And that's it. Hit create, then AI will brand your restaurant, name it, give you a couple of options, do all the images, do all the recipes, write the descriptions, price everything, do all the health information, create your entire restaurant in under a minute. You can decide to publish it in all Wonder locations for $10 a month instantaneously. And now you're live to potentially 20 million people next year. You can push it on DoorDash, Uber and Grubhub if you want as well. And you own the restaurant. You price it, you own it, it's live. And if you're an influencer, you have.

• 1:44:06Jordi Hays?

  So are you doing a rev share back with the, with the creator? Or how does, how does that work?

• 1:44:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, you just basically the creator would pay us for food and pay us for robotic time. So we're plug in, let's say you created a fast casual Mexican concept. It would plug into our infinite bowl machine that we acquired from Sweet Cream. The infinite bowl machine would make your bowl according to your recipe. And then we would actually print your packaging on demand to match your logo. So you're fully in business. You don't need to do anything. You can be live in a matter of minutes with your new restaurant. And then we're next year launching an automated sauce machine, the infinite sauce machine, which has 130 raw ingredients and can make 80% of all sauce recipes on the internet on demand, 500 sauces an hour.

• 1:44:53Speaker 06

  So you can also create your own sauce recipe, your own dressing, your own. Whatever sauce you want on these on these bowls that are made from the infinite bowl machine. So that's that's sort of all it's all gonna launch at the end of this year. IBM.

• 1:45:07John Coogan?

  I mean, like, you're you're you're describing a very, a very broad vision for the type of food that can be delivered and made. Walk me through the like, the level of robotic automation, because you walk into a place that toasts bagels and they have a machine, it's sort of robotic, that will like, move the bagels down and toast it, or the pizza goes through the oven. And then you and then we see pitches all the time from humanoid robotics companies where it's operating a toaster that's not automated at all, but the but the robot is moving, and it's fully humanoid. What is actually useful? Where are we in the deployment of this? What like, what robotic form factors are actually moving the needle and driving value?

• 1:45:51Speaker 06

  No, so, okay, so where we are today, we have conveyors in every location. We have again, no open flames, all electric cooking platform.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:58Speaker 06

  Um, when the item gets on to the conveyor, it goes down to the expo area, it gets auto scanned, no human, robotic arm, picks it off, and puts it into the right bagging lane. So like, that is, that is the extent of the robotics today.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:13Speaker 06

  But the robotic machine, the infinite bowl machine we bought from Sweetgreen is live in 32 Sweetgreens. It makes all the salads and all the bowls without any human intervention. The only thing you have to do is put the ingredients in the machine, but the bowl is beautifully made. It turns the bowl, neatly puts the ingredients in the bowl, and there's no human labor. You're pulling out 25 points of labor on on making those bowls. And the bowl machine can do 500 bowls an hour. It can do 13 million in revenue in 300 square feet. Incredible piece of machinery. This great team from Spice Robotics, they have 34 MIT engineers up in Boston, are now working for us, and they're building the sauce machine.

• 1:46:54Speaker 06

  The sauce machine will go live early next year. And we're working on an infinite beverage machine that could make basically any drink. You know, in a coffee shop or a cold brew concept, all the foaming, layering, blending, that machine will also go live next year. So we're layering on the automation. And then in the middle of next year, we're launching an automatic retrieval system where all has a cold storage, a frozen and ambient, and everything's stored in there. And so if you order wings, it'll robotically pick the wings and send them to the fryer. And then the person just puts them in the fryer. In the future, the fryer will be automated, but that's kind of like where we are today, where we're going next year.

• 1:47:37Jordi Hays?

  How?

• 1:47:38Speaker 06

  But we envision.

• 1:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:47:40Speaker 06

  Well, we envision in the not-too-distant future, being able to generate 20 million of revenue at 2,500 square feet with only 15 people operating that 20 million in revenue. So your labor cost is a small percentage, your rent is a tiny percentage, and we're able to make a 50% full wall margin, which we're gonna take that extra margin and put a lot of it back into price. So we'd expect prices to come down and be deflationary over time. And it's consistent with our mission of just making great food more accessible.

• 1:48:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, food, has food ever been deflationary? It just feels like it all, forever, it just goes up and up and up. I wanted to get your thoughts on humanoid robotics, specifically in a restaurant context. I'm guessing I already know what you think, but what's your take?

• 1:48:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we don't use any humanoid robots. So I think.

• 1:48:37Jordi Hays?

  No, I understand now. I mean more like diffusion. Do you think that, do you think a humanoid form factor will ever be productive in a commercial kitchen? Or are these kind of like bespoke systems like you've created gonna dominate?

• 1:48:50Speaker 06

  I mean, I think definitely the short term, what we're doing is sort of like first principle thinking on this stuff. Like the humanoid robots going into a kitchen that exists as, oh, there's the fryer. This is what you do. You put the fries in the basket, the basket down, the basket up, the basket over. We like to rethink and think, why do you need to do that that way? Why can't you just create a fryer that has a conveyor, and the conveyor goes through the fryer and fries it along the way? So you don't need to put anything in a basket and take it out of a basket. Like that sort of, that sort of thinking. I do think there's some things that can't be automated. It'll be a long time before we could ever automate it, like assembling a burger or rolling a burrito.

• 1:49:31Speaker 06

  If a humanoid is able to roll a burrito or assemble a burger, we'd be very interested in that and we would look at it. It doesn't seem like anything that's going to happen in the very short term, but I'm always open to know that anything you think is not possible today, you know, could be possible.

• 1:49:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were asking a humanoid founder about what we're calling Diet Coke bench. How effectively can a humanoid open a Diet Coke? It's simple, but probably not too easy.

• 1:50:00Speaker 06

  I really would like to just...

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Okay, good. Just my last question is, I'm wondering about your vision for the future of like restaurant brands generally because if, like, will we get to a point where I can go and prompt or design a specific meal and if I want buffalo wings put on pizza and folded into a calzone, deep fried, like, as long as I'm using the tools that are within one facility, will I be able to just create something that's essentially a one of one meal that is to my exact specifications and actually be direct to consumer?

• 1:50:40Speaker 06

  Yes, you'll be able to create your own restaurant, your own recipes, the way you want, and go direct to consumer. So we envision a future where there are not only influencers creating restaurants, but every college student can have their own cold brew concept, a high school student can have their own, you know, salad or Mexican concept. We envision in the not-too-distant future, there are tens of thousands of salad concepts in the US, tens of thousands of fast casual, and the market will be very long-tailed, very fragmented. It won't be consolidated the way it is today.

• 1:51:10Jordi Hays?

  It's fascinating, but you're basically taking franchising and bringing it online, and franchising in a way has been so successful because you're giving people a system and a proven product, but in this case, you're not asking for them to take on, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt to set up these...

• 1:51:30Speaker 06

  Ten dollars a month. That's all it is, ten bucks a month.

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  Well, thank you.

• 1:51:34Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Are you guys, what are you hiring for right now?

• 1:51:40Speaker 06

  I mean, across the board, but we're we're kind of, you know, big open, a lot of open positions in robotics and engineering. So, you know, we've got over a thousand engineers on staff, but we can't seem to to get enough. So, um, yeah, if you're listening, reach out.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. So great to meet you, Mark.

• 1:51:59John Coogan?

  For taking the time to come talk to us.

• 1:52:01Speaker 06

  Nice to meet you guys, too.

• 1:52:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've been following your career.

• 1:52:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, same here. I was building an e-commerce company in 2012, and I was like, yeah, this guy's the LeBron James. So, thank you for everything you've done for the industry.

• 1:52:11Speaker 06

  Great to see you guys.

• 1:52:12Jordi Hays?

  Great to get to have you. We'll have to create a TVPN kitchen.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love it. Goodbye. Uh, there was something that you wanted to pull up, Jordy. What should we pull up?

• 1:52:21Jordi Hays?

  A post here from Rat King, our friend over at the New York Times.

• 1:52:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:52:26Jordi Hays?

  Tech reporter.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  What's he say?

• 1:52:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he wrote, he wrote a profile on us.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:52:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was able to get a screenshot, actually, from our contract.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:37Jordi Hays?

  With OpenAI. Uh, and he says, interesting, as part of negotiation with OpenAI, TBPN has a commitment to editorial independence written into the contract, which states the following, TBPN retains full control over its daily programming, editorial decisions, guest selection, and production schedule. TBPN will continue to host a broad range of voices and perspectives, which we shared earlier.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, open, open stage to talk about whatever, whatever you're building in technology and AI. Uh, TBPN independently determines its external appearances and commentary. OpenAI will not control TBPN's planning materials or working documents. OpenAI will not provide direction on TBPN's editorial calendar. OpenAI will not influence who TBPN books or what topics it covers. Again, we just talk about so many things. Oftentimes, we're talking about topics like on the fly. There's breaking news. This was incredibly important.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's also just more fun to have, have the directors be the hosts as well.

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  So that we're not talking it. So we just say whatever.

• 1:53:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people have always asked us, how do you guys decide who comes on the show or decide what to talk about? And the honest truth is, we, you know, it's whatever we're interested in. It's always been that way. It's super important. Uh, it's always been important because We have to sit here and talk for three hours every day.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  It's gotta be interesting to us.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be interesting to us.

• 1:54:02John Coogan?

  Or else it's brutal.

• 1:54:04Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, OpenAI will not materially alter, discontinue, or rebrand TVPN. OpenAI does not have rights to TVPN host likeness. Yeah, we specifically have it set up where they can't even train models on TVPN. Can't train it on the chat. They can't train on anything TVPN related. I'm sure other companies train on TVPN.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Already in one way or another. But yeah, this was incredibly important to both teams, and I think we got it to a really good place.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  And thanks to Mike Isaac for covering it. Well, let's bring in our next guest, Adam Meyers from CrowdStrike. He is the head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike and the host of the Adversary Universe Podcast. Adam, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:54:49Jordi Hays?

  Adversary's worst nightmare.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  The adversary's worst nightmare.

• 1:54:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, thanks for having me. Congrats on that position, too. I was reading about that earlier.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:54:57Speaker 07

  It's awesome.

• 1:54:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, and thanks for hopping on. A crazy week. I imagine it's an extremely crazy week for you. Can you sort of level set for us? Is this a really, really weird week generally?

• 1:55:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting because when we had, last time we had George on, or maybe the time before I was talking, it's like we haven't had big AI-related security breaches to date. And not everything that's happened this week has been, you know, directly tied to AI. But it feels like everything is heating up.

• 1:55:29Speaker 07

  We're seeing more of it. There's been a couple in the last two weeks of these supply chain attacks. And, you know, I think what's clear is that, especially with the use of Claude code and some of the different agentic solutions that are out there. People don't know necessarily what these things are downloading, what they're loading on their systems. I know you guys have talked about like Open Claude before and things like that. And it's just, you know, the supply chain for software has been an issue for a while. And I think it's just escalating, right? We've seen so many of these over the last week. We've seen Team PCP doing a few of these, and then this most recent one, which was a big one, tied back to North Korea.

• 1:56:09John Coogan?

  North Korea.

• 1:56:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, two things are happening. People aren't reading code. They don't understand the ways in which they're, they're actually building products. And then there's also like, you know, it feels like a hundred or a thousand times more. Software just being created too, and the combination of those things is what's driving this?

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:56:27Speaker 07

  I've been doing a plan with it a lot and it's, you know, you can't even see it as it's running and it's just pulling down MPM libraries and God knows what else from PyPI and stuff like that. So it's just, you know, who knows what's out there. And the other thing is you install these libraries one day and then they become evil overnight. And, you know, you have to go back and review everything that you're using.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you give us a supply chain attack 101? Some people might be familiar with SolarWinds. That was the last one that really broke through to the mainstream. But just how does this work? What's the anatomy of a supply chain attack? And then we'll go into how to fight it and why they're on the rise in particular.

• 1:57:03Speaker 07

  Sure. Yeah. So generally supply chain attacks, you know, are going to impact the software supply chain. And so in SolarWinds, I actually worked that one. So I can, I can tell you that one was, was pretty special because they got into the CICD environment, were able to actually affect the building of the software so that it was done in a way that nobody really could tell that that had happened. What we're seeing in these new supply chain attacks is that they're targeting the developers themselves, many of whom probably listen to the show. And so it's important to pay attention that they, you know, they go after your credentials. They fish you, they get access to your logins to things like MPM and PyPI and then abuse that.

• 1:57:46Speaker 07

  And, and there's a number of ways they can do this with Git tags where they can actually, you know, hide the code and then redirect Git to a Git tag. But effectively what happens, you know, for the layman is that you have software that is depended on by enterprise applications, by open source stacks. And their, you know, Axios was downloaded something like 100,000 times per week. Right? So that, that gives you a sense that these things are being used extremely frequently. And you know, people don't look at them. They don't, they don't analyze that code. They don't analyze that library. They trust it came from MPM. It must be good. The community has looked at it.

• 1:58:28Speaker 07

  But those things can be updated at a moment's notice and you don't, you don't know what that latest update is unless you review the code yourself.

• 1:58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So on, on reviewing the code yourself, we were debating this. Uh, the two sides that we were kicking around was maybe, uh, the reaction to this is that sure, we're not going to write as much code going forward. We know that the models are good at writing code, but there will be a lot more code reading that goes on and people will just demand that if you're hired as a software engineer, that you read every line, you, you work through the dependencies. You are in charge of the code that you ship regardless of whether or not it was generated by an LLM or not. The other side of it, uh, was sort of like, maybe the answer to, you know, bad code, bad AI code is more good AI code.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  And that we will be doing more AI code reviews and that we can actually throw more AI at this problem. I imagine the solution is somewhere in the middle, but how, how are you wrestling with those two paths forward?

• 1:59:26Speaker 07

  Well, I think what we're looking at is how do we secure it, uh, absent of is somebody reviewing the code or not, right? And so there's things that you can look for at the endpoint at the security fabric, right? We, we kind of see ourselves as the operating system of security at CrowdStrike. So being able to see that, you know, the AI agent is writing code and it loads a library and inside that library, you know, use this Axios example, there's a chunk of it that's base 64 encoded and it's being, you know, decoded and instantiated. That's suspicious behavior, right? Just if I say that out loud, I'm like, hey, you guys are going to pull down a bunch of base 64 code and then decode it and run it.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:04Speaker 07

  You'd be like, no, we're not. So, um, you know, I think that those things that we could see at the endpoint at. The build time, we can actually look for that and say, okay, this is suspicious behavior. Let's flag this and pay attention to what's happening with this particular thing. Because, you know, to your point, you could demand everybody read all the AI slop that they're generating. But the reality is that even if they do that, they're not looking at all the libraries that they're using. Right? How many libraries does a standard build have, right? I mean, I've, I've been vibe coding for a while and, you know, who knows what libraries? You know, you run it and that's the beauty of it, right? You run it, it spits out a bunch of stuff and then it works.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:42Speaker 07

  The reality is, nobody's looking at those code bases until something like this happens.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. What does the, what is the future of, uh, security products crowd strike? I, I can just imagine a world where, uh, more people need security products for open source projects, for their personal projects, for their personal life. Like, if you have someone whose day job is important, but then they're vibe coding their, you know, their, their family calendar at home, but all of a sudden that creates a vulnerability where you can get their, you know, phone number and then, you know, SIM swap.

• 2:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one thing that's interesting is like, soft, people have had like relatively high trust with software for the last 10 years, right? It's like, oh, it's a Google login and only, only this year have I started to be like really question different apps and things like that that people are making because there's a tendency, if you're working in tech, to like, want to try the new thing, right? And now when something pops up, it's actually kind of a headwind for startups because I think we're probably headed into a lower trust era.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that's part of it. I also would point to the people that are building these libraries, right? They need, and we've seen this with Chrome plugins too and browser plugins. You need to have MFA, you know, multi-factor authentication on all of your authentication for, you know, pushing code out to these library bases because, you know, somebody comes along, fishes the developer, convinces them to enter, you know, password for, you know, drive or some sort of cloud storage or something like that. They take those credentials and then they use that to log in and change the code base. So the developers really need to be focused on securing their own accounts and identity. And we've seen, you know, we released this global threat report a few weeks ago.

• 2:02:33Speaker 07

  Identity, you know, for a long time endpoint. And when CrowdStrike, I've been with CrowdStrike since we started back in 2011, endpoint was kind of where the bad stuff happened.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  What a good run.

• 2:02:49Jordi Hays?

  What advice are you giving to developers today that are, you know, I think everyone, that my advice would not be freak out and slam your computer into the table?

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  We're going back to pen and paper.

• 2:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can't go back to pen and paper, but like, what are the, you know, two factors, an obvious one, any other like advice that somebody should basically implement immediately?

• 2:03:15Speaker 07

  Look, if everybody secured their identities, my job would be a lot easier. Right? Like, the number one thing that we've seen is identity attacks. I mean, two years ago, we saw the voice-based phishing. So threat actors calling up the help desk and being like, "Hey, this is Jordy and I can't log into my account." Right? And, "Sorry, Jordy, I'm just picking on you there." But, "Hey, you know, I can't log into my account." And they're like, "All right, well, you know, who's your supervisor? What's your work location?" You answer those two questions and they reset the cred for you. And that, that happens to the point, hundreds of percentages of increase that we've seen that occurring from threat actors. So, you know, one of the ways to get around that

• 2:03:57Speaker 07

  from a defense perspective, multi-factor authentication, don't use SMS, by the way, for multi-factor authentication, because that's a whole other thing, because I can SIM swap you, or I can, you know, and, you know, if you have a backup for your multi-factor authentication as your Gmail, well, I'll target your Gmail and then I'll intercept that key. So having smart secondary factors and using pass key and things like that, really important. And then using different, you know, I tell this to everybody, and, you know, even if I'm talking to a bunch of school kids, like, "Hey, use different passwords for everything."

• 2:04:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:30Speaker 07

  And I love nothing more than going into a room of people, I'm like, "All right, raise your hand if you don't use the same password for every account." And they all raise their hands. And I'm like, "Look around. If your hand is up, you're a liar, because everybody does password reuse."

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. Give us the pitch for the podcast. Give us a summary. Tell people where to find it.

• 2:04:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's the adversary universe podcast. It's myself and Christian Rodriguez, who's our field CTO of the Americas. And just like you guys, we like to have a good time, just kind of back and forth banter, bringing guests occasionally. But we really dive into the adversaries. So in this case, with the Axios incident, we're attributing that to Stardust Chalima, which is a North Korean group. We've been tracking them since 2015 and

• 2:05:15Jordi Hays?

  So and then lapses, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, was connected to the light LLM attack. But that, do I have that correct? That was a different group?

• 2:05:25Speaker 07

  Uh, well, yeah, that's, that's kind of team PCP. I think claimed credit for that. But you know, there's, they're, they're actually fighting. You can watch this in some of their channels. The two groups are kind of, you know, talking.

• 2:05:36Jordi Hays?

  They're like, I did it. No, I did it.

• 2:05:40Speaker 07

  Well, I think the lapses guys are shiny hunters was like, this is why we hack them, right? So, um, you know, the hack team PCP. So there's a lot of back and forth there. But you know, this one was North Korea who has been doing, you know, they stole last year 1.46 billion dollars in just one attack against a cryptocurrency company. So they've been stealing cryptocurrency since 2016. It, you know, billions of dollars is kind of the current total. And when they do a supply chain attack like this, they want to go after developers who are doing blockchain and, and kind of DAOs and stuff like that, because they know that if they can get into there, then they can, they can actually steal cryptocurrency and use that to buy things for their weapons program.

• 2:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Yeah, a lot more straightforward than, than acquiring data and then trying to auction it off. Yeah, totally.

• 2:06:33Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, some of, some of those are interesting because they actually, they were deploying stealers, right? To steal credentials to then go after other targets. And there's a whole ecosystem on the underground where, you know, you could go in, you could buy creds to an organization. And if you have creds to an organization and you log in, you can go straight into their single sign on, you can get into, you know, Microsoft SharePoint or any of their data stores and you're off and running. And there's really very little that organizations can do. To prevent that, you know, it's a legitimate user logging in with a legitimate credential. So it becomes very difficult for them.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. Have a great weekend.

• 2:07:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was insightful. Come on, come on more often.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, this would be great.

• 2:07:14Speaker 07

  Anytime, guys. My pleasure.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Good to have you.

• 2:07:17John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Our next guest is Jeremy Elair from Circle. He's live in person in the TVP in UltraDome with us. We're very excited to talk to him. Jeremy, good to see you.

• 2:07:26Jeremy Allaire?

  Good to see you.

• 2:07:27John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:07:27Jeremy Allaire?

  I'm good.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  Take us through the announcement. We were covering it over the past few days around maybe, maybe reset on where the business is today. And then we'll go into the quantum story.

• 2:07:42Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, obviously we went public last year.

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:47Jeremy Allaire?

  And, you know, as we went public, we talked. Thank you.

• 2:07:50John Coogan?

  There's a soundboard in person too.

• 2:07:52Jeremy Allaire?

  Can I hit that now? And, and, you know, at that time, like we were talking a lot about like our stablecoin network.

• 2:08:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:00Jeremy Allaire?

  Which is like rooted in USDC.

• 2:08:03Jeremy Allaire?

  But really, you know, over the last year, we've really widened out.

• 2:08:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:07Jeremy Allaire?

  And so we are a broader platform company now, and we have an operating system that we've been building called ARC. And that's getting ready to, you know, go mainnet, as we say. And, and then we've been kind of building out abstractions around kind of payments and sort of making payments more simple and mainstream. And then just building a lot of infrastructure and tools for developers and stuff. So the platform is really broadened. But I mean, if you look at, you know, where we are now, like USDC has become the most widely transacted digital currency in the world. Bigger than anything else, basically, and has overpassed, overtaken Tether in terms of transaction volume.

• 2:08:47John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:08:48Jeremy Allaire?

  And, you know, we're seeing new uptake. We're seeing new uptake from, you know, major companies now, you know, whether it's like a fintech like Ramp that just launched like whole treasury management with it. Or it's, you know, a global bank like JP Morgan that's now has used it to like sell digital bonds. And so it's all over the place, which is pretty cool. And then. You know, one of the things that we saw really start to pick up and we'll talk about, I think, hopefully today, too, is effectively like this explosion in people building agents.

• 2:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Jeremy Allaire?

  And agents consuming services and needing ways to kind of pay for all of that and the technology and standards to kind of do agent-to-agent economic transactions, financial transactions, and USDC has played a big role in that, and that's emerging and to me is like one of the most interesting things happening in the agentic economy. And yeah, USDC and our state of the network is like 99% of the transactions happening now at that layer.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so how are you tracking adoption? What kinds of use cases are you expecting to be the first to really kind of go more mainstream? This is something that people have been talking about for years now and as agents have become massively more popular, it feels like now could really be the moment. But like, what are you tracking most closely?

• 2:10:15Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, I mean, look, there are a bunch of things. I think, you know, if you think about like the agent stack as it's emerging, right, you're clearly seeing a lot of companies that have services, have software, have other things, and they're basically like, okay, I need to kind of convert what I do into an agent consumable system. So I want to have an MCP server, I want to have, you know, CLI interface, right? So all these kinds of things and this sort of discoverability. And then you need ways to basically enable agents to like onboard and transact really, really quickly and not go through the kind of onboarding that you would typically deal with. And so that's where we see this first wave is basically

• 2:11:00Jeremy Allaire?

  agents consuming services that are now kind of agent-ready and have been kind of structured that way. And so there's like a registry of now, you know, thousands of services that are basically becoming what's called X402-enabled, which is a key standard we're involved with.

• 2:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:18Jeremy Allaire?

  There's a big announcement actually today about that. And so that's like the first, it's sort of like getting that connected. But to me, the really interesting and more explosive kind of growth potential is really...

• 2:11:33Jeremy Allaire?

  You know, agents that are providing services to other agents themselves. And so if you think about like, I'm, I'm building an agent that's, you know, extremely good at a particular form of, let's say, medical analysis, or I'm building an agent that's extremely good at reviewing resumes, or I'm, whatever that is, this sort of agent as a service is, again, the, the way that people are talking about this is, like, in those models, you're basically paying for, um, you know, intelligence.

• 2:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:01Jeremy Allaire?

  And intelligence is, is going to be priced in, in, in dollars, but also as, as consumable tokens. And you need, at that point, like, if you look at like, what's the cost for, cost of intelligence for X number of tokens?

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:14Jeremy Allaire?

  With a given model, it could be five cents, it could be a dollar, it could be thirty five cents, it could be, it could be more, it could be something long running, could be, you know, a hundred dollars or whatever. And so, once you start having agents contracting with each other and needing that medium of exchange to, to settle that, that's where I see this as explosive.

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:33Jeremy Allaire?

  Because you get this compounding effect of agents.

• 2:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were talking earlier, there, there's a, a guy in the New York Times today that built, uh, you know, 1.8 billion dollars.

• 2:12:41Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, yeah, I know, I've been reading around, I've watched your show.

• 2:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:44Jeremy Allaire?

  Came in here, yeah.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, and, and what's notable is like, he's using a bunch of different intelligence providers.

• 2:12:50Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:50Jordi Hays?

  But if you're just hopping between different L L Ms all the time, it's not great. You're like, copy and pasting.

• 2:12:56Jeremy Allaire?

  Right.

• 2:12:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's not like unified.

• 2:12:57Jeremy Allaire?

  Right.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  And so, you would imagine that over time, you get to actual aggregators.

• 2:13:02Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:02Jordi Hays?

  And you're like, hey, we need to tap into a different model for this.

• 2:13:05Jeremy Allaire?

  A hundred percent, yeah. And, you know, like, an agent, uh, red, an agent marketplace and these registries of agents and this, and, and obviously, like, because this is all machine to machine, like, it's super discoverable.

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:16Jeremy Allaire?

  Um, and what's behind any given agent, which is just kind of consumed through, you know, uh, some kind of underlying CLI or whatever API, right? Like, doesn't matter what the underlying model is behind it, it's just like, I, there's a, there's a function I need, and it's here. And so, um, yeah, I, I think it's also, you know, the, the kind of, you know, uh, compensation, fees, transactions around agent to agent stuff is obviously.

• 2:13:43Jeremy Allaire?

  Has that like huge exponential potential. I think what gets more interesting is is when you really start to think about structured economic relationships, like like most economic relationships are not just like you have a thing, I'm paying you for the thing, right? It's like a labor contract, there might be a lot involved in it, or a service contract, there may be many, many stipulations that are part of it. And and like a trade agreement between two companies, there's like all kinds of stuff. And so you can imagine like more elaborate forms of contracts, and those need to be machine written contracts, machine enforced contracts, and machine validated and audited,

• 2:14:25Jeremy Allaire?

  and and and kind of have dispute resolution against all of those. And like economic operating systems that are built on blockchain tech stacks are like the way that will happen. And that's more of a view of like, what is the agentic economy? What is the economic system? And actually, these these these new companies that are, you know, the one person billion dollar startups, et cetera, like all of that phenomenon, in some ways, like, these are these are emergent corporate forms, right, that that are using a lot of AI labor and but over time, like, I think even the the nature of corporate forms will change, and

• 2:15:06Jeremy Allaire?

  will have more digitally native corporate forms that most of the substance is actually just software execution. And like, there's humans involved, and and maybe the legal system will always require there's a person that's there.

• 2:15:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:21Jeremy Allaire?

  But I think we're gonna we're gonna face a lot of very hard legal questions around, you know, sort of entity substance, like, what is the substance of the entity? What is the entity? And but I, you know, I think a lot of this, there's a lot of material here that we have to work with to to ultimately create these sort of fully digitally native forms.

• 2:15:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:41Jeremy Allaire?

  That are, you know, composing and interacting with with contracts and economic systems.

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys working with companies today? The beauty of USCC is anybody can kind of get the power of it by just

• 2:15:53Jeremy Allaire?

  Tap in.

• 2:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Permissionless, just tap in. But I know you guys have invested in in companies in the past, partner with, you know, a number, a ton of them directly, like, how are people? I'm sure you're getting You know, insane amount of real pitches and then also, you know, people pitching you with open claw, things like that.

• 2:16:10Jeremy Allaire?

  Oh, my God, yeah. I mean, look, I think like, so a couple of things, I think, within this AI space, right? We're, yeah, we're making investments, like venture investments in different types of startups that are doing interesting things. We have, we have builder programs, so we have, you know, with funding and stuff like that. So we have builder programs in this space. But a lot of what we're doing is just basically like making sure everything that we have, like all of the infrastructure for wallets, the infrastructure for money, the infrastructure for creating smart contracts, like all the stuff that goes into this, that all of that is just consumable and discoverable by either AI development tools or by AI agents themselves.

• 2:16:54Jeremy Allaire?

  And, and then letting, letting things happen. But like, stepping back and a little bit away from the AI specific side of it. Yeah, I mean, the, the range of, the range of companies now, like getting involved and plugging into this is really broad.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:11Jeremy Allaire?

  And, and that's exciting. You know, this is definitely kind of going, going into a mainstream phase.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  I imagine AI companies are ahead of the curve there in terms of adoption and turning on agentic payments because you go to an agent and it needs to use some resource. That's the logical, the logical pattern versus.

• 2:17:30Jordi Hays?

  There's something, there was a post, I forget who, who put it out earlier this week, something to the effect of people, AI people are more excited about crypto right now than crypto people.

• 2:17:42Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I've, I've always thought of these as, as sort of highly complimentary. And, and even going back 13 years, when we were kind of starting Circle, the thing, the thing that got me really excited was this idea of programmable money, that we were going to have like self-running software machines that would intermediate economic stuff on the internet. And that was the promise of the tech 13 years ago. You couldn't do it, it wasn't possible, it didn't exist. But it was like, as an internet technologist, that was really exciting to me. I'm like, what? Wow, like if you can actually have, you know, these sort of self running software machines that are audible and can and run. Now, I didn't have a concept of generative AI.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:23Jeremy Allaire?

  But definitely was like, okay, programmable money. That is going to be like a completely new form of utility for money that's never existed.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:32Jeremy Allaire?

  And and so that that was very exciting. And so I think in in many ways, like,

• 2:18:38Jeremy Allaire?

  you know, a crypto infrastructure, crypto as a tech stack is very, very purpose built for the the agentic world. Like, they really are hand in glove and and will work very, very closely together. And so, you know, trustless intermediation is like what what what happens in AI, right?

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:00Jeremy Allaire?

  Whether it's of data or of of.

• 2:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting to think about how many business transactions, like even if there's a contract, they're so trust dependent.

• 2:19:10Jeremy Allaire?

  Yes.

• 2:19:10Jordi Hays?

  And and stables can can play a role in helping that evolve because you can say,

• 2:19:17Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  you know, you know, basically, if, you know, you can you can escrow funds.

• 2:19:21Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:21Jordi Hays?

  You said you can make it programmable.

• 2:19:22Jeremy Allaire?

  Contracts.

• 2:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:23Jeremy Allaire?

  And and these can be very, very loud.

• 2:19:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's always been the thing. Will people, like, people like to buy from people. But part of that is because you want to know, okay, who's my counterparty?

• 2:19:33Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Do they have a good reputation?

• 2:19:34Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Do I trust that even if we have a contract, they'll they'll follow it?

• 2:19:38Jeremy Allaire?

  Right.

• 2:19:38Jordi Hays?

  And I don't have to get into some, you know, legal.

• 2:19:40Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember the pitch for machine to machine payments.

• 2:19:44Jeremy Allaire?

  Yes.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  I think it was around like Ethereum, maybe 2015.

• 2:19:47Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, yeah. So this was like an early thing.

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it sort of made sense, but it was very hard to imagine writing all the code to do all that.

• 2:19:56Jeremy Allaire?

  Now, now it's just ready itself.

• 2:19:57John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I'm wondering what you think holds about the the current economic philosophies or the economic rules of the road just in business and what might be different as we move towards a world of decentralized, agentic payments. Like, I imagine network effects still hold. I imagine that if you create value, you create the network. You can capture value through some. Transaction percentage and everyone will be happy in the ecosystem. How do you think about the economics?

• 2:20:29Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think, I think there, there are a bunch of different pieces here. Right. So, so Circle is a, is a money issuer. Like we issue digital dollars.

• 2:20:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:38Jeremy Allaire?

  We issue digital euros. E U R C is the largest digital euro stablecoin. We issue digital treasury products. We have the largest tokenized money market, basically. So we're a money issuer. And so if we can build networks that have wide utility and protocols for that, those, those monies that we issue that are super, super widely used and provide a great, you know, utility. You can permissionlessly plug in, et cetera. And, and we can grow that. The monetary base alone can be massive, right? So we can, we can, we can, we can imagine that, you know, these, these kinds of, of digital dollars running on these networks, there'll be trillions of dollars of these as opposed to hundreds of billions of them now.

• 2:21:21Jeremy Allaire?

  And so that itself is, is significant and, you know, the economics are very significant from that.

• 2:21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:27Jeremy Allaire?

  But I think, you know, ultimately, I think, you know, as, as the infrastructure becomes kind of more widely utilized for real world transactions, I mean, whatever that means, right?

• 2:21:43Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, we absolutely have an opportunity to participate in the, the, the velocity of those transactions and the economics around that. But, you know, we had this philosophy when we started Circle that, you know, over the long run, that the marginal cost of storing and moving value would go to zero and that the business model of charging fees for payments would collapse.

• 2:22:05John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:22:05Jeremy Allaire?

  And, and, you know, I think over the long run, that is still going to be true.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  Actually zero or like 0.00001%? And it's just so big, you're so good.

• 2:22:14Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, I mean, almost, yeah, I mean, actually zero to most of the consumers of it because the costs underneath it are going to be so low.

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:22:21Jeremy Allaire?

  It's like, like, you know, You don't get charged for your WhatsApp audio call, right? They're like, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna deal with the

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  We'll make it up other ways.

• 2:22:31Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, it's too cheap to me. But like, we've, we, we just announced something called Circle Nano Payments. It's a, it's a module for agents to basically be able to like have a stored balance of, of digital dollars, of, of tokenized dollars, and be able to transact them to like different wallets on different blockchains. And, uh, and we've gotten it to the point where we can actually have transactions priced uh, at one one millionth of a penny for transaction. Uh, and, you know, you're like, well, who would ever need that? Well, if there's like

• 2:23:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, here's, here's an example. So yesterday we had Eddie Q. on from Apple. He was talking about the early days of the App Store and how when you, when you bought a song, they would effectively kind of open a cart and they would hope that you would buy multiple songs.

• 2:23:20Jeremy Allaire?

  Oh, yeah, I remember.

• 2:23:21Jordi Hays?

  They would, they would hope you'd buy multiple songs in a 24 hour period before they actually like process the payment because otherwise you're giving a quarter.

• 2:23:28Jeremy Allaire?

  It's action.

• 2:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a quarter.

• 2:23:29Jeremy Allaire?

  Twenty five cents, thirty cents, right?

• 2:23:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so like that right there is insane, like the fact that, that Apple, one of the, you know, biggest consumer tech companies in the world, had to use this kind of weird workaround just to not give 25% of every transaction. Taking money away from, of course, like the creators and the record labels and Apple, just like pure kind of rent extraction.

• 2:23:50Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, it's like pay, payment systems like were never designed, were not designed for a machine and an AI economy. They weren't. And, um, we, we even see this now where because the cost to transact USDC on, has, has gone to, you know, sort of fractions of a cent in, in, in general, you can do that, like the velocity of transactions has exploded. And you see that in the growth and the year over year growth. It's like tens of trillions of dollars of transactions on a monetary basis of around, you know, We like trillions. Yeah. Congrats on saying the biggest number.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  On scale, what are you tracking right now to understand where we are in the adoption of agentic payments? Because I imagine like it is happening.

• 2:24:35Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:36John Coogan?

  It's small.

• 2:24:36Jeremy Allaire?

  It is.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Is it, are you doing like a percentage of GDP thing?

• 2:24:40Jeremy Allaire?

  No.

• 2:24:41John Coogan?

  Percentage of your transaction base, like just growth month over month?

• 2:24:46Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Like what's the, what's the correct internal KPI?

• 2:24:48Jeremy Allaire?

  Well, so there's, there's, um, there's a couple of ways to look at it.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:52Jeremy Allaire?

  Uh, right now.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:53Jeremy Allaire?

  So, so one is like, there are specifically standards for agentic payments.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:59Jeremy Allaire?

  And so we are a co-developer of the X402 standard. Actually, the X402 foundation just got merged into the Linux foundation and a lot of great companies, Stripe, Coinbase, uh, who's a pioneer in this circle.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  This has been a proposal in HTP for like 25 years, right?

• 2:25:17Jeremy Allaire?

  It's this old thing.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  It's so crazy.

• 2:25:19Jeremy Allaire?

  It's like payment request model. And so, but now if you look at like X402 version two,

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:23Jeremy Allaire?

  it's like building out into a pretty rich vernacular that's needed for the, the, the needs of agentic payments. So one way to look at it is like, what's X402 traffic? And like you can, you can look at X402 traffic, you can track it.

• 2:25:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:25:37Jeremy Allaire?

  You can look at the payloads, you can see what the transactions are. And that's in the like, it's been growing, it's in the hundreds of millions.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:25:42Jeremy Allaire?

  Okay, so quite small from a, from a starting base, but I think the, if you look at a leading indicator, which is the number of, of these like agents or services or endpoints that are X402 enabled, has been growing very rapidly.

• 2:25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:57Jeremy Allaire?

  And, and we as, as well as like companies like Stripe and Coinbase and others are, we're basically like shipping stuff so that it's like super butt simple to like have X402 in front of whatever it is you're doing or, or you in front and behind. So you could be a consumer and a service provider. And so I think that like 2026, we're going to see this huge growth in that. And then the consumption models, the leaked anthropic code actually had all of these references to X402 in it. So, you know, it's clearly like even in Foundation models becoming something that they're going like, hey, this is going to be like a common pattern. But you know, so that's, that's one way to look. And, and then the other is like, it's hard to measure, which is like, people are using AI to create bots.

• 2:26:41Jeremy Allaire?

  Like these polymarket trading bots, or these hyper liquid trading bots, or like all kinds of stuff. And those aren't using X402. And so that's like other traffic. But it's AI driven transaction volume. And so it's hard to measure. We gotta talk quantum.

• 2:26:54Jordi Hays?

  Quantum.

• 2:26:55Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Quantum, when, I mean, I'm assuming you were aware of the risk of quantum to encryption overall.

• 2:27:03Jeremy Allaire?

  No, it didn't. I mean, so very aware.

• 2:27:08Jordi Hays?

  And I'm saying like aware predating starting circle, right? Like, because this is just a risk for overall encryption.

• 2:27:15Jeremy Allaire?

  This has been, you know, crypto is cryptography, which is math. And, and you know, all this is about who can compute these, you know, keys and ciphers and all that stuff. So of course, it's always been a background debate, always been a theoretical background debate. As we've been building up our own operating system, our own crypto based operating system, ARC. We have been like saying, okay, we're doing this kind of clean room from the start. It's a new infrastructure. We have a chance to do post quantum readiness from the start. Whereas, you know, existing networks and there's this Google paper and all that jazz and so on. Like, there's a migration and there's risk and all that kind of stuff. And so we basically said, okay.

• 2:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Just massive coordination problem.

• 2:27:57Jeremy Allaire?

  Huge coordination problem. So we basically said, look, we have phenomenal, you know, you know, PhD crypto people, you know, in the company. And so we, we made this a key priority. And so we actually just announced today, our whole post quantum roadmap. And, and one of the, one of the most powerful things is that, you know, when ARC goes mainnet in the not too distant future, right? It will have post quantum signatures there from the start. So if you're issuing assets and you're, you're doing transactions, you can actually use post quantum methods from the start. I think we'll be the very first blockchain network in the world to have that.

• 2:28:39Jeremy Allaire?

  There, which is key. Now, there's like multiple layers to this, and so the roadmap also details like, okay, you know, how do the validators on the network get themselves to be quantum resilient and resistant and so on. So there's multiple layers that have to happen over time. The base layer, which is the most important, which is the fundamental mechanism for how you sign transactions, how transactions are published to the network, and how assets get defined. Like, that's post-quantum. There's a lot of detail. We put it out in our documentation today. But, you know, we've been thinking about it a long time, and, you know, it's sort of interesting because we were gearing up to launch this,

• 2:29:19Jeremy Allaire?

  and then this Google DeepMind, or whatever it was, came out, and we're like, okay, well, time to launch.

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's an interesting challenge for the industry, because everyone needs to get their house in order and like, create a plan. But then it's also like, the entire industry needs to rally, because even if you guys have your...

• 2:29:35Jeremy Allaire?

  Oh, yeah. No, it cascades across all these ecosystems. And like, USDC runs on 32 blockchain networks, right? And so like, you know, we are part of the whole ecosystem, obviously. And then, you know, of course, like, if, from a de novo perspective, people building new stuff, I mean, one thing to remember is like, basically, like, crypto infrastructure blockchains have been an early adopter phenomenon until very, very recently. And like, the actual usage at a global scale in the real economy, like, you know, 98% of that's still ahead of us. So we're still very early in all this.

• 2:30:08Jordi Hays?

  Last question for me. How did you process the 2028 intelligence crisis, that paper, the treaty? Because some of it was, you know, basically making the argument, there's a lot of kind of rent-seeking in the economy, and AI can potentially make a lot of transactions a lot more efficient. That's kind of what you're betting the company on.

• 2:30:28Jeremy Allaire?

  They had a bunch of specific stuff about stablecoins and USDC and like, you know, all that. I mean, look, we are... So I read that and there's a lot of really interesting things in there and broadly, like, you know, even circle itself.

• 2:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the interesting criticism too is like, the criticism was like, okay, this is like sci-fi. But when you look back at sci-fi throughout history, there's a lot of sci-fi that is like, you know, kind of comes to life.

• 2:30:56Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, the fundamentals of like, of like, like completely restructuring, like what transaction costs are and, and basically models where, you know, much of the work that's conducted in the real economy is work conducted by AI or by intelligences. And that, that, that work is economically going to be measured out and metered out and executed using these new digital currency forms. Like, I believe that very, very deeply. And I don't think anyone knows how big that will be, but it certainly, you know, again, like, total processed volume, which is like this number that like, the card networks and others use, like, these numbers are going to be, look so small in comparison. The unit

• 2:31:41Jeremy Allaire?

  economics are going to be very, very different. So I'm, I, I, I agree with, you know, a number of those conclusions. I'm not a hedge fund. I don't have any positions in any of these companies and all that. But like, I think it's, it's, it's real and it's happening. And, yeah, we're, we're, we're trying to build for that future.

• 2:32:00John Coogan?

  Amazing. I'm glad we have you working on it. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:32:03Jeremy Allaire?

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  To come on down to the TBN UltraDome.

• 2:32:06Jeremy Allaire?

  Thank you.

• 2:32:06John Coogan?

  I really appreciate you. Our next guest is in the waiting room and we will bring in Justin Levine from Sheppard into the TBN UltraDome. Kicks off our lightning round.

• 2:32:19John Coogan?

  Jeremy, how you doing?

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:32:20John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry, Justin.

• 2:32:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm still updating the Chiron.

• 2:32:24John Coogan?

  Traveling through time. Congrats, big day. Yeah, big day, thank you.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor, honor to have you here on this day. Sorry, we couldn't give you a heads up, but.

• 2:32:32John Coogan?

  It's all good, all good. Well, we are not here to talk about us. We're here to talk about you. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:32:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, Justin Levine, co-founder and CEO of Sheppard. We're an AI-native insurance business. We focus on large-scale industries like construction and renewable energy.

• 2:32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the growth of the construction data center industry broadly? Like, what's the headline number that you're quoting? Because I imagine you have a TAM and it's growing. But how do you actually sense make about the what to expect over the next couple of years as you build the business?

• 2:33:07Speaker 09

  I mean, we're in a massive construction super cycle specific to the AI infrastructure layer. I think this year alone, there's something like $400 billion of infrastructure spend just related to either data center assets or the energy assets that need to support those data centers. There's not enough energy on the grid, so we now have to build the energy assets next to the data centers in order to make it all operational. So, you know, from a TAM perspective, we are, we're seeing a massive inflection in terms of construction. This year alone, $80 billion of data centers were started. So $80 billion new data center starts just happened in the last 12 months. So we're just seeing a massive wave. And it's kind of ironic for us.

• 2:33:49Speaker 09

  We built Sheppard on this thesis that AI was really ripe to productize this service of underwriting and doing underwriting differently. And then ironically, a lot of these AI companies became our customers because this industry is really, you know, the driving force of construction right now.

• 2:34:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so who are all the different parties that you guys are helping ensure? It's AI companies, Neo Labs, like actual construction firms?

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, who calls you?

• 2:34:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's a mix of all the above. So everything from hyperscalers to the labs companies to, you know, contractors that are building, obviously, these assets. Our portfolio is actually more diverse than just AI-specific companies. But so, you know, our typical business is a large-scale developer of assets that are either energy assets or... Healthcare assets, hospitals, things of, you know, all sorts of different, I'd say, large, commercial, physical assets, and then we insure the contractors as well. So a big portion of what we do is identifying the best contractors who are using the best technologies out in the field, and then rewarding them with innovative pricing.

• 2:34:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so what, what, what are, what are they insuring, right? Is it?

• 2:35:04John Coogan?

  Weather, inclement weather, fire damage.

• 2:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Labor cost, like.

• 2:35:07John Coogan?

  There's so many different.

• 2:35:08Jordi Hays?

  What is, what can you, what can you insure versus like, what is just too, what, what could you insure, but it's just too hard to price? You have to go too, you know, too high to make it feasible?

• 2:35:17Speaker 09

  There's, there's a lot of different hazards, obviously, like, related to the construction cycle, so there's obviously like, the, the, just the, the, the cost of the building during the, the construction phase, so the property risk that is associated with, you know, again, a large data center campus might be $20 billion of both construction material as though, as well as equipment that's being installed. So there's a, an enormous property component, and just insuring the actual property during the construction phase is a huge strain on the insurance ecosystem. Then there's a liability perspective, so, you know, the, the builders that are, are creating these assets are, they are on the hook for mistakes, for defects, for potential,

• 2:36:01Speaker 09

  you know, injuries to people or buildings and other, other assets that are around these job sites. So depending on sort of like, the, the product offering, you're, you're obviously focused on it, on a specific hazard. We really focus on like, the driving hazard. So casualty is our, our key, our, our key product offering, and, and again, that's going to be like, property damage or bodily injury to people in and around the building of these large-scale assets. But then we also do property, so we also do the, the, the materials and the cost of construction while it's being built.

• 2:36:36Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what are your relationships like on the actual insurance side? Who, who are you, who are you actually, who's, who's putting up all of the capital and taking on the risk?

• 2:36:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we partner with large scale insurance balance sheets, almost similar to like a neo-bank that's going to have, you know, sort of a traditional bank behind it, you know, providing all the financial stability and rating and the necessary requirements to fulfill whatever the contractual risk that is there between a lender and a builder. So we kind of, we stand up under what's called an MGA model, which is that Sheppard really owns all of the upfront, marketing, sales, underwriting, policy servicing, everything from a submission coming in the door, the underwriting that happens, the making, the decision making around what risks we want to, we want to ensure, and then ultimately servicing those accounts once they become policyholders underneath our brand.

• 2:37:30John Coogan?

  Take us through the raise.

• 2:37:32Speaker 09

  We got a 42 million dollar rounds.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  And, and yeah, what is special about this, like the actual investors on this round?

• 2:37:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, so, so this is our Series B. It was led by one of the largest insurance companies in the world, so Intact, private capital led the round, that's the venture arm of Intact Insurance. Intact's a $30 billion global insurer. I would say what's special about it is the signal. You know, I think a lot of the things that we're trying to do differently, specific to the automation of underwriting, making underwriting significantly faster and more efficient. A large insurer, a large commercial insurer like Intact, pairing with us and partnering on this, I think signals that they see that the world of underwriting is about to change dramatically, just like other large industries, whether it's legal or accounting or all these

• 2:38:28Speaker 09

  other areas where we've seen a huge impact from AI and brokerage and underwriting are kind of, you know, right in that, that wheelhouse of where services businesses can change dramatically. So Intact had partnered with us at the A, they were a capacity provider for us, so they are one of those balance sheets that sits behind us, they've seen what we've been doing, they see the innovation that we're bringing in the industry, and so they, they actually preempted the round and doubled down into the, into the B.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Last question for me. How human is the process of underwriting? Because I feel like you could probably build a model, square footage, what are the assets? Where is it? You know, you probably have underwriting models, but there's probably still so like, who are you hiring? How will the how will the human capital side of the business scale?

• 2:39:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, totally. So I, you know, commercial insurance, you know, differently from personal lines is definitely more complex. It's more more data heavy, more intensive. And there's a lot more sort of decision nuance and decision making that happens at the underwriter level. So we actually, we equate what we're doing on the underwriting side to a little bit of a similar view of the self-driving kind of autonomous vehicles type of roadmap. So we've mapped our own level one through level five. And the idea is like today, most commercial insurance companies have underwriters with two hands on the wheel and they're, you know, literally doing every single thing. What we're trying to do is get to a place where the underwriter at Sheppard is much more of an orchestrator. They are managing a portfolio

• 2:39:58Speaker 09

  of 200 accounts rather than just 20 or 15 on a monthly basis. And so underwriters do play a significant role. We hire underwriters who think of themselves as entrepreneurs who want to build a portfolio. They want to orchestrate and manage that portfolio. What they don't want to do is data entry and some of the, I'd say, like, process-heavy and high-friction elements of traditional insurance underwriting today.

• 2:40:24John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:40:26Speaker 09

  Very, very cool.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  And great to have you for us. Congratulations on the round and good luck.

• 2:40:29Speaker 09

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:40:30Jordi Hays?

  Ripping, ripping.

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  Have a great one.

• 2:40:31Speaker 09

  Congrats, congrats.

• 2:40:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:40:32Speaker 09

  See you guys.

• 2:40:33Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:40:34John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Gaurav Misra from Mirage, formerly Captions App. I found out about the company through at Randall, who's in the previous round. We'll bring in Gaurav to the TVN Ultra Dome. Gaurav, how you doing?

• 2:40:46Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:40:47Speaker 04

  Good. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Welcome back.

• 2:40:50Speaker 04

  Thank you. Yeah, it's been almost a year.

• 2:40:52John Coogan?

  Crazy for us.

• 2:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were, how, you must have been in the first, how many guests?

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  I'm a huge user of this app. I love this app. I've used it for every meme that I send you. Every time there's a video with captions over it, um, I'm, I'm always downloading on my phone, screen recording, putting it in captions, and then I'll even use it to transcribe videos.

• 2:41:11Jordi Hays?

  John, John is a magician. Like, he can make, he can make basically feature-length memes.

• 2:41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that usually just gets sent to, to the team chat.

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, but yeah, uh, for, for those who don't know, uh, the, the, the apps, but also just where the business is broadly, and where you're expanding to, uh, sort of give us the lay of the land.

• 2:41:33Speaker 04

  Yes. I mean, as you mentioned, you know, we transitioned our name. So we kind of went from captions to Mirage. But, you know, the app remains to be captions, the company that we renamed briefly. And part of that is like, we're building out a product suite. So, you know, it makes sense to sort of have a different company name for that. Now, we, obviously we raised about $75 million. Recently, we announced that, uh, which is exciting.

• 2:41:56John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:41:58Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 2:41:59John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:42:01Speaker 04

  Love that. And so,

• 2:42:07Speaker 04

  so, you know, with that funding,

• 2:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:09Speaker 04

  a lot of what we're gonna do is expansion, you know, market expansion. So, you know, we are very excited about the magic moment the product already has. And you talked about it a little bit, right? And when we can bring the product in front of a new customer, they're very likely to convert, very likely to pay, and very likely to retain, right? And that's kind of what our investors saw. That's kind of why this new investment came in. Now, we want to bring this to as many people as possible around the world as quickly as possible. You know, historically, we've been sort of marketing in like five to seven countries. That's kind of where we've been, U- US-centric, like a little bit in Europe and stuff. But now we want to go really broad, you know, especially Asia is a big focus region. So that's kind of the plan of where we're going.

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

  How do you think about just feature requests and all like the the the scope of what you can do with video plus AI? I don't want to narrow you down to mobile, but like I think you've executed very well on mobile. But there's so many different features and a lot of them get broken up into different models, different APIs. I feel like there's so much opportunity to bring all that together. At the same time, you're going up against meta and edits and cap cut and divide dance. Like there are some big players, but there's also a lot of opportunity. So how do you see the landscape of things that you can do? I'll scroll reels all the time and see some crazy edit and be like,

• 2:43:28John Coogan?

  I know that they jumped to Blender for that, or they used a particular AI model for that, or they're in After Effects for that. And I and I want to recreate it, but I don't want to necessarily sit down for five hours and remember how to use Blender.

• 2:43:40Speaker 04

  I mean, it's you actually hit the nail on the head because this is exactly kind of what we're the way we're thinking about how our product roadmap goes, right? Like, I think if you look at the AI video space, there's tons of companies, there's a lot of activity happening right now. Right. But our approach is a bit different than everybody else. Like, we're not only about generating video, even though that's a big component of what we do, right? And we use all kinds of models out there. We have our own models as well, right, for audio and video generation. But it's really about the assembly of the video into something that actually makes sense, right? Something that a narrative that that, you know, ultimately can work for you, whether you're a small business, you're selling something, whatever it is. You can tell your story, sell your product, market yourself or your business

• 2:44:21Speaker 04

  using our product because we can assemble the right video for you. Now, here's the interesting part. What we've noticed is that a lot of our customers, especially the ones that are retaining for long periods of time, it's not just about fully generated video. Like, that's like, it's the thing, if you're making a Super Bowl commercial short, like go and generate the entire thing, like it's going to look awesome. Right. But there's actually a much, much larger market for like a mix of content. Like, think about like our average customer, like they're like a plumber, right? Or maybe an electrician or like a nail salon, right? They want to actually show like their actual nail salon, right? What does it actually look like as opposed to a generated nail salon of some sort, right? And they want to merge that with some generated footage, some cool shots, like maybe, you know, a founder video, like talking, you know, perfectly about whatever whatever they want to do and

• 2:45:05Speaker 04

  put it all together into something that they can give to customers, market on their website, wherever they're putting it out there, social media, right? So It's really about the connection of generated and non-generated together. And then, you know, putting the narrative together. That's the intelligence layer, right? So like, that's really our focus.

• 2:45:21John Coogan?

  How do you think about entry points into video creativity? There's something that can be sort of intimidating about an empty text box. At the same time, it is like the universal interface. It's the most broad possible UI. When do you want a user to start with an existing video or an image versus start with a blank text box?

• 2:45:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I actually, so even today, over 50% of our users start with some sort of media. An image, a video, you know, a set of images, a set of videos, audio, music, all kinds of things, right? So over 50% of people start with media, which actually is like very different than most other app. Like, a lot of like pure video generators, people start with text. They start with a prompt. And ours is flipped. It's like media first, prompt is attached to it, right? Now, I think the way we think that's going to evolve for us is that, you know, it's going to go more and more media first. That's the crazy part, right? Like, I think people expect it to go more prompt first, but I think our angle is a little bit more media first.

• 2:46:28Speaker 04

  Using real footage, you know, I actually think that, you know, there's another extreme here. Think about like, let's say you want to make a documentary, right? You probably want like zero-generated footage in a documentary, right? Like, it's like all documented reality, right?

• 2:46:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've been seeing that. I've been lately, like, I'll try to pull up a video on YouTube with, with, with my son of like a cheetah. But I have to find videos that are older than like four years because I don't want a bunch of AI cheetahs. I want the real thing. I'm trying to see like documentary footage. So you gotta find like the vintage National Geographic and stuff.

• 2:47:07Speaker 04

  Wow, yeah. Soon that's going to be lost. We may never find it again.

• 2:47:10Jordi Hays?

  No, we will always have the archives. We'll be going deep into the vintage.

• 2:47:14Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 2:47:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's real. What do you, what are the plans to scale the business over the next year or two with the new fundraising?

• 2:47:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so a lot of it's going to be market expansion, right? We talked about that. I think secondarily is use case expansion, right? So like you talked about like, we started off with something really simple, adding captions to your videos. Like we, that was the first thing we ever did, right? Straightforward, but quite useful, right? And then from there, you realize that it's about, it's really about like automatically editing your video, right? Like automatically adding edits, automatically doing stuff that people do manually normally, right? And that's kind of how we built our roadmap, right? So the future for us is expanding use cases and what can we automatically edit, right? Today, it might be, okay, it's talking head videos, it's real estate videos, things like that, right? Tomorrow, it could be product launch videos, right? Tomorrow, it could be like all kinds of other things that we don't do today

• 2:48:04Speaker 04

  perfectly, right? So that's kind of where things are going. And with that comes like new sets of users, you know, expanded use cases, obviously, it's like expanding the talent for product, right? So that's kind of where we're going, both on, you know, product expansion, geo-expansion, you know, that's really the focus.

• 2:48:21John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Congratulations and we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:48:26Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you back on. Let's not let it be a year.

• 2:48:29John Coogan?

  Always a great time.

• 2:48:30Speaker 04

  Yes. And by the way, congrats to you guys.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  Thank you. Have a great weekend.

• 2:48:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 2:48:35John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:48:36Speaker 04

  All right.

• 2:48:37John Coogan?

  And without further ado, we have our last guest at the show, Philip from Star Cloud. Putting more and more data centers in space, we're going to talk to Philip. He is, I believe, in the waiting room. We'll bring him into the TV panel, Ultra Dome, and he's ready.

• 2:48:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Google released a feature called Inbox Zero. They say Inbox Zero is a thing of the past, introducing AI inbox, cut through your email clutter with smart prioritization and daily personalized briefings. Uh, Isaac says, "Brand sending five emails a day to drive higher and higher ROI won't work anymore. RIP email."

• 2:49:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:11Jordi Hays?

  Be interesting to see how this channel does.

• 2:49:13John Coogan?

  That sent us a bunch of, uh, a bunch of emails that he's been getting, uh, and they look like spam recruiter emails, but they all come from newly set up Gmail accounts and they're not quite human sounding, so we can clock them, but basically he's getting like an ever increasing amount of poaching emails. Uh, and, uh, you know, the, usually like you'll need another filter on the other side.

• 2:49:41Jordi Hays?

  Recruiters are gonna have to start going, standing outside offices and just waiting for people to leave.

• 2:49:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, well, we have, uh, I believe we have Philip from Star Cloud in the waiting room. Uh, we got some vertical video. We'll make it work. We are gonna have a quick chat about today's event in space. How you doing?

• 2:49:58Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:50:00Speaker 10

  How you guys? Apologies for the vertical video.

• 2:50:02John Coogan?

  You're all good. It's great. We got back to back sounds. Okay, so.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  I can't turn this off.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  Second time on the show. Uh, kick us off with the fundraising. Tell us what happened.

• 2:50:13Speaker 10

  Yeah, so we just raised a hundred and seventy million dollars at a 1.1 billion dollar valuation.

• 2:50:21John Coogan?

  That is.

• 2:50:22Speaker 10

  Thank you so much.

• 2:50:23John Coogan?

  A massive round. So.

• 2:50:25Jordi Hays?

  The video is vertical because the valuation.

• 2:50:27John Coogan?

  Is going vertical. Yes.

• 2:50:30John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, yeah. Oh, this, this works great. Uh, so yeah, talk to us about, uh, what you'll be building with that new round. Is this, uh, hiring? Are you gonna be in the R and D phase? Do you have manufacturing partners lined up? Are you gonna be buying heavy equipment to make stuff? What does the next couple of years look like for you?

• 2:50:51Speaker 10

  Yeah, so we're building the third satellite. That's very similar to, it's gonna fit on the starship Pez Dispenser Form Factor. So it's this constellation we've just filed with the FCC for 88,000 satellites. Um, and so what this allows us to do is build a manufacturing line for that. Um, 88,000 satellites, by the way, would allow us to deploy about 20 gigawatts of compute capacity, which is only a hundred billion dollars worth of capex spend.

• 2:51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:17Speaker 10

  Um, so, yeah, we're ramping up.

• 2:51:20John Coogan?

  Too low, too low. And that was, we must win in this.

• 2:51:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, absolutely wild. Who, like, what, what kind of partners are, are you, are you working with? I can imagine basically every, every chip company.

• 2:51:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:36Jordi Hays?

  Wants to have some exposure to what is an emerg, you know, will be an emerging category. Um, how are you approaching that side?

• 2:51:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, 100%. Um, so we're working with Nvidia on, we just announced, and at GTC Jensen announced it, this space Ruben ship. So it's like a slightly mass optimized, slightly radiation tolerant, and then slightly thermally optimized chip, which can be used for space inference. And we've been working with them on that for a while because we've got an enormous amount of data now from the Star Cloud One satellite, which has the first Nvidia H100 onboard. Um, and so we're using all of that telemetry to form the design choices, both on the Ruben ship and also on our second and third satellite.

• 2:52:17Jordi Hays?

  And are you running workloads, like mini workloads on the first satellite? How, what does testing look like?

• 2:52:25Speaker 10

  Yeah, exactly. So we ran, we trained a model. So we trained Andre Karpov's NanoGPT on there.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:52:31Speaker 10

  We did the first hyped out inference. So we're running a version of Gemini called Gemma on the spacecraft. And then we're now also doing some more like military kind of useful workloads, which is running inference on SAR data. So synthetic aperture radar, which is basically where companies or where satellites collect a 3D image of the world underneath them. And then they can use that to detect things like a vessel entering, you know, entering your territory or other things.

• 2:52:59John Coogan?

  How is it? How is the discussion going? How is the research and development going around heat dissipation? That, that felt like the key. Will it work? What are the economics? Are we, are we expecting to be like on track for some solution? Do you feel like the solution's in sight on some curve or maybe even already here? How is that going?

• 2:53:22Speaker 10

  Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, this is, I want to give you guys credit for shifting the window on this. Because I think you guys were the first to do a segment where you were like, do you remember the bit where you were like, imagine before they had cameras on spacecraft and people would be like, wow, that's so crazy. From then on, people were like, okay, maybe, yeah, this probably actually could, I think. Yeah. But, but yeah, so, so we've been, we've been working on this radio for radiator for two years now.

• 2:53:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:49Speaker 10

  It's, you know, to solve problem in the sense of the physics of it.

• 2:53:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:53Speaker 10

  What's, what remains to be done is the manufacturing challenge. So making this thing cheap and light.

• 2:53:59John Coogan?

  And also small enough to fit into that, what do you call it? Like the PEZ dispenser?

• 2:54:04Speaker 10

  Exactly. The PEZ dispenser form factor.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:07Speaker 10

  We, we, we've got that, we've got a design that we've mocked up. So we fabricated it and it's going through thermal and vacuum testing now. It's about a hundred times less cost per watt of dissipation than the International Space Station radiator. And about 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator.

• 2:54:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:22Speaker 10

  And the main reason is we're not doing 3D like additive manufacturing. We have a much simpler manufacturing technique. Um, which, yeah, that's our kind of our core IP.

• 2:54:31John Coogan?

  Sure. And then I just, I mean, can you give me like a, a mental picture of what I'm visualizing? Because I feel like you can't just be a sail that just like the, there's no wind. So the wind doesn't expand the sail. Am I thinking about like hinges and little tiny motors to sort of like expand and, and unfurl?

• 2:54:50Speaker 10

  Yeah, exactly. So the deployment mechanism is what's called a pantograph. So it's, um, it's like this scissor mechanism that if you've ever seen like when you, when you walk past a building site, you sometimes see those like, um, platforms that will raise up and down. They're, they're lifted by this pantograph scissor mechanism that goes like this. It's exactly the same deployment mechanism, which by the way, all Starlink Solar is deployed using a pantograph. So what we've done is we've just added, you might have say 20 segments, 20 sections of solar panel that unfold in the Z fold. And then we've just added five segments of radiator at the beginning, which also unfold in the Z fold. And then they're connected with tubing. And then we're pumping coolant past the chips directly and then out to this Z fold five segment radiator.

• 2:55:33John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Uh, you're at one GPU in space. You filed for.

• 2:55:38Speaker 10

  Five GPUs.

• 2:55:38John Coogan?

  Oh, you're five. Okay. I saw you short. Uh, so you have five, but you're, you're going to 88,000 or something like that. Uh, what will the curve look like? Are you trying to do 50 and then 500 and then 5,000 and then 50,000? Are we going by orders of magnitude or is it like?

• 2:55:55Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:55:55John Coogan?

  A lot of work and then they all start flying up really fast.

• 2:55:59Speaker 10

  Um, so we are very heavily dependent on Starship before we will be flying frequently. Um, so we're, we're expecting Starship to deploy the first Starlink V3 payloads either end of this year or early next year. And then from there, we're expecting 18 to 24 months before the first commercial payloads. So customers like us flying. So we're looking end of 2028 before we're launching on Starship. But our own deployment schedule is later this year, we'll be launching StarCard 2, and that will be a 10 kilowatt spacecraft, about 100 times the power generation of the first one we flew. And that has this, this is the first one to have this deployable radiator. It will be by far the largest commercial radiator in space. And then next year we launch a very similar version of that. And then we launch on Starship this PES dispenser. Actually, we may even launch it on Falcon nine, the first one, just to test it.

• 2:56:42Speaker 10

  Um, which will be about two hundred kilowatts. So uh twenty times again, the start up two. And then we can launch fifty of those per starship. So then you're talking about ten megawatts of compute per starship launch. And you know, once one starship is flying frequently, we're expecting to be launching hundreds of times per month. So that's a hundred starship launches about a gigawatt of new capacity. So we're talking on the order of tens of gigawatts of new capacity per year being deployed at that point.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  Do you, do you have any insight into how like space compute might in the short term be better for a particular AI workload? Like it's gonna be better at diffusion or worse at diffusion or better. You know, we've seen some bifurcation just in the data center around ASICs, Rock chips, Cerebras, et cetera. Is there, is there a world where we're like, oh, there's this one small use case that's gonna really, really work well. And then maybe over time it'll do everything, but in the short term, we're confident about this.

• 2:57:39Speaker 10

  Um, so at a high level, it's not going to be any training workload.

• 2:57:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:57:44Speaker 10

  And at a low level, it won't be anything that requires sub fifty millisecond latency. So there'll be a sweet spot in the middle, which in my mind is basically all back office business processing tasks and all code generation tasks. You know, you could even do voice agents for customer service or um yeah, anything like that, video generation as well. But it won't be things that require extremely low latency or things that require very highly internally networked consolate uh cluster. Like like a training workload you could not do.

• 2:58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the round. I'm very excited.

• 2:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, massive. Yeah, and you you uh you seem like uh you've you've even evolved yourself since the last time you were on the show. I'm sure I'm sure you've just you and the whole team have been uh pushing it to the absolute limit, but um.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's it's it's fantastic to see someone like call their shot and then it becomes just one domino falls after another and then it's being mentioned at GTC and Elon's talking about it and it becomes uh, you know, much more like science fiction fully moves towards like science fact, which is very exciting. So thank you.

• 2:58:47Speaker 10

  I appreciate that. No, thank you.

• 2:58:49John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon. Hopefully soon.

• 2:58:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good to see you, Philip.

• 2:58:53Speaker 10

  Congrats on OpenAI. It's amazing.

• 2:58:55John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:58:57Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye.

• 2:58:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I texted my dad the news. He says, congratulations. That's so exciting. Thanks for letting me know. Talk to you soon. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you, Dad.

• 2:59:14John Coogan?

  Oh, it's amazing. Well, if you've texted me or you've called me in the last three hours, there's a good chance that I might respond to you in the next couple of hours because we are winding down the show. Please leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter, tbpin.com. Everything is the same. We will see you on Monday.

• 2:59:33Jordi Hays?

  The fun week. Next week, five shows, 15 hours. Let's be honest, it'll probably be more like 17 or 18 or 19. We'll see.

• 2:59:43John Coogan?

  Who knows? The world is our oyster. And thank you for being with us along the journey. We appreciate you.

• 2:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's get one more gong hit, John.

• 2:59:50John Coogan?

  One more gong hit.

• 2:59:52Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 2:59:53John Coogan?

  A gong hit.

• 2:59:58John Coogan?

  Goodbye, everyone.

• 2:59:59Jordi Hays?

  See you soon.

• 3:00:00John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow.