Ramp New $16B Valuation, OpenAI Wins $200M U.S. Defense Contract | Saquon Barkley, Eric Glyman, George Hotz, Joseph Torigian, Paul Klein, Ryan Daniels, Alex Kantrowitz

(00:30) - Timeline (14:02) - Eric Glyman is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a financial technology company offering corporate charge cards and expense management solutions. In the conversation, he discusses Ramp's rapid growth, highlighting that the company has reached a $16 billion valuation and serves over 40,000 businesses. Glyman emphasizes the integration of AI into Ramp's products to automate tasks like expense reporting and bill payments, aiming to save businesses time and money. (29:42) - Timeline (58:31) - George Hotz, also known as "geohot," is an American software engineer and hacker renowned for unlocking the iPhone and reverse-engineering the PlayStation 3. In the conversation, Hotz critiques the use of buzzwords like AGI, emphasizing the need for concrete discussions, and expresses skepticism about the practicality of humanoid robots, advocating instead for simpler, task-specific robotic solutions. He also highlights the challenges in achieving fully autonomous vehicles, noting the current reliance on human intervention in systems like Waymo. (01:33:44) - Joseph Torigian, an associate professor at American University's School of International Service and a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, specializes in the politics of authoritarian regimes, focusing on elite power struggles and civil-military relations in China and Russia. In his discussion, he explores the life of Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping, highlighting his unwavering devotion to the Chinese Communist Party despite personal persecutions, and examines the Party's strategies in managing ethnic minorities and its approach to corruption as a means of maintaining control. (02:00:52) - Paul Klein, co-founder of Browserbase, discusses the company's recent preemptive funding round led by Glenn Solomon from Notable Capital, with participation from CRV and Kleiner Perkins, highlighting the strong board composition. He introduces "Director AI," a tool enabling developers to automate web tasks by generating repeatable scripts for actions like form submissions and data retrieval. Klein also addresses the future of AI-driven web interactions, emphasizing the importance of on-device automation for consumer applications and the role of Browserbase in facilitating B2B use cases through browser-based solutions. (02:14:35) - Alex Kantrowitz is an independent journalist and founder of Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast focusing on major tech companies. In the conversation, he discusses the evolving roles of journalists and analysts in the tech industry, emphasizing the blurring lines between reporting, analysis, and opinion. He also shares insights on Apple's recent developments in AI, highlighting the challenges of integrating AI into products while maintaining high quality standards. (02:44:13) - Saquon Barkley, a standout running back for the Philadelphia Eagles, emphasizes the importance of surrounding himself with trustworthy individuals to navigate investment opportunities, acknowledging the challenges athletes face with numerous proposals and limited financial education. He credits his manager's discernment in declining most offers, except those from trusted contacts like Zach Franklin, highlighting the value of building relationships with knowledgeable and successful people to make informed decisions. (03:00:54) - Ryan Daniels, co-founder of Crosby, discusses his journey from addressing contract inefficiencies to establishing a tech-enabled law firm that integrates AI to expedite contract reviews. He highlights the firm's focus on automating routine legal tasks while maintaining human oversight for complex matters, aiming to enhance efficiency and reduce costs for fast-growing businesses. Daniels also envisions a future where AI agents negotiate contracts on behalf of clients, significantly accelerating the negotiation process. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

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 TBN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, June 17th, 2025.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  Ramp Day.

• 0:05John Coogan?

  We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. Welcome to the show. Massive day. Ramp has announced a new valuation, $16 billion. Let the robots chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your brain to build things, says Eric Lyman, CEO of Ramp.com. Save time as money. Time is money, save both. Go to Ramp.com. Switch your business to Ramp.com. We have a great lineup for you today. Let's run through some timeline just to give you an idea of what's going on in the news. Obviously.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because one of the biggest issues.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  The war is still on the front page of the Financial Times. The Wall Street Journal is taking a little bit of a more positive view, highlighting peace talks at the G7 and this idea that Tehran signals readiness to renew diplomacy. Iran says it wants nuclear talks as long as US stays out of the conflict with Israel. And so that's where the major front page news is, but there's a ton of other stuff that's more important that's happening in tech. And so we got to talk about tech and business.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  The big issue is if you want to use X, the everything app for news today, good luck, because I personally can't go on there without the first 10 posts being about Ramp.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  And certainly we are contributing to that, but we'll try to cover.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  It's a timeline takeover.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  It's a timeline takeover, folks.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  But there is other news. On the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Berber Jin has a scoop about OpenAI. OpenAI, Microsoft tensions are reaching a boiling point. Startup frustrated with its partner has discussed making antitrust complaints. Tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft over the future of their famed AI partnership are flaring up. OpenAI wants to loosen Microsoft's grip on its AI products and computing resources and secure the tech giant's blessing for its conversion into a for-profit company. Microsoft's approval of the conversion is key to OpenAI's ability to raise more money and go public. But the negotiations have been so difficult that in recent weeks, OpenAI's executives have discussed what they view as a nuclear option, accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior

• 2:13John Coogan?

  during their partnership. People familiar with the matter said. And so there's a whole bunch more analysis on this that we'll go into today. And I'm sure we'll talk to some folks on the show about it.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Don't use the M word, monopoly.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Yes, it's banned.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  It's banned. It's banned. No, that really is a nuclear option. They were very happy partners for seemingly about a year and a half.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  And clearly, Satya and Sam have different visions for their partnership going forward.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  I think at the time when they did their original $10 billion investment, it felt like everybody was getting a good deal. I think with the growth of ChatGPT, in hindsight, maybe that wasn't the best structure, the best, you know, way to do a partnership. And certainly, there was some, some fine print that they're now trying to walk back. And I, there had been some other chatter around, one of the issues and the reason for the Windsurf acquisition to not be formally closed and announced was that if they just sort of went forward with it with the existing structure of the OpenAI Microsoft agreement, Microsoft might have some claim over, over Windsurf's IP.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  And again, it's all very complicated because there's 20 different entities. And ultimately, you know, it's hard to know what fits in where. But again, Masa seems-

• 3:42John Coogan?

  I wonder how real that is. Like, I haven't used Windsurf enough. Maybe we should ask Tyler. Have you used Windsurf at all? Cursor? What do you use?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  I've used Cursor. I haven't tried Windsurf, though.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Give Windsurf a try today. I want, I want your little review. I want to know how, how it differs. Because specifically, I want to know, is the intellectual property, are there like, you know, specific designs or specific algorithms in Windsurf that, that if copied by Microsoft would improve GitHub Copilot? Because my, my, my thinking is that the real value with Windsurf is the aggregation being the front door to AI CodeGen and then generating data and feedback and then feeding that back into a reinforcement learning system and doing another training run. And so if, if it's just, like, are you buying Windsurf? Is the value of Windsurf the fact that they have a lot of people using it?

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Or is it that they've designed something, you know, unique that if copied would immediately give you the same product? Like, would everyone switch to GitHub Copilot if, if they copied Windsurf? Because Gemini has copied a lot of the ChatGPT features.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure ChatGPT has like 99% penetration, right?

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, part of it too was OpenAI knows that CodeGen is going to be very important to their business long term.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  And they'll spend $3 billion to get a really talented team that's that's figured out some, you know, key. They have they have real traction. They're they're growing quickly. And it can just accelerate what they're already doing on the CodeGen side. I think copying, I don't know, is how much of a concern that is because big tech, again, will copy everything. If something works, they'll copy it.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  The the thing that-

• 5:27John Coogan?

  Stories and pull to refresh, all of these different things. Yeah, some of these were even patented, but tech has this like weird thesis around patents where they shouldn't patent UI elements. And so I think all the tech companies own a lot of patents, but they never really enforce them. And you never and you never really hear about like, oh, this tech company has this tech. And like, yeah, no one else has an alarm clock app because Apple patented the alarm clock on the phone. Like, this doesn't happen.

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  The the dynamic that I think is fascinating is OpenAI has a lot of traditional venture capitalists on the cap table or on one of the different entities.

• 6:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  But Microsoft and Microsoft was making sort of growth stage, very high risk investments into OpenAI. But they don't have to be founder friendly. They don't have to be, you know, they don't have to like play by the same rules as the VCs where-

• 6:15John Coogan?

  True.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  Normally, I can I can almost bet that any investor that is on that that, you know, traditional VC in OpenAI, if Sam went to them and said, hey, I know this is going to be, you know, I know the structure is not, you know, exactly what you would have liked, but, you know, let's be like, you're going to go forward with it?

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Sam can't do that to Microsoft, three trillion dollar company, when Satya has has is representing all of Microsoft shareholders, right?

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, so so I I like-

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  And it's not like Microsoft is trying to lead a bunch of these deals a year and they're worried about their reputation of being founder friendly.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  It also sounds like OpenAI leadership just doesn't like the original deal that they did and they agreed to. And they want to try to unwind some of that now, so.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do wonder how much of this is just like, like the, we keep hearing about like the nuclear option, the most aggressive option, like taking it to the courts, taking it to antitrust, taking it to whatever. And, uh, you know, we've certainly seen that with the, with the XAI, OpenAI battles that have played out because Elon Musk was a donor to the nonprofit. And I was always just thinking, yeah, it, it like all of these deals. I think that the stress is so much higher, not just because like super intelligence could potentially, there's a chance that it's like God in a box and you become like the most powerful person in the world. But, but aside from that, it's like, we are clearly looking at a category that will have a power law winner that will be worth over a trillion dollars.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I don't think that's controversial to say, maybe you could say, oh, they actually like the market's only a hundred billion or something, but like, it seems like consumer artificial intelligence is going to be as big as the search engine market or as big as the iPhone market or as big of as, uh, you know, any of these other, uh, GPU accelerators market. So like, we're looking at the, the next hyperscaler, the next, the, the, the eighth company to join the mag seven will probably be an AI company. OpenAI looks like a leading candidate there. And so the, like, what is at stake is so much higher that it's potentially worth it to go through every possible option, PR, leaking to the journal, going to the courts, lobbying,

• 8:32John Coogan?

  getting Trump to do a press conference with you or getting Trump to put pressure. Like, there's no amount of money that you can spend. There's no amount of political capital that you can expend that, that looks ROI negative when even getting a small slice could be a hundred billion dollars. Like very, very material. And so I think that's actually driving more of the dynamic than like, when you see like a billionaire who takes a flyer on some sort of early stage company and they're, and they're in it for a million bucks. And then the deal happens and it's like, oh, you're going to get some and we need to, we need to cram you down or do something like the company's not doing that well. Like it, like you're shuffling it around. It, it's not that much of a lever on people's net worth, but like, we're at a scale where owning

• 9:16John Coogan?

  artificial intelligence would be a lever on even Elon Musk's net worth.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and the other thing here is the way that OpenAI's, or sorry, Microsoft's investment in OpenAI were structured in that it was more of a profit share, right? It was this 49% profit share capped at a 10x.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's also possible that Satya doesn't actually feel like maybe that that's the right structure, right? When he's like, hey, I actually want to own a piece of the front door to consumer AI.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the equity could be worth more.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  And so on both sides, you know, they did this deal at a, you know, in many ways, 20 years have happened in the last few years. And so it's very possible that both sides are kind of unhappy with the deal and need to rework it.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  So, but it really would be nuclear for OpenAI to start complaining to, about, you know, antitrust, anti-competitive.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Would it be, though? I mean, Microsoft's dealt with like the worst antitrust ever. Like, they went through the whole browser wars and destroyed Bill Gates's life for a couple of years and he had to step down. Ballmer came in.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that's pretty nuclear if Sam wants to drag.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Talking about a company that's, you know, this is, uh, this is the Trinity Test Site over there. They've been, they've, they've, they've seen nuclear bombs go off.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  The whole sand is glass. They're, they're immune, maybe. I don't know.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have to dig into it. Anyway, uh, we'll, we'll bring you more analysis on that in a little bit. Let's run through some more timeline. Uh, OpenAI, or AI, speaking of AI, Sam Altman spoke at YC's AI Demo Day, uh, and so did uh, the Perplexity CEO. Uh, somebody said, how do you stay motivated when you're down? And Arvin from, uh, Perplexity says, I just watched the Elon Musk YouTube videos. And I love this comment from Hard Deep. He says, you imagine the CEO of a $14 billion valued company to say something philosophical? And he ends up being one of us.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  I just watched the Elon YouTube videos.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  Just searching Elon Musk in YouTube. Hopefully searching it in Perplexity.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Well, Arvin, if you're, if you're just getting into motivational YouTube videos, Elon Musk is just the front door. You gotta get into David Goggins. You gotta get into.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  Sam Sulek.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Sam Sulek. We, we need you to watch some, uh, uh, who's, who's David Senna's favorite person? Uh, Jaco Willink.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  Jaco.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Jaco. Good.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Get deep down the Jaco rabbit hole.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  We'll send you the Jaco Willink good video and you'll be.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Get Jaco to actually go come give a talk at your office.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  You can do that.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  About.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  That's an option. Anyway, massive news from SupaBase. What's funny is that if you'd asked me about SupaBase's growth in December 2024, I would have told you it was excellence as Jared Freeman from Y Combinator. And in 2025, they are just an absolute rocket ship. And I think a lot of this is due to the fact that they've become one of the preferred, one of the preferred database vendors for a lot of those AI scaffolding companies vibe coding tools. And so people are setting up these databases very quickly and the growth is incredible. Very, very exciting for them. So congrats to them. Also, some good news in OpenAI world, even though they're, they're going through the, some battles

• 12:27John Coogan?

  with Microsoft, they scored a $200 million US defense contract. So they're working with the DOD.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  The most unhinged picture.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  This photo, I know. How did this photo shoot happen? Like this does it, this looks like he's about to go on stage and he has a lav mic and it's from a low angle, but like what lighting scenario created this photo? It's amazing, but it's very impressive. Anyway, great selection by Nick.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Not beating the, you know, evil tech arms dealer allegations with this picture.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you're, if you're founder, you got to be careful how the angles people photograph. But at a certain point, if you're on stage, they're going to take photos in any direction. But yeah, and if they take enough photos, they'll get every single expression. So get ready. Other news, Meta finally put ads into WhatsApp. In January 2012, they said, we don't sell ads, which is still live. But this is why we love them and this is why Zuck is undefeated. WhatsApp should have ads.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  The backbone of the internet.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  It's the backbone of the internet. And Signal says that's why he's an Apple fanboy because they don't do ads. Well, Apple does have a huge ads business.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  I bet you this is just them listening to their users. I bet, you know, the users, you know, all over the globe said, you know, the only thing that could make WhatsApp better is just putting some ads in this bad boy. It's the one place I go that I don't get any.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  I felt like this was already happening. I felt like this leaked like five years ago.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  How much was a $20 billion acquisition? Of course they were going to put some ads in at some point.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. Senator, we sell ads. Anyway, we have Eric Lyman from Ramp in the studio. Welcome to the show, Eric. Congratulations. Jordy, get that mallet ready.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  I got a gong hit coming up.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  What's the news? What happened today? Tell us.

• 14:11Eric Glyman?

  2,283 and we're at $16 billion value.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  I've been waiting to do that one.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is that the number of days since you started the company?

• 14:26Eric Glyman?

  That is.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 14:27Eric Glyman?

  That's how long we've been at it. We have a long way to go and guys couldn't be happier to be here.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  So, so is the job finished?

• 14:35Eric Glyman?

  Job's not finished.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  That's great. What, what is coming up? What can we expect? Are, are there, is there a clear, public roadmap? Or, I mean, the, the number of features launched last year and this year is a ton. What can you tell us about the product?

• 14:53Eric Glyman?

  Look, I, I think the, the world is moving faster than ever. You're, the whole introduction of this segment was about folks working on AGI, ASI, whatever it is.

• 15:05Eric Glyman?

  You know, I, I don't know how far we are along that path, but I can tell you AI is definitely smart enough to do your expense reports. It can definitely do bill payment runs. It can definitely speed up accounting and those are the kind of, I, I think real innovations is a port. We're actually bringing customers today over 40,000 businesses. You know, and so we're, we're putting it deeply into the product and we can go through all that. We're also using it to ship a lot faster. All of last year, we thought we moved fast. We were pretty proud that we shipped 207 features. So far in just the first five months, that number is over 270. So we're moving a lot faster. Thank you to the help.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  How big is the team now?

• 15:45Eric Glyman?

  We are over 1,100 people.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 15:48Eric Glyman?

  Currently.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  It's remarkable. I, and how much has that grown over the last few years? Is that accelerating? Because it seems like there's a narrative where like you can do more with less, but obviously you're trying to grow as fast as possible. So are you growing headcount and the amount of features you're shipping and the size of, and, and the footprint of the businesses that you serve as well?

• 16:09Eric Glyman?

  It's all growing, but it's certainly at different rates.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:13Eric Glyman?

  So first, I mean, the business itself, it's really unusual. Usually just it's like law of physics. The bigger companies get, gravity weighs you down. You just go more slowly. And I think the most unusual thing, and you know, Trey Flanders pointed this out in an interview with Bloomberg. Revenue growth has actually been faster so far in 2025 than even 2024 at much larger scale. And so revenue growth is picking up as well as purchase volume.

• 16:40Eric Glyman?

  This team size is growing too, but to your point, we're seeing leverage. I think around this time last year, I want to say we were somewhere, you know, 700 to 800 ish folks. And so what we've grown, the pace of the, the top line and the bottom line has grown much faster. And when I look at, you know, last couple of things, developer productivity is way up. Over the last four months, the average engineer at Ramp is shipping 50% more commits. You know, in a given day than they were just months ago. And so more productivity from developers and from, and I think the best go to market organization in the business, you know, look, that team is growing.

• 17:23Eric Glyman?

  You have teams that are extraordinarily productive. And so, you know, at, at the core, we're hiring across all of them. But we are seeing these gains.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  You're in a unique position where you interface with a huge swath of the American business community. How do you track kind of the, the general vibe or the outlook of American business leaders right now? There's a lot of uncertainty. There's geopolitical news every day on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. How are just everyday American businesses feeling?

• 17:57Eric Glyman?

  I think right now, as far as the, you know, data shows, I would say like, Fairly hopeful and optimistic. I mean, back in 2022, when interest rates really spiked, I mean, you would see a sudden pullback in terms of spending. We put these out regularly. It's now monthly reports. If you go to ramp.com/data, you can see our benchmarks across industries and verticals. I think the biggest warning sign is spend on advertising is starting to slow down, as well as some spend on recruitment, computers, things that are usually some leading indicators about how bullish companies are. But if you look month by month, companies are tending

• 18:39Eric Glyman?

  to actually spend more. And so still optimistic. But I think that the other big thing that's really top of mind for folks, and we take really seriously, is almost where you started,

• 18:50Eric Glyman?

  where I think every, certainly the Valley companies are being asked by their boards, what are you doing about AI? But you know, this is true of small businesses, of old school enterprises, you name it. And I think that for most of the 40,000 businesses we serve, they don't have a single software engineer, let alone an engineer working just for their finance teams. And so, you know, it's a big part of why we spend over half of our payroll ultimately, just on research and development, which is an extremely high ratio. We want to be these organizations' finance teams, these engineers for these finance teams. So those are the main things that we hear about, that we see.

• 19:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Like, there's, there's like new headlines every day, and yet the market has been kind of just kangarooing around, jumping up and down. And I think it reflects that kind of like, there's some uncertainty, but still enough optimism in the system that we're not seeing like a full, full pullback.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's so much broader geopolitical uncertainty. It's hard to make super big, long-term strategic decisions of, should we grow headcount 10%? Should we, should we?

• 19:55John Coogan?

  And this year, there's been, there's been a number of like, of like, almost false starts, where it's been like, oh, we're going into a radically different tariff regime. And then it's like, oh, the tariffs actually kind of rolled back. It's like, oh, there's like this narrative. And then, so if you're actually planning, like, by the time you have the, all the staff meetings to plan for the thing, it's like, kind of over. And then you're kind of just back to business as normal. So you got to chop wood.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you, how do you continue to build, build in this sort of?

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  General, like, how do you, how do you continue to have this mindset of being day one, right? The growth is just absolutely insane. I think you're in a position right now that every CEO, when they go raise their first dollar of venture capital, they, they want, they, they imagine this playbook where a couple thousand days in, they're a multi-billion dollar company, but it rarely happens. What's, you know, what, what kind of wisdom do you, do you look to in terms of, you know, continuing to just motivate the team day in and day out? We're having Saquon on the show later, which we're excited to talk to him about kind of that, that championship mindset. But what, what, what do you kind of draw on to, to keep that drive high?

• 21:05Eric Glyman?

  You know, I, you know, John, I'm, I'm happy that you posted this earlier. You know, for me, this, this creates a lot of emotion. You, you mentioned it straight away. Look, we did hit this $16 billion valuation. It really should be a day of celebration, but, you know, I'm, I'm sad too. I'm, I'm thinking about the 98% of businesses that, you know, are not on ramp, that are losing time, that are losing money, are still experiencing that worst hour of their month, doing expenses the old way. And, you know, there, there's just no need for it. And so I think, you know, there's an element of, of just, you know, trying to solve a problem and make the world a better place is what gets us up and out of bed in the morning. I also say, look, I'm, I'm happy you're, you're

• 21:50Eric Glyman?

  interviewing Saquon. He is, he is an inspiration and a motivation, I think, to, to a lot of us. And it's not just that he's, he's great at what he does. I think there's lots of folks who are extremely talented. I, I think, you know, time and time again, his focus on, you know, whether it's letting the young guys eat, you know, uplifting others, bringing folks who should have been in the parade, lifting them over the gates to bring them in. I think the, the drive that he has of seeing others on the team win is really motivating. I mean, there's a lot of folks who, I think Ramp famously hires, you know, freshmen interns, dropouts, folks early in their career and take a bet on them. And for me, seeing folks come in, succeed, get great at their craft and build teams, and

• 22:34Eric Glyman?

  creating the space to do that is, is, in a more serious note, very genuinely motivating. And so those are the things.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, Keith Roy talks about that idea of like, if you're not, if you don't have something burning in your belly to go build and like become a founder, like you should go work for a company. That's that's scaling, has product market fit, is going to be high growth, but set you up for success if you're.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, learn what excellent looks like.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and what good management looks like, make the transition from individual contributor manager back or something like that. And like, you can tell that he's talking about ramp, obviously. He's like, basically like, go work at ramp.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk, I mean, I think it'd be the thing that I think would be most interesting is like, talk about the scale. The scale of your ambition, right? I think it's helpful to think about it. Okay, 2% of the businesses in the US are running on ramp. That's great. We obviously want to get the other 98%. Where we work on it here.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  We're gonna do that. We're gonna get 100% of the business on ramp, but then the real challenge starts because then we have to encourage entrepreneurship to create new businesses.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  To create.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  To create new ramp customers.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  That's the real long term.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  The second.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  But I mean.

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  Second lover.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  But on a serious. My question about the 98% is like, how many of them just aren't doing any expense reporting at at all and are just like, yeah, I have a credit card and I don't know how much people spend. Versus paper receipts versus other solutions. Do you have an idea of like the pie chart of what American, like there's millions of businesses? Like, what is the most common, like, you know, alternative that's currently in place?

• 24:07Eric Glyman?

  Yeah, no, I'm happy you pointed this out. I mean, the one and a half percent, we think is by volume of corporate and small business card transactions. By businesses, there's, it's probably closer to 99%. So there's about three and a half million to four million businesses that have five or more employees. And so typically at this point, you're employing others, you're, you're keeping some books and records, hopefully paying taxes. And, you know, keeping those records. And so, you know, when we look at that, 40,000 is a lot, but it's, it's tiny. It's, it's not yet one and a half percent. There's about 30 million businesses. A lot of those are LLCs, maybe with a single employee or no, no employees. And so the number.

• 24:49Eric Glyman?

  As much starker and I and just to drive this home, you know, guys like it is one and a half percent. If we just look at card volume, but it it turns out there's other ways to pay for things. You know, there's ACH, check wires. We also shared for the first time the volume on non-card purchases has exceeded card volumes ultimately on ramp. And so we're just getting going. I think our market share is closer to 0% and one on that. And I've, you know, it's also been brought to our attention. There are more countries than just the US too. And so, you know, there's, there's just a huge amount of scale this opportunity. And I think honestly, like, you know, it may be a bit unjust,

• 25:33Eric Glyman?

  but I think, I think you're actually right, John. Like, most businesses never get off the ground. If they do, I think one in eight fail in a given year. And most businesses are operating on really slim margins. And if you actually go and, you know, you can increase, when you look at the average American business, eight and a half percent profit margin, mathematically, if you can either, you know, a penny saved is not a penny earned. You know, a dollar of savings is actually worth 12 and a half earned on the top line. And so if you can actually go and, you know, add percentage points to the bottom line, I think not only will a lot more businesses make

• 26:16Eric Glyman?

  it and live to fight another day, but I think that a lot of folks who have huge talents, but, you know, don't have specialization in finance, don't have expertise in this field, if you can go and actually just get this out of a box through software or just build a business that you're passionate about, I think the world gets a lot more interesting. And so I actually think it's a very real point that you're bringing up.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy how, how like, I don't know, like culturally, you can change the mindset of every employee. Like, I mean, our producer like will send a request to us on ramp for like individual pieces of equipment he's buying. And, and, and that is like incredibly fine-grained, but it makes sure that we're not like spending too much on, on random stuff. And And that that type of like, you know, every penny matters culture is something that like Ramp makes it easy to actually like enforce that in a way that's not very cumbersome, but you can still instill that that that that like behavior, which I think is really, really valuable.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have some breaking news here.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Please.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  Jeb Bush post just hit the timeline.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Yes, we've been waiting for it.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  The silence this morning was deafening, but he came out and said, "Ramp reached a $16 billion valuation. Ramp isn't just a tech story. Businesses across the US are saving billions of dollars because of their technology. Eric and Kareem are making our economy stronger and I thank them for it. This is American innovation at work, so let's give it up for Jeb Bush and the whole Ramp team.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  He's been a backer for like years now, right?

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, he got in early, early and right, you know, so.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 27:51Eric Glyman?

  I have to give a shout out to the governor too. I mean, unironically, like I have to say, there's a lot of investors, venture capitalists, angels listening to this podcast, and by the way, you're totally right. This is the best place to come to. I learned a lot, but look, I have to say that the governor actually exhibits, I think, everything you would hope for an investor. You reach out to him, he's responsive, he helps close new business.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 28:19Eric Glyman?

  He helps encourage more people to join. When you have great news, he shares it. He's there. I wish everyone, you know, approached investing the way the governor did.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Everybody can learn a little about being a helpful VC from Jeb Bush.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  We love it.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for stopping by. I'm sure you got a busy day ahead of you.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the milestone. It is, it's an honor to watch you and the team work. And we, you know, couldn't couldn't be more excited to cover the next decade of Ramp domination. So hit it again, hit it again, John, and then we'll let, there we go.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on, Eric. Enjoy the day. I know it is just day one. Cheers.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  Bye. Later.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Another air horn. On an absolute tear.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  In other news, uh, this was an interesting post I saw from modem introducing the dream recorder, the magical bedside open source device that plays your dreams back as cinematic reels. So it will, I, I don't know how it does this if you wear a headband and it tries to read your brainwaves, or if it's just like listening to you talk in your sleep. I, I don't know. We were discussing with the, with us, with some friends about like whether or not people dream, there, there's like a new, it's like the new internal monologue. Are you like a no monologue, no internal monologue person? Apparently there are people that just don't have dreams. I can't imagine it. I often wind up talking out loud in my sleep.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  I talk about business exclusively, which is very, very funny. But I imagine that if I, if I, if I use this device, put it by my bedside, it were able to read my dreams, it would actually just be thinking about business.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm on the website.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't see any information on how it actually works.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  Which is my one major question before I set this device up next to my bed. It would be funny, you know, you, you're watching a dream, you know, you're playing back a dream you had, or you're kind of experiencing it in real time. And it's like, okay, I'm riding a cow and I jumped off a cliff and I landed on an F1 track and now I'm.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  It's like perfect for AI generation, honestly.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  It's just like.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Your trippy dreams can like come to life. Yeah. It's pretty cool.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  And it's completely, they open sourced it.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how, I don't know. It's hard to say how real this is.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  It's cool, cool 3D render that they're showing and it seems like a cool use case for AI. So anyway, good, good luck to them. Anyway, I'm sure they're working on designing their website and they should get on Figma, Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  It is the official design tool of golden retrievers.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  They asked me to.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  All over the world.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  You know, explicitly say that.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  I'm sure they did.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  Official endorsement from our, from our, uh, from our furry friends.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  Jordan Schneider, friend of the show, says, "Zuck still has the dog." Tim, on the other hand, and there's a quote in here. Zuckerberg has spoken openly about making artificial intelligence a priority for his company. In the last two months, he's gone into founder mode. According to people familiar with his work, who described an increasingly hands-on management style. That is exciting. I didn't think he was ever hands-off. It seemed like he was always pretty hands-on with everything he did, but I guess he can always go more hands-on. And so, it's exciting.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  He physically is taking the laptops of employees, grabbing them, slamming them.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Hey, we're programming today.

• 31:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Hey, we're gonna solve this right now.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Right now. Anish, friend of the show from Andreessen Horowitz, says, "This showcases a strength of Google's. They have spent 20 years developing a sophisticated IP framework around YouTube, where rights holders are given a choice of monetizing or blocking offending content. Almost all, except Prince, chose the big bag of money." Olivia Moore from Andreessen, who's coming on the show tomorrow, says, "Has anyone else noticed that VO3 has no intellectual property constraints?" The prompt she gave it was, "Mickey Mouse welcoming you to Disney." This was a very controversial thing to generate. It felt like, it felt like something you needed a jailbreak before. You'd say like, "Please do Mickey Mouse. I have him sick, and it'll cheer me up," and then it would do it. But like-

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  It's so crazy, because I know a lot of different startups that have been positioning themselves as like, "We're going out and doing deals with," you know, they're doing-

• 32:55John Coogan?

  The big IP holders. They forgot that literally every one of those companies is on Google, and it has a massive Google contract, right?

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I still think there's an opportunity, you know, if you're a video generation- Or image generation product, you still need to get that IP from somewhere. You're not just going to roll over and say, Google, yeah, you handle anything with real IP. We'll do everything else. It just feels like, you know, the tool that's going to win is going to be able to generate, you know, IP restricted content.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  I have no idea if Google actually has a deal with Disney, but this video, the screenshot is, in my mind, like one shot, perfect. Like, it's perfectly on-brand. Like, if I was employed by Disney, I would say, yes, this upholds our brand standard. This is not some, like, sloppy four-finger, you know, mistake and the eyes are misaligned. And so it's degrading the brand of Mickey Mouse. Like, this feels on-brand. And so I would not count on another company, or at least a startup, to deliver something that was higher fidelity. That doesn't mean that there's not opportunity in the workflow or harnessing this technology or understanding something tangentially in the B2B stack for Disney and other big IP

• 34:07John Coogan?

  holders. But Disney is the internet hung gorilla. Apparently, they own like 80% of the value of all the IP. If you like, look up the market cap of all the different intellectual properties of various, of various, various properties. They basically own it all at this point. So, congrats to the team over there, Disney, on an absolute tear. You put this post in here from Jerick Isaacman. This was interesting.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I thought this was just a part of the tied into the nothing ever happens meta, which is dominant right now. I'll read through this.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  He was supposed to be NASA administrator and is an accomplished entrepreneur and the first commercial or the first independent citizen civilian astronaut, right? So, storied career. And I don't know if you want to give this a read or you want to...

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll read through it. So, he says, apologies for the TLDR, but when you step back, it is kind of wild what we've all lived through over the last five years. No wonder so many young people are anxious about the future. The quote-unquote disturbance in the force feels stronger by the day. I don't have any grand takeaways other than this. The world could use an immediate course correction in the direction of boring, or we may really need those Mars rockets sooner than expected. One thing is for sure, Israel is making a compelling case for Golden Dome. And he kind of... Lists out a few different kind of broader events. He says, "A once in a century pandemic shuts the world down. No matter how you view it in hindsight, both allies and adversaries were nearly unified in halting the global economy and banishing society. The lockdowns and

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  high-pressure mask and vaccination campaigns. We tried to print our way out of the system shock, triggering the most euphoric markets since the dot-com bubble." Let's give it up for euphoric markets. "Pre-revenant IPOs reappeared for some reason and people forgot that good companies generally don't spec. The digital revolution kicked into overdrive, work-from-home, virtual education, traumatized parents, Zoom cocktail parties, Peloton, DoorDash, and Microsoft Teams. Probably the most painful development." Taking shots of him. Taking shots. "Civil unrest emerged alongside deepening social and political divides and a disheartening end to the war in Afghanistan. Trillions spent, thousands of lives lost,

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  and the Taliban is still running the show. Market euphoria gave way to historic inflation. Interest rates shot up to cool things down. The tide went out. The S-H-I-T..." The bad companies. "...the bad companies failed. Centralized crypto exchanges gambled customer deposits. Hedge funds weren't hedged. VC-heavy banks like SVB collapsed, triggering a temporary panic in the regional banking systems. The big banks got even bigger." This is really taking you through this. "For the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a nuclear superpower launched a full-scale invasion of a neighboring country. The West isolates Russia, and we witness an asymmetric dynamic in warfare: cheap drones, missile swarms, all playing out in real time on social media. The metaverse and Web 3 died quickly as the MAG7 let a

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  market rebound on the promise of AI. China closes gaps." And anyways, it goes on and on and on and on and on. And he says, "All in just five years." So the reason I thought this was interesting is, you know, anything almost happens and then doesn't happen, and people just say, "Nothing ever happens." But it's like, if you actually look back, it's like... When you read your back, it's like, there's a ton of history. Wow. A lot has happened. It's been a crazy five years. Things are happening. I think it almost feels like... Depends on the frame. "Nothing ever happens" is now just like, it would have to be like a 90% stock market Yes, yes, yes, yes. A nuke going off.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  You know, there's a number of things that people would be like, okay, something happened.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  But in general.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  The definition of happened just got really, really degraded.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Any.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  Because we're in this new normal.

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  Really significant event, as long as it stretches out over, you know, six to 12 months. And then everybody moves on. It just doesn't count as happening.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hopefully, our defense and policy leaders are paying attention and making some course corrections. Congressional leadership is mostly well intentioned, but often fights for expensive job programs. Exactly the kind of thing an over consolidated defense industry encourages. Even as we stare down an unsustainable $36 trillion of national debt. That's how you end up holding a fleet of battleships during the advent of the aircraft carrier. Only this time, the analogy breaks down because as a nation, we have forgotten how to build ships. So instead, we will have $300 million fighter jets we can't afford, arriving a decade too late in quantities that may not even matter, disrupted by million dollar hypersonic laser equipped drones that our adversaries will likely produce at scale until perhaps a dark Norse, the dark horse Skynet T1000 shows up.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  This is the time, especially in such politically charged environment, when we need to be finding more ways to come together instead of moving apart. A time to be rooting for America and our leadership, not betting on the next catastrophe. Because if, if the next five years look anything like the last military parades and trade imbalances will be the least of our problems. And Tom Mueller says, great summary of our current situation. We need to stop with the division and build our way out of it. And Casey Hanmer says, thanks, Jared. I can't believe how many healthy, smart, well educated, well resourced people aren't building out factories right now. Yep. Very interesting.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  If you are healthy, smart, well educated, well resourced.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  I hope he. I hope Isaac, Jared Isaacman like lands a role somewhere in the government at some point. This was like very detailed and very inspirational. I feel like he should, he should. Do, I don't know, that be empowered somewhere and do something cool. Cause he was, I was excited about him as, as head of NASA, but now that he's a free agent, hopefully he gets traded to something bigger. It'd be great. Anyway, um, let's tell you about Vanta. Automated compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  Get on the platform trusted by Duolingo, intercom.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  Ram. Duolingo. Oh yeah. Nice. Uh, Nick Carter has a funny post. I feel like we almost touched on this yesterday, but he says, faking an email from a VC saying they are sending you a term sheet while raising is securities fraud, misrepresenting material facts in connection with a securities offering. Uh, Gary Tan had some notes for us, uh, at YCD.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we asked him.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Don't commit securities fraud.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we asked him about the, uh, inflation and, and the, you know, different interpretations of what ARR is.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  He just said, you know, be, uh, be very, very explicit about your revenue.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, VCs are very fine, very okay with risk. You just have to give them full insight into

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. So they can underwrite it themselves.

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  The business. So, yeah.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Very, very silly. Yeah. Uh, we are, we are, we're definitely in the new stage of a new bubble, a new market, a new bull market. And so there's a lot of froth and there's a lot of people, uh, testing the barriers, testing the, testing the limits of these things. Anyway.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  This next post is wild from Joe Cohen. Uh, a Caltrain's employee built himself in a legal apartment in a train station and he has unfortunately been sentenced to six months in prison, uh, because it was an illegal apartment in a train station. Um, and.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  When I first read this, I thought it was built in a train and I was like, that would be so sweet. If he like somehow secretly took over a train car.

• 41:27Jordi Hays?

  Just got an extra link in the train, you know, that they forgot about.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then it's just building there. But, uh, and then apparently everyone's response to this is it's impressive what he was able to do with $42,000. Maybe he should be in charge of California. And she'll has some photos. You know, it's not, it's not luxurious luxurious living, but it's not bad either. I mean, this is, this is pretty comfortable. How did he actually build this though? He went and got all the furniture and installed the panels. I mean, I'm interested like, how do you do plumbing in an environment like this? Like that is a shower with a drain. It seems to be working. It's, you know, it's pretty shoddy, but it's not. It definitely seems like it works.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  Weird story. And to think, you know, this is one, one story like this.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  Around the world, there's probably thousands and thousands of people that have built little secret apartments in places they shouldn't be.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  And they're just scurrying around, you know, like a, like a, like a mouse setting up, setting up shop.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  Setting up shop in the walls.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Like, like, like sand through marbles. It finds all the cracks.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  It's, you know, inefficient. We like resource utilization. I'm, I'm, I'm for this guy.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're, they're, they're, maybe they're. Should be a rule where it's like, if you set up a secret apartment and you, and you, and you sleep there for 10,000 nights straight and you're not caught, you then are.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  You just grandfathered in.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  You're getting, yeah, you, you, you get the deed. You, you actually own the place.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I used to, I rented a house at one point with a roommate, like a decade ago or something. And we had these two bedrooms that were right next to each other and they built, they built built in closets between them, between the two rooms. And as I was moving out, I was looking and there was a window and we looked in the window and the window like went to a room that didn't exist in the house. So, but it wasn't, it wasn't like someone was living there. It was more like they, when they built the built ins, they built two walls. And there was just a window there that they didn't like patch up. And so there was just like empty space where the closets didn't really make sense to fit.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  And so it was just like dead space. It was probably like five square feet, not much, but it was still like this, like room. And you could look, because the window is cracked open inwards. And so you could look in and see this like kind of empty tiny room. And it was very creepy. Yeah.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Weird.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Not, not, not, not the best, but you know, I think these, I think these like, like empty rooms kind of happen from like shoddy remodel after shoddy remodel and like moving really quickly and be like, oh yeah, like we don't really care about that space, whatever. It's, you know, we lost some square footage, but it doesn't matter. Like we just need to slot in these closets in the right place. Anyway, if you're planning a remodel, make sure you use Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. And why not $42,000 apartments? Maybe you should use Linear. Wouldn't have gotten caught.

• 44:21Jordi Hays?

  You're stretching, stretching a little bit now, but if you are building a product. Because it is ramped. A ramp uses Linear. OpenAI uses Linear.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Streamlined.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Projects and product.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  Retool.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  It says streamline projects.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  Boom aerospace.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  You're telling me I could not build an apartment using Linear?

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  Meet, use the product, use the tool.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  You're challenging me to build an illegal, you're twisting my arm, making me build an illegal apartment.

• 44:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is a little challenge for you.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  Challenge. Where we can just give it to Tyler.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, build, build a.

• 44:52John Coogan?

  Get on Linear.

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  A, a cubicle-sized apartment somewhere on.

• 44:56John Coogan?

  Studio, but don't let us know about it.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere on this lot.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  So he's in the ramp office now. That, that really looks like the ramp office. Is that a photo? Or is that AI? I can't even tell. That really does. What?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  It's a real photo.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Oh, it's a real photo. There we go. Yeah, that is, that is exactly the layout. Wow. Yeah, Jordy, look over there. You see behind me? There's a, there's a door. Who's living in there?

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  Where does it go to?

• 45:18John Coogan?

  Do we know?

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  We don't know.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  That could be where Tyler's sleeping. We don't know.

• 45:21Jordi Hays?

  Anybody could be in there.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  We haven't seen his house. We don't know. Edward Mayer has a good post here about what he likes in tech companies. He says, I've been thinking about what kind of tech companies actually excite me to work for or help build and why? I came up with a list. I call it sacred engineering. What companies do you know that fit the bill? One, real-time consequence. There's no undo. What's built or launched happens and it either works or fails visibly. Thinking of SpaceX, obviously, but there's lots of other examples.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  Even Rainmaker, you spend all this time, you know, launching, you know, some, some drone that's supposed to control the weather.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  Augustus gotten a little, got a little dust up on the timeline with Trey Stevens because he was caught building a tent outside. And Trey said, hey, if you can control the weather, why do you need a tent? But to August's credit, he said, "We can only make it rain. We can't make it not rain."

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 46:16John Coogan?

  He's the rainmaker, not the rain preventer.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  Figure out how to do both.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta, you gotta figure out both. There's obviously applications to both. Mastery over extremes, pushing the limits of heat, speed, pressure, complexity. Nature isn't a backdrop, it's adversary or gatekeeper. Precision with soul. Every bolt, weld, line of code must be perfect, yet it serves a larger purpose or dream. Like a temple built to reach the divine collective will. Sacred engineering is never solo. It's many minds and hands moving as one. Symbolic payload, it means something. A launch, a cure, a mission. Everyone knows it's more than just tech. It's a statement. This is good writing. This is, this sounds like something I would hear like a voiced over Super Bowl ad. Everyone knows it's more than just tech. It's a statement by a Dodge Ram.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  Transformation. Something irreversible changes terrain, orbit, political landscape, or human perception. So making the world a different place. I like it. Very good.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from Chris at Pace. He says, "To those of you watching at home, this is your canary in the coal mine to let you know that the next wave of consumer apps is incoming. No surprise that iPad is the first wedge, given the intersection of M-chip and App Store distribution." So somebody who was at WWDC says, "I turned my iPad into Tom Riddle's diary with Apple's new foundation models and LLM built into iOS. It's lightning fast."

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, I mean, this, this is, this is such an exciting time. Like, I remember the early App Store days and we talk about the beer app, but there were so many other cool apps that people were just ripping and some of them turned into massive, massive companies. Like, people forget that at one time, like Uber was just one of a many, of a bunch of apps that you tried. It was the hot app of the month. Every, every.

• 48:03Jordi Hays?

  Apple could have messaged, Apple could have messaged this so much better and just said like, "Introducing free inference."

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Free inference for apps. Like, Go is going to be a gold rush for developers that are building cool things. All of these. Apps, there's gonna be so many applications for for kids to, you know, story time and all these different playbooks and stuff like, yes, it's gonna be hard to go and disrupt like Salesforce on mobile because like Salesforce is gonna want to build that or whatever, like some of the big or rebuilding, you know, Google Docs and all the crazy enterprise stuff is probably going to be a little bit more entrenched, but just having fun and building something that's really unique, that's completely enabled and AI native is like it's total game on. And obviously it's getting even easier to actually build these apps. They're partnering with Anthropic to speed up Xcode. And

• 48:53John Coogan?

  so there's gonna be a ton of really, really cool things coming out of this. What a time to be a, an app developer. If you're developing a cool app, you're going viral. Hit us up. Come on the show, break it down for us. But I, I think this is gonna be a really, really fun time. I'm definitely looking forward to the next iPad Pro. In just a couple of months, I think I'll probably pick one up. That'd be great. And when I do, I'll probably have to play sales tax. Hopefully the sales tax will be processed with numeral numeral HQ.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. I prefer to buy products that use numeral for sales tax. It's now, it's now like a key decision factor. If I'm choosing between two products, go with the one that's using sales tax.

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  You're so right about that, John. Get, get on there right now. This post from Jacob was funny. My wander vacation morning routine, having my eight sleep wake me up, checking ramp first thing in the morning to ensure I'm saving time and money, putting my Nautilus on from Bezel and turning on TBPN to monitor the situation. So Jacob is absolutely locked in, monitoring the situation from his happy place. I'd love to see it.

• 50:01John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 50:03Jordi Hays?

  Lulu came out.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Very funny.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  A little bit, some people might say this, this could be a little bit spicy, but consider launching on June 19th. The big companies usually avoid that day for announcements. They don't work on Juneteenth and mainstream media have the day off too, but tech people are all still online. Good opportunity for attention arbitrage.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  What does mainstream media has the day off? Does that mean like there's no CNBC that day? Like you just turn on the TV.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's more like Wall Street Journal.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  Is the market closed? I don't know. Is it like a bank holiday now officially? I have heard that some companies are off.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yes, Thursday, the US stock and bonds markets will be closed for Juneteenth.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  So. Well, we'll be on and hopefully some companies will launch. We already have a couple of companies coming on the show that day. So that'll be fun. But yes, I like this idea of figuring out creative days to launch. It does seem like the, there's like a glut of startup launches and then they come and go and they go back and forth. Because there's some days when it just kind of lines up that everyone's launching the same day because of like the various travel schedules and stuff. But finding those little pockets of alpha where the timeline's easier to break through is good. You don't want to get steamrolled. It's always rough.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was interesting. Christian yesterday said things are still very busy.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  And that tracks with what I'm seeing, but I think a lot of the rounds that get down, get done over the next month won't even announce until the fall. But.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of these announcements get pushed because of scoops. Like if a journalist gets a hold of it, usually that moves up the timeline. And so you say, hey, like, you know, it's leaking. We gotta go live with this today or tomorrow. We don't have a time to, to schedule everything, but we can do the best we can. Fortunately, that's why, that's why we exist. If your, if your stuff's leaking, give us a call. Come on the show the same day.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Tane from Wing, he's been on the show. He says, for all the slack Masa gets, I guess, give him slack? Is that, is that the right term? Flack.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  Flack.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Flack. For all the flack he gets, I guess you gotta give him slack.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  Give him some slack.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  For all the flack he gets.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  Some respect.

• 52:13John Coogan?

  He might be the only person ever to make a hundred billion dollars on two different investments. Alibaba, a $20 million investment in 2000 turned into 100 billion realized. ARM, a 32 billion acquisition in 2016. SoftBank's stake is worth 135 billion now, mostly unrealized. But you know, there's, there's probably liquidity there. And so he's done it twice. Being saying the scale it took to do the second one, really, really testament to being a size lord, but you only get to be a size lord if you get the first one right. So if advice for emerging managers, just go find a $20 million investment that you can make that will realize you $100 billion.

• 52:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:53John Coogan?

  That's step one.

• 52:54Jordi Hays?

  Start there.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  And then you'll still get a lot of hate and need to do it again.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  You'll still need to kind of justify your existence.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. People will hate on you.

• 53:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:03John Coogan?

  Write negative articles.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  They'll talk down to you.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Even though you did.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  They'll meme you.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  They will meme you. But yeah, what a legend. He participated in the CNBC deep dive on the Abilene Center with Crusoe and OpenAI and SoftBank and Stargate. So we got to get him on the show. I'd love to chat with him. Be fantastic. Anyway, Delian's bringing some spice to the timeline. He says it's been 49 days since the Discord founder stepped down. I assumed a reporter would manage to get this story, but since no one figured it out, I've had it confirmed by multiple insiders that Benchmark again pushed out this founder since they were unhappy with the IPO path. Tricky. I feel like Jason Citron's a great

• 53:50John Coogan?

  entrepreneur. I'm surprised that this happened this way. I don't know exactly what Discord needs to do to get on the IPO path, but it seemed like it was maybe highly valued in the private markets because when I think about Discord going out at like 10, that seems easy, but I think that the later funding rounds were much, much higher. But again, like, how much can you even put on the CEO of this company that started it, you know, what, a decade ago, who's been building this for so long? And it's like, all of a sudden, like, oh, the IPO window's closed for a couple of months and you're upset about this guy?

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  I don't know. I would batten down the hatches and ride it out, but we'll see.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't understand. They were unhappy with the IPO path. Was that just, who knows, Citron maybe wanted to delay it more?

• 54:41John Coogan?

  I feel like the IPO path is more the CFO.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, so they brought in Blizzard Activision, Activision's former CFO, Hu Mom.

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  Soknini, maybe mispronouncing that, but he's a new CEO, still seemingly taking them down the IPO path, but.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah. I mean, like, how much of that is on the CEO? I mean, maybe the road shows? Like, he's not telling the right story or something to these, to these, like, institutional investors who would be the anchors, anchor buyers in a roadshow, but I don't know. I think Jason's got it. Get him back in there. Bring him back.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't hear.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  I'm a big fan of this guy.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  The founder took a step back.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  He has a super fascinating story.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  And came back in.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, he has a super fascinating story. He, he, he, he didn't follow like the traditional Silicon Valley. He actually has like an un, what do they call it? Like untraditional path, untraditional, non-traditional background? Like, he went to a, a small college focused on like game development, built a couple of games, he wound up selling one to another company, and then started Discord and kind of grew from there. There's some old footage of him at like TechCrunch Disrupt, like pitching his like mobile League of Legends competitor is very fascinating. But yeah, he's been on absolute tear. Let the guy, let him cook.

• 55:59Jordi Hays?

  Let him cook.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  He's been on it for 12 years. Doing his best work. Let him, let him give it a couple more.

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, Dalian continues to be on.

• 56:06Jordi Hays?

  Talking up the time.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  On an absolute tear. Says Bill Gurley has now commented on three different podcasts that the only reason Hillen Valley is hawkish on China is because we're talking our book, or perhaps it's because the organizers are proud patriots and recognize that China's playing a 50-year game looking to unseat the United States? Yeah.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  The tension between these two is palpable, and I think we should get them on.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  Get them both on, have them debate.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  For a pay-per-view.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, pay-per-view.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  Dalian, Mr. Bill Gurley, you're welcome to come on and settle, settle the score.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  Settle the score.

• 56:41Jordi Hays?

  Just a couple venture capitalists talking it out.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  I think they could find common ground.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  I would certainly hope so. Anyway, if you're looking to get in the action, head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  Millions.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  SemiAnalysis has a fun little anecdote here about why chips are rectangular when wafers are round. Silicon wafers are round because the silicon is grown in a cylindrical ingot using the Surchalsky method, and then this ingot is sliced into circular wafers. Circular wafers pose a challenge. Rectangular dies cannot perfectly tile a circle, so any die that overlaps the curved edge is incomplete and must be discarded. By contrast, the in-panel packaging, we use organic... in panel-level packaging, we use organic laminate materials, not grown crystals, so they don't have to be circular. To illustrate the amount of

• 57:44John Coogan?

  area wasted, we used the SemiAnalysis Die Yield Calculator, which they provide for free, to compare how much waste area there is using a 300-millimeter wafer versus a 510x515-millimeter panel wafer using an interposer that is 61x68 millimeters. Our results show that panel wafers offer significantly better area utilization than circular wafers. Very interesting that Dylan Patel is going in. This is why companies like TSMC are actively developing panel-level technology with many of the industries framing panel-level packaging.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  I just want to say, if you're analyzing semiconductors, this is who you're analyzing against.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  He really is incredible. Anyway, we have our next guest in the studio, George Hots. How you doing, George? Good to hear from you.

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Welcome.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  Can we hear you?

• 58:38George Hotz?

  Oh, can you hear me?

• 58:39John Coogan?

  Yes, I can hear you.

• 58:40George Hotz?

  Gotcha.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  Uh, well, let's kick it off with something, uh, simple. I want to take your temperature on, uh, AGI timelines, P Doom, the, the easy and fun stuff.

• 58:52George Hotz?

  Know what AGI means, and I don't know what you mean by Doom.

• 58:55John Coogan?

  No?

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Is, are, are these terms just like entirely irrelevant? I mean, now we've shifted to like super intelligence, they're all buzzwords, but at the same time, like, there is, there is an idea of like, the, like, I don't know, the, the conversations may be shifting to like, the AI generating more economic value than humans? Is that a relevant metric to track?

• 59:18George Hotz?

  Machines have been generating more economic value than humans since the industrial revolution.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Is there some, is there some other metric that we, that we should be tracking?

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Or is it just like irrelevant?

• 59:29George Hotz?

  You're just talking about like hype, like, I don't know. I mean, I, I like, I don't know what you mean. Like, you can talk about concrete things, but the term like AGI means nothing, right? Like, computers, everything that's a Turing machine is a general purpose computer. Is that what you call intelligence? I don't know what you mean. Is a linear regression intelligent? What if it's big enough? The Chinese room does know Chinese.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Yep. Um, what, what, I mean, what about, uh, uh, your, your decision to get on a spaceship traveling at point nine C away from the, from the earth? Like, how close are we to that? Are we closer than the last time we talked, which was like a couple of years ago? And it seemed like it was maybe going to happen within your lifetime. Hasn't moved at all?

• 1:00:14George Hotz?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I'm actually gonna get that spaceship, but it's kind of like in an ideal world, what I would want to do, you know?

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:21George Hotz?

  Just, just, just back away and chill. And don't look back, actually. You can't look back.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  You can't.

• 1:00:27George Hotz?

  Never look back. They're all there.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  You need the, you need the blast shield, right?

• 1:00:32George Hotz?

  You need the information shield.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Information shield. What do you mean?

• 1:00:37George Hotz?

  Oh, that's how they're gonna get you.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:40George Hotz?

  Right? I mean, okay, so like, here's a way you can think about AI, right?

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44George Hotz?

  Um, imagine there were ten CIA agents assigned to you. And they're running at a thousand X real time. So they're like, hyper fast CIA agents that devote their entire lifespan to your day.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:57George Hotz?

  And they're trying to manipulate you.

• 1:01:00George Hotz?

  Maybe to get you to buy things, maybe to get you to vote for a certain guy, whatever. But like, that's what you're gonna be up against with AI. What we're currently building, what, what, what, if you think about the biggest companies in AI, what they do is advertising. What advertising is, is just manipulation of humans. Um, so you're gonna have a team of CIA agents thinking about you and trying to manipulate you at all times. And now you see why you wanna head away at the speed of light, right?

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:24George Hotz?

  Even CIA agents can't beat that.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  Is there, is there some world where there's like a capital war and I'm paying for a more powerful ad blocker?

• 1:01:34George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, that sounds good. Like, another question is kinda to say, like, okay. If you think that, you either think that current, like, capital accumulation dynamics are gonna continue. And that the rich are gonna continue to get richer.

• 1:01:48John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:49George Hotz?

  And if you believe that, the question is kind of, well, how many people are gonna survive in the future? How many people are gonna have any modicum of independence?

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:56George Hotz?

  Um, right? Like, you have some far AI people who think that there's gonna be a singleton. Right? You think that there's gonna be literally one, right? Um, you know, some people maybe think it's ten, some people thousand, ten thousand. Uh, some people think that all the humans will get to continue to exist as independent entities. Are they already independent entities? That's a question, right? I don't know.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Good question. Uh, I mean, if you were trying to put it in like, the form of a bet. Human population above or below eight billion in 2030?

• 1:02:27George Hotz?

  Oh, Bob, I think. I just believe that normal trend. Oh, is that what the trend says? Yeah, just go with the trend says. I don't think there's gonna be any discontinuities to any trends, really.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Well. Yeah, I mean, I mean, at some point, but but the question is like, how far out do you have to go until you start seeing these effects?

• 1:02:44George Hotz?

  What do you mean by human, right? What about someone who lies in bed all day and watches TikTok? Are they human?

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is odd. They kind of drop out of society.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  I think I think a question that that popped up for me is, is this all this debate about AI safety and what should labs be doing? What should labs not be doing? It feels like your angle is it should be each individual's responsibility to look to look after their own safety in the context of of AI. Is that at all?

• 1:03:13George Hotz?

  I just I just like this whole like should shouldn't like what? I don't know. I'm not a sadistic fuck who wants to manipulate other people like the people in power. Like, I don't know.

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, people still look to you as like an example of like, uh, someone who might have, uh.

• 1:03:30George Hotz?

  Answers? No, I don't have any answers.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Not not necessarily answers, just like, uh.

• 1:03:35George Hotz?

  But you can buy my shitcoin. Here, should I show a shitcoin? Here you go. Just flick this QR code and you can buy a George Hotz coin. And that will give you answers. You will find satisfaction and fulfillment in your life after purchasing a George Hotz coin.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Is that the end state? We all have our own coins?

• 1:03:54George Hotz?

  No, no, no, I don't mean it like that. I mean, like, I think that a lot of people are like, they don't really know what they're looking for. And that vacuum is is a very, uh, you know, it's very dangerous and it's going to be filled by dumb shit and don't have that vacuum, right? You gotta gotta stand for something, you know, or something. I don't know.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, do you think that there's a chance that someone is able to take a stand and and actually, uh, bend the arc of of AI progress in the way that, uh? I mean, it happened with nuclear, right? Like, like, nuclear development did stall. There was a stagnation in real world build out of nuclear capability. On the energy side.

• 1:04:37George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a few things about nuclear that make it different. Uh, so nuclear, uh, even as a weapon is incredibly hard to deploy tactically.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:46George Hotz?

  Right? So, so if a country has, has nuclear, uh, weapons, they're, aside from like a mutually assured destruction idea, they're not all that useful.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53George Hotz?

  It's not like you can use a nuclear weapon to accomplish tactical objectives. You know, if you could, I think Russia would have already done it.

• 1:04:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59George Hotz?

  Right? Russia has some tactical objectives they might want to accomplish, but, uh, nukes aren't really gonna do it, right?

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:04George Hotz?

  I mean, and from a pure real politik perspective, not even from a, uh, like, uh, oh, like a taboo moral perspective. Like, what do you, do you want an irradiated pile of rubble? Like, that's what you're gonna get. No. What you want is drones that are hyper-specific and can take out exactly who you want, can control areas, right? So like, as a military technology, nukes are not that good. AI is way better.

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but what about it as an energy technology? It feels like the, it feels like the fear, like the memetic fear of nuclear war and total destruction caused a whole bunch of regulation to pour into a sector and essentially a stalling of nuclear energy build-out. And if, if, if the AI doom scenario, whether it's real or not, becomes so memetically powerful that someone's able to harness that and actually say, if you try and build a big data center, we will shoot you, then maybe it stagnates, no?

• 1:05:54George Hotz?

  Really think that's the reason for nuclear. I think it has more to do with why we can't do other big infrastructure projects in this country, right? Like, it doesn't have to do with the nu-, we also can't build dams, right?

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04George Hotz?

  And i- if you look, like, that is the thing. If people think that there's some weird taboo around nuclear, right? But then, okay, look at hydroelectric, right? There's no taboo around hydroelectric.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14George Hotz?

  China leads in installation of both nuclear and hydroelectric.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  What's different?

• 1:06:18George Hotz?

  And everything. It's almost like they're correlated, right?

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21George Hotz?

  So the thing is not, there's a specific fear around nuclear. It's like, you know, the US decided that they're a developed country. We're not gonna develop anymore because we're already developed. You see the D on the end, right? Like?

• 1:06:31John Coogan?

  Hmm, interesting, yeah. Is there, so, so is that just cultural then, when you, or like the Malayas sets in? Would you expect that to happen to China when they catch up?

• 1:06:40George Hotz?

  I don't know. I, I, yeah, I mean, maybe it's just like this normal story arc, uh, of like, uh, you know, it's, it's...

• 1:06:52George Hotz?

  I don't know. I don't know. I I think that like you have a real problem when the kids can't live better than their parents.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57George Hotz?

  Um, so, but I I don't have anything more to speculate on that.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Do do you have more context on on China and specifically in like the AI context? Um.

• 1:07:10George Hotz?

  US electricity looks like this and China electricity looks like this.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Is that all that matters?

• 1:07:14George Hotz?

  Pretty much, yeah. I mean, that's a pretty good proxy for everything, right?

• 1:07:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18George Hotz?

  Um, like, there's two things, there's two things, you know, people are like, George, how do you feel about the Trump administration? I'm looking at two things.

• 1:07:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25George Hotz?

  With any administration, I'm looking at two things. Did you decrease government spending?

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:29George Hotz?

  And did you increase total electricity production of America? Those are the only two numbers I care about. Those will capture everything.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Why does uh, why does government spending matter? We were joking that, you know, Trump must be extremely AGI-pelled if he's running up a massive budget deficit.

• 1:07:45George Hotz?

  The hell is AGI? I don't know what this is.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Uh, like, in in this formulation.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Never seen it.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  In this formulation, it's that it's a.

• 1:07:54George Hotz?

  It adds numbers.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, but but it but it is an extra lever on on labor and capital and it creates more GDP that then can be taxed to pay down the increasing amount of debt.

• 1:08:05George Hotz?

  Super, super Excel.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  Yes, super Excel.

• 1:08:08George Hotz?

  What is what is what is super Excel do that normal Excel doesn't do?

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for better Excel.

• 1:08:14George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, we need.

• 1:08:15George Hotz?

  Excel 2.0, what?

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  The thing is, Excel was the the final soft piece of software and then but in order to add another, you know, a hundred trillion dollars to to global GDP, we needed to like kind of rebrand it. And so now we get AGI.

• 1:08:32George Hotz?

  GDP is the the complete, it's biggest bullshit thing ever, right? Like, I always joke with my friend and I that we're gonna start companies and be billionaires, and I'll tell you how we're gonna do it.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:40George Hotz?

  All right, I start a company, he starts a company. Uh, we both write contracts to each other.

• 1:08:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:45George Hotz?

  Right, like, I'll buy something from him for a million dollars and he'll buy something from me for a million dollars. We'll just do this real fast, we'll keep passing the money back and forth. Whoa, look at our revenue. Wow, that all contributes to GDP. Wow, we made, we're billionaires overnight, right?

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:00George Hotz?

  Like, like, and that's my argument is the economy is just that with a lot of extra steps, right? You can't use services. It's not part of GDP. This is complete nonsense. You can't have services. Like literally, literally, you take the steel out of the ground, you grow the corn. Okay, that's GDP.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  But is, I mean, if, if that GDP is fake, is not the, is the deficit not fake? Like, is government spending less fake?

• 1:09:20George Hotz?

  No, we really owe that shit to people. It's not fake.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  But can you just tax the fake, the fake money? Like, if you tax your scenario where you're generating a billion dollars in fake money?

• 1:09:29George Hotz?

  You can't tax the fake money because we're passing the same dollars back and forth. The minute you tax it, that falls off so fast.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:37George Hotz?

  You can only tax productive work.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  Uh, is, uh, is AMD doing productive work right now?

• 1:09:46George Hotz?

  AMD's doing all right. Yeah. Either Nvidia's really overvalued or AMD's really undervalued. It has to be one or the other.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  How does it all play out? Like, what, what does AMD actually need to do to get back on track? Or realize their potential?

• 1:09:58George Hotz?

  Nvidia needs to stumble. I mean, it worked for AMD and Intel, right? Like, so AMD ended up beating Intel in the entire, like, no one would buy a data center, Intel CPU anymore.

• 1:10:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07George Hotz?

  And it's just because, well, you know, they stumbled and now Intel owns that market. So, you know, AMD just sits there in second place.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:16George Hotz?

  They're pretty, they're being a better second place than they were a few years ago.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20George Hotz?

  And then when Nvidia stumbles, AMD is like, oh, hey, we're here.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  Is, is DGX Lepton, like, their, their cloud offering? A potential stumbling block or is it, uh, or is it the right move for them?

• 1:10:32George Hotz?

  I don't know what that is. What's an Nvidia cloud shit?

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:36George Hotz?

  Cloud's dumb. Cloud's dumb. You can, you can break AI down basically into like, there's like five, five tiers, right? Like, at the base level, you have like electricity and data centers and land and like things like that. Uh, tier two or like TSMC, ASML, Samsung Intel, right? fabs, uh, Nvidia, AMD, OpenAI, Anthropic. And then on top, you have like completely worthless things like Cursor and Wind Surf. Um, you know, these character AI, all these people who think, oh, with you up, we're gonna, we're gonna get the ARR. No, that worked in the web. It won't work for AI and I can go into why, but it's kind of boring.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  I want, I want to hear why.

• 1:11:07Jordi Hays?

  Keep going, keep going, keep going.

• 1:11:09George Hotz?

  Basically, okay, so like, here's the difference between AI and web. Um, would, would you want to run a service like Gmail? One server can serve ten thousand people easily, right? And there's no demand for like better Gmail, right? It's not like, it's not like I can click and get like, yeah, you can buy Gmail Pearl. It'll have a few things, but most people don't really care, right? There's no limit to the ceiling of how good you want your AI to be. Or how fast you want your AI to be. Maybe there's a limit to the speed, but like when you're at like a thousand tokens per second, I want the biggest model in the world, right? Like, so there, there, there's very little limit on, on that. Uh, but suddenly you can't serve one, uh, ten thousand users from one server anymore.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:45George Hotz?

  Right, and the whole dynamics of the web, the whole reason some of the value aggregated to these end players, and they still didn't aggregate to the cursor and the wind surfers. They aggregated to the OpenAI and the Anthropic, right?

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:56George Hotz?

  Nobody, nobody, nobody who built like an email client survived. They all got eaten up by the, the tier fours of the web, right? The Googles, the Facebooks, um, all of these like app providers, right? Where's a Zynga today, you know? Like this already happened, right? People just don't, where's Zynga? Oh, Zynga's gonna be the next thing, man. Like, no, it's not. Facebook ate all of that value, right? Google ate all of the value from all the people building on top of Google. So the tier fours ate all that value.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20George Hotz?

  So OpenAI, Anthropic will eat all the value from the cursors and the wind surfers of the world. They'll acquire some of them, they'll compete with some of them, right? Same as you saw on the web. Uh, but I argue that the tier fours aren't even gonna have value. Because the tier fours are, this ain't the web. This ain't where you can have one server serve lots and lots and lots of people. You know, I'm running O three, I'm running, you know how much I cost OpenAI every month?

• 1:12:44George Hotz?

  I pay the two hundred dollars a month and I cost him a lot more than that. You can now click on Codex, yeah, spin up four nodes. Yeah, why would I not click four? It's not my computer.

• 1:12:56George Hotz?

  You gave me the button, hey, I'm just using it.

• 1:13:00Eric Glyman?

  George Hotz, single-handedly bankrupts three hundred billion dollar company.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  Is there no value in just being the, the, the front end to AI applications to be like the, the, the, the front door? Just the, the, the default button? Because we see these, we see these, these, these, uh, these models kind of go back and forth in terms of benchmarks or what's hot, and there isn't as much customer churn as you would expect. Because people are, are just kind of like defaulted into the app that they installed whenever. And so even if Gemini gets better in terms of the actual performance metrics, people don't switch from OpenAI to Google overnight.

• 1:13:36George Hotz?

  It's so negligible, you gotta make something ten X better, right? You gotta make something 10x better. So like thi- thi- this whole game is open AIs unless they stumble.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:13:45George Hotz?

  Um, I'm not switching to Gemini because it's 20% better. I have downloads the new app and think about a whole new thing, right? No one's gonna switch.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Is there, is there a chance for a company to kind of come out with something that's 10x better with an algorithmic improvement? Or is it just a race for scale? Like, what could actually be that next? It felt like GPT 3.5 when they really broke through with Da Vinci and then 4-0 or and then 4. Like, it felt like this kind of like binary moment when a lot of people realized that this was usable for their daily life. Even if it's just a Google search replacement or whatever, write a poem or whatever. Like, a- a- a 10x, what you're describing, like a 10x improvement, feels like that kind of like qualitative binary shift. Is that possible with just scale? Or is this something that we need a different model for?

• 1:14:34George Hotz?

  I don't know. Um, I don't know. I would bet majority still on, like, these big labs are also attracting the talent. Um, but it is also like, i- it's a pretty commoditized, a lot more so than like Google search. Right? Like, you can look at people track how far open source is behind. It's not that far behind.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:54George Hotz?

  Um, so, no, I- I don't know. I think this game is mostly gonna be, uh, chat GPTs. I think Elon's aware of this too. That's why he's trying to go 10x bigger with the data center.

• 1:15:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:07George Hotz?

  We'll see. Maybe it'll work, you know? There's, there's someone to bet on. Anthropic, I'm not that bullish on, but, uh, maybe.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  You kind of predicted the, uh, the pre-training wall, uh, but that's not a refutation of the bitter lesson. And we're gonna see similar scale play out in reinforcement learning? Or is there gonna be something else that we're building the big data centers for?

• 1:15:29George Hotz?

  There's something that we don't understand, uh, in terms of data efficiency. Um, so like, when you think of how long it takes a GPT to learn to talk, like how much data it takes, it takes like terabytes of data. In order to make a GPT talk like a normal person, it takes terabytes of data.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:45George Hotz?

  Whereas a human trains on megabytes.

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48George Hotz?

  Right? How is it that if you take all the text that you've ever heard in your life and you you put it to whisper and you you uh you transcribe it? It's gonna be a couple of megabytes, ten megabytes, maybe a hundred megabytes.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58George Hotz?

  So humans have this thousand X data efficiency.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:02George Hotz?

  Uh, advantage. And we're gonna have to fix that if we want like reinforcement learning to work. Especially like reinforcement learning that you wanna do in the real world. Humans could do, humans can learn from very few samples.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:15George Hotz?

  Um, and yeah, I think that like it might be okay if these foundation models train unsupervised on lots and lots of stuff. But uh, yeah.

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  Is that eh? Is that something that? Somebody's working on just like a a new, more data efficient algorithm to drop into the pipeline or? Do we have any like leads there? Because it feels like right now we're going down the path of like reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards and we're going after like individual business use cases that are increasingly long tail? And that could be kind of like valuable, but it doesn't feel like the breakthrough that you're talking about.

• 1:16:54George Hotz?

  Like, has there ever been a breakthrough, right? Like, people think GPTs were a breakthrough. Well, they weren't. Like, if you just, if you watch the the world, it was just, it was all just.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  Smooth curve.

• 1:17:04George Hotz?

  But but but but what I will say about AI scaling laws?

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:07George Hotz?

  Oh, man, you see, like, people get excited about AI scaling laws, but here's a pitch that'll kill your excitement immediately. Ready? AI scaling laws. You can put in exponentially more money to get linear returns.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. Uh, do you, yeah, do you believe that uh the real value is investing in in humanoid robotics then?

• 1:17:30George Hotz?

  Uh.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Have you heard this theory? So so it it, so I mean, if you if you put exponential more money into humanoid robotics, assuming that they work and assuming you can uh you you can, like, if you make ten times as many robots, you get ten times as much output.

• 1:17:46George Hotz?

  Anyone, anyone who wants a humanoid robot has never worked in a factory in their life.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:51George Hotz?

  Right?

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 1:17:52George Hotz?

  No one wants a humanoid, oh, yo, yo, it's gonna walk around, it's gonna get its legs, right? No, here's what I want. Yeah, yeah, we got a laugh track. All right, can you show me a robot arm that's capable of putting a screw in something?

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 1:18:08George Hotz?

  Put the screw in the thing.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10George Hotz?

  No, no, no, no. Not like you carefully jigged up the screw with a screw dispenser. Like the way a normal human does it where the screw's sitting there in a little bucket on the thing and it picks up one screw and it puts it in, it takes the screwdriver.

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  No, we're, no, we're, no, we're, we're, we're not close, but also it feels like we're not far. It feels like that's what?

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  I, I feel like, I feel like humanoids are this interesting sort of like space because a lot of smart people just say like, here's the 20 reasons why they won't work and, and like why we shouldn't build them. But then so much capital and so many different teams are trying to make them work that they, they very well might work for some things. And like they just, humanity might brute force it because we saw it in a sci-fi movie, you know, 30 years ago.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Why, why, why, why are we cooked on?

• 1:18:55George Hotz?

  This is as dumb as self-driving cars was, right? And nobody learned their lesson and people like Kyle Boat should be ashamed of themselves. Like they really should. These people who go and raise large amounts of money for another thing that like they should know, they should know better, right? Here's basically like, remember in 2012 and Google said that, you know, my, my, my 12-year-old daughter would never have to get her driver's license?

• 1:19:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17George Hotz?

  Come on, that's nonsense, right? And like now, okay, they shipped Waymo. It's in a few cities. They're tele-opted, right?

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, how, how tele-operated are they in your opinion? Is it, is it effectively one to one?

• 1:19:33George Hotz?

  It's more than one to one. There's probably about, I would say there's 1.2 operators per car. But it's not, they don't have a steering wheel and pedals.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41George Hotz?

  It is, it is an autonomous system that they're probably doing some higher level inputs on. They're definitely like saying when you can be aggressive, when you should slow down, uh, you know, whether you can turn to the stop sign or not.

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53George Hotz?

  Um, you know, again, like here's, here's the simple reason to know that it's like that, right? Have, there's definitely some tele-opt of the Waymos, right?

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01George Hotz?

  Have, have you ever seen a picture of that room?

• 1:20:03John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:20:04George Hotz?

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:20:06John Coogan?

  I've always thought it was like an ace up their sleeve because like if there's a lot of pressure on them to say these Waymos aren't safe, they can pull up, pull the, the sheet off of the ghost and say, there's actually a human in the loop. Don't worry. It's safer than you thought.

• 1:20:20George Hotz?

  Yeah, yeah. Like you, the fact that you've never seen that room tells you that it's way worse than you think it is, right?

• 1:20:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:26George Hotz?

  Tells you that there's way more teleop than you think it is.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:28George Hotz?

  If it was really one person supervising 10 cars, Google would post those pictures all over the place.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:20:33George Hotz?

  You don't see any pictures. There's, so Cruz, it actually came out, the lawsuit, I think it was like 1.5 or 1.7 humans per car, right?

• 1:20:40John Coogan?

  Or vice versa, like, right, 1.5 cars per person, right?

• 1:20:44George Hotz?

  No, no.

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  Wait, more people than cars?

• 1:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what he's saying.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 1:20:49George Hotz?

  It's still that.

• 1:20:50John Coogan?

  Because an Uber only requires one person.

• 1:20:53George Hotz?

  Yes, I know.

• 1:20:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but so, so maybe the real innovation is just allowing somebody to get in a car with, and not have to talk about the weather or, or, you know.

• 1:21:01George Hotz?

  Exactly. I'll pay more for that. I'll pay more for that.

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, is there any hope that we drive this down and we get to two cars per person, then four cars per person, and it starts doubling exponentially and eventually like we are there?

• 1:21:13George Hotz?

  I mean, yeah, like it's obviously going to happen, right?

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:16George Hotz?

  It's obviously eventually going to happen. If you want to see where the real state of the art of unsupervised self-driving is today, right? There's no person with FSD. When you get your Tesla, that's not teleop. You can go press FSD and that's real AI.

• 1:21:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:27George Hotz?

  Uh, and, well, you can see how good it is, right? Would I, uh, take a nap in there even for five minutes? Oh, A and L.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37George Hotz?

  Um, you'd be super, right?

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  How are things going on the commis side? Uh, give us the update there.

• 1:21:42George Hotz?

  Pretty good, you know, we're, we're, we're on track to, um, we're on track to be two years behind Tesla. So.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:21:49George Hotz?

  So, so two years behind Tesla. Uh, but, you know, here's why we win, right? Like, because like.

• 1:21:57George Hotz?

  It's cheap. Uh, okay, so. When you think about self-driving cars, uh, it doesn't look anything like the rollout of Uber. Right? Or Airbnb. When you roll out something like that, you're trying to roll out a two-sided marketplace. Uh, you gotta spend tons of money on customer acquisition costs. You've got to make sure that you've perfectly matched that marketplace right away. Because if drivers aren't getting rides, they're gonna leave the platform. If riders have to wait to loan for drivers, they're gonna leave the platform. So it's this careful balancing act, but once you get this marketplace, you got, you got a moat, right? Switching costs are real high. Try to get everybody to switch at the same time. It's a challenge for wait and never do it. Self-driving cars don't look anything like that. Self-driving cars look like scooters.

• 1:22:36George Hotz?

  The only thing that it's gonna take to roll out big fleets of self-driving cars is capital. Right? It's just strictly a capital market. You could just, I could, if I look at a city, I can calculate how many Waymos there are. If I want to build my own network and deploy that network and run it at a lower cost, it's straight up capital. Easiest thing for investors to calculate. Very little risk. So self-driving cars are gonna be this awesome race to the bottom. Right? It's gonna be like scooters, where there's gonna be like ten providers of these things for a while, and then they're gonna consolidate, like one's gonna do it, but. Um, yeah, people aren't really gonna win.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  What is, what's most valuable in terms of developing the next? Like the next better version of full self-driving? Is it having a lot of data, building a big data center? Having a great team to actually design the system? What's most important? Are they all equal?

• 1:23:25George Hotz?

  Yeah, all those things matter, right? I think the main thing that matters more than anything else is just time. Like, figuring things out, research, infrastructure's getting better. I think a lot of it's just infrastructure. My new company's AI infrastructure, right? Like, the infrastructure gets better. Um, my, uh, my, uh, coworker has a saying, he's like, uh, what we do is that we make the, uh, hard things easy and the impossible things hard. And that's like the goal of infrastructure. As you build infrastructure, your infrastructure gets better. And then what was, what you couldn't even dream of doing ten years ago is now one command today. And today, you know, what, what you, you, you, uh, yeah.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  What's the current use case for most people with tiny boxes?

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  You know, that's my design, right? You're not supposed to know, but I mean.

• 1:24:17George Hotz?

  I sell a computer. It has specs, right? Like, so many people want to tell you, and I hate this, I hate this, they're telling you like how the product's gonna impact your life, or what you can use the product for. Oh my god, who cares? Here's what it is. I'm gonna tell you what it is. That's your job, right? I'm not an advertiser.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  But I mean, I mean, our intern wants to build something with a tiny box. I want to give him some ideas.

• 1:24:41George Hotz?

  Go buy one. I don't know. Why do you want to build something with a tiny box? I mean, is it good? Yeah, it's just a, it's a bunch of GPUs in a box, you know? It's a nice little box.

• 1:24:49Jordi Hays?

  GPUs in a box. What, um, what robotic form factors are you most bullish on? We've touched humanoids. You gave a great review there. We've touched autonomous vehicles. Sounds like generally bullish, but Capital Wars, Race to the Bottom, uh, all that stuff. Are there any other kind of form factors that you're thinking about that you are generally optimistic or excited about?

• 1:25:13George Hotz?

  Arm.

• 1:25:14Jordi Hays?

  The arm.

• 1:25:15George Hotz?

  Maybe two arms, right? Just two arms, right? Cause I look, I run a factory. I run a factory in San Diego. We make all the commas right here. And I can't wait to get a whole lot of robots in there. But, uh, I don't need humanoids. I'm just gonna stick two arms to the table. And then it's gonna grab a comma. It's gonna put the screen on the front. It's gonna flip it over. It's gonna put the four screws in it, then it's gonna pass it on.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:38George Hotz?

  Alright, show me anything that's anywhere near that level today.

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, uh, what would you do if you were trying to build like a truly multi-purpose robotic arm?

• 1:25:48George Hotz?

  The arms are already good enough. It's the, off-the-shelf arms are fine. It's all software. Again, it's always all software. Autonomous vehicles are all software. Robotics is all software. But everybody loves to bike shit.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00George Hotz?

  Like, what color are we gonna paint the humanoids, you know? Like, let's have a great conversation about that. Well, you know, we don't want to paint them red because that might scare people and it might terrify. This is actually the level of stupidity that I see in most discussions about humanoid robots.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Would you, uh, would you trade in your legs for wheels if you could? I got that.

• 1:26:19George Hotz?

  Am I training my legs for Reels?

• 1:26:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is a question from Aaron Frank, friend of the show. He's asking us in real time.

• 1:26:25George Hotz?

  You're a wheel guy then, like people would ask me if the wheels are like making a statement. I just don't want to have to have this conversation.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  Well, what about the sim to real gap in robotics? Like, how is simulated data, you know, you build a bunch of data in Unreal Engine, then you try and transfer, learn it back. Obviously, there's been a bunch of experiments of that with self-driving cars. Is that a path that we should be going down for the robotic arm development?

• 1:26:52George Hotz?

  Yeah, so I think with a lot of sim to real stuff, the reason people are excited about it is because of that data efficiency gap we spoke about. Right, like current machine learning algorithms, like a thousand X less data efficient than humans. So yeah, you're gonna need a thousand X more data, right? If a human can learn something in one exemplar, 10 examples, the computer is gonna need 1,000 or 10,000. Now, do you really want to reset the stupid state of the physical world 10,000 times? You might do it 10, but you're not gonna do it 10,000, right? So that's where you want to simulate, or you can just click reset and everything's back to exactly how it was. So I think this stuff's gonna play a role, but I think more fundamentally, that data efficiency gap has to be understood.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  We talked a little bit about coding agents. We talked about how you're bankrupting OpenAI by spinning up a lot of different Codex agents. What other sort of a Gentik software are you excited about? Do you expect to, you know?

• 1:27:50George Hotz?

  What's a Gentik mean?

• 1:27:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically bots, it's like what we're calling bots now.

• 1:27:56George Hotz?

  What's a bot?

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, like, I just, you know, I don't know.

• 1:27:59George Hotz?

  You mean like data from Star Trek?

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe. No, but I think about a world in the future, you know, do you expect to be, I don't know if you're a Slack guy, an iMessage guy, Discord, maybe no messaging at all, just, you know, you know, telepathy. But do you expect a world in the future where you're just, you know, a perfect interaction between, you know, human employees and agents? Or is it, you know, gonna be more like? You know, you'll do the odd deep research, or maybe you send some automated outbound emails, or have some codex bots running.

• 1:28:34George Hotz?

  I don't even like follow this.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  When do you think you'll be able to book a flight just by saying, I'm trying to get to New York tomorrow?

• 1:28:39George Hotz?

  Oh, see, the worst part about this is like, eh, like, and that's gonna come pretty soon, actually.

• 1:28:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:45George Hotz?

  Right? We're gonna pretty soon have computer use models that are actually capable of going to delta.com and booking a flight.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51George Hotz?

  But then what's actually gonna happen is Delta's gonna partner with whatever company does that, and they're gonna put it behind a stupid, uh, thing and like, yeah, so that's gonna, yeah, that's gonna be here in a few years, right? Not with agentic shit, but just with normal hooking the APIs together, right?

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wait, so, yeah, what is the?

• 1:29:07Jordi Hays?

  It's bullish on APIs.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  What is the mistake about like the agentic buzzword? Like, what are people like even describing?

• 1:29:13George Hotz?

  Again, it's another thing that I, I really have no idea what it means, you know? I, I was hanging out with some friends last night, and like, like, uh, my friend's in this VR company, and, uh, the, you know, the, the CEO is really interested in things being open source.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:26George Hotz?

  But he's also really interested in making sure that things are protecting our intellectual property and proprietary. And the truth is, he has no idea what the word open source means.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:36George Hotz?

  He has no idea what it means that they can copy his shit. Right? Like, that someone else could use it. He just, he just heard the word open source in some like buzzword thing, and he's like, do we have the open source? Do we have the open source in the thing?

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Check the box. Check the open source box. But let's protect our IP.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  Last question about the agentic buzzword. I think that there is something that people are picking up on, which is that these models seem to be very smart for a short amount of time, but if you run them for a long time, they start hallucinating and going, going off the rails. And so, you, you have like 10-minute AGI, it feels incredible, but as you let it run and do more work, you can't just say, hey, go do a week's worth of work, come back to me when you're, but it's superhuman in one minute. And so, is that kind of trade-off curve real? And then, is it just a matter of like better harnessing to actually get to two hours of work, which is kind of what the agentic people are like advocating for?

• 1:30:30George Hotz?

  Uh, no, so I don't think it's better, but this is definitely a real phenomenon.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:34George Hotz?

  This is definitely a real phenomenon. Uh, you can experience this, there's papers exploring it.

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:39George Hotz?

  Which show that if, in 10 seconds, there's absolutely no way I'll come even close to a modern LLM.

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:30:47George Hotz?

  Um, because the first shot from the LLM is great.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:51George Hotz?

  And then it kind of degrades, and it degrades pretty quickly. We're Whereas humans look a lot more like this. Humans can stay coherent internally for much longer. Um, so, yeah, I, I think that that's a real thing. I think that that's mostly gonna be fixed by like long context.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Just more energy.

• 1:31:13George Hotz?

  Long context RL, yeah, just like, you just gotta do it. We'll figure out new ways to make the context better. We'll combine diffusion and uh, and autoregression and some clever ways. Yeah, I, I think that this is just gonna be a, like, there's not gonna be a breakthrough here. There's not like one magical thing that we're missing.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:33George Hotz?

  I think it will be a continued plod. The same thing with data efficiency. I think people will start to care about it. Some new tricks will come out. Some of them will work, some of them won't work. We'll continue to do graduate student descent until we find a

• 1:31:46Jordi Hays?

  Anything, anything, uh, last question for me, anything that you're particularly optimistic about, anything you check the timeline and you think, this is awesome. I love this. I love this. I wanna see more of this. A little, maybe a little white pill to kinda cap it off.

• 1:32:02George Hotz?

  Yeah, so here's something I'm optimistic about. That fact that the one server can't run 10,000 users. That is most of the reason that the modern internet, that, that is one of the reasons that the modern internet sucks. That, that, that so much of the stuff is in non-recurring expense. And then it becomes really, really hard to compete with these people, right? Like, you could run Twitter on one computer.

• 1:32:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27George Hotz?

  Right? And 20 people could do it too. But like, they don't because, again, these companies have moats and they invest in making sure that their moats can't be broken. With AI, I think there's gonna be a much less of a problem. Especially when you look at the move from autoregression to diffusion. So autoregression can run in large batch sizes. When you run ChatGPT, you're running with a whole bunch of other people on that same computer.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50George Hotz?

  It's only 100, it's not 10,000, but still, it's 100. Diffusion is running the cloud at batch size one. And once you're in batch size one land, running it locally starts to make sense. Actually running the models locally, or at least having your own computer in the cloud.

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07George Hotz?

  Not being some shared resource that's really controlled by some else.

• 1:33:15George Hotz?

  So yeah, this was never a thing because you can't put lots of people on a GPA. They tried some weird stuff with the licensing, but yeah.

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is a great conversation.

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  I wish we had a full hour. This is great.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, George.

• 1:33:29George Hotz?

  Cool. Bye.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  See you later.

• 1:33:31Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Joseph Torigian, author of "The Party's Interests Come First." He was recommended by Jordan Schneider of China Talk. We're very excited to talk to him about the life of Xi Jinping's father, Xi Jinping. Welcome to the show, Joseph.

• 1:33:49Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 1:33:53Speaker 05

  It's great to have you.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  I would love to get a little bit of your background, how you landed on this topic. It's incredibly difficult to research. I was digging just into the life of Xi Jinping, and there were no English biographies for a long time. One of the most deepest dives on Xi Jinping was from The Economist, actually, in the form of this podcast and this reporting about the prince. And I was interested how you got into this, what your background is, and then we could go through some of the story.

• 1:34:24Speaker 05

  So I had just finished a book about elite power struggles in the Soviet Union and China after the deaths of Stalin and Mao. And someone asked me to write about party history and Xi Jinping, and I thought I would do a short article about Xi Jinping, a little bit about his father. But what I did, by now, was the more research I did, the more I could learn, and I could tell a really interesting story, three Xi Jinping, that wasn't just about Xi Jinping, but could be a sort of microcosm of Chinese Communist Party history in the 20th century.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  Got it. One of the themes that I've been kind of wrestling with in my takeaway from studying Xi Jinping was that there is this constant narrative of being both a victim and a perpetrator of party aggression, essentially. And I was wondering if that narrative feels right to you, where that comes from, why there's so, why these leaders are so reluctant to reject the system that's sending them to jail or putting their family in hardship? Like, it feels unique, and it doesn't feel like something that happens in America. Or maybe I'm just brainwashed by American politics or something, and it is happening over here, and I'm just not picking up on it. But is that a theme that you picked up on and you

• 1:35:40John Coogan?

  think is worth digging into? Is it what's unique about this story?

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

  It sounds like you read my book quite closely. That is certainly one of the themes. There's a puzzle there, which is Xi Jinping, the father of Xi Jinping, was persecuted by his own party on several occasions, and the party asked him to do things that he thought were wrong. Nevertheless, he remained devoted. And I think to appreciate that, we need to look at this Bolshevik communist political culture. And it's because these people see the party as a source of meaning and purpose in their lives. So in that sense, to reject the party would have meant rejecting themselves. So perhaps, counterintuitively, when the party hurt them, the motivation was to redouble their efforts to win back the party's trust in them.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  Do you think that there's, I'm still struggling to understand the dynamic of like, how dominant the single party is in China? And I'm wondering if, if we compare it with American politics, we, it feels like we're always in this 50-50 stalemate, where every four years, it's like, it's neck and neck. And then, and then, yeah, maybe one party wins by some sort of margin. But I've always wondered if that's a, if you talk to somebody who's like a socialist, they're always really upset because they're basically like, well, they're both capitalists who are running. And so they see it as, as a false choice. But the vast majority of the American electorate is incredibly animated by the, by the differences,

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  even though they might be somewhat minor, if you zoom out a little bit. And I'm wondering, like, the, the, the more single party system versus the dual party system, how does that emerge? Can you give me some, some history of the party? And, and why is it so stable?

• 1:37:26Speaker 05

  So Lenin said that what we are doing is building a party of a new type. And he thought that Western political parties, as you said, were essentially representative of dominant class interests. What Lenin wanted to do was create an organizational weapon. And the reason for that was, he was running a conspiracy and He wanted to take over the country and then use violence to transform it into something that was completely different. And to do that, you need to create an institution that can force people to do things that they might not want to do. It's by design constructed so that the top leader can make a choice and then everyone has to follow along with that choice. And sometimes that choice is wrong and has devastating impact for the party and the nation.

• 1:38:11Speaker 05

  But you can see that if you have such an ambitious agenda, what you want to do is create a system where the top leader is sort of firewalled from any kind of political consideration.

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Can you, I mean, there's so many anecdotes that could kind of tell the story. Would you mind telling me which story from Shi Jiong-shun's life really stuck out to you as emblematic? Or maybe even just give me the high level, because we kind of just jumped into it. Give me like the high level story arc that you decided to weave the entire narrative through.

• 1:38:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, so he was born in 1913. That was only two years after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. He was born into a rather dramatic place. He was born near where the Terracotta Soldiers are, which probably many of your viewers know about. That was where Qin Shi Huang forged the first unified Chinese state thousands of years before. And it was the city where emperors had ruled for millennia. But by the time Shi Jiong-shun was born, it had fallen into years of banditry and war and famine. And he was attracted to radicalism, trying to figure out a way to help China escape from these imperialist encroachments and political infighting at home.

• 1:39:30Speaker 05

  And his first political act was an attempt to assassinate an academic administrator. And it failed. He got a bunch of teachers sick and was thrown into prison and joined the party there.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  How old was he again? Wasn't he like 15 when he was sent out?

• 1:39:44Speaker 05

  That's right. He was very young. And what's interesting too is he didn't really have an intellectual attraction to communism.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:50Speaker 05

  And when he was released from incarceration, he Read this novel, that's a terrible novel. It's basically just a protagonist who goes from one disaster to another, but it fetishizes this idea of resistance and struggle. And so it speaks to the fact that, you know, for a lot of these people, their intuition was that something needed to be changed, but they weren't exactly sure what, and the party was a source of meaning for them.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  Hmm. I know you mentioned that he had a lot of interaction with the party around relationships with other religions, and I was wondering if you could, if you could kind of, like, when I grew up, I remember like the Free Tibet movement, and it's kind of like fallen by the wayside. Tibet's not really in the, in the, in the news much anymore. Could you take me through the story of his interaction with some of these kind of tangential groups in China and, and how, how the history of those relationships played out?

• 1:40:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So, within the Chinese Communist Party, you would have people that were experts in the military, on economics. Xi Jinping was the leading united front figure. So what's the united front? Well, Mao Zedong called it one of the CCP's magic weapons, and it's basically political influence campaigns. And so what you do is you figure out who's on your side, who's in the middle, who's against you, and you empower the ones that like you, you win over the ones that aren't sure, and then you hurt the ones that are, that are dead enders. And this was something that Xi Jinping continuously applied to China's ethnic minorities. And so he was, in the last years of the civil war and the early years of the People's Republic,

• 1:41:30Speaker 05

  the leader of the so-called Northwest Bureau, which included a huge expanse of China, including Xinjiang, but there were also lots of Tibetans in Qinghai and Gansu, which were other massive provinces in China. And so he was trying to figure out how to incorporate them, and it was definitely bloody, but he also wasn't blind to the advantages of finding local power brokers and winning them over. But over the 1950s, the party decided that that approach was dated because people weren't coming to socialism on their own. And so essentially, the party declared war on them with tanks and planes and...

• 1:42:07Speaker 05

  During the Cultural Revolution, any sign of an ethnic difference was seen as class struggle. And then in the 1980s, the party understood that they had really screwed up and that they needed to have a new approach. And Xi Jinping ran ethnic politics for the secretariat, which is sort of the party's brain. And he tried to use economic development, bringing religion out into the open so it could be better controlled, allying with local power brokers. But by the end of that decade, many people within the party concluded that when you do that and you give people space, they just use it to hurt you. And so the party decided that growing protests weren't a sign of reaching a new equilibrium,

• 1:42:48Speaker 05

  but hitting some roadblocks on the way, but that fundamental approach had been a mistake.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's this narrative that keeps popping up whenever you hear about turmoil in the party around purges, which is a term that I don't, I'm not really, I can't really map to as an American, because we don't really have those, I guess. And a lot of this is always tied to there's corruption, and we're going after corruption. And every kind of major defenestration feels like it's tied to corruption. And I'm always wondering how we are evaluating those claims, because at the same time, in a growing, developing country, there probably is a lot of corruption.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  And there's probably a lot of people that are banditry, for example, that you mentioned. There are people that are taking advantage of different parts of the government, so the corruption might be real. But then also corruption is used as a weapon to amass power or remove certain people from power. And so can you walk me through how corruption is used as a tool? How real do you think the various corruption narratives have been? Maybe if there's any examples of corruption being wielded as a tool for party power?

• 1:44:11Speaker 05

  So as soon as the party was able to take over the country, they immediately faced a question, which was how they were going to ensure that they didn't take such pride and arrogance in their victory that they allowed bourgeois liberalization, meaning individualism, to seep in and that they would be divorced from the masses and that they would care about their own materialist needs. And so from the very beginning, the party struggled to figure out a way to eliminate this problem. And so especially during the Mao era, you had constant, constant rolling campaigns that inevitably went too far. And now, under Xi Jinping, you see that he believes that corruption,

• 1:44:55Speaker 05

  for him, is about whether the party can survive. Because for Xi Jinping, ideals and conviction and a sense of motivation are necessary for the party to exist. And the biggest danger to that is corruption, because it basically means putting yourself first. But also, corruption is a problem because it's a vector for Western influence. Because there's this idea that the West is materialistic and oriented towards consumption. And once that gets into China, then the West can use it as a weapon. And in fact, many people in China thinks that's what happened to the Soviet Union, that essentially the leaders of the regime became oriented towards the West

• 1:45:36Speaker 05

  and the West won what they call a war without gunpowder, meaning you don't use violence to destroy the regimes you don't like. You do it by winning over certain people within it. And one other thing to say too here is that you're right. Corruption is partly about regime security, but it's also about getting rid of people that you don't like. And so what's interesting here is, you know, why do people keep doing things that make them vulnerable to accusations of corruption? And here, I think, speaks to something else about the system, which is nobody's quite sure where the red lines are. And so sometimes you just get it wrong. And sometimes the top leader changes where the red lines are. And you can see that in a system where the top leader is the one who gets to make those decisions, it's a very powerful weapon.

• 1:46:22Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is the current sentiment from the party about the state of the world? Right? I feel like here in America right now, you have a frustration. China's become the factory of the world. We're deeply reliant on them.

• 1:46:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  At the same time, the world feels very unstable.

• 1:46:45Speaker 05

  They're becoming consumerist because they're certainly buying Xiaomi phones and Huawei products.

• 1:46:51Jordi Hays?

  So I'd be curious, like, any type of insight around the party's sentiment around what's happening in China culturally? And then sort of geopolitically on a world stage? Do they feel like they're making progress? You know, we study their goals around individual industries like semiconductors, AI, defense, et cetera. But I'm curious what, what, you know, sentiment in and out of the country.

• 1:47:13Speaker 05

  So it's interesting to see how ambitious Xi Jinping is in terms of how he characterizes his goals in a holistic sense. He says that for millennia, you would have one dynasty collapse after another. And that the Chinese Communist Party needs to break that. And his solution is this idea of self-revolution. And basically, what he wants to do is figure out a way of how you win over the third and fourth generation of young Chinese to the revolutionary cause. And your questions speak to a dilemma there, right? Like, you can see how a message of sacrifice and rejuvenation is meaningful maybe for many people. But that he also recognizes that economic development is essential as well.

• 1:47:58Speaker 05

  So, you know, how you balance those two things at the same time is not clear. And it's something that I think the party is, has constantly wrestled with from the very beginning. How you balance ideals and conviction and motivation with being practical and thinking about economics and that kind of thing.

• 1:48:16Speaker 05

  You know, in terms of how China thinks about the world, they see real inherent strengths in their system. And even though they're communists and therefore should be people who only think about the world in terms of concrete, objective conditions, they talk about spiritual civilization all the time. And in fact, they think that China has one, but the West does not, because in capitalist societies, all they do is care about money and consumption. So in Xi Jinping's mind, he sees those problems only getting worse and worse in the West as opposed to China, where in his mind, they can tell a good story, a motivating story, but also the party can organize interests in a way that doesn't allow one class or one group to dominate.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  How does that actually play out? Because I feel like we, there's incredible amount of wealth still in China. Like, there's still wealth inequality. There are many tech billionaires and massively successful folks over there. Of course, when they get really, really big, they tend to disappear for a little bit, and it doesn't seem like a great place to be, a Jeff Bezos type. But at the same time, it doesn't feel like, oh, yes, like, they are truly communist, and everyone has the exact same standard of living. And so, is that even the goal? Are they okay with some level of wealth inequality? And, or did they see it as a failure?

• 1:49:33Jordi Hays?

  And even that digging a level deeper, if Xi and party leaders can speak to the sort of civilization, you know, the spirit of the Chinese civilization, and how great it is, and how the system of the West is failing, what do three, you know, five levels below that in the Chinese system in terms of, you know, how much do you try to dig in? And, you know, what is the average factory worker? Do they feel that same sense of pride in the spirit of China? Or is there kind of a disconnect?

• 1:50:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a really, those are some really good questions. So I think for Xi Jinping, he can do course corrections to a certain extent, right? So this is someone who, a few years ago, was really doing a very severe crackdown in the tech sector. And people who made a lot of money were suddenly very worried. Xi Jinping was talking about common prosperity. But over the last few months, they have been talking more about the economy. And it seems that Xi Jinping has empowered his premier to focus on development. And that doesn't mean that they've suddenly stopped caring

• 1:50:47Speaker 05

  about security or ideology. It just means that they can move around a little bit without admitting that they were wrong. And I think the reason for that is that the party, when they talk about ideology, they're more careful, I think, than people give them credit sometimes, right? So, for example, if you look at the latest party congress report, it begins with ideology. And it talks about how we need to believe in this stuff. And we still are socialist and communist. But then it says other things, too. It says, the reason communism works in our country but failed in others is that we cynicize it. We made it Chinese, which basically means we made it say whatever we want it to be, right? And so then you also see other language about markets still being decisive and China still being in the stage

• 1:51:30Speaker 05

  of primary accumulation, which means that development, not restructuring, society is the top priority. So, you know, they talk about common prosperity because they know that they need to tell a good story about getting rid of inequality because they subscribe to socialism. But then you have all these buts and ands, right? So they say, you know, we're not going to become populist like Latin American countries by allowing people to have such a social safety net that they feel that they don't have to work hard. And so for all of these reasons, I think that

• 1:52:01Speaker 05

  He's trying to manage dilemmas because he can't solve problems, if that makes sense.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Have you, um, yeah, I mean, we've been talking to people about how some of China's investments in the semiconductor industry are in some ways more capitalist than the way America subsidizes our, like the CHIPS Act compared to the, the series of five-year plans that have been somewhat cutthroat over in China between a whole bunch of different companies competing for grants. And yes, there's a lot of government money pumping into the sector and they've been able to stay at the lagging edge for years, but it's been designed to be kind of dog-eat-dog and hasn't just been a situation where China's just picked one winner and said, here's, you know, $50 billion and go run with it. I'm interested

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  to hear the story about the development of Hong Kong relative to some of the mainland cities. Can you, can you walk me through what that taught about China and Xi Jinping? Because I believe he saw kind of that happen. I've seen the time lapses and I've, I've been to Guangzhou once, very briefly, and, and, and the balancing act there between those, those various cities and what that kind of taught, taught China.

• 1:53:17Speaker 05

  I'm really glad you asked about Hong Kong. I've done a handful of interviews and you're the first person to raise it. And it's, it's quite an interesting story and it's revealing in many ways. So Xi Jinping, he was persecuted for 16 years, right? And then he's released and the first job that he gets is the party boss of Guangdong, which of course is the province that borders Hong Kong. And he saw physically just how far behind China had become. And his first task that he had to deal with were the thousands and thousands and thousands of Chinese people who were fleeing to Hong Kong, often losing their lives in the process. So it was such a striking physical manifestation of how far the socialist

• 1:54:00Speaker 05

  motherland had, had, had fallen behind. And so for him, that helps explains the special economic zones, which he played a role in establishing. And, you know, he has this idea that one of the problems is that is ideology. We need to make people, you know, believe in the cause, but he wasn't so foolish as to not recognize that you also had an economic angle here that you needed to figure out. And then in ensuing years, in Beijing, when he was running the United Front, he had to figure out how these people in Hong Kong were going to feel about returning to the mainland. So he kept meeting with these Hong Kong people during the handover negotiations. And he would say things like, you know, we're all Chinese.

• 1:54:42Speaker 05

  Go overseas and look around and you'll realize that actually, uh, Western countries aren't as great as you think. You put your money in a bank and the fees are greater than any interest that you would make. You know, these kind of like, sort of a

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Jabs.

• 1:54:53Speaker 05

  Very conventional communist views of boom and bust and that, uh, uh, he, uh, but you know, what's interesting is for them, like in, in Hong Kong, uh, one of them during these meetings, a lawyer from Hong Kong said, you know, you in the mainland, you feel like you're coming out of a tunnel because the Cultural Revolution is over and you're reforming. But we in Hong Kong, we feel like we're going into a tunnel because we're, uh, we're looking at unification with you, but we're not sure about what direction you're going and we're frightened. And it was, it was Xi Jinping's job to win their trust and faith to this, uh, to the, to the handover.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Xi is up for reelection in 2028. There's no term limits. What, what should be people be looking out for in terms of the lead up? And, and what he's, is it the right, um, kind of outlook that, that he should be, you know, really trying to prove like this is that his next few years really matter in terms of proving that he's the right leader for the next five years beyond that? Or, or how do you, how do you look at the election?

• 1:55:58Speaker 05

  So he is in a situation where whatever he decides is what will go. Nevertheless, he is facing really, really powerful challenges when he looks at the succession. Because as his father's story shows, if you read my book, There's it's hard to think of anything more explosive than succession politics in an alignmentist regime. And it gets back to what we were talking about earlier, which is that these are very leader-friendly systems. The whole purpose is to have a really, really powerful person at the center who can make choices and then everybody has to listen. So Xi Jinping, if he if he picks a successor, it raises the question of, well, who's actually really boss? And then the named successor will have to figure out how much space he

• 1:56:42Speaker 05

  has and whether or not he's actually getting Xi Jinping right. And he'll want to impress Xi Jinping, but he also won't want Xi Jinping to think that he is getting too big for his britches. But if Xi Jinping doesn't pick a successor, then he might be afraid about what will happen to the party after he dies. And he will likely want to make sure that the person that he thinks is best is the person that becomes the next leader. So he's kind of stuck, right? Because neither of those options are very good. But and he's probably also thinking in his own mind and changing his mind and testing certain people and seeing how well they read him and how well they handle situations. So it really is something to watch, and a lot of it will be about personal chemistry.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love to know how hereditary dynasties play into that dynamic. And if you could ground it by explaining the concept and history of the princelings and then kind of the current status of the idea of a princeling. I don't know if that's kind of gone out of fashion, or if that's still if if if that matters today.

• 1:57:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. So in the 1980s, the party, as it was trying to figure out how to survive after the founding generation died, they looked at young people and they were a little afraid. Because during the Cultural Revolution, young people had beaten them up, brought them to struggle sessions, incarcerated them while they were still alive, which raised questions about what would happen after they died. And a lot of them had been betrayed by their own secretaries. And so in the 1980s, a lot of them were picking princelings to work in their offices because they thought that they would be more trustworthy. The problem with princelings is that they were not well-liked more broadly within the population and in many circles of the party because they were seen as entitled,

• 1:58:28Speaker 05

  they were seen as arrogant, they were seen as benefiting from their parents' status. And so they had this weird sense of both entitlement and vulnerability at the same time. And Xi Jinping was a witness to that. And that was one of the reasons, I think, why Xi Jinping decided to go work in the grassroots as opposed to pursue a career that was purely in Beijing so that he could avoid those kinds of charges. So Xi Jinping's career was hurt in many ways because he was a princeling, although he also did benefit his father. So it's a little bit of a complicated story. Now in China today, I think that Xi Jinping probably doesn't have a great relationship with these princelings because he doesn't want them to think they have special purchase on him because of who their family is. And

• 1:59:11Speaker 05

  Xi Jinping thinks everyone should put the party's interests first. So in that sense, I think that princelings matter because Xi Jinping is a princeling and the fact that his background tells us something about them. But I think many other princelings feel that they don't have much of a say in the direction China's going.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  Well, that's the name of the book, The Party's Interests Come First. And thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic conversation.

• 1:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. Have you back on when there's when there's specific news as well.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to have you back and talk when there's anything that you have to announce, but also anything in the news that you could comment on would be fantastic. But congratulations on the book, and I highly recommend everyone go pick it up, The Party's Interests Come First. Thanks so much for stopping by, Joseph.

• 1:59:52Speaker 05

  Great questions. Thank you.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Bye. Next up, we have Paul from Browserbase coming into the studio. He's not here yet, and that, and you know what that means, we get to do some ads, baby. Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Go to attio.com.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Get on Adio.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  A-T-T-I-O. Also, how did you sleep last night?

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  A-T-T-I-O.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 2:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Coca-Cola, Modal, USV.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  I think I got you.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  They got range.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  I think I beat you.

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  How'd you sleep, John?

• 2:00:25John Coogan?

  Ninety-three. Only seven hours and 19 minutes, but great on quality.

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Back on my, back on my game.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:00:32Jordi Hays?

  97.

• 2:00:33John Coogan?

  Oh, it's a disaster.

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Clean eight hours.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  Oh, brutal. Okay. Well, congratulations. You're, you're back. You've been.

• 2:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Back in the game.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  You had a rough, rough week.

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  There's been about a 10 day period that perfectly coincided with you being sick.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  You beat me 10 weeks in a row, but I beat you for one week and it felt like 20 weeks of victory for me. I was pumped.

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, I will let you take the intro with Paul. Get the details from him on what's going on in his world, in the browser base world.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  There he is. Mr. Paul Klein, the fourth. Welcome.

• 2:01:06Speaker 06

  Hey, guys.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Big, uh, big day for you. Break it down. What's going on?

• 2:01:11Speaker 06

  Good. Uh, you know, series B announcement today. Of course, you know, Saquon has his touchdown chain. I brought the browser base chain in to celebrate today.

• 2:01:21Jordi Hays?

  You got the big B. All right. Well, I'm going to hit the gong for the big B if the team.

• 2:01:25Speaker 06

  Let's do it.

• 2:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Go to the wide. Get ready here.

• 2:01:30Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Solid connection for you and the browser base team. Um, love to see it. Love to see it. So the chain, what, how, do you have any sort of like milestones that change stays on until 100 million of, of ARR?

• 2:01:45Speaker 06

  The chain is currently taped on. Uh, it falls off. It's from Amazon. So I, I think at the series D will upgrade to a better chain.

• 2:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Really? Okay. Okay. So a couple, a couple of rounds away. Awesome. Who, who participated in the round? Um, I'm, I'm sure you had a pretty fun process, uh, but, but break it down for us.

• 2:02:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. You know, we're super lucky at browser base. Every round that we've done has been preemptive. So it was a quick one. And that's because we work with people we've known for a long time. You know, Glenn Solomon from notable capital. He's someone who met with us in the earliest days and, uh, the notable team formerly known GGB capital. They're just killing it right now. They just, the features and labels, series B as well. And I think that really started the conversation for us. We're like, hey, but it sounds like it's a new B's. We'd love to kind of have a conversation. Of course, CRV doubling down as well. Ree, Ree Christian on our board. Uh, you know, Pioneer Perkins as well. One of our earliest investors at the seed, participating in the A and the B. So we're really excited about this composition. I feel like this board is a good starting lineup and, uh, we can go pretty far with it. So we're excited.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. You guys also had a big launch today. Is that right?

• 2:02:50Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Director, what's going on there?

• 2:02:53Speaker 06

  Our whole thing is that, you know, when we think about how people automate the web and browser base, for those who aren't familiar, we're basically a web browser that can be controlled by your AI, really an infrastructure company. So we sell to developers who are building features that wanna go automate the web. And we realized that one of the places that people are starting when they're building applications is often in these kind of lovable B zero or both experiences, their vibe coding. And we kind of looked at the way vibe coding applications were set up to help developers who build like, you know, automation scripts like submitting your Delaware franchise tax, or grabbing a quote from a website for a supplier you want to work with. And for us, we wanted to build something built for the vibe coders who actually want to build software that will do work on their behalf. And that's what Director is. Director.ai allows you to go to the website,

• 2:03:37Speaker 06

  prompt, and it's going to output this repeatable script that will go to a website, click buttons, fill in forms, download files, all on your behalf. We have a few cool prompts on there as demos. One is like going to Cal She and checking the poll for, uh, will Trump unfollow Elon on Twitter? Another one's like, hey, go to the NASDAQ website and find me all the earnings calls for this week. And then it outputs not only, it doesn't, it just does that for you, and then also outputs code so you can integrate that into your application and run that every single week in a repeatable way.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  Uh, George Hots was actually surprisingly bullish on computer use. He's, he, he usually pours a lot of cold water on a bunch of different stuff, but he was pretty, pretty optimistic about, uh, me being able to book a flight on delta.com with an agent coming soon. Uh, what I didn't get from him and what I want to get from you is where does that interaction live? He was saying that, yes, it's coming. You'll be able to just say, I'm trying to fly to New York tomorrow. Book me a flight that gets me there in the evening and it will do it for you and it'll interact with the webpage or the API. The question is, where does that interaction live? Is that in a consumer app that I, uh, subscribe to or pay for is ad-supported?

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  Or is that a delta.com feature or back and forth? Like, where does the, where, where does more of the agentic interaction live?

• 2:04:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think for for consumer use cases like booking a flight, it has to live where the distribution is right. And that's probably going to be Google, Apple on device. Your AI will control the browser on your device. But if you think of companies like Ramp, if Ramp wants to go automate collecting an invoice from a website where they don't have a first party connection. The way they can agentially do that is with a web browser, going to that website, you know, getting your invoice for you and putting it through there, you know, bill pay. I'm a Ramp customer, so you know, something I've been asking for for as a feature for a while. So I think that like, you know, for consumer automation use cases, it certainly will live on device or in some sort of consumer app, maybe ChatGPT. But for the B to B use cases where you're actually using some software and the automation is an extension of the existing software.

• 2:05:38Speaker 06

  That's where I think the the browser and more generalist to computer use that lives within a company like Browserbase. It's really going to stand out.

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's dig into that that ramp example more because I've had to do this where I've wanted to classify like an Uber receipt. For some reason, I wasn't subscribed to the emails. And so I go into the Uber website and I pull the receipt down and then I upload that to ramp, right? With Browserbase, they could potentially do that if they have my login. Long term, there's probably some sort of API interaction. And so I almost feel like there's this weird world where like you see a lot of people do using computer use. And then once something really takes off, then they then they automate with an integration. But then there's like a new wave. So is your growth kind of like a series of S curves? Is that the way to think about it?

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  Or do you think that people will just be so happy with the results from computer use that they will just say, why would I even bother building the direct API connection?

• 2:06:32Speaker 06

  Well, I think there will always be direct API connections and there should be, you know, if someone has app to build that, I highly encourage it. I think about like the rest of the internet, the internet that already exists. Are we going to rebuild that internet? The analogy I like to use and I use in this piece today with Alex Conrad is that, you know, we think about Waymo. You know, Waymo drives on the roads we've already built and Waymo has got good enough to navigate those roads. It might be more efficient for us to build highways just for Waymo or just for self driving cars to go go out and browse. But in in the end, like if AI can use the internet the same way we can, just as well as we can, why not just let it browse the web like we do?

• 2:07:06John Coogan?

  Short, high speed rail, I'm hearing.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Dedicated roads for something that's autonomous that doesn't need to steer. That's a high speed rail. But yeah, why not just be in a self-driving car?

• 2:07:20Jordi Hays?

  How much are you thinking about bigger partnerships long-term? There will be some companies that will not be excited about computer use agents kind of interacting with their web properties. And at some point, you might be constantly going back and forth with them, trying to figure out a way to, I don't know exactly what it would look like, get around CAPTCHAs and things of that nature. But is that something that over time? I mean, we've had Zach from Plaid on the show many times. And early on, we're sort of doing things maybe manually and then with software. But then they ended up developing out meaningful partnerships to enable these sort of interactions to be more seamless.

• 2:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Is that something on your roadmap at all? I can imagine just after you guys have raised over $50 million in a very short period of time, I imagine people are kind of knocking on your door now at this point to have conversations as well.

• 2:08:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're certainly excited to partner with the anti-bot detection companies. In our mind, BrowserBase is an opportunity to be an arbiter of good bots. For example, we may be able to help a customer of ours say, hey, we're this small startup. Here's our use case. We've done KYC with BrowserBase. We have restricted domains that we can only browse to. And we could help represent them to the broader anti-bot community and say, this is a customer that we've certified. And I think for the longest time, Antimibe was built because there's only bad bots online. But now there's good and bad bots. And on BrowserBase, we hope that we can empower, show and prove that these are good bots and use the brand that we built as a center part of our trust. But regardless, Plaid is a amazing company, right? I've really looked up to Plaid.

• 2:09:01Speaker 06

  It is possible to build iterations for every single bank out there. There is a finite number of banks, or at least a workable, attractable number of banks. There is billions of websites out there. So regardless, you still are going to have to have some AI for when an agent, your customer prompts your agent, hey, can you work with this specific website? You might not have an integration built in browser base is kind of the primitive that, you know, the integration of Last Resort and we hope that if you're building an agent, you include a browser tool more for like the what if it happens, not if for the when it happens.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  How do you think about competition coming from the hyperscalers and the big cloud platforms? Companies like Stripe and Plaid haven't seen much competition from GCP, Azure, AWS, but on the flip side, some of the other parts of the AI stack have been either cloned or offered or vended in through some of the bigger cloud platforms. Is that a risk or do you have an idea for a moat that is is too high for for the king of moats, Jeff Bezos, to clear?

• 2:10:07Speaker 06

  Well, I think it starts with a few things. One, I think you have to build a great developer product and that comes down to actually having a dashboard, features that people love to use and work really well. Yeah, Jeff Bezos is the king, but I don't think any developer really raves about AWS console, right? And secondly, you have to have more than just infrastructure. Infrastructure always kind of becomes a commodity, right?

• 2:10:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:26Speaker 06

  So moving up the stack one layer, that's what we did with Stagehand. Stagehand is our browser automation framework. When you build it, you kind of write code and it generates the the integration. Sorry, when you write Stagehand code, it actually generates the browser automation functionality in Browserbase. So it's like one layer up. The analogy here is like Bursail and XJS.

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:44Speaker 06

  Browserbase and Stagehand. So when you own the framework, you're really able to offer more stickiness and just build more first party integrations into the framework that run better on Browserbase. And then finally, Director is at top of that stack, right? Well, if you have a framework, you probably want to have a way to generate that framework code. So we moved one layer higher to the application level. And I haven't seen any incumbents really do well at adding, you know, building developer love around new frameworks. And then one layer higher, like building applications to generate them yet. So for me, I'm kind of betting on innovation here. I'm betting on us expanding our portfolio. And there's this Parker Cronbrad tweet, which was like, hey, this is going to be one on the field. Who can build it better? Who can sell it? Who can market more? Who can innovate more? And we're ready to go battle on the field with our new fundraiser.

• 2:11:27John Coogan?

  In the field, in the bathrooms, in the Slack channels. Corporate athletes. It's fought out everywhere. We love it. Talk to me about the good bots versus bad bots dynamic, trends in the robots.txt. Is there a need for some sort of like, I don't know, like almost universal, like trust rating or something that identifies you as a good bot as you go around? Because there's going to be lots of anti-bot protections and yet I imagine that having some sort of like, coming from a trusted IP address is something that gets you out of a lot of cloud flair, CAPTCHAS. And, and I imagine that, that there's probably work that

• 2:12:11John Coogan?

  you can do almost on like the business development side to, to kind of grease the wheels as you try and automate more and more of the web. Is that something that you're thinking about? What, what are the different approaches that you can take to make sure that as the anti-bot protections get more and more robust, you don't get bogged down in that and you're still offering a good experience to developers?

• 2:12:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a great question. All, one of our investors, Jeff Lawson, he, he always frames great infrastructure companies as kind of being one of three things. One is like APIs representing capital. So it's like, hey, if I want to deploy a thousand servers, I don't have the capital standard up, eight of us, I can just deploy a thousand servers. The second one is algorithmic complexity. So you know, your inference as a service, right? You have a bunch of inference, you know, how can you run that more efficiently than anyone else? How can you serve it in a innovative way? And then the third one is really biz dev as an API. And I think browser based, long-term partnerships are extremely important to us. And that's why we're really proud to work with companies like WorkOS, Clerk, Stitch, and Okta, which all have major CAPTCHA presences on the line, online, because that's where it protects authentication. Secondly, I think the credentialing actually happens when you log in. Like, that's how you show

• 2:13:16Speaker 06

  you are who you are. And I think solving agent auth, which I think these authentication companies I just mentioned will solve, really allows our customers to say, hey, I'm Paul, I'm logging into my United account, and this is my agent, but it's acting on behalf of me because I've authenticated it. I think that's pretty compelling. You know, a lot of the reason anti-bot exists is to prevent, you know, account takeovers or spam. But if it can authenticate and say, hey, I'm acting on behalf of Paul, I really think that's a good way to show proof of ownership or proof of humanity of a bot. And that's going to be solved very soon. It feels like there's a bunch of stuff happening in agentic auth that is very, very promising. And that's going to be great for browser base. And we're happy to partner with all those companies to make it happen.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Well, congrats on the big round and thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Always welcome. Congratulations to you and the team. Excited to watch you guys work.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Have a good rest.

• 2:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, guys. Cheers.

• 2:14:03John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:14:03Jordi Hays?

  See you around. Appreciate it.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  And really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Alex Kantrowitz from Big Technology. We love big technology and we got the king of big technology in the studio. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us. How are you doing?

• 2:14:30Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. I'm doing great. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:14:33John Coogan?

  Would you mind doing a quick introduction on kind of how you frame yourself in the giant pool of big technologists and big technology folks?

• 2:14:43Speaker 07

  Definitely. I think it's fairly straightforward. I'm an independent journalist. So I used to be working within newsrooms in 2020. I quit BuzzFeed News, started my own thing. I've been writing the newsletter for five years and doing big technology podcasts for just underneath that.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  Amazing. And I mean, this is just, we can go into a bunch of other stuff, but I want to talk like the meta level, the inside baseball for a little bit. Do you see, do you see kind of a meaningful difference between being an analyst and being a reporter, an investigative journalist, someone who gets scoops versus someone who provides op ads? Do you, do you think that's a meaningful distinction in kind of the modern independent journalism era or the going direct era or anything like that? We see ourselves not as breaking news here. We see ourselves more as like a reaction and opinion show and talk show or anything like that. But I'm interested to see how you think it's evolving and then how you see yourself in the ecosystem.

• 2:15:43Speaker 07

  Well, it's so interesting because the definitions, they sort of blur.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:15:47Speaker 07

  And I think if you do this for long enough, you're going to realize that you're a little bit of each, right? You're going to want to get interested in a subject and then just make a bunch of calls and, you know, maybe you'll find something out. And now, next thing you know, you're an investigative journalist or you write a piece of analysis. Now you're an analyst. Situation where I interviewed Blake Lemoine because I was interested in this guy who said that Google's AI was sentient and Blake Blake is late to the podcast interview and I'm like, what's going on? And it turns out that while I was waiting for him, Google was firing him.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  Fired. Yeah.

• 2:16:20Speaker 07

  Correct. So I said mid interview, hey, Blake, this is news. Can I like get a comment from Google and publish it? And he goes, yeah, sure. Go for it. So then I write to Google mid interview. We published the story on big technology because I have a Substack.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:34Speaker 07

  I wake up the next morning and it's a story in the Journal and Bloomberg and the New York Times and a bunch of other places. Most of them said as first reported in big technology. So then I'm a reporter with scoops. So I think that, you know, I think the key to this stuff is, are you present? Are you curious? Are you going to try to serve your audience? I know you guys are doing this. So you're probably, you know, in all these buckets as well. And I think it's one of the cool things about doing, you know, reporting or news or information on the internet is you get to play, you know, in all these different buckets.

• 2:17:04John Coogan?

  That's fascinating. Yeah, I had, I had not thought about it that way at all. That's fascinating. Anyway, let's move on to the big news. I'd love kind of your reaction and breakdown from WWDC. We talked to a lot of folks about it and I, I mean, obviously a lot of mixed reactions, but I came away kind of optimistic that we could be going into this era of like a new explosion in AI apps with leveraging on-device inference. And I was extremely optimistic about it, but there's a lot of other narratives going on. What was your takeaway?

• 2:17:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was really interesting. So I was there. I was on the broadcast riser because I was doing some stuff with CNBC.

• 2:17:46John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:17:46Speaker 07

  And I have never seen a more different event one year to the next. Last year, super enthusiastic, a little bit more open, big vision setting with Apple Intelligence. This year, I think they spent, this is a conversation from a conversation I had with MG Siegler last week. They spent more time talking about the phone app than they did AI. So it was clear that the expectations have changed for Apple and they ran into a lot of difficulty building AI in the same way a lot of companies have run into difficulty building AI because I think anyone who builds with this technology knows I'd be curious to hear from your listeners and viewers if this is the right perspective, but it's probabilistic. It doesn't act the way that you want to all the time.

• 2:18:31Speaker 07

  If you're a company like Apple with a very high quality bar, it's not very easy to wrangle this technology. This is why I think that they should buy perplexity because they can just integrate an AI search engine into their products and have that control that Apple wants. So we definitely saw a very big change last year to this year. And the focus was really on this new design, liquid glass that they've brought into iOS, which is starting to roll out in like the developer release and with a bunch of fixes, we'll all get access to it at some point soon. But it was definitely, you know, a very subdued event for this company. And it's interesting that I'd actually be curious to hear why you think that this on-device

• 2:19:12Speaker 07

  development is the thing that's going to lead to an explosion in AI apps. The conventional wisdom from the people that I speak with about this is that you can already build fairly fast applications using the stuff that's available today. And you can build much smarter applications with these larger parameter models than this very small model that Apple is making available on-device. So I didn't really find that to be a needle mover, but I'm curious to hear why you think it is and what your audience is telling you about it.

• 2:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's still like, I think there's this hangover from war stories where developers like created a cool experience, released it, and then incurred massive costs from it going viral because a lot of these generative AI features are naturally so exciting and novel that people just have this excitement to use them. And that was leading to some meaningful costs that independent developers, historically, you could just spin up a simple mobile app or SaaS tool and not be thinking about what your cloud bill was going to look like. Maybe you were even just had credits and you weren't going to incur it at all.

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  It's the kid without a credit card that is this super long tail of developers. They're not super mature. They're not venture backed, but you get a ton of those random solo developers that don't even want to think about incurring costs. And they want to build, you know, the next flashlight app, the beer app or Flappy Bird, these types of, all these different. Apps that kind of start as little demos and then maybe they grow into something with proper infrastructure and a backend, but the more that they can leverage the free out of the box tools, the faster they can get going. And yes, eventually they'll raise money. Eventually they might switch to, you know, cloud models that are better and more expensive and they

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  need to think about the business model there. But being able to use AI in an app that lives in the App Store, uses App Store viral distribution, truly zero cost, seems like it unlocks a different tier of entrepreneurship or app development that that could be a really, really interesting canvas to explore. It's kind of like when the, when the, when the original AI video came out, there was that one viral video, Harry Potter Balenciaga. And it's like, that's something that that could have been done with a traditional CGI pipeline. Like you could have gotten ILM or Pixar team to go and make that. Like it was doable with the previous technology, but when

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  you lowered the cost from a million dollars to do a, you know, a 3D face scan of Dumbledore and, and put him in Balenciaga or hire the actors and shoot it with cinema cameras. When you lower that to just a couple of creative prompts, like that human creativity part comes out and you get a viral video, Harry Potter Balenciaga. Right. And, and the same thing I think could potentially be on the verge of happening with viral apps as the, as the, the, the overhead and the cost to develop software drops with products like Cursor and GitHub Copilot and Windsurf and Codex and Devin. And as that drops, and then also as the ability to call it AI inference on the device. We're already seeing it. There was a cool app

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  that went, went out on X earlier today or yesterday. Somebody made the Tom Riddle. The Tom Riddle iPad app. So you can, you can write hello and it kind of dissolves into the UI and then, and then a script writes back to you and that's all generative text. And so it's just a simple fine tune prompt. It doesn't need to be, you know, oh, IMO gold medalist, like amazing math, like PhD level.

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  It's not leading benchmarks.

• 2:22:56John Coogan?

  It doesn't need to lead benchmarks. It just needs to be conversational and with an interesting UI. And it's something that this developer was able to build pretty quickly. And for like a young Harry Potter fan, that's going to be a magical experience for, you know, maybe a couple of minutes, maybe an hour, maybe, maybe, maybe it doesn't turn into the next big thing, but you'd get a million of those in the app store and then one of them, you know, develops and develops and becomes something really, really cool. So that's why I've been very optimistic.

• 2:23:22Speaker 07

  Let me give the counterpoint, which is that with the biggest models that we have and the such powerful models that we have, we haven't yet seen a, you know, critical mass of hit apps that you would say, oh, if we could just bring the cost down, we would get an explosion. But you have opened my mind. I'm willing to say that this is definitely something that I hadn't considered where you could have the sort of low lift fun apps that don't, you know, make the developer go broke that maybe were cost prohibitive to build beforehand that we might see. So let's, let's talk about this in a couple of months and then we'll see, we'll see what happened.

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I mean, I do agree with you. And the example that I think would be worth digging into is, do you remember that app, Lensa? It was this magic avatar app. You download the app and you take, and you take, and you take like 10 photos of yourself and then it can generate a, like an AI image of you. It was kind of a precursor to the Studio Ghibli moment. And they were extremely good at monetization because they'd be like, yeah, we're, we're making the image. Do you want it? Buy this $20 one in-app purchase. They did very well. It was a little bit of a flash in the pan. I think it went, it went really big and then.

• 2:24:30Jordi Hays?

  They haven't shipped an update since December 2021.

• 2:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it didn't really go anywhere, but that felt like an important shelling point for, for, for generative AI imagery. And then we saw it again with Studio Ghibli really taking. Over the internet. I feel like we haven't had that in text yet. There hasn't been that like, where's the Harry Potter Balenciaga for something that was just purely text generated? But, but, but I think that it might be a cost issue. It might be something that people just haven't had a chance to, to, to play with at low enough cost. And I think that anytime you, you reduce the cost, like, you know, GPS, you drop the cost of that really, really low and you get Uber and I, I'm just still optimistic that, that there's a, there's a, there is a binary difference in, in point zero zero zero zero one cent and zero cents. Like

• 2:25:17Speaker 07

  I hope you're right. Yeah, I'm smiling because I'm remembering this lensa moment. And there's been this like, it was the start of people being like, don't upload your face to AI because then they'll have your, you know, your biometric data. And I remember in the middle of the Studio Ghibli thing, there was a tweet that came out like that where someone was like, you know, be careful about uploading your face to chat GPT. And then someone took their Twitter avatar and chipped it underneath.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:25:42Speaker 07

  And I was like, all right, well, no good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

• 2:25:46Jordi Hays?

  It's so brutal because the company that did lensa pivoted to something called Prisma, which was a photo editor with like cool artistic

• 2:25:53Speaker 07

  It's a Russian company.

• 2:25:55Jordi Hays?

  So it's, it's cool artistic filters and they basically built the Ghibli type experience and then

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  I think they were actually Prisma before because I think I'd used that to try and do

• 2:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Prisma Labs is the name of the company.

• 2:26:08John Coogan?

  And, and it was never quite there. And then OpenAI just kind of leapfrogged. And I think that will be a dynamic that happens a ton. I think that there will be kind of solo developers, kids that build a magical experience, like the flashlight app. And then yes, Apple will steamroll them. But that solo developer, that kid will probably make a ton of money with like a $2 in-app purchase just for upgrades or throw some ads in it or something, make some initial money. But even more important, the experience of having like a hit app sets you up for, okay, the next go around, I'm ready to raise money. I'm ready to think about the, the, the seven powers or the moats that I should build around my business. Maybe I wind up going into B2B software or, or

• 2:26:50John Coogan?

  infrastructure or something else. But, but they've caught the itch of, of entrepreneurial. Because they've had that taste of like I built I built a product that had an impact. And that's something that I I love when those things get unlocked at an earlier earlier.

• 2:27:03Speaker 07

  It's a it's a very cool idea. I mean, I've had this idea to build a generative AI app where it's like a choose your own history where you can either play. Through these scenarios because you can do this, you can like prompt Claude today and you can do it today. Where you could like be a historical character like let's say you wanted to be like Alexander Hamilton during the American Revolution and sort of like experience. That as he did, quote unquote, right? But doing it through gen AI experience, you can do that. I think the problem has been that the models haven't been powerful enough for the thing that I want to build. But I I think that you guys are on to something like if this is a moment where. Apple, you know, Apple might start with the smaller model. Let's see what happens. Maybe you get the equivalent of that beer drinking app.

• 2:27:44Speaker 07

  If that works out, then there's a lot of incentive for them to put much bigger models within the operating system. And then you could really unlock some very cool things and and it does make sense that if you end up. Not going broke by building a gen AI app that becomes popular, you might want to build another one.

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I actually had this exact experience, the historical character on Character AI. The the the the app where you can chat to a fine tuned L L M on a particular person. I picked Stalin and.

• 2:28:19Speaker 07

  What does that say about you? No, I'm kidding.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  Well, I'll tell you. So I was like, I want to go and argue with Stalin about communism. And I want him to play the steel man, the literal steel man in his case. And and and I and I want to and I want to have a real hardcore debate about what Stalin did, my perception of him. I I feel like I have a lot of good ammunition to to fight back against his ideology. But let's go have this debate. And so I started debating with this character AI, the Stalin. But it had been so RLHF and so fine tuned on like American values. That Stalin would come to me with something like, yes, like, you know, I did a lot of bad things and I'm like, sorry about it. I was like, I don't think Stalin would talk like that to me. I think Stalin would be very proud of what he did.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  And not admit fault. And I was like, okay, character, you clearly didn't fine tune this enough because it's still, it's still rejecting, you know, the real, the real communism, real communism.

• 2:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he slept with it and realized that, yeah, you know, maybe I did get a few things wrong.

• 2:29:22John Coogan?

  That's not the Stalin I wanted to debate.

• 2:29:24Speaker 07

  The genesis of my idea was just dumping Wikipedia pages into, I think it was Claude, and basically playing these scenarios as like, maybe somebody who's not like in the power position in history.

• 2:29:37John Coogan?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:29:37Speaker 07

  So I always find it interesting. So my wife is European. So we've like visited a lot of like historical sites in Europe. And I've always thought like, well, what happens if you're not like the lord or the lady that they feature, or the king that they feature in these museums? Like, what if you're just like, somebody on the line? And what would your life be like? So for me, because I'm a fun guy, I dump Wikipedia pages into these bots and say, well, what would that be like? And then you can role play through it. And I think that if you want to, if you find a way to like prompt these bots to give you like the, the non sanitized version, it can be really interesting. And I don't know, fun, I don't know if fun is the right way to put it, but worth, worth going through these scenarios and playing the games.

• 2:30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, totally. It's a great idea. Somebody will probably build it. But even right now, it's like, even, even if they would get you to pay, that's an extra hurdle that causes conversion rates. And there's a million different things that, that kind of downstream from that. Even if it's just writing extra code to make sure that you're processing a payment in order to pay for your cloud bill and your Claude bill. So I'm excited to see what happens. I don't know. We could see how it plays out.

• 2:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Can you give us, yeah, can you give us an update on the app store? There's just been a lot of back and forth between, it's Tim Sweeney, right? Over at Epic.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:53Jordi Hays?

  And Apple chirping at each other. What is the state of the app store? Are alternative, you know, payment rails getting, you know, real adoption yet? Can you give us kind of a broad overview?

• 2:31:08Speaker 07

  Well, we're super early and there might be some court cases to still work through in terms of this alternative payment on the App Store. But basically, what Tim Sweeney and Epic Games are trying to push through is Apple, if you want to buy stuff within apps, you have to use Apple's in-app payments. And when you use Apple's in-app payments, Apple gets a cut, a sizable cut of the money that you spend, and that is very important for their services business. And just to take a step back, so basically Epic is trying to say that that should be illegal, whatever it is, monopolistic or anti-competitive, and we want to be able to process the payments on our own or via the web and not pay Apple the 30% or whatever it is from every dollar that goes through our services.

• 2:31:53Speaker 07

  It is, so I was going to take a step back because it's just happening in this very interesting moment. So if you think about Apple's financial position right now, almost everything is either flat or shrinking. The iPhone revenue 2024 versus 2023, flat. Maybe it grew a tiny percent, but like you look in their 10K or whatever it is, and you see the, you know, the growth or the loss is just the dash. Flat iPhone revenue. And by the way, that's happening as iPhone sales decline. And the only reason revenue is flat is because they're getting a higher average selling price per iPhone. So Apple is in sales decline with the iPhone right now. And that's happening as people spend more time with their phones and as people in China are less interested in buying iPhones

• 2:32:38Speaker 07

  because Huawei has become this object of national pride and it's almost as good. So they're starting to buy Huawei's. And by the way, they're not locked into the Apple ecosystem because they use WeChat. So the company is seeing flat sales revenue on the iPhone. They're seeing declines in things like wearable on the iPad. I think MacBook grew about 2% last year. That's the only like traditional Apple business category that grew. But there is this services category that grew 13% last year. And what does that include? It includes a number of things under threat. That includes those in-app payments that you just brought up. And it also includes this 20-plus billion dollar payment a year.

• 2:33:17Speaker 07

  Year that Apple gets from Google, which is also under threat because there's this federal case going on in DC that Google has already lost.

• 2:33:25John Coogan?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me stop you. It also includes Apple TV. Let's talk about F1. Let's talk about some of the movies they're making. Let's talk about all the stuff that they highlighted.

• 2:33:33Speaker 07

  I'm not here to be super negative. Not here to be super negative, but let me be realistic.

• 2:33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:37Speaker 07

  If that Google payment in 2024 went away, and like, let's say that was 20 billion, it was probably more. But let's say it went away in 2020, 24. Any, any thoughts about what happened? All right. Apple as a, as a company shrinks. Services, the one, the one division growing double digits, growing 13% actually contracts.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:57Speaker 07

  Now, it's a one-time hit, so you would go down and then you would grow from there. But the reason why Apple is in the $3 trillion range is because it has this services division, which investors will value as more of like a software company. So there you could get into like the, the 30 or the 35x multiples versus a hardware company, which is

• 2:34:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other, the other thing you didn't mention is

• 2:34:17Speaker 07

  A lower margin.

• 2:34:19Jordi Hays?

  iMessage has also opened up pretty dramatically too, where you have red, red receipts, you know, between Android.

• 2:34:25Speaker 07

  You guys have seen the Android folks typing and been like, what's that? Or seen the red receipts? Like, why is the green bubble doing the typing thing?

• 2:34:32John Coogan?

  It's starting to happen.

• 2:34:33Speaker 07

  So you're right.

• 2:34:35John Coogan?

  I, I think gold bubbles are coming. The, the OpenAI phone is coming. He's going to pick a different color.

• 2:34:41Speaker 07

  Trump phone?

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Trump phone. Yeah, that, that, Trump phone will have gold bubbles.

• 2:34:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, no doubt about that.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  The gold bubbles are coming. Talk to us about, about Google. You interviewed Sergey Brin recently. What, what, what was your read on his involvement? Because I feel like there's a press cycle every few months about like, he's coming back. He's, he's, he's, he's back in founder mode. He's deeper than ever. He's not fully stepping into the CEO seat, but they're clearly stepping up to the AI moment. At the same time, they're dropping a ton of product updates. Google I/O was a massive event with like a ton of different features. And then they're also at the parade of frontier of so many AI models on, in terms of performance and cost. And yet a lot of stuff's not breaking through. What's your read on Google right now?

• 2:35:28Speaker 07

  I think they are, they knew they were behind on AI. I mean, Basically, they had, they developed, this is going to be old history for a lot of people, but for those who don't know, they developed this transformer model within Google. They were very safety concerned. We talked about Blake Lemoine a little bit ago. He was using a version of their LLM chatbot called Lambda that he believed was a person. So they had this advanced technology working within the company, but OpenAI, of course, was first to market with something that exploded with ChatGPT. So once, I think Sundar Pichai realized what was going on, he said, okay, we're going to turn all of our focus toward, you know, this AI moment, building large language models.

• 2:36:11Speaker 07

  And he was lucky or fortunate, or he planned, whatever you want to say. I mean, the company has Demis Hassabis, the head of DeepMind in there. And he consolidated these two divisions, DeepMind and Google Brain, which had traditionally kind of struggled over resources and realized they needed to coordinate. So Demis takes over both of those divisions. And now you see that Google is shipping like crazy with AI. And they have some great, I mean, they obviously previewed some very cool things at Google I/O. They have some great features working already. I mean, Notebook LM is really interesting. I think Gemini could work a little better in places like Gmail, but we'll probably see it. Like being able to search your emails is a pretty big deal. And do like things like, I sometimes will say, like pull out the emails

• 2:36:54Speaker 07

  from all of Big Technology's paid subscribers recently to, so I can invite them, you know, to our, to our private Discord. And Gemini gets that right about 50% of the time. So I think it's clear that they're in this moment.

• 2:37:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What do you expect to see out of the Google OpenAI relationship? Right now, we're seeing tension between Microsoft and OpenAI, their partners. They, they maybe both are unhappy with, with how the deal has worked out. I think all this stuff is evolving. But in my view, over the next five to 10 years, I just see this massive war and battle for the consumer between OpenAI and Google. Is that how you're looking at it as well? And do you expect to see more attention there?

• 2:37:35Speaker 07

  It probably will happen. So just to, I'm going to answer that question. I'll just finish up what I was saying that Google's in this moment of reinvention. So they are going to move from search to AI. And also, I think Sergey is really involved on the technical side of things to answer that part. So the partnership that Google and OpenAI did is for basically server space. I think OpenAI is really running out of GPUs. And of course, they have this hosting deal with Microsoft. That's kind of like up in the air. We're not quite sure where we're going to go on that front. And you see Sam Altman every couple of days saying, all right, we're out of GPUs. Stop burning our servers. He's joking, but it's a real issue for the company. So of course, you look to Google, which has the TPUs to sort of offload some of that.

• 2:38:20Speaker 07

  Some of that sort of compute need. Now, we don't see OpenAI being made, unless I'm wrong here, we don't see OpenAI's models being made available within Google Cloud. That's the other side of the equation. I spoke with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian a couple of months ago, and he said we'd welcome OpenAI on the platform. So that's another step I think that we should anticipate. And then on the consumer side, I mean, again, like, and you guys know this better than anyone else, like Silicon Valley is filled with frenemies. And we have another situation here where you're probably going to have Google, you'll have OpenAI, we already have it, OpenAI relying on Google infrastructure, but competing with them on, let's say, the assistant front or the chatbot front.

• 2:39:01Speaker 07

  And I think that's one of the cool things about watching tech and for those who are in tech being in tech is there is almost, you know, reliance on one another's innovations and products, but also a recognition that everyone is working to build the best products and may the best product wins, win. And, you know, one product may be the king one day, and then it could get leapfrogged the next and build on top of each other. So I do see this being a heated battle. And we're going to see a lot more drama, I anticipate, from all these companies coming up pretty soon. But it is notable that now OpenAI and Google have opened up the line of communications, line of communication, and maybe more is coming.

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  Last question.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm excited to, I'm excited to see all this play out. My last question, when, when can we place OpenAI in the category of big tech? Are they there yet? Does 300, 300 billion dollar valuation, does that do it? What's your framework?

• 2:40:01Speaker 07

  It's so interesting because yesterday I was seeing people on X talk about like, whatever happened to Fang, right? It was Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple and Google, and people are calling it Mango now. You guys saw that? Like Meta, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  I just like Mag7, Mag7 works.

• 2:40:22Jordi Hays?

  We're hoping, we're hoping that, you know, YC can make enough startups so we get the Mag70. We'll see. We'd like to expand it.

• 2:40:30Speaker 07

  So I would say, look, I'm not, I'm not a Mango head, like the O in Mango is OpenAI. I'm not a Mango head yet, but it certainly seems like they're on the trajectory. So I'm, I'll put my order in and we'll wait on it for a little bit now.

• 2:40:43John Coogan?

  How much have you dug into the innovator's dilemma with regard to Google? There's this whole story about like Sundar Pichai hasn't read the book and doesn't matter. And Ben Thompson says, well, it doesn't matter because it's structural. But the thing that I keep replaying is like, is like, what if Google had actually just released that Blake Lemoine chatbot? Like, what if they were the first mover in chatbots before ChatGPT? It feels, it feels like that ChatGPT moment would have been theirs. And then they could have compounded off of that and it would have been fine. But maybe they'd be disrupting themselves. Do you have any thoughts on, on that?

• 2:41:19Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it gives more credit to Chris Pike's thesis around top down versus bottoms up innovation. But anyways.

• 2:41:27Speaker 07

  Yeah. So I mean, I wrote this book that came out in April 2020. Don't recommend releasing books in the first wave of a pandemic, but it is sort of what launched big technology for me. And it's called Always Day One. And the idea is, comes from Bezos, that The reason why the big tech companies have been able to stay competitive and dominant for longer than the average, right? The average company on the S and P 500 last 15 years today, as opposed to 67 years last century. And the reason why these companies have been able to sustain their dominance is because they reinvent and they don't really care too much about their legacy business. They're able to say, what is going to take me into the next generation? And sometimes they're late. I mean, Microsoft is a perfect

• 2:42:12Speaker 07

  example. They held on to Windows forever. They had the lost decade and then Satya Nadella, who ran the server and tools business, which was all about on prem servers, said, you know what? Let's do this cloud thing. And now they're where they are today. Google had maybe a lost couple of years, but I think they've definitely gotten with the program. Like I mentioned, they're in reinvention territory right now. And I think you could really tell the difference between what they were doing and what Apple was doing at WWDC, although some might disagree. But they're all in on AI right now. And I think that you don't have to be first. You have to be all in and you have to nail it. And the book isn't yet

• 2:42:52Speaker 07

  written on where Google ends up after this because it does threaten search. But I think they have as good a chance of as any given the, like we talked about, the compute, the talent and the data to be one of the leaders, if not the leader in generative AI.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully you're the one to write the book.

• 2:43:09Speaker 07

  That'll be cool.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  But thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah, we'd love to have you back. This was fantastic conversation.

• 2:43:15Speaker 07

  Definitely. Great having you, Alex. I'm a fan of your show. Thank you for having me on.

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:43:19Speaker 07

  Looking forward to the next one.

• 2:43:19John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:43:20Speaker 07

  Cheers.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:43:20Speaker 07

  Take care, guys.

• 2:43:21John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Saquon Barkley from the NFL.

• 2:43:24Speaker 07

  Technology investor.

• 2:43:25John Coogan?

  Coming in from the Philadelphia Eagles. Let's bring him in the studio and we will talk to him about everything going on in his world. Welcome to the show.

• 2:43:36Jordi Hays?

  Ramp day.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  It is Ramp Day.

• 2:43:38Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't be Ramp Day without Saquon.

• 2:43:40John Coogan?

  Hold on, we are gonna do one ad first. If you're looking for a luxury watch, go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is now available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. We are working to bring in Saquon. And do we have more news to talk about in the meantime? We can also talk about wander.

• 2:44:01Jordi Hays?

  There's always more news.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. We are working on that. Oh, I think he's here. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:44:21Speaker 08

  What's up, guys? Thanks for having me.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for jumping on.

• 2:44:25Jordi Hays?

  Been looking forward to this.

• 2:44:26John Coogan?

  Congratulations on a massive day in Ramp World. We'd love to get your story. How'd you meet Eric Glyman? What's it been like to work with him?

• 2:44:37Speaker 08

  It's been, it's been great. It's been great. The conversation and introduction kinda came from my manager, Cuz, who's been super helpful with me in learning and exploring more in the tech world. But getting to know, getting to know Eric and being of all Eric has been amazing. He's become a really good friend. My favorite thing I like to tell people about Eric is he has this contagious smile. He always has this big smile on his face.

• 2:45:06Jordi Hays?

  He really does.

• 2:45:07Speaker 08

  Every single time you're around him, it makes you feel welcome. And just him and his team, they've been doing an amazing job. And excited for the news that they announced today.

• 2:45:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's huge. Talk to me about the Super Bowl ad. We have your picture from the Super Bowl ad up on the stream right now. How did that come together? How fast was that process? How was the shoot?

• 2:45:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, we've been talking to Ramp for, for a while, the Ramp team for a while. Um, I had dinner with Sam and Max in, in PA.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:45:39Speaker 08

  Um, we had a couple of them there to come to a game. Um, and I, I forgot, it was maybe like 10 days, a week or two before, uh, the Super Bowl. Uh, my manager cuz asked me a, a, about this idea of, of running an ad. Usually, you know, I probably would say no to a Super Bowl commercial, uh, 10 days before, but the, the Ramp team, uh, they're, they're super efficient and, you know, they, they made it so easy and they were so helpful for me. Um, and you know, they, they obviously knew I had a lot of stake and wanted to make sure that was the main focus, but they did a great job. I, I think the ad came out amazing. They also showed me that, you know, in past, uh, these brands that I've worked with,

• 2:46:24Speaker 08

  they probably took too much of my time, uh, when you're able to do this and, and create something so special and that fans love. Uh, but the whole team, the whole Ramp team is incredible. Uh, Kareem, Sam, Max, all of them, they're all special people and I'm excited to be able to work with them.

• 2:46:39John Coogan?

  What was the reaction from the rest of the team to see you in an enterprise software ad in the Super Bowl? Uh, was that surprising or was everyone just kind of excited to, to, to see you take that step?

• 2:46:51Speaker 08

  Um, yeah, I think it was more just exciting, uh, more excited. Uh, I've always, you know, always talking about how can I do, how can I be creative in new ways and, you know, we always talk about financial freedom and evolving yourself with, with the best companies and the best founders and, um, you know, it, it's, it's been pretty cool. Just so far in my career, all the great things I've been able to do, but the platform that has been established because of football, both the things football's able to bring me into and the world is, is able to bring me into. And, um, I don't know all this stuff yet, but continue to learn in this space and continue to meet, you know, extremely incredible people and incredible teams.

• 2:47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's an exciting time. Uh, I want to talk about, uh, lessons from popular books. A lot of people in tech have read The Score Takes Care of Itself by the 49ers coach and borrowed ideas from football and taking them back to business. Uh, you, you read Zero to One. Uh, what is a concept that you took from Zero to One or you think other football players could take back into the world of football from that book?

• 2:47:57Speaker 08

  Um, that's a great question. Uh, Peter talks about, you know, when you're starting a company, um, you never want to have two people doing the same job. And an interesting thing that Nick Sirianni did this year, uh, well, my first year, I'm pretty sure he did it in years prior with the Eagles, my first year with the Eagles. He, he had all of us in a meeting and let all of us know what our role was and what was expected of us. Not saying that our role can expand, um, not saying it can increase, but what's needed for us to be able to go out there and compete and accomplish what we all want to accomplish as a super ball. I, I think the things you could take is just from.

• 2:48:48John Coogan?

  Might be losing you.

• 2:48:57Speaker 08

  It's a right to buy in, knowing what you gotta do, knowing what you gotta accomplish. Um, sometimes your role is not doing what the team asks you to do to be successful and it takes a great team and. You guys hear me?

• 2:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're back.

• 2:49:14Speaker 08

  That was you guys?

• 2:49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I kind of dropped out for a second, but we're, we're, we, we got most of that.

• 2:49:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, can you hear me?

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:49:22John Coogan?

  There?

• 2:49:23Speaker 08

  Oh, sorry about that.

• 2:49:24John Coogan?

  No worries.

• 2:49:27Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:49:27John Coogan?

  Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, uh, we're good on this end, I think.

• 2:49:30Speaker 08

  Yep, I hear you guys.

• 2:49:31John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. Uh, let, let's move on to another question. I want to talk about, uh, similarities between the offense, defense dynamic on the football field to, uh, you know, these two units, they aren't necessarily on the field at the same time, but they both need to perform. There's some similarities to business where maybe the sales team wants to go and sell a product that the engineering team needs to go and deliver and make. They're two, two teams that need to be working somewhat in concert, um, but they're doing very different roles. Uh, what can you tell us about the team building that goes on between the offense and the defense to keep the whole group working in concert?

• 2:50:13Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's super important. Team is the most important thing when it comes to, can you hear me?

• 2:50:18John Coogan?

  Yep. Yep.

• 2:50:19Speaker 08

  Hello? Sorry, I think I'm in a dead spot. I apologize.

• 2:50:23John Coogan?

  It's okay.

• 2:50:24Speaker 08

  But I think team, I think team is the most important thing, especially in my sport, or just kind of any profession, to be honest. I think the parallels from business, from science, from sports, all those things, you know, have similarities. And it all comes down to building a great team. So we know how important it is for, you know, on the offensive side, for us to accomplish what we need to do and establish a line of scrimmage. But it's the same thing going on defensive side, establishing a line of scrimmage. A lot of games in football is won up front. And it takes all phases, offense, defense, and special teams, for us to go out there and accomplish what we want to do. And when you look at it, in any profession, that's why I say the parallels are so similar.

• 2:51:09Speaker 08

  You need a great team. You need people buying into the roles. You need people doing all the little things it takes to be successful. And that's why you have, you know, successful teams. And you have, like, I don't think I can name any individual, whoever you think is successful, whether it's a billionaire, whether it's an MVP. It takes everybody. It takes a family. It takes, it takes a culture. It takes a village to be able to have that, have that success.

• 2:51:34John Coogan?

  I want to let you go because obviously you're very busy. Last question for me, and if Jordy has anything he can ask too. Tell me about Big Dom, the Chief Security Officer. What's his role in the organization?

• 2:51:46Speaker 08

  What is Big Dom's role in the organization? I don't even know if I have an answer for that, to be completely honest. Like, I know, I know he gets a lot of love. And, you know, ever since his, the situation with the 49ers on the sideline, you know, he's, I go to events and, you know, people ask for my autographs. And Big Dom is probably getting more requests for autographs and pictures than me, to be honest. But to be, like, the best way I can put it, he's just the glue to the team. And it's, I'm not even exaggerating when I say that. Like, he is the glue to the team. He keeps everything in line. And he makes sure he has everybody's back.

• 2:52:29Speaker 08

  And that's one person that I know, outside of my family member or friends, that if I need anything... And I need to make one phone call. I'm picking up the phone and I'm calling Big Don.

• 2:52:39John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:52:40Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  Jordan, you have anything else you want to run through?

• 2:52:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wanted to ask, you know, general, you know, how you, how you, you and friends and maybe other players are thinking about investments today? You've invested in Ramp, you've invested in Andorol. These are some of, you know, the top companies in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, a lot of people, you know, will start a big company, sell it, and then make a series of silly investments. How do you avoid maybe making, how do you avoid the bad investments? What's your kind of framework for that?

• 2:53:09Speaker 08

  Um, yeah, how do you avoid making the bad investments? That's a, that's a great question. And you, you get, uh, as a, as an athlete, uh, you get a lot of things thrown at you, to say the least. And you don't know what's the right thing to get involved in. And, um, you, you just gotta try, you try to educate yourself as best you can. And to be honest, when you come from the NFL, a lot of us go to college, go to college for three years, maybe four. And, you know, our financial, like us, how, how educated we are on the financial side of things, it's not that great.

• 2:53:48Speaker 08

  And I'm open and honest, and I'm able to admit that to myself, um, that coming out the NFL, it, it wasn't that great. And it still has so much room to improve. But the way I handle is by surrounding myself with the right people. And you have to trust people and one, I have an amazing manager, cause, um, and he's pretty good at saying no, to be honest. He, he, he will say no to pretty much everything unless Zach Franklin calls. And when Zach calls us, uh, anything, anything he say is kind of like, oh yeah, let's, let's just do it right now.

• 2:54:19Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:54:22Speaker 08

  Let's just go right to it. Um, but it's guys like that, like you, you just surround yourself with people like that who, who are super smart and super successful and done it the right way and you able to build relationships with them. And you be able to earn, you able to earn their trust and you able to trust them and uh make those decisions. So it's tough because you get a lot of things thrown at you and I don't know if I have a the the exact perfect answer, but.

• 2:54:46Jordi Hays?

  That's a pretty good answer.

• 2:54:47John Coogan?

  That's a pretty good answer.

• 2:54:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, right?

• 2:54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a great answer.

• 2:54:51Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of people in in the tech world, you know, have spent decades investing, professional investors, and they should follow the same framework. Say no to those things and then if a certain person calls you, you just say, yeah, you back up the truck.

• 2:55:06John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:55:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:55:08John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Uh, we'd love to have you back. Uh, hope to see you soon in person.

• 2:55:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats on the markup too. First of first of many, I imagine.

• 2:55:16Speaker 08

  Thank you guys so much and I apologize for the.

• 2:55:18John Coogan?

  No, you're all good.

• 2:55:19Speaker 08

  I'm leaving. I was coming back from a event at a hospital, so.

• 2:55:24John Coogan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:55:24Speaker 08

  I might, I might be a little shaky. I apologize.

• 2:55:26John Coogan?

  No, you're good.

• 2:55:27Speaker 08

  You guys for having me.

• 2:55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to have you in the studio soon. Yeah, uh, well, we'll, we'll get you under the lights here for, uh, for a couple of minutes if we can grab some of your time because this is fantastic.

• 2:55:36Jordi Hays?

  This is great.

• 2:55:37Speaker 08

  I appreciate you guys.

• 2:55:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Saquon. Have a good one.

• 2:55:41John Coogan?

  That is an amazing answer.

• 2:55:42Jordi Hays?

  That's the best investment framework. I, I know multiple smart, very smart people that have basically the same framework.

• 2:55:48John Coogan?

  Yes, that's amazing.

• 2:55:50Jordi Hays?

  If it works, you know, it works.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait for that one person to call.

• 2:55:55John Coogan?

  That was incredible. Uh, anyway, we have our, uh, we have our next guest coming up in three minutes. In the meantime, let's run through some timeline.

• 2:56:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got some. Yeah, I mean, the big thing that has been developing for the, for the, for the people monitoring the situation at home. Uh, apparently, uh, President Trump is warming to the idea of using US military assets to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

• 2:56:20John Coogan?

  The real monitoring of the situation is the Microsoft OpenAI situation because that's the one that most people in tech are monitoring on a daily basis. But uh, we do need to cover the geopolitics. What's the update there?

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, apparently Trump, uh, Trump has been warming up to the idea of military action against Iran, um, so much so that the poly market is spiking up to 75% chance of military action against Iran before July, so a couple of weeks left.

• 2:56:49John Coogan?

  Now, there would be a difference between military action and boots on the ground. And I think that there's probably a, a, a, a bit of a Rubicon to cross there mentally for the American people. Um, obviously people don't like the idea, uh, or there are many people in America that don't like the idea of sending money to fight a foreign war and they think we should re-prioritize America and American paying down the debt, for example, all those different things. Uh, the Ukraine war has gotten some pushback from a lot of folks in tech and beyond, um, for that reason. But the real red line for a lot of people is boots on the ground. Don't send our soldiers over there. It's a quagmire. We lived through the global war on terror. Let's never do that again. Uh, and so, uh, it'll be interesting

• 2:57:29John Coogan?

  to track which way this leans because there's obviously multiple tiers to engaging. One is just, you, you know, you sell the weapons or technology to another company, to another, uh, government that uses them, then you're deploying American military assets, but no boots on the ground. And then the final is, of course, uh, boots on the ground. Uh, but hopefully this whole thing resolves quickly and we can get to a, a peace negotiation and a trade deal. Um, because, uh, we want, we want freedom and we want capitalism.

• 2:57:56Jordi Hays?

  Stability.

• 2:57:56John Coogan?

  We want, we want business. We want, we want, we want 10 more whizzes out of Iran. Give me the Iranian whiz. That's what I want.

• 2:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:05John Coogan?

  Give me some cybersecurity companies that we can flip to Google for 30 billion. That's what I want.

• 2:58:11Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 2:58:11John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:58:12Jordi Hays?

  We have some more. Apparently there's some news leaking about, uh, OpenAI's, uh, or sorry, XAI's fundraising.

• 2:58:19John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:58:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they are, uh, spending 4.7 billion in the next, uh, three months on a new, out of their new $9.3 billion raise. Uh, they're projecting 18 billion for new data center capex through 2027.

• 2:58:38Jordi Hays?

  And they are the X AI employee payroll has almost quadrupled since the series C.

• 2:58:45John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:58:46Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting to think about.

• 2:58:46John Coogan?

  Should we hit the gong?

• 2:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do it, John. We'll give you one of these air horns, too. There we go.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  Gong.

• 2:58:52Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting that X was going through this like, you know, intense austerity, limiting spending, you know, keeping employee counts low.

• 2:59:00John Coogan?

  Now it's boom.

• 2:59:01Jordi Hays?

  Now it's just scaling, scaling.

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  I love it. We love scale. It's great.

• 2:59:06Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:59:07John Coogan?

  Uh, what else is in the news? Oracle has a new initiative to help companies sell technology to the Pentagon. Larry Ellison, absolute dog, working to help bridge the gap between startups, companies, and the DOD. We've seen this from a couple of companies. Palantir has the AIP program. Anduril's been acquiring some companies and leveraging their connections in the DOD to actually get distribution on these products once they're built. Every company has a different kind of angle on the problem, but it feels like the big narrative is like, we heard this from the Secretary of the Army, like, the DOD is ready to buy new capability from the private sector, but it's still really hard to actually get a program record. It's actually really hard to get the products

• 2:59:50John Coogan?

  in, educate people, build the right consensus, figure out what the budgets are, and get the products in the hands of the warfighter. And so Oracle is stepping up with a program called the Oracle Defense Ecosystem. It's structured to help smaller companies break through the challenges they typically face in selling tech to the Defense Department. It's far too hard to serve the American defense enterprise. We can provide an easy path for these companies to get better access to the defense market. So shout out Oracle. Consistently underrated. I say put them in the MAG7 right now. I love them.

• 3:00:21Jordi Hays?

  The, if you just saw the chart of Oracle, you would think it was a Bitcoin chart. I think it's just basically up into the right like crazy. It's an absolute hockey stick. In other news, Morgan Barrett is posting just 30 minutes ago, he said, "When I heard that there was rampant payments corruption in Iran among the military, which is causing the regime to collapse, I initially thought that was a TBPN bit advertising ramp." So yeah, we want to, you know, there's, once, once, you know, Iran is, is.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  We'll get them on ramp.

• 3:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Free and capitalist, we are happy to go over there and spread the good word.

• 3:00:58John Coogan?

  Get everyone on ramp. Anyway, we have our next guest, Ryan from Crosby, coming in the studio. Ryan, how you doing?

• 3:01:03Jordi Hays?

  There he is. Welcome.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  Hey, guys.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  Big day. What's going on? Congratulations. Yeah. Kick us off with the introduction of the company, yourself, the news, everything.

• 3:01:12Ryan Daniels?

  Amazing, guys. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for getting me on. Are we ringing the gong?

• 3:01:16John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, you gotta tell us. Is there something gong worthy to ring the bell?

• 3:01:20Ryan Daniels?

  We're, uh, we're announcing Crosby today. We've been in stealth since, uh, about the fall and we're announcing that we raised our $5.8 million seat.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  Let's go. Congratulations. There we go. Incredible. Congrats. Uh, so break it down. What, what, what are you building? And then give us some differentiation? How do you see the market playing out? We'll, we'll dig into it all, but give us the.

• 3:01:45Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah. A hundred percent. I'll give maybe like a few seconds of my background and how I got here.

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:50Ryan Daniels?

  This is a live tracker, by the way. I'll get to that in a second.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to hear about that for sure.

• 3:01:53Ryan Daniels?

  A janky way onto these boxes.

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:01:56Ryan Daniels?

  So, uh, my background is had been between tech and law for like a decade, early at a couple of startups that did well. And also for various reasons ended up going to law school practicing. My last company, we grew really quickly from like 10 to a hundred people in about a year. And the only thing slowing us down was contracts. And because I was the only person there who knew anything about legal, it was like my problem. And obviously I tried out every legal AI thing I could get my hands on. Over the last few years, it's such an interesting space, but I kept feeling like something was missing. A lot of the legal AI tools, plugins, word add-ons on the market made me a little faster as a lawyer, but I was still doing so much manual work. And so I started working with my co-founder, John Sarahan, really early at Ramp. So we're celebrating twice today.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:02:42Ryan Daniels?

  He was really interested in like.

• 3:02:44John Coogan?

  It's the Ramp alumni day.

• 3:02:47Ryan Daniels?

  John's big post today is that finance agents could walk so legal agents could run.

• 3:02:52John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 3:02:52Ryan Daniels?

  That's as good as we did.

• 3:02:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:54Ryan Daniels?

  So we got, you know, John, like he was obsessed with helping, um, you know, fast green businesses grow faster and save money and save time. Like that was his thing. And I was obsessed with this contract problem. We started jamming idea last summer and really quickly we came up with the idea Just starting our own law firm, like what would that look like, like full, you know, starting from scratch, hire lawyers, try to replace their work agentically, like what work can actually be done with agents, what can't, how do we get the speed of AI with the, you know, expertise of lawyers? And, you know, we, we had this feeling like contracts are the API of business. Like anytime there's any economic growth transaction between two parties, there is a contract and we should make that faster. They haven't changed in like 50 years, the way we review them. So that's what we're doing. That's Crosby.

• 3:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Yeah, I have been very upset with

• 3:03:41John Coogan?

  The legal bills?

• 3:03:42Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Well, well, that, that I love, I love our lawyer, but, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's definitely a cost center. No, but I've been, I've been kind of interested to follow, you know, the fact that, that we haven't adopted more AI. We, we're an SMB, right?

• 3:04:01John Coogan?

  We use AI all over the place.

• 3:04:02Jordi Hays?

  We use AI across the entire business from content generation to management, transcription, all sorts of transcription. Research, all this stuff. And yet, you know, when it comes to actually generating and, you know, going back and forth on contracts, it's still very manual and it just feels like a place that, that we already should be, have, have picked things up. So.

• 3:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk about the different tiers of legal work? Like my, my mental model for this is like, there's like form filling, which did actually get somewhat commoditized by just crud apps in the web 2.0 era. You have companies like LegalZoom. If you need to just fill out a form to form an LLC, they'll do that. Stripe, Stripe Atlas, for example, doesn't use, didn't use AI, but was able to advance a lot of things. Then on the far other end, you have someone who looks more like A legal artist, like the top tier of lawyers who are thinking really creatively about how to construct also, I mean, whoever came up with the OpenAI org chart, clearly that

• 3:05:09John Coogan?

  person's not getting displaced by AI anytime soon because that was a work of art. It's like a, it's a

• 3:05:15Jordi Hays?

  It's basically a monument to big law.

• 3:05:18John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yes. I mean, I'm sure the legal bill's there is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But, but, but it seems like every year as we chip away at better foundation models, more agentic reasoning, longer, longer test time inference, longer reasoning agents, we can move things from one bucket to the other. And, and, and so, so talk to me about the flow of, of like the, the roadmap of moving more and more into the AI world. What's, what's, you know, today, what's in six months? What are you tracking on the foundation model side and looking forward to an unlock?

• 3:05:58Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah. I mean, these are like, I mean, these are like the fundamental questions that John and I were playing with back last fall when it was like me sitting there doing legal work and him looking over my shoulder, trying to convince me he could automate the things I was doing and me being really skeptical. And like, we did this for weeks. And I think, I mean, you, I think you nailed it. There's sort of like, we, we kind of mapped out and there's probably thousands of SKUs of legal work from like

• 3:06:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:22Ryan Daniels?

  reformatting a Word document to, you know, writing an appellate brief for, for court. I think as you go from more, least complicated to more complicated, the work gets slower, it gets more expensive and it looks more like an art and it's like, there's a real craft to it. It gets more sophisticated. And I think part of what's going on there is that part of legal work is fundamentally like a dialogue between humans, right? It's a lawyer to a judge or to a jury or two contract, you know, like parties negotiating with each other. And there's like nuance and subtlety that we, we had a really hard time, like, like the difference between the words reasonable and commercially reasonable are like in, in embedding sort of concept, almost the same, but, but actually quite different. So like,

• 3:07:01John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:07:01Ryan Daniels?

  So this is what we're struggling with. I think, look, we obviously have a long bet on where the models will get to in terms of like getting better and better so that we can have a fully agentic law firm. Like that is where surely this will go. And so the idea that we started with like a word add-on

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:16Ryan Daniels?

  as like the packaging for this is kind of straight, like no lawyer has ever, or nobody's ever gone and said, I want a word add-on. They just, they want a lawyer. They want to throw it over the fence and not think about it. So that's what we're doing here today. And right at like, we call it like right at the sort of cutting edge, Like of where the machines sort of stop and the human intuition or judgment or just accuracy has to come in.

• 3:07:37Ryan Daniels?

  That's kind of what we've been trying to model like from a workflow perspective where lawyers will jump in. That's where we are today.

• 3:07:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:43Ryan Daniels?

  To be more precise on the like where, what kind of what skews, like where do things land? I think right now we're focused on contracts. It's crazy. It's like it's forty billion dollars or so that we map spent on contract review in the U.S. These are like contracts that are like a lease to like a merged agreement that's eighty pages. And so we just focus there. And so our, our goal is to move up the complexity scale. We're with these commercial agreements now that are like, let's call it, you know, first quartile, you know, not the easiest things, but, but still needs some human in the loop.

• 3:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about maybe how, so we, we recently moved into this new studio. The typical process, you wait a long time to get a lease. When you finally get the lease, you know, I, I take a, a quick skim, throw it over to our lawyer. They're like, cool, it's going to take us a while to review this, right? It's variable. Maybe they're busy, maybe they're not, they turn it around. You get through this issues. How much do you already feel like you're an order of magnitude better than the traditional process? Like, can I basically immediately send a contract to Crosby and you guys can just like basically go line by line almost immediately and, and you know, cause, cause the typical process is like, okay, you have a lease, maybe there's fifteen or so places that you might

• 3:08:54Jordi Hays?

  want to push back or change or, or things you want to add. And you're basically just going through and, and talking through those things and it, and it feels like that could be done. I, I imagine, I, I don't know how far along you guys are, it feels like you could already be at a point where the speed, the, the, the sort of-

• 3:09:10John Coogan?

  It's almost like, it's almost like I want a, an agent on my side and I want them to have an agent on their side and I want the two agents to fight it out and do two weeks of fighting in two minutes. Because like really I, I want representation and they deserve representation, but I just want things to go faster because what kills me is not that they're pushing back on, is it two thousand dollars or five thousand dollars? What I hate is that it's two weeks in between a turn of documents.

• 3:09:36Ryan Daniels?

  Okay, like, like honestly, the first thing about the mapping out legal complexity was like the first slide in our pitch deck.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:42Ryan Daniels?

  And then like the last slide where this, this is, this is illusory but crazy idea, but it's like, it's getting more real.

• 3:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:47Ryan Daniels?

  That there's a professor that was doing research, I think at, at Stanford Law School that like- If you have two law students doing mock negotiations for divorce negotiations, so it's very stylized. It's like who gets the kids on these days and that day. And then you give their same bottom lines to agents. The repeated agentic negotiations, they simulate that process. They always get to better outcomes for both parties in minutes, right?

• 3:10:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:10:09Ryan Daniels?

  So it's simple. There's not that many things to negotiate.

• 3:10:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:11Ryan Daniels?

  So John and I were thinking like, okay, there's like about 50 main sticking points in a commercial agreement. This is like, if you're any startup, you were selling software, you were negotiating MSAs constantly. It's called 50 sticking points. What if we could map like Adobe's preferences and like Microsoft preferences? And rather than having months of back and forth, just agentically simulated. And in minutes, say, guys, this is what you're going to get to. And so that's like, that's like maybe a few years out, but that's the goal of this company. We want to be the API for businesses to connect with each other from a legal and risk hearing standpoint. Where we are today, how it works, like in terms of, because we got money now, we're signing a new office. So we're doing that same thing.

• 3:10:49John Coogan?

  It's been three months.

• 3:10:50Ryan Daniels?

  Exactly. We need an office. But we like these commercial agreements, right? Like you do a few of them every week. We're actually, I would say, and like, I think for the fastest growing companies, these are the things that really slow them down. So we're specifically working with the fastest growing companies on the market. Like we've been working with Cursor, Clay and Unify. We've now done, this is over 1,200 contracts since we launched.

• 3:11:13John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 3:11:14Ryan Daniels?

  And they look similar, right? So they're kind of like, you see patterns, you see their preferences. And so the way we're today, and this is like, it's like all the pain that like I hated was like, when a lawyer sends you something back, it's going to be an hour or two days, you don't know. And they're going to ask you questions, you have to clarify and kind of solve things. And then you send it to the counter party. Today, the way it works is a salesperson at Cursor or at Clay will just slack us a document, tag our bot, we ingest it, we do review, obviously with some AI, some human oversight, send it back within an hour. Our median time is 58 minutes and the salesperson sends it right back. And we have a knowledge base for everything those clients care about. So we know the things that Chris is like, I don't care. We don't need to worry about that. We can let it go and the things that really matter. And our driving insight here was we can unlock sales teams to be so much more, you know,

• 3:11:59Ryan Daniels?

  fast at their jobs, the things that really matter because of this.

• 3:12:02John Coogan?

  You mentioned that you're building a Word, a Microsoft Word plugin. Microsoft's obviously built co-pilots into a few of their products. Are you worried about getting paper clipped? If Clippy comes back and Clippy gets a law degree?

• 3:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Clippy with a Harvard Law degree, that is dangerous.

• 3:12:20John Coogan?

  I'm joking, but I'm somewhat serious. Like, it feels like the last thing on Microsoft's roadmap, but they do have GitHub Copilot. They do have a product for software engineers. Is there any risk of Microsoft going into this market, just generally, even if it's not directly?

• 3:12:37Jordi Hays?

  This is the question everyone wants to ask. What if Clippy does this?

• 3:12:39John Coogan?

  What if Clippy does this? Are you gonna get paper clipped?

• 3:12:43Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah, wow. Alright, so I see that. So, you know, the first thing that like every founder in legal tech is like, I'm gonna build a better text editor. Like, I'm gonna build a better Microsoft Word.

• 3:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:55Ryan Daniels?

  And, and it's like this pipe dream. And like, it never worked. Like, it's just, like, you can't.

• 3:13:00John Coogan?

  It's impossible. If you move the image, the whole document always goes. That's just the nature of Word docs.

• 3:13:06Ryan Daniels?

  I can't even tell you how much time. So like, I don't know, I'm bullish on Clippy. Like, I think we're like, we're working heavily on top of Word, but we're not, like, the better that we do, and the more documents we review, the more, the more Word licenses that we need to buy for our law.

• 3:13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, and also, I mean, you have, you have a flywheel, and it's a completely different market, but.

• 3:13:23Ryan Daniels?

  We're not selling, we will never sell against Microsoft Word.

• 3:13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Would you ever, would you ever release a B to B to B type, you know, product in terms of like a copilot? It feels like a very distinct decision to say, we are our own law firm, tech-enabled law firm. We are not, you know, just, just allowing other law firms to build on top of this.

• 3:13:46Ryan Daniels?

  So like, I think lawyers, I mean, I am one, right? Like, I think that we appreciate, and I mean, I say this sincerely, like, there is an art to what we do. But I think it makes us really ambivalent about AI. Like, we, like, even if the work it does, not all that, we, you know, we talked to so many lawyers, and some of them are like, the most AI pills, but most are like, I'd rather write it my way. Like, I think the way that I drafted that sentence. Like, even if our tools, like, I always thought that there would be a cursor for legal by now, that lawyers would just like use the way our whole team is obsessed with, you know, with, with, you know, better IDE. But I don't think it's manifested, which is, which is all to say, I think part of what we're innovating on here is not just the software and the AI sort of workflow tools we're building,

• 3:14:31Ryan Daniels?

  but also the way that we train lawyers, that we upskill them. It's a skill issue. The way that we get them better at what they do to use AI the way that we want them to. Now, if we can fully automate this service one day, and it's basically like selling software. Which I think we will do. I still want to package it like a service. I don't want people like opening up a software platform to deal with this. Like lawyers, that's just not how people think about their lawyers. It's just a problem you want to throw to someone else. And so I'd love us to feel more of that service experience always.

• 3:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like it's an agent in Slack and you can get that experience that you have with a great lawyer of, you know, just talking through things.

• 3:15:06John Coogan?

  Last question, uh, for me at least. Um, I don't know how much you've studied the history of like legal tech, but, uh, Atrium's like the popular story that everyone knows, but there was actually a company before. Do you know Clearspire?

• 3:15:18Ryan Daniels?

  I do.

• 3:15:18John Coogan?

  Have you heard of this? Okay. So lessons from Clearspire and Atrium. I'd love to know how you tell the story to maybe investors who are asking about those companies and what lessons you've learned and how you're differentiating.

• 3:15:30Ryan Daniels?

  Well, what's interesting is like those companies were all like sequentially sort of staggered by like, I'm amazing about Clearspire. That's like niche. There's this great book about it. Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 3:15:37John Coogan?

  I, I haven't read the book. I, but there was like a Harvard Business Case Study on it.

• 3:15:41Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah, like a PDF. Yeah.

• 3:15:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, PDF. I read the PDF.

• 3:15:43Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 3:15:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, fascinating.

• 3:15:45Ryan Daniels?

  So it's like, so it's like, so like, I think they, they came up with a really clever innovation, which was you have a, it's just an, it's a, it's a regulatory thing, but you have a C corporation.

• 3:15:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:54Ryan Daniels?

  You know, typical startup and your P L L C.

• 3:15:56John Coogan?

  And then a binding contract, right?

• 3:15:58Ryan Daniels?

  Exactly. And so we, we've done that. And then Atrium did that. They took it a little farther. They, but, and, and they, and they took it a little farther and focused on types of work that were maybe more automatable. They focused on startup law. They were like Y C's law firm.

• 3:16:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:16:10Ryan Daniels?

  And I actually haven't spoken with, maybe I spoke to one person from Clearspire, but I've spoken to all the co-founders now of Atrium. And almost all of them, except for one, said, right idea, wrong time. Like we just spent all of our money on N L P and now that's a solved problem.

• 3:16:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:16:24Ryan Daniels?

  Right?

• 3:16:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:16:25Ryan Daniels?

  And so, and so that, that's the, and so like, that's the story is like, it's a really, really good idea.

• 3:16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:30Ryan Daniels?

  You go after specific types of law that can be automated that like, you don't even care the lawyer's name. There's types of work where you're like, I need to know my lawyer's name.

• 3:16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:37Ryan Daniels?

  I want to know their resume, but for other work, you just need it fixed. And so I, I really think like they, they figured out the hard things for us and they set the stage.

• 3:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the series A branding of like, we'll do your series A super cheaply was like, it was, it was great wedge, but it just didn't expand that much. Cause like you only do one series A and then for the B, it's like way more complicated and you just bring in a traditional.

• 3:16:57Ryan Daniels?

  Totally. And that's a loss leader for like, who?

• 3:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. It doesn't feel like a loss leader when I get a six figure bill, but, uh, but I guess it is. Anyway, this has been fantastic.

• 3:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm super excited. I mean, there's just so many different types of contracts that don't make sense to that are important, that need to be done well, that don't make sense to, you know, you don't need to, you know, spend tens of thousands of dollars on. So anyways, very excited for you. Excited to follow the journey. You can be one of our new legal AI experts in residence. So come back on when there's news. And congrats to you and the team.

• 3:17:31John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Thank you for having me on. Bye.

• 3:17:35John Coogan?

  Great. Well, that's been a fantastic show. Let's check in with Tyler on his review of Windsurf. Did you get it installed? How's it going?

• 3:17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, it's, it's pretty good. I think I, so I haven't used a lot of these like IDEs yet. I've used Cursor like a little bit.

• 3:17:51Jordi Hays?

  You have like, your code's like handmade, like farm to table?

• 3:17:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I like to actually like to, usually I write it up by hand and then I just scan it in.

• 3:17:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:17:59Speaker 02

  I think it's more of a, yeah, I feel closer to the code base then.

• 3:18:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:18:04Speaker 02

  But I think it's, it's really useful. I mean, it's great for like front end stuff. I think, and obviously I've only been using it for like, you know, an hour and a half.

• 3:18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:12Speaker 02

  I'm sure there's a learning curve. But I, I think when you, when you start to have like, okay, now I have this function that runs on server. It's like, how does that connect? It might not be in the exact same code base. It's hard to integrate these things.

• 3:18:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:18:26Speaker 02

  But I think for a small, like, it's just running locally. It's like super great.

• 3:18:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Did you have to, was there a model selector? Because there was that drama about Anthropic, like pulling the plug on the Windsurf connection so that when you set it up, you used to just give Windsurf your credit card and then you'd have access to Claude and they would handle the billing internally. Now it seems like you have to bring your own Claude API if you want to use Sonnet, which is the popular one, I believe. Is that right?

• 3:18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm looking right now.

• 3:18:55John Coogan?

  What was your experience like selecting a model?

• 3:18:56Speaker 02

  So I'm on the like free tier, but I think I've, it's like a free trial. But I can choose 3.5 Sonnet. But yeah, it's bring your own keys.

• 3:19:07John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:19:07Speaker 02

  So I would have to go to the Claude website and then do like export keys and then just paste it in. But even then, I mean, I'm sure it's like pretty easy still.

• 3:19:14John Coogan?

  Did you notice any, the original question we had was like, if Microsoft got their hands on this intellectual property, that would be incredibly valuable? Like, does that feel like a reasonable narrative to you? Or are we leaning more like, this is more about data aggregation in the front door to AI?

• 3:19:32Speaker 02

  I mean, if I had to guess, I assume it's the latter. Like, I, I, I think there were some rumors at some point about OpenAI trying to build their own kind of IDE.

• 3:19:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:41Speaker 02

  And that it failed.

• 3:19:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:19:43Speaker 02

  And that was like, maybe the reason for the acquisition.

• 3:19:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:47Speaker 02

  But I, I mean, I can't imagine that it's really the, the IP.

• 3:19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:51Speaker 02

  Cause, I mean, at some point, it's like, just, it's kind of a, at some point, it's like a VS code fork, right?

• 3:19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, yeah, Microsoft owns VS code. So, yeah, you'd think that they would be able to iterate towards like the best in practice UI patterns, essentially. If that's what really makes Windsurf stand out. I'm wondering, like, there was a ton of heat on Windsurf on X for a while. It was really popular. And yet, I saw that at the AI Dev World Fair that Swix put on. They had everyone raise their hands and it was like eighty or seventy, eighty, ninety percent cursor users. So cursor's clearly broken through in a really meaningful way into just like broad adoption. And that seems really, really valuable because you're getting all that training data that then can be used in reinforcement learning contexts and, and derive better AI models.

• 3:20:41John Coogan?

  So, um, yeah, it seems like, it, it, it's kind of unclear to me exactly how much of a real issue this is. We'll have to ask some more people. We have some other AI folks coming on the show later this week. We'll, we'll try and dig into, you know, is Microsoft after just the cash flows? Or the equity, or the data, or the IP, or the models? Because they have like different claims on different pieces of OpenAI. And all of those are probably negotiating points as they kind of separate these two entities out. And so, um, it's certainly a, a unique situation because most investors, if you get them on your cap table, maybe you give them a board seat, but they're not getting access to your GitHub. They're not getting access to your code or your IP. Can you imagine if that was like, oh yeah, like, uh, you know, I took money from this tier one VC

• 3:21:26John Coogan?

  and then they just gave all my code to a competitor that they invested in? Like, that would be a wild dynamic.

• 3:21:29Jordi Hays?

  It really is a wild deal in hindsight. I mean, it was a wild deal at the time, but the sort of forty-nine percent prof capped profit share. We don't get equity. We don't have a board seat. But, you know, we have sort of a right to IP here and the individual models. So it's going to take a long time to shake out and. Sam is fighting wars on, on at least a couple of fronts.

• 3:21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we, we, we didn't get a chance to dig into the full Ben Thompson article on, on this, but he says, "The Wall Street Journal doesn't indicate who its sources are, but there is little doubt in my mind, they too are on the OpenAI side, and I get why." And he says, "His biggest takeaway," this is Ben Thompson writing a stratechery, which you should subscribe to. He says, "My biggest takeaway from this story is that I have underestimated the amount of leverage that Microsoft has over OpenAI. I mostly wrote about this slow motion train wreck last month. I still think that his, his take is broadly correct. And note that the right to make OpenAI models available to other cloud providers is one of the points of contention in the story, but the fact that OpenAI seems to be reduced to issuing fantastical threats

• 3:22:39John Coogan?

  through press suggests that the decision about the endpoint of these negotiations is almost entirely up to Microsoft. To that end, I can understand if the company is pushing for more than I suggested. Indeed, if anything, these threats through the press might make Microsoft want to hold on to more, since they probably have, since they'll probably have to fight OpenAI again in a few years. I still think, however, that this is all the more reason to give more ground now in exchange for an ironclad agreement securing Microsoft's exclusive Azure access to OpenAI models in perpetu- in perpetuity. That is a fascinating thing, because if OpenAI somehow compounds and runs away with it,

• 3:23:21John Coogan?

  like, they, they have this massive consumer engine that could be... So, it, it feels like right now Anthropic and, and OpenAI on the developer side are neck and neck, and Anthropic even seems a little bit ahead on code gen and just developer adoption. But if you, if it winds up being a capital fight, if it winds up being biggest data center wins, and we need to build the trillion dollar data center, and Stargate becomes extremely real and extremely material, well then, having a consumer app that's printing $10 billion a year is going to be way easier to underwrite as an investor to go and build the next model. And then you might get higher scale, which could make the developer API more valuable.

• 3:24:02John Coogan?

  And if Microsoft has exclusive right to resell that, that, and they're the B2B player, they're the B2B front end to OpenAI models, that is... Extremely valuable, extremely valuable. So I was not, I was not aware of that. He also talks about his, his interview with Cursor CEO, CEO Michael Truell.

• 3:24:22Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is, it is the, the, the perfect irony with, with OpenAI is that it's, it's one a YC company run by Sam Altman, who was president of OpenAI. And if YC was advising a startup that came to them and they said, we're going to enter into this like really complicated commercial agreement and we're going to structure as a nonprofit. We're going to take all these donations and then in the future, we'd like to go public. They would be like, you should just try to not add too many people to your board. You know, take as little dilution as possible. You should, you should basically run like a dictatorship.

• 3:24:57John Coogan?

  Sam Altman's talked about this. He's like, I would not take my, I would do not, do as I say, not as I do.

• 3:25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so to, to create one of the most important new companies of, of, of a generation and then to have it just be ensnared in, in all of this drama from the nonprofit stuff and the battle with Elon all the way now to battle with Satya is just absolutely brutal.

• 3:25:19John Coogan?

  Well, the last story we should, we should close it out with is the Trump phone. The Wall Street Journal says Trump's smartphone can't be made in America for $499 by August. That's because we got Tyler over here assembling iPhones in America. If Trump gets ahold of them, I think all bets are off, but Trump's mobile phone shows some specs that would be, that would beat Apple's biggest, priciest iPhone models. Doesn't want to just make it in America. He wants to release a gold Android phone that will be proudly designed and built in the United States. Fascinating development. This is the first time I heard about it was when the Wall Street Journal was saying it can't be done. But yeah, apparently Trump's son told the podcaster Benny Johnson

• 3:26:01John Coogan?

  on Monday morning, you can build these phones in the United States. So we'll see.

• 3:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Where? How?

• 3:26:08John Coogan?

  Got to dig into that. The, the display is going to rival Apple's $1,200 iPhone 16 Pro Max.

• 3:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Nobody, nobody ever thought to turn the White House into an incubator.

• 3:26:20John Coogan?

  It's happening.

• 3:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Nobody ever, I mean, I'm surprised, hundreds of years of presidents, nobody thought, I'm gonna turn this into a venture studio. Venture studio.

• 3:26:30John Coogan?

  Jimmy Carter had a peanut farm, but he divested. An idiot before he took the presidency, because he didn't want, he wanted his hands clear. He didn't want any conflicts of interest, so he sold his peanut farm. We are now in a different era. Building 50 megapixel iPhones.

• 3:26:45Jordi Hays?

  The hottest new venture studio is the White House.

• 3:26:49John Coogan?

  The White House. Anyway.

• 3:26:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the velocity of new C corps.

• 3:26:53John Coogan?

  It's a lot.

• 3:26:55Jordi Hays?

  They're just firing out of, out of an absolute cannon.

• 3:26:58John Coogan?

  Cannon, yep. Bitcoin treasuries and social networks and crypto.

• 3:27:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we didn't really cover the story of, of this, of the Tron IPO.

• 3:27:08John Coogan?

  Not enough people are, are.

• 3:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Which Eric Trump has now denied having a role.

• 3:27:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:27:15John Coogan?

  I mean, this is the first CEO, founder of a unicorn company in the White House.

• 3:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:21John Coogan?

  It's huge. People talked about Zuckerberg maybe running for president.

• 3:27:25Jordi Hays?

  They never say unicorn tech founder Donald Trump.

• 3:27:28John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, they never, they never introduce him that way. Maybe they should. Really put the focus on what matters.

• 3:27:34Jordi Hays?

  What's truth trading at?

• 3:27:35John Coogan?

  Figure it out. Oh, wild times, wild times.

• 3:27:41Jordi Hays?

  A cool 5.1 billion.

• 3:27:44John Coogan?

  5.1? That feels down off of, off of a little bit of a pie.

• 3:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it, it's been generally down and to the right. In, in 2022, it peaked at 92, 90, 92, well, the intraday high was $99. It's sitting at $18 now.

• 3:28:04John Coogan?

  Okay, so it was like a $30 billion stock at one point?

• 3:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but you know, if, if you sell enough Trump mobile devices.

• 3:28:11John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 3:28:11Jordi Hays?

  And then the.

• 3:28:12John Coogan?

  Maybe it's new narrative, maybe it's catalyst.

• 3:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Trump media DJT, True Social is just pre-installed and maybe they, they have their own search. They build out their own search.

• 3:28:22John Coogan?

  I think they should get into foundation models, really, really take a run at the big labs. Hire some researchers, start doing some reinforcement learning. Let's see it. I want, I want, I want some, some research papers. Maybe they should do an open source model.

• 3:28:36John Coogan?

  I want some, I want some thought leadership on, on artificial intelligence, AGI. We've suspected that he's AGI-pilled, but we haven't seen it in the research papers. Let's make it happen. Anyway, that's our show, folks. Thanks for watching.

• 3:28:51Jordi Hays?

  We had some range today.

• 3:28:52John Coogan?

  We did have a lot of range.

• 3:28:53Jordi Hays?

  George Hotz was wild. He had some spicy takes.

• 3:28:56John Coogan?

  He did.

• 3:28:57Jordi Hays?

  That was fun. I wish we had another 30 minutes.

• 3:28:59John Coogan?

  We went all over the place. We went over to Chinese history. We went into the NFL.

• 3:29:03Jordi Hays?

  Technology investor Saquon Barkley.

• 3:29:05John Coogan?

  Some Series As, some Series Bs. Really good range. Fantastic show. I think that's exactly what people come here for.

• 3:29:11Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 3:29:12John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you for watching, folks.

• 3:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, folks.

• 3:29:14John Coogan?

  We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:29:15Jordi Hays?

  We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:29:16John Coogan?

  Have a great day.