Chime Climbs, Tech Titans Join Army Reserve, Meta Buys 49% of Scale AI | Joshua Steinman, Bernt Børnich, John Doyle, Emily Sundberg, Lennart Heim

(02:47) - Joshua Steinman, founder of Galvanick, discusses the recent Israeli airstrikes on Iran's nuclear and military facilities, highlighting the precision of modern targeting technologies and the deployment of next-generation asymmetric capabilities. He notes the significant impact on Iran's military leadership and infrastructure, emphasizing the strategic implications of such operations. Steinman also reflects on the historical context of Iran-Israel relations, tracing the shift from pre-1979 alliances to the current adversarial stance, and underscores the potential for further escalation given Iran's history of targeting U. S. interests and the presence of Iranian assets capable of asymmetric attacks. (55:51) - Bernt Bornich, CEO of 1X Technologies, discusses his lifelong passion for robotics, leading to the development of NEO, a humanoid robot designed to safely and affordably assist with everyday tasks in home environments. He emphasizes the importance of deploying robots in diverse, real-world settings to gather the necessary data for creating truly intelligent machines, highlighting that the variability of home environments provides the rich data needed for advanced AI learning. Bornich also addresses the challenges of scaling humanoid robot production, noting that while 1X has vertically integrated its manufacturing to maintain flexibility, sourcing materials like copper and aluminum in the U. S. presents logistical and cost challenges compared to China. (01:12:19) - John Doyle, founder and CEO of Cape, a privacy-first mobile network, discusses the critical vulnerabilities in global cellular networks, emphasizing their complete lack of security and the ease with which malicious actors can exploit them. He highlights the strategic decisions by China to infiltrate global telecom infrastructure through subsidized Huawei equipment, contrasting it with U. S. carriers' outsourcing practices that have led to significant security gaps. Doyle explains that Cape addresses these issues by owning all the software that runs the network, allowing for enhanced security without the need to build physical infrastructure. (01:25:54) - Emily Sundberg is a New York-based writer and director, best known for her daily business and internet culture newsletter, "Feed Me." In the conversation, she discusses her experience at Apple's WWDC, noting the enthusiasm of developers for the announced updates, and highlights the evolving fashion trends among attendees. She also shares insights into the competitive landscape of Substack, emphasizing the importance of quality content and active reader engagement for success. (01:47:01) - Lennart Heim, a researcher at the Centre for the Governance of AI, focuses on the role of computational resources in AI development and governance. He discusses the impact of China's DeepSeek model on the AI landscape, highlighting its open-source nature and cost-effectiveness, which have raised concerns about potential biases and security risks in widely accessible models. Heim also emphasizes the importance of compute governance in AI regulation, suggesting that controlling access to advanced computational resources could serve as a mechanism to enforce safety standards and prevent misuse of powerful AI systems. 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, June 13th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're covering lots of stuff, taking you all over the world. We are going to touch on what's going on in Iran. You know, we're not a political show, but obviously this has taken over the timeline and we do want to understand a little bit about what's going on. So we're going to have our good friend Josh Steinman jump on, get us up to speed. We're going to run through a few posts before we bring him in. First one, apparently there's a G-Wagon angle here. Have you heard this?

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes, of course.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Faraz Khan, friend of the show, says, "I love my G-Wagons. The Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon, G-Class, exists largely because of Iran, specifically due to the influence and initiative of Mohammed Reza Shah Palavi, the Shah of Iran in the early 1970s."

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it was, it was built for him.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, that's right.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  For the Shah, purpose-built and became so popular that it became a global icon and arguably top-five car.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic car.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  Of all time.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  So hopefully we can move past the geopolitical conflict and get back to what matters, building cool cars together in a global community.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  They probably have some insane vintage G-Wagons on the ground.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Hopefully none of them were destroyed.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Well, it's absolute chaos in the timeline. Walter Bloomberg has a quote from Trump to the Wall Street Journal. We'll see if this is a real quote. I don't know. "Attack would be great for the market because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon." The, the market was not responding to that right now.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  Michael Burry is confused.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  And Shane Copeland does have the market. You should be tracking Polymarket. The odds of an Israeli military strike against Iran were surging yesterday before the market started selling off. So Polymarket was once again ahead. And so Shane says, "You knew this was coming if you were checking Polymarket." That's why we're proud to partner with Polymarket because they bring you the news before it happens.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Well, we will kick it over.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  There was some interesting activity. People were looking on Shane. Uh, well, that that too, but you know, people were looking at Poly Chain, apparently a wallet on a few different occasions during Israeli

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Strikes.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  Strikes, like, you know, twelve hours before when people were creating accounts potentially to to trade against this stuff. So anyways, they're doing a service for other people to understand the world a little bit better.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Well, we're going to try and understand what's going on. So let's bring in Josh Steinman, the founder of Galvanic, to break it down for us. Thanks so much for taking the time and hopping on. How are you doing?

• 2:44Joshua Steinman?

  Doing great. Doing great.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Explain to us, uh, first off, let's start with what's going on right now. Uh, there's a lot of posts. It's really hard to make sense of all what's AI slop. There's some really striking images. I saw one crazy photo of what appeared to be a drone that went directly into a single bedroom. Very, very precise. How precise are these targets? What's actually going on? What's the scale of this? Is this World War III? And then I want to get a little bit of the history from you.

• 3:11Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah. So first of all, I think precision targeting is not like a new thing. I mean, even as far back as like the, uh, the first Gulf War, there were reports that American cruise missiles were able to target, you know, very specific locations like, uh, you know, the thing that got leaked to the media was like, oh, we can, we can hit a bedroom window with a cruise missile. And I can't speak to whether or not that's accurate, but you know, that's over thirty years ago. So you can just think like, things have gotten a lot better. I think the big takeaway right here is we're seeing actual like next generation asymmetric capabilities being deployed. Uh, and and they're being deployed in a way in which we're literally seeing them. Obviously, the footage is getting leaked.

• 3:53Joshua Steinman?

  There's all this reports of like Iranian missiles failing at launch. So you have like possible next generation cyber weapons being deployed. Maybe it's RFEW, you don't know. Um, but this is like really stuff that's happening. I mean, they built drone bases supposedly inside Iran, which is wild, although obviously we just saw the Ukrainians do the same thing.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:14Joshua Steinman?

  Against the Russians.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I heard some report that I think a hundred suicide drones left from Iran. None of them made it to Israel. And so, uh, some defense technology was clearly employed there to stop that. Or maybe it's just shoddy manufacturing. Who knows?

• 4:27Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah. Look, the point that I make here is like, you just have to hand it to the President of the United States. Because from his perspective, this is all just a negotiation. Like, this guy's the goat. You know, he's just like, hey, we're still open for negotiation like,

• 4:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:41Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, we're gonna kill half your leadership and like, we'll see you at the table in three days.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this is the first time.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  What did you, what did you think about the, you know, people were sharing around sixty one days ago? I guess he, he gave like a sixty minute kind of deadline or sorry sixty day deadline.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  We're on day sixty one.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Day sixty one, this happened.

• 5:00Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, did you, were you reading into that at all? Were you expecting it?

• 5:05Joshua Steinman?

  Uh, I wasn't personally expecting it, but it does make sense. Now, the question of whether or not that was directed or agreed upon or just sort of like a shelling point. Like the Israelis looked at that date and they're like, okay, if we do it on this date, it'll seem coherent. You don't know. I think probably one of the few people who will know on the planet is the president. Uh, but it is nice because I mean, the president is very open about what he wants. Um, and I think, you know, for the past twenty years, our foreign policy leaders, whether it's the president or secretary of state, they sort of had this like very amateurish attitude to foreign policy like, oh, we're just gonna play nice with everybody. And Trump is just like, no, we don't want you to have a nuclear weapon. We're a hundred percent fine with all of these other things.

• 5:49Joshua Steinman?

  We're negotiating on this and like, yeah, there are gonna be consequences and you're literally gonna see them right now.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Okay, give me a little bit of the history.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it, uh, be, before we get into the history, is it too early? People on the timeline are, are calling it the one day war. They're taking victory laps.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  And then there's the other side, which is it's World War Three. I was seeing that a lot last night. Which one was it?

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  It just feels a little too early for people to be claiming victory, given we don't, uh, know the consequences. We've also had a pretty porous border for, for years. So I think there should be concern, you know, even at home around.

• 6:23Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah. Yeah. Sun Tzu and Klaus was both right about how politics and war are essentially extensions of the same, of the same thing, right? How do you get other nations to do what you want them to do or to come to a negotiated, uh, you know, agreement, et cetera? So I think, you know, I don't know. I'm not even sure the degree to which, if at all, the United States is involved. What I would say is it seems like Iranian air defense systems are essentially zeroed out. So the war will go on as long as the Israelis want it to go on.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:54Joshua Steinman?

  And so at that point, then you create this like, you know, interesting triangulation relationship where the president is still offering what remains of the Iranian leadership, an olive branch. It is up to them to take it. If they don't. You know, they have to know that the Israelis essentially have the capability and intention and the willingness to essentially just do whatever they want, including high-level leadership targets. And I think you have to imagine if you're the Iranians that, you know, you're asking what else do they have in the toolbox?

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Give me a little bit of the history. I think most of us are familiar with the meme of like, this is a picture of Iran before the revolution, very modern, we used to be allies, Iran used to be a massive, I think, third-largest GDP in the world.

• 7:42Joshua Steinman?

  Used to be an ally of Israel, by the way, you know, just talk about like weird turnabouts.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Crazy. So walk me through kind of the story of like how we got to this point.

• 7:51Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, so obviously, there's a lot here and I would encourage people to do their own research, lots of great books, and I'm by no means an expert's expert, although I have been working, was working in this area for, at this point, almost two decades.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:07Joshua Steinman?

  So, yeah, there was a revolution in Iran to push back against leaders that the United States and the UK supported and wanted to remain in power.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  And the main flip there was they went from essentially a capitalist democracy to a communist theocracy, more or less?

• 8:28Joshua Steinman?

  I mean, you know, the Shah of Iran is, was essentially, and you know, he's still here, you could say, I think he lives in Los Angeles. So more of a, I'd say more of a capitalist monarchy, although, you know, you'd have to go into the full details of how the government was architected, so.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  It was very compatible with American.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting that he landed in the land of the G-Wagon.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Is it a coincidence?

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Not a coincidence at all, I would imagine.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  He brought it here, okay.

• 8:55Joshua Steinman?

  So, you know, there was pushback, there were elections, there was a lot of, you know, foment.

• 9:05Joshua Steinman?

  The government essentially fell and then there was sort of a second revolution that happened shortly thereafter, uh, where the hardline Shia Islamic theocrats came to power. So the first, you know, the, the first sort of situation happens where there's this, you know, not failed election, but election where the government is not, um, reified, I guess you could say. I'm just trying to like compress all, all this down. So, you know, a lot of unrest, um, and then the Islamic, uh, revolution comes to power, uh, in Iran.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Hostage crisis, obviously.

• 9:40Joshua Steinman?

  A lot of things happened. Uh, for folks that don't know, you could check out how, uh, yes, they took Americans hostage that were at the embassy, uh, during this revolution that was in 1979. Again, a lot of dense history here.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Four hundred days. Yeah. It was a long hostage crisis. Four hundred days. Like, that's really long.

• 10:00Joshua Steinman?

  And it happened alongside the, uh, the presidential election campaign, um, for Jimmy Carter. He lost Reagan won. Famously, the, um, the Iranians didn't let the hostages go. At the same time, there was a failed hostage rescue attempt that has very interesting history into the architecture of the US Department of Defense, US Special Operations Command comes out of that failure, um, known as Desert One. So yeah, a lot of history there. I think for folks that are not really tuned in on this, the thing that I would say is, um, you know, the Iranians were very active in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Um, their explosively

• 10:43Joshua Steinman?

  formed penetrators killed hundreds of Americans, their individual operatives who were both Iranian nationals and Iraqi nationals, also directly responsible for the deaths of a ton of folks.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  This was Quds Force in, uh, in Iraq, right?

• 11:00Joshua Steinman?

  Yep. So a, a lot of that, um, And so, you know, there's, there's a lot of bad blood.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Joshua Steinman?

  And so I'm not saying that, you know, oh, we should go to war with Iran. I actually think let the Israelis handle it. I prefer we close the border. But at the same time, like, they're not good guys. You know, they've been killing Americans for a very long time. In a bunch of different places. And I think you've had a lot of US

• 11:26Joshua Steinman?

  senior leaders, whether it's President Obama or others, try and find ways to build bridges to that government and essentially been rebuffed. And then, you know, doubled down on. So it's just like, you know, no heroes.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Last, last question from me. Yesterday, the internet went down. Cloudflare, Google, you know, the, the, the tinfoil hat crowd is saying maybe their linked happened. I mean, Cloudflare said this is not, we, we weren't attacked. We would say if we were attacked because it would, it would be a get out of jail free card. Like, it seemed like it was an issue with their key value store. What's your take?

• 12:01Joshua Steinman?

  I don't know. Obviously you always want to wait until more facts come out.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Joshua Steinman?

  The timing didn't seem.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  We don't need facts. What's, give us the hottest take.

• 12:10Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, no worries. Sorry, things sometimes happen, boys. So, say lovey.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, do you think, do you think we'll ever, do you think we'll ever have clarity on, on the outage yesterday? It was.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  I think Cloudflare did a pretty good job explaining, but I don't know.

• 12:24Joshua Steinman?

  Look, here's what I would say for folks that want to look to the future. Like, what's the Iranian response going to be? They absolutely have, you know, how many foreign sabotage teams are operating on the US soil? They, they absolutely have assets here in the United States. Those assets absolutely have access to asymmetric capabilities. Those could be drones, it could be like hit squads, et cetera. And I think that you'll be able to gauge the temperature by whether or not those assets start to get activated and start to then go after things here in the United States. Especially because the president has been clear, like, maybe he was aware of what was going to happen, but there was no official, you know, logistical US support for the Israeli operation. Like, they did that themselves.

• 13:09Joshua Steinman?

  You know, maybe there was some sort of like, sure, do whatever you want. Um, you know, permission from the United States, but you have a statement from Marco Rubio. And so I would just say like, stay tuned. The asymmetric tools that were used against the Iranians are not, you know, unique to them. These are things that are out in the wild right now. So I'm certainly going to be paying a lot of attention to that. And for TVPN viewers, I say that's where I'd, you know, be looking.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, thank you for monitoring the situation.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  On behalf of, uh, on behalf of us.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  There's no better place to monitor the situation than from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 13:45Joshua Steinman?

  That's essentially what we're doing at TVPN.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  From the fortress.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  We're constantly just monitoring the situation.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  That's, that's what the show is all about. Thank you so much for hopping on, Josh.

• 13:53Joshua Steinman?

  Thanks, guys.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Josh. Cheers.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Enjoy your weekend. Uh, well, in some good news, um, Chime went public. 12 years ago, Kirsten Green writes, they had a simple, the founders had a simple conviction. Americans deserve better from their banks. Chime went public with 8.6 million members, 121 billion in annual volume and an average of 54 transactions per member per month. So congratulations to the Chime team. They rung the bell.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely fantastic. Congratulations to Kirsten Green on, uh, being their first.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Great outcome.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  How were they, uh, how were they trading is the big question.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Oh, it, it, it went way up. It did very well. Uh, the, the company climbed 37% in debut after 864 million dollar IPO. Very good news. We can go into the whole story. I'd love to know a little bit more about the backstory. I'd love to have the CEO on the show.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  I actually guess it priced at 18.4 billion.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, originally, or, or that's kind of how, where they debuted and then, and now it's trading at 11. It's down a little bit, uh, but still that, that's in the range that, that, um, I think a lot of, uh, analysts were, were anticipating or, or how they felt it would be. Fairly valued.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Well, if you love fintech, you gotta get on Ramp, ramp.com. Time is money.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  Save both.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. And we have, Ramp has, Andoril has a customer. We have a fun activity today in the studio. We have Tyler Cosgrove, our intern over there. He will be assembling

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  A Fury drone made out of Legos that was very nicely, courteously, sent to us from the Andoril team. How you doing?

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Good. I'm very excited.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Bring it down for us. What's the plan?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  The Fury Andoril drone. It's a Group V autonomous air vehicle. So I think it's, it's, I think 124 scale. So the real thing is, I believe 20 feet long, which is like around half length of a F-16.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  But yeah, there's, how many pieces are in here?

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  When's the last time you, you put together a Lego set?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  I was probably 12.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  So like eight years.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  So a few years ago.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  I'm feeling pretty good. I don't know who has the current record on, on the, you know, the speedrun of this.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yes, I think you can set the world record.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  I think you can set it.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  It might be like Palmer's kids, but I believe they're pretty young.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, they are.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  So I think I should have some advantage.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna smoke them. You're gonna smoke them.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Okay, so we're going for a world record. We're not doing any percent here. We're doing 100%. We're, we're doing glitchless. I don't want to see any, any cheats employed over there.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  We're gonna be tracking the timer. Production team's gonna start a timer. I don't know if we're gonna be able to put it on the screen, but we will be tracking him. So on your marks, get set.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  Do we, wait, wait, wait. Do we wanna, do we wanna have any like consequences, like fantasy football style?

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes. I have, I have something for you. I think it's in my car. I have, if you can do it under, how, how long do you think it's gonna take him?

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I, I think if you can do it, the reward should be under, under

• 16:55John Coogan?

  30 minutes?

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  20 minutes?

• 16:57John Coogan?

  20 minutes?

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  No, under 30, under 30.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Okay, if you can do it under 30, I have an Anduril t-shirt. And it's shareholder worn. It's a shareholder worn Anduril jersey.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Wow, that's powerful, that jersey.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Worn by a shareholder.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  I bet we could get it signed.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  We can get it signed.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  By Luke Metro.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  So it's extra large. I don't know if it'll fit you, but you will win an Anduril t-shirt if you can do it in under 30 minutes. On your marks, get set, go, start your engines.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Send it, send it.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  He's, he's going to be working on that while the show goes on. We're going to be bringing you the news, break it down. It looks pretty complicated, 600 pieces. We will see how he does. Okay, we will be checking in with him over the next half hour, over the next hour, letting you know how it goes. Anyway, let's read through some of this chime. Let's tell you about Figma first. Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together, honestly.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  If golden retrievers could design software, they would use Figma.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Absolutely. So let's go back to Chime. Chime Financial rose 37% in its trading debut after pricing its shares above the marketed range to raise, to raise $864 million in the year's sixth biggest US IPO. That's great. The fintech firm shares opened at $43 after selling for 27 in the IPO, and they've been kind of trading around since then.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're sitting at $34 a share at this point, so down 6% today.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Still up from 27, which is great. Accounting for employee stock options and restricted stock units, Chime has a fully diluted value of about 15.8 billion based on filings with the US SEC. That fully diluted value is a sharp drop from the $25 billion valuation in a 2021 funding round at the peak of the tech boom. And so we've seen a lot of these companies that had higher marks during the zero interest rate era, but of course, interest rates have gone up. That affects the value of future cash flows. It affects the value of tech companies in particular, but it's still important to get out, get liquidity, even if it's not at the high mark. Your LPs, you can distribute, they can choose what to do with it. Maybe they hold, because we've seen a lot of companies that go out at below the previous

• 19:11John Coogan?

  peak, but then they grind up because they have a lot to build off. And this isn't a situation where... It's a company that's sneaking out at a four billion, you know, SPAC or something. This is a true IPO in the tens of billions still seems pretty solid.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there are still so many private neo banks that this is a very important sort of reality check on the market to understand how how the market, you know, the post SERP era is really going to value these. There was another one that got out, I think that was called Dave. I'm actually curious to see.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Oh, I know Dave. I know the founder.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, the founder.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  We've had.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Dave is David. Dave grinded up at one point. They were.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  So we had, we had one of the founders on the show. He's working on that new chrome. Oh, that was from Honey.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  Honey.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  Honey, Honey worked with another guy at Dave.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Two years ago, John.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Named John Wallin.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Dave was valued at $5 a share.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Today it is valued at $200 a share.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Wow. Wait, what's the market cap?

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  So the market cap today is 2.78 billion. So it traded down. It was basically.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, sorry. Say the market cap again.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  2.78 billion.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  2.7 billion. Wow. Yeah, it was down at like 30 million or something. And it was crazy because they had like 100 million in cash on the balance sheet. And I know someone who's a significant shareholder in that company and and it was like, it was like a really rough roller coaster because it like at one point it was worth a ton and then it was worth nothing and then it was back up.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's still down 33% from its IPO.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  But it's in a solid place to actually build back up. So wow, what a roller coaster.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  What a ride. And you had to been very, I mean, very, very different businesses. But ultimately, if you were a Chime investor, watching Dave in the public markets was, was not, was not very fun. So the CEO of Chime said, we don't focus on short term fluctuation of the stock, even if it goes up today. I'm sure there's going to be other days that won't be as great.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Fact check. True. We remain focused on the long term.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  So the investors in Chime that are making money off this DST Global, we know some folks over there, Crossland Capital, Access Industries, General Atlantic, Menlo Ventures, Cathay Innovation, Iconic, and it sounds like Kirsten Green as well, over at Forerunner.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  Kirsten led the seed round of Chime.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Sean Carolyn, a Menlo Ventures partner and Chime board member, said he's relieved. There was a reprieve in the markets following the tariff induced volatility in April. That IPO window closed, we grabbed it back open.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  The IPO window. I was thinking it would be very interesting to see a president run on a platform of just keeping the IPO window open permanently, mandating that it's open.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, just create, we should, you know, normally I'm sort of against

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Maybe an amendment?

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Big government, you know, intervening with the market. But in this case, I think sort of mandating that the IPO window should just always be open.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  It should always be open.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  You're really onto something here, John. You've always been very presidential, but I like where you're going with this.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  This is a winning platform. It'd be bipartisan, I think.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  It's sort of like the opposite of the freeze the rent guy over in New York.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yes, freeze the IPO window open.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  Freeze it open.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Freeze it open. All capital markets were like, holy cow, what does this mean? Carolyn said, noting that Chime delayed its IPO. The company's strong debut Thursday indicates how that now the markets are healthy.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Since so a lot of people are very happy about that. They've never taken their eye off the mission.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm surprised.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  They've never attempted to chase the new shiny object.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Would you surprise me?

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Oh, I was gonna say, you know, we'll see if Chime, depending on what happens in Iran, market might see that positively if Chime could enter, you know, bring neo banking to Iran.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  Well, I'm surprised by how

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  At Iconic says, they've never taken their eye off the mission. They were never tempted to chase the shiny new object. And yeah, they've seemed to be just

• 23:01John Coogan?

  Look at this murderers row of IPO underwriters. You got Morgan Stanley, you got Goldman Sachs, you got JP Morgan and 11 other banks worked on the offering. Let's hear it for investment banking.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  Investment banks.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  They don't get enough credit, you know, investment banks. They just, they just work tirelessly.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  If the stock pops, they're getting heats.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Where are the ticker tape parades for the analysts that stayed up all night?

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Working on this IPO. Anyway, Chime's marketing includes a deal with the NBA's Dallas Mavericks for its logo to appear on the team's jerseys. Pretty cool.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Pretty cool.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Great. Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta. Vanta automate, 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. Anyway, moving on. Uh, big news. Uh, all a whole bunch of tech leaders are now officially in the army.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  The reserves.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  The reserves. Palantir Shamsankar joined the Army Reserves today. He broke it down in the Free Press. Uh, also Boz from Meta jumped in honored to accept a direct commission as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve as part of the newly formed detachment 201, the Army's Executive Innovation Corps, together with Shamsankar, Kevin Wheel and Bob Magru. Uh, our primary role will be to serve as technical experts advising the Army's modernization efforts. We talked to the Secretary of the Army. Uh, they're very dedicated to bringing in technology and modernizing the entire fighting force. Very exciting and it's awesome that, uh, these tech leaders and executives can get in there and, uh, and start having an impact.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  So very, very accepting, uh, very exciting. Boss says, "I have accepted this commission in a personal capacity because I am deeply invested in helping advance American technological innovation." Nerd snipe, "Anyone care to venture a guess on why we called our detachment 201?" 201, that's gotta be an HTTP thing, right? HTTP 201.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  201 is a personnel file in the intel community.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Oh, um, I think it's, I think it's an HTTP reference. So HTTP 201 created. Status code indicates that the, that the HTTP request has resulted in the creation of a new resource. I don't know. That's my guess. Let me know what you think.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  HTTP status codes 201 means created according to at poker chess man.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, that, that, that sounds like what, what it would be. Well, out with the 404s, in with the 201s. Congratulations to everyone involved. Uh, Bob Magru says, "This evening I will become an officer in the Army, US Army Reserve as part of detachment 201, the Army's Executive Innovation Corps. I'm proud to have the opportunity to serve." Shamsankar also says, "Our mission is to help the Army transform for future missions and adopt bleeding edge tech. America wins when we, when we unite the dynamism of American innovation with the military's vital mission." This was our, this, this was the key to our triumphs in the 20th century. It can help us win again. Shom came on the show. He told us about the dollar a year men. You remember this?

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talking about executives in business who could not, they could not be paid, they had to be paid a salary. They couldn't work for free, right?

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Armed forces.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. To, to help with the war effort during World War II. And some of them worked incredibly hard pivoting manufacturing lines to you're making cars. Now you're making Jeeps and tanks and they worked really hard and they made a dollar a year because they legally had to make money.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  You gotta make something. Yeah, this is good. Where you live in an unstable world. We want our brightest technologists to be allies.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  And a part of our defense efforts.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Maybe we should get the, get the army on linear. It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps. They have linear for agents, you know?

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that was their original intention, but it would, anywhere you're building software, you should be using linear.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I should really join the army reserve and just be pitching SaaS products the entire time. Just, just forward deployed BDR.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  I don't really know that much about implementing this stuff, but I can sell it.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  It's just like, hey, we're trying to have a meeting about, you know, modernization.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Not now, John.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  And I'm like, well, sales tax on numeral? What about that?

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  If you put it on autopilot.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, congrats to Polymarket. They're putting up massive numbers in terms of visits in May.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they pulled data from SimilarWeb in May.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Robinhood is sitting at 37.1 million hits, Coinbase at 34.7, Polymarket in third. So I think they're just pulling all the, you know, finance.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Finance and like kind of new, like it, it, these all lean like newer startup investing markets. But, um, Kraken at seven million, Pump Fun at five million. I would have assumed Pump Fun would be massive. I mean, five million is nothing to shake.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  I think crypto is still niche, still niche.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  PrizePeg's at three million, Kalshi at one.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  I see this, you know, the, the, the reason that we were originally excited to partner with Polymarket is that it's an alternative to traditional news. It's a way to understand the headlines of the future today, or at least get, you know, odds against them. And, uh, so I think this signals that a lot of people are just going to Polymarket to understand the world. So congratulations to the whole team.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Yep. This was an interesting post by a friend of the show, Casey Handmer. I had no idea, it's a little bit dark, but he's talking about the ISS's structural integrity, quoting a post from Christian Davenport, who says, "The Axiom 4 mission is postponed indefinitely while NASA and Roscomos investigate a leak on the Russian side of the International Space Station." And so Casey says, "The ISS's structural integrity is far more marginal than is being publicly discussed. We are having multiple and increasingly frequent leaks from heavily fatigued node segments in the Russian section."

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  This screams like the plot of a sci-fi movie.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  It really does.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  Leaks coming from the Russian section.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Yikes.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  "When aluminum gets flexed, it fatigues and gets harder, increasing its tendency to crack. Cracks concentrate forces at their tips and spread over time. Multiple cracks have been discovered. There is no factor of safety associated with this failure mode. None of the structural pressure vessels are meant to crack. We are not even single fault tolerant on the structural integrity of the station. We could wake up tomorrow and find that with zero warning, it has failed catastrophically. Whether that means a leak slow enough to close some hatches, get the crew out, or at least into safer parts of the station, it's a roll of the dice. It could also depressurize in less than a minute." And Elon Musk says, "There are potentially serious concerns about the long-term safety of the International Space Station.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Some parts of it are simply getting too old, and obviously that risk grows over time. Even though SpaceX earns billions of dollars from transporting astronauts and cargo to the ISS, I nonetheless would like to go on record recommending that it be de-orbited within two years." Striking, very interesting. We gotta put up a new one. We gotta put up 10 of these. Like, I know that they don't have that much economic value.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Space yachts, John.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  But like, this is what I love. Yes, yes, we need, we need a dozen more ISS. I know that it's so expensive. I think, I think it's one of the most expensive man-made objects ever built. Although maybe Stargate will, will, will beat it out. I, I seem to remember the ISS being costing a total of a hundred billion dollars.

• 30:31Jordi Hays?

  The thing with Stargate is it's a project that's happening across states.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  So it's hard to say that it's the most expensive.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  Oh, much like the ISS is different modules put together. Oh, oh, kinda similar.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  We could fit the ISS in a, in a large enough warehouse.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  And fit Stargate as a series of warehouses.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  We have to have, we have to have a human, a human rated space station. It's just, we have to have a space station. It's just so important.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see an Elon mega project of building a space guy.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  There's that website, there's that website, how many humans are in space? Have you seen this? Humans are in space right now. Uh, who is in space.com? There are 13 humans in space right now. Who is in space? The ISS Crew 10 launched March 14th, 2025. There's four people there. There's the Soyuz.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Johnny Kim's up there. You know, wait, no way. You know Johnny Kim, right?

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Oh, Johnny Kim is a legend. So Johnny Kim.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. This is the guy who speed, he did everything.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Yes, he's done everything.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  He's skill maxing.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Yes. So he was a Navy SEAL. He's a doctor and he's also an astronaut. And the whole meme is like, his parents are finally, uh, are finally like proud of it.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Happy.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Cause he did everything. But it's like, yeah, it's incredible.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  They still want more.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Johnny Kim is, is the best. We should get him on the show from space.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  He's been up there for 66 days.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  And then, uh, and then Tian Gong Space Station, the Chinese space station has three astronauts on it and then another three from a different, uh, from a different mission. And so there's six over there and then there's seven on, on the, uh, on the ISS. And so we got 13. We need more. We need, we need, we need, we need to be bringing this exponentially. I want hundreds and thousands.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see them doing more like Kai Sina, like live streaming daily.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Yes, totally.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they get a little lonely and bored.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  It's a content problem.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  They gotta be marketing.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  Everyone's like, oh, you're running some, some scientific experiment. When are we gonna do the paper? That's boring. No.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  They're like, thank you for the, thank you for the five dollars, John Coogan.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Thank you for the five dollars.

• 32:31Jordi Hays?

  They're like doing impressions and stuff like that.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  If you donate a hundred, they'll squeeze the washcloth and show how the water, you know, sticks around. Uh, let's check in on Tyler.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  This is how we solve the NASA budget problem.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Let's see how he's doing.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  How we doing Tyler?

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Give us an update.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  He's dark and the table's black.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  It's quite hard to see.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  I don't know how far I am right now.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  What time I'm at, but.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  He's at 15 minutes?

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Okay, I can do it. I can do it.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  Okay, keep going. Keep going. He's working. He's working. Anyway, let's, uh, we are, we're releasing recap videos now. Roughly a one hour recap video of everything that happened on TBPN this entire week. We know we put out a lot of content for you. This week we'll be recapping WWDC. Apple released Liquid Glass. It was a little bit controversial. We talked to people that were very optimistic about the new design direction.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  People settled down and they're.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  I think they eventually settled down.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Thinking to themselves, all right, this thing might be pretty nice looking.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  Probably will get pretty good.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  And we'll all move on.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  It also.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  Probably transition well to VR and other platforms.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it also, it also tied really well to Apple's kind of retreat. Ben Thompson wrote about this. Apple is turning over the reins to developers to develop some new AI applications. So we're very optimistic about that. We also had, we had our intern Tyler Cosgrove. He's making Legos right now, but on Monday we had him assemble the first American iPhone from scratch. And by scratch, I mean seven pieces that he had to kind of glue together, but he did it.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  It was way more, give him some credit. It was way more than seven.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Maybe 12, but it was fantastic. We have, we had Andrew Huberman on the show. That was fantastic.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  We got to talk to him about what's going on with NIH budgeting.

• 34:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, research funding broadly.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Funding will drop by 40%. We tried to dig into what is, what, what, what pieces of the research budget should we keep? How, what is the dynamic between the different types of research that are funded? And he really broke it down for us on the back of his four hour interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is the current NIH director. That was a very fun interview. We also went to Y Combinator Demo Day 2025. We were live from San Francisco. We talked to dozens of teams, dozens of founders. We talked to high school dropouts, college dropouts, tons of AI agents, about 90% of the new YC class is AI-driven, but we had a bunch of interesting conversations. We also talked to some venture capitalists there and we shot a lot of

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  Where were all the hard tech founders?

• 35:06John Coogan?

  We did not see many of them. There were a few, but we mostly

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  They were there. They were among us.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  And then, and then we also discussed the Meta and Scale acquisition or investment. Meta is investing something like $15 billion. The deal actually just closed today. And so we had commentary from a number of founders and pundits and journalists and also venture capitalists, talking about the nature of that deal and how it came together. And so we hope you enjoy this, this week's recap and it gives you, it gives you a good overview.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  We're one away from being seven days a week.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Yes, we're very close. We also have a great show for you today. We're having, we already had Josh on the show, but we have, 1X is coming on to talk about humanoid robots. We've got Emily Sundberg coming on, the fantastic writer of the newsletter Feed Me. We have John Doyle from Cape, building a new cellular network. There's a lot to talk about there. And then we have someone from the Rand Corporation coming on, which will be very fun. And so we will go back to the timeline, back to what people are talking about in the news. More updates on what's going on in New York. Zorin Mamdani is surging, continues to surge in the polls and seems to be doing very well in the debates, but is not popular on tech

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Twitter because he says capitalism is theft. The quote is taxation isn't theft, capitalism is. Zorin Mamdani could soon be mayor of the finance capital of the world. Incredible. It is, it is a very odd choice for a city that is known for capitalism and finance.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  Enhance.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  Finance.

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, we will see how this one evolves. It is already a case study in marketing.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  It is.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  Signal called this out earlier this week that he's just laser focused on a few key lines and It is resonating with some.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  Certainly not our corner or our audience of capital enthusiasts.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Well, if you're a capital enthusiast, 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. Uh, let's go to Pavel. Pavel says, Pavel Asparuhov says, uh, traditional company structure is falling apart. Pretty much every organization should be structured in three parts. People who sell things, people who do things, people who automate things. Everything else is just fat. Very interesting. Sellers, doers, automators. It's kind of maps to, yeah.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  I would, I think this is, I mean, great insight ultimately, uh, uh, resonates, but, uh, people who make things, that people who sell things, people who make things, people automate things.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  People do things, do things is just, just doing things.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that is interesting that there's not, yeah, yeah, the, the, the, the doing things part of this is, is the most vague, but maybe that's management and strategy and, and deciding what to do in the organization. But I do like the reframing of like.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  Some people make things, some people sell things.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  I, I.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe making things is, is better, but again, the automation thing is, seems like an interesting twist on, um, a traditional engineering organization. As the role of the software engineer changes, it becomes more about automating any type of business process. And I think the role of the software engineer, uh, is, is definitely growing in scope. It's not, it, it, it's vibe coding, an internal tool, using cursor, retool, or all the different softwares that are available. It's also, um, buying off the shelf or bringing in off the shelf software to automate processes. And the, the leverage of the software engineer leads to just massive automation across the entire company.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  The selling things is very, is very interesting because even though that is automated in, in some ways, it, it, it increasingly relies on.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  What's automated about a steak dinner?

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Exactly. On in person, interpersonal relationships and communication. And so that, that has definitely, uh, you know, carved itself out as a unique, uh, a unique function within the modern organization. Uh, but yes, I, I think the people who do things is, could be billed, could be make things, but could also be, um, define the strategy and, and build the company. But if you want to automate things, put your sales tax on autopilot with numeralhq.com. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  Just get on there.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  And if you're one of those people that sells things. Get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  It is the backbone of our high-velocity.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  It is.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Guest program.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  It is.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  Get on there.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  Chamath had a hilarious post that I really enjoyed. He says, "Well, this is probably one of the funnier things I've done, but my friend and sommelier, and I got a California liquor license and started a wine collective. With our license, it allows us to buy wine directly from vintners, get wholesale pricing, buy and house entire collections of wine. We didn't do this just for us, but created it to allow our friends to participate as well. At some point, we may open it up to the world as at large. If you love wine, want access to the best wines, and avoid retail markups, this may be a fit. The team charges for shipping and handling, but otherwise pass through the raw cost to our members. Right now, we're saving 15 to 40% per bottle, depending on the winery/vintage. We call

• 40:37John Coogan?

  it Drink With Me. We also create quarterly capsules of the best wines Josh and I have drank, and allow members to buy in quantity. The first box is below." So it seems like he's on the cusp of launching a D to C wine company.

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is a wine membership, wine club. There's thousands of these. People love them. I think it makes sense for Chamath's creator evolution.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, in terms of his brand, like, he, you know, like...

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  Always drinking wine on All In.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Always drinking fantastic wine.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  All In alone, and just casually dropping, you know, a little note about Drink With Me, or whatever wine he's drinking, can probably, you know, drive this to 10,000-plus subscribers.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  I completely agree. The creator-market fit here is fantastic.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Very fun. And if you zoom in, it says, "Drink With Me: A curated wine collective by Chamath Polihopetia and sommelier Joshua Plack." Looks great. Congrats. I mean, he enjoys, he has a passion for wine and he's expressing it in, in a business. He loved to see it. It's great. We talked a little bit about this, but we didn't get back into this. Scott Belsky came on the show this week, talked about the data wars and there's new, and there's new reporting from the information Salesforce is blocking enterprise AI rivals like Glean from using Slack data for their applications. This was a big issue back in like 2012 with this idea that, that you had all this data

• 42:05John Coogan?

  in Facebook, you had all this data in Google, you had all this data with Apple and you could not, even though every one of those companies would tell you, it's not our data, it's your data. You can take it with you. It's yours. You own your data. People would say, okay, that's great. Google, I'd like to give all of my data to Facebook because I want better, I want better ads on Facebook. And Facebook, I want to give all my data to Google so that when I go in my Gmail, I can search my friends list. And both companies would be like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We don't trust the other company. It's your data. You can export it through this like CSV zip file that you have to download every time. But we're not just going to let an API link these two services. Because the walled garden must be maintained.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  And you know, it's like, oh, oh.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  It's a beautiful garden. You have to appreciate the beauty of the garden.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  It's my, it's my data, then, then, then I can, you know, integrate my iMessage with my Android friends. Like, oh, no, no, you couldn't possibly do that. And, and, and I mean, these big tech companies, they have, they have reasonable arguments for it, but it, but it always has been funny. And now it's more important than ever. And so Scott says, anticipated and referred to this as the impending data wars in previous editions of implications. That's his newsletter that you should go subscribe to, but didn't expect it to start this quickly. Data grab and protectionism underway, especially by those that don't own their own graphs or sophisticated permissioning layers. And so, yeah, there's this big question. OpenAI is launching deep research. It integrates with Gmail and Google Docs.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  That's going to be fantastic. If they cut that off entirely and they get cut off, like, that might be something that actually drives enterprise adoption of Google's Gemini Deep Research Project, right? Because if we have a whole bunch of documents in Google Drive and we want someone to be able to run a deep research report around all of our internal documentation, which obviously they would want to do, and Google successfully cuts off OpenAI, like, you're just going to have to go there or else it's going to be a hassle of like, okay, I guess, download all of our PDFs from Google Drive and then feed them into ChatGPT one at a time. Like, no one's going to do that. The friction's going to be so high, even if you can download your data.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Like, it needs to be there over an API. And so Salesforce is taking the first, the first shot in the data wars. And we'll be tracking it here on the show.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  For the next, for the next forever.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this was a very timely call out from Scott on the show.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Yes, it was. Well, if you're losing sleep over the data wars, you got to get on 8Sleep. Go to 8sleep.com/tbpn, get an 8Sleep. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? I'm on a generational run, put up huge numbers last night. I think I got you beat this whole week across. I think it's, I think it's tied up. Monday, 91. Tuesday, 86. Wednesday was on the road, doesn't count. Thursday, 91. Friday, 95. Let's hear it for me.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  I got completely mugged.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Oh, soundboard not working. I was expecting some clapping, but the soundboard must be broken. Oh, there we go.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  There you go. That's for you, John.

• 45:10John Coogan?

  That's my favorite. 95.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm happy for you. I'm happy for you.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Just throw up an excuse. I'm sure you have a good excuse. It's fine. Let me hear it. Let me hear the excuse.

• 45:20Jordi Hays?

  It actually was funny. I woke up a little late this morning because my son Crawled into bed and basically pushed me so far off the edge of the bed that the Eight Sleep alarm, the vibration alarm.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Was waking him up instead of you.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  He didn't even wake up. He was just, he was sleeping like a rock, but, but I was just feeling it like very faintly.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. My, my, my son hops in the bed after I, after I leave and, and I use the warm up alarm from Eight Sleep, which is fantastic. It, it, it really makes me get out of bed. But he loves it because he's like, oh, it's so warm and cozy. And then he just gets like, he gets, he sleeps like an extra two hours because he likes it really warm.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  And so he enjoys my, my post alarm side of the bed, enjoys that.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Very sweet.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's go back to the Army's newest recruits, tech executives from Meta, OpenAI and more. The Wall Street Journal was covering it. Executives from Meta, Palantir and OpenAI are joining a new Army Innovation Corps, bringing tech upgrades to the military. The tech reservist will serve 120 hours a year, so two hours, a little over two hours a week as lieutenant colonels, advising on AI and commercial tech acquisition. Very exciting. And so I, I like this from Boz, Andrew Bosworth over at Meta. He says, it's possible I watched too much Top Gun. He's 43, standing more than six foot two.

• 46:43Jordi Hays?

  Happens to the best of us.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  It does. You can never watch too much Top Gun. Come on, Boz. It's an amazing movie. He was told he was too tall to realize his youthful ambitions of flying an F-16 fighter jet.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  Did that happen to you too?

• 46:56John Coogan?

  It was never even in the conversation. I remember, I remember seeing a movie in like about the Vietnam War when I was like 13 and it was very obvious that I was never going to make it in the military. But there was someone from my high school and I do have a family member who's flying F-16s and it seems like it's a, it's a, it's a wonderful program. It still is incredible.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  You really have to be a very specific specimen to be a pilot.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I did flight lessons as a kid and I was in the civil, the civil, what's it called? Civil Air Patrol. And.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  Day, I was really worried as a kid. I wanted to be a pilot and I was worried that my eyesight would degrade because you can't, you can't have glasses, you can't have LASIK or anything like that. You just gotta have perfect eyesight. You gotta be very specific height. And anyways.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Bosworth went on to say, there's a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the valley. I completely agree. They will be sworn in as uniformed officers in a public ceremony on Friday, the day before the Army's 250th birthday. Happy birthday to the Army. Happy birthday. Less than a decade ago, even working on technology that might be used in defense, never mind suiting up for service, was anathema in Silicon Valley. The new reserve program reflects how the relationship between the Pentagon and the tech industry has deepened. Meta and OpenAI adjusted their policies to work more with the military last year, although Meta is not technically a defense contractor

• 48:26John Coogan?

  right now. They are a supplier to a defense contractor with their annual partnership. Little bit of confusion there. That story went out and it was so fast, a lot of people didn't understand. They're not, they're not of an official military contractor at this point. Although, I would love if they were. Palantir has been involved in national security work for two decades. It has an AI and data project with the Army worth potentially more than $1 billion. For the Army, the deepening ties can prepare for it for wars of the future. They are expected to be waged in part with, with ground boot, ground robots and drones, and rely on networks of sensors and artificial intelligence to coordinate it all.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  I mean, looking at the conflict from yesterday in Iran, that feels like, in many ways, the future of warfare. Zero troops deployed and, you know, absolute devastation.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of robots, we're gonna have the founder of One X on the show in just five minutes. But in the meantime, let me tell you about AdQuick, 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. Go to adquick.com. Anyway, Shamsan Kar took to the Free Press to write a little bit of a, I guess this is an op ed or a little article about his experience. He says, I am the CTO of Palantir. Today I join the army. Says, my father grew up in a mud hut in India. America gave him and me a life. Now technologists like me need to give back. Oh, this is heartwarming. Fantastic article.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  Does he have a GigaChad filter on here?

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love the best, the best bit. This is your new bit. If you need a bit going into the weekend.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  If you see a picture of your, of your

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Of your absolute boy.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  Absolute boy and they don't, and they clearly, you know, just a casual filter. Accuse them of using a GigaChad filter. I mean, I mean.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  He looks like he's in shape. Yeah. Let's leave it at that without, without bringing out the glazinator 3000.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Later today. Triple glaze. Receiving their commissions on my side will be some of the most impressive minds in the world of technology. Kevin Weal, the chief product officer at OpenAI, Andrew Bosworth, Boz, the chief technology officer at Meta, and Bob Magru, formerly the chief research officer at OpenAI and engineering director at Palantir.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  None of these, none of these men need to pad their resumes. None of them have free time between fatherhood demanding day jobs and a dozen other demands. Are they all dads? Let's hear for fatherhood. Let's go.

• 51:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. I mean, we got 50% of this group on the show already.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  We got it. We gotta finish it out. We were close with Boz. We almost overlapped at some event. We're gonna, we're gonna make it happen. We almost caught him at Figma Config. We're gonna get him on the show. Let's make it happen. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for so many tech heavyweights to openly align with the US military. Equally, it would have been out of character for the military to enlist the support of the nation's business elite, much less create a special corps that they could deploy their technical talents in service of the government. But a sea change has taken place. Wars in Europe and Middle East and above all, the threat of war in the Pacific have focused on the national mind and initiated a scramble for mobilization. Exploding pagers and long-distance drone strikes from shipping containers prove that technology has once again changed the battlefield. Our military has to change with it.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  The Army's Executive Innovation Corps, under the direction of the Army's Chief of Staff, General Randy George, who has been on the show, is part of a larger effort by our military to transform the way it prepares for and fights wars in the 21st century. Maring the nation's most innovative private companies with our most important military missions is fundamental to that effort. That cooperation relies on reviving a sense of duty in an American elite that has become disconnected from our nation and its tradition of service. Let's check in with our intern and his tradition of service. How is it going, Tyler?

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  Servicing Lego.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  He's 75% of the way there.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  This is much harder than I thought.

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  Well past 30 minutes.

• 52:36John Coogan?

  Well past 30 minutes. Okay, well.

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  So we gotta start thinking of the punishment. You don't get a prize for...

• 52:43John Coogan?

  What's a good fantasy?

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  I actually, I have a really, I have a really good one.

• 52:46John Coogan?

  What is it?

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  I have a really good one.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  I know what you're thinking of.

• 52:49Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually about, no, you don't, you actually don't.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Because I was going to give this to you as a gag.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Give it to me?

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  The thing that I'm imagining would be a gag gift for you.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  But now it's going, I'm going to sort of

• 53:02John Coogan?

  Flip it around?

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  Convert it into a punishment for Tyler.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Are you gonna drop it right now? What is it?

• 53:06Jordi Hays?

  It's on the way here. It's on the way here. It's in, it was in the car and Ben's gonna drop it here in the next few minutes. So we might have to wait till after the next guest, but you can look forward to that.

• 53:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we didn't tell you, but if you'd been able to get it done in 10 minutes, we would have gotten you a fantastic new watch on bezel. We had our finger hovering over the protective nautilus, but that's kind of out of the window.

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  Would you have worked faster, Tyler, if you knew that?

• 53:32John Coogan?

  You knew that there was a nautilus on?

• 53:34Speaker 03

  You should have told me.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  On the board, your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. It'll have to be next time, but in the meantime, if you're listening, you can go to getbezel.com.

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  We should treat this Lego set as sort of something that he can kind of iterate against. You know, like you don't just do a Rubik's Cube once, like you do it once, you try to do it faster, etc.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  And so I think we should give Tyler another crack at the Nautilus.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  And now that he's dialed in, he should be able to do it a lot faster. So Dylan, why don't you bring this up for a second?

• 54:05John Coogan?

  Okay, this is, this is the potential punishment? What are we doing here, Jordy?

• 54:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna give this to you, John, because you're a horse-sized human. These are the Apple Dex, apple-flavored electrolytes for horses.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  Can we play the horse noises?

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  It's from, it's from Horse Health Products.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Horse Health Products.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a 40-day supply for classes, for all classes of horses.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Show it, show it to the single.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  And, and I'm just gonna, I'm gonna go, Tyler, your punishment is you have to finish this before your internship ends this summer. It's totally safe for humans. So it's 40-day supply for a regular horse.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  Okay, let's see how long it takes you.

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  You gotta see how long you get through it. Anyway, so you, you have this waiting for you after the show. And we could do something if you finish the next one, the next iteration, if you do it in 30 minutes, maybe, maybe you don't have to have it. But you might try it and discover that you actually love it, so we'll see.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  Okay, Tyler's still working on that, we'll check in with him. He does have two hours, we have another hour of guests coming into the studio. We have One X coming up next, talking about humanoid robots. But, and

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited for this, they've had a, they've had a massive week.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  And I have a ton of questions about, about humanoid robots. The biggest question is, is data that sim to real gap. There was, there was something percolating in my mind related to the Alex Wang acquisition, the Scale AI acquisition at Meta. Because robotics data is so difficult to get, maybe Scale AI would play in that market. We'll see where that develops, but in the meantime, let's bring in the founder of One X and start talking to him about humanoid robots. How you doing?

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  There he is, what's happening?

• 55:50John Coogan?

  Welcome to the

• 55:51Speaker 04

  Everything good, everything good. Thanks for having me.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Give us some context on your background, on OneX and Neo, and then we'll just get into a bunch of different questions. I was about to tell John, Neo was actually blessed by Lil B, the bass god.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  I saw that.

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  A while ago, much like Timothy Chalamet was before the generational run. So it's very possible that Neo is on a similar run itself.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  I'm very excited.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, great to have you on, Burnt, and yeah, give us some color.

• 56:24Speaker 04

  Awesome. No, and I think like, hey.

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  Over here.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  Wow. That's convenient.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  I do think there has to be something to it, right? It's been going pretty well lately, lately, so we have been blessed.

• 56:42John Coogan?

  Okay. You've clearly made one. How many have you made of these things?

• 56:46Speaker 04

  It's about 100.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  100. Wow, okay.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  Different versions though, right? They're not still all operational. Like, we're very quickly cycling through hardware revisions to ensure we actually get to the launch by end of year. So we do quickly deprecate them as new ones come out.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Sure. What does launch mean? You want to be able to sell these to companies? This is business to business, business to consumer. I've seen them on streams. They seem like, kind of just like companions. It's less industrial, but what's your thesis for the early adopter here?

• 57:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, let me just jump in straight into it. So like, who am I, who's the company? What are we doing? Why are we doing this?

• 57:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  So, well, I'm Burnt, I'm the founder, CEO, comes from this from a robotics background. Been on this journey all my life. Picked apart all of my mom's kitchen appliances since they had motors when I was a kid. Always liked building stuff, programming. Started OneX 10 years ago, and like, the mission stayed pretty constant. We want to create abundance of artificial labor. And we're doing this through creating these intelligent machines that can live and learn among us. And the last part is so important. I think what really differentiates OneX from the rest of the pack here is the focus on making robots that are safe among people and that are very affordable. But first principles engineering, how do you make something that's like, super lightweight? Doesn't need very special raw materials?

• 58:06Speaker 04

  Doesn't need like that high tolerances in manufacturing? Make something that's like, closer to a refrigerator than a car, but still as capable as a human.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  And when I say getting this out the door, what I mean is literally like getting it into your homes, right? So we're going through in-home testing among employees now. I have one in my house in Redwood. It's amazing to get to finally live with the product. And it's gonna be some customers having them quite soon, but like under NDA, early testing. And then if we play our cards right, it should be in the main market by end of year. That's the goal.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Wild, moving quick. Um, how has a company evolved since 10 years ago? Uh, humanoids have always been uh in people's minds to some degree. They haven't been in the headlines as much as they've been, let's say, in the last couple of years. But kind of walk us through maybe those different stages, how your vision evolved and and uh then I have a bunch of other questions.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's the kind of product that we all know will happen, right? And we've known it for like, I don't know, last 50 years, like at some point this will happen. And the impact is tremendous, right? So I think what's really changed uh the last couple of years is uh, to be very blunt, that it works. Uh, for the for the first eight years, it was kind of a grind. And it's a kind of a problem that's really worth just like doubling down on like grinding and pushing on until it works. Uh, and I don't think the impact of this type of technology can be exaggerated, right? It's we're we're years, not decades now away. It's it's very hard to like put a specific date, but we're years, not decades away from robots building robots.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Robots building out our data centers, our energy infrastructure, our chip manufacturing. Like our mining, in general, like it's this kind of hard take of moment, right? Where we can actually get to an abundance of artificial labor. And it doesn't really even matter if it's like physical or digital, right? Because once you have this engine running, you will just in general like have extremely intelligent agents, whether they're in the digital or physical space. And kind of will redefine what it means to be human, like what do we value in humans? Like, how do we see our own worth? And I'm just really freaking lucky to be a liar, right? To be part of that. It's been my dream all my life. And

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the timing is amazing. What about, what about getting, getting into more specifics with Neo? Do you have any sort of specific early use cases that you're focused on in all of this sort of, sort of marketing that I've seen so far? It hasn't seemed to focus on certain use cases like manufacturing or certainly not mining or things like that. It feels like you're maybe more, you know, focused on the, on the home. Is that, is that correct? Am I off?

• 1:01:00Speaker 04

  No, no, no, it's, it's correct. But it's really important here to point out, but like, you take a step back, right? It's like, we're years, not decades away from actual abundance of artificial labor. So as a company, the only thing that makes sense here is to get there as quickly as possible. It's all we care about. What's the shortest path? So we're not a consumer company. We're shortest path to artificial labor. And it just happens to be that the shortest path is through consumer. Because you need to live and learn among people. Like, if it's one thing that's incredibly clear in AI, it is that the diversity or like the variance in your data set basically equals your intelligence, right? That's, that's where intelligence emerges from. And in a factory, there just isn't enough diversity.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Think about like, if you're, if you're in a factory all your life, moving something from A to B, and that's all you're doing, then like, you could ask like, okay, how much do you actually learn? Right? And we actually have the answer. You learn about, we need like 20 to 30 hours of data from that. And then we don't learn anything more.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 1:01:57Speaker 04

  So like that, that's just like, that's not where to deploy robots. We want to deploy robots there, but we have to deploy them first where we actually get the data that gets you through a true, truly intelligent machine that doesn't just repeat emotion. It understands deeply the task it's doing. And this brings you into like something interesting that you said in your intro here, which is companionship, right? Because everything we do is social, like work is social. Like whenever you do something, usually it's because of someone wants something. And usually if someone's next to you or even like communication, the social complex of objects, like, hey, is this cup on the table? Someone using it? Is it yours? Like, is it, is it half full, half empty? Is it dirty? Like, oh, there's liquid in it.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  But if it's coffee and it's cold, it's probably like not in use anymore. Uh, it's actually dirty. Like, everything has this like social context. And this is what creates this incredible variance and diversity in the home. Not only is every home different, but like everything happening in the home is different every day. And everything has a social context. So I think we're seeing pretty strong proof now that like a lot of model intelligence comes from this diversity. And we really want to double down on that. And then the other part is, I think it's just going to be incredible to live with these companions in our life that can not only give us back time in our everyday life with like household chores, but actually be a trusted friend, right?

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  And we're talking to our phones with chatbots and being like, these are our new companions, but it's not the right interface, right? The right interface is something that you can really deeply connect with and it gets you away from a screen.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Bicentennial Man, a movie I know you haven't seen, but is a fantastic story of a humanoid robot that stays with the family for 200 years and evolves and changes and, uh, it's, Robin Williams, beautiful movie. Uh, I want to talk to you about kind of the progression of the software. Um, teleoperation, super valuable in a bunch of different ways. Simulation, uh, we're seeing lots of promising data. Uh, there's the Sim2Real gap. There's, uh, deterministic algorithms for walk cycles. There's end-to-end systems. What is your view on the path that we need to go down to get to something that's truly

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  generalizable so that you can put a humanoid robot in a completely novel situation? Just talk to it and say, hey, clean up this table and it will remove all of these cans one at a time. It knows exactly how to do it and it's never actually been trained on that specific task, but it can generalize just like any other human can.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  I think I.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  There's two interesting answers. The first one is no one knows how to solve that yet. And then the second answer is, we actually know really well how to solve that, which is it's going to be some big transformer. And you just need enough high quality data. So we kind of know like it's an engineering problem at this point. Because even though we don't know the exact solution, we know what we need, right? We just need an enormous amount of relevant data. And this data is very different. All models that you see today, they're trained on what I call like only observations. If you think about the internet, whether it's video or pictures or text or whatever, it's static, right? So you're like, given that I saw or read this, what's the next thing?

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  But what you're actually missing and where, in my opinion, like a lot of like our ability to reason comes from is that you have some hypothesis about what's going to happen. Like you have your own mental model of like this conversation. So when you're saying something, if I'm training just on what you're saying, that's not the same as if I'm training on what you were thinking and planning and then what you said. And then what the result of that was, which was like how I reacted to that. And robots actually allow you to do this, right? Because you have what the robot is thinking and what it was planning to do, what it actually did and what it resulted in. And this data is what is needed to get to this. And that's how we're gathering at scale.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  There's no, yeah, there's no real like massive data set like the web that you can just scrape. Folks are using teleoperation to generate data. There's simulation data. Like what are the richest sources of data for you? What do you see as being like the real trove that you're going to be doubling down on over the next few years?

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  I think it's all of them, but they're all just like a crutch. It's like you're bootstrapping your way to where robots are learning in the real world. And this is really the direction we're moving in because teleoperation does not scale, right? It's super valuable and we need it, but it doesn't scale. Simulated data, very useful for simple things like walking, but for like peeling a shrimp or whatever, right? It's like, it's not nearly detailed enough, like it doesn't work. So you just, what you need is to use the internet data, some teleoperation simulation, synthetic data, all of these things to get to where your model is able to sometimes succeed. So when you say get my coke in the fridge. Maybe there's a fifty percent chance that a robot comes back with a coke.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Maybe it got stuck somewhere on the way and didn't manage to do so. But once this happens, then you can basically just tell it, hey, good job. Or like, hey, we're just supposed to get my coke if it's just, I don't know, staring out the window instead. Uh, and that's the data loop that scales, right?

• 1:07:16John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:16Speaker 04

  And that's what we're deploying. So when we're saying like getting this into your home, what we mean is almost more like adopt a Neo to help us teach it. It's not going to do everything in your home day one. We're not there yet, but we're able to deliver a product that is really fun, very engaging, somewhat helpful. And really the ability to be part of this generational journey from the beginning, right? That's the product.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  And that's how we gather that data. And this comes back to how we design robots that are safe. Because if you want the robots to actually be learning in the real world, they need to be safe, not just with respect to you, but with respect to itself and your environment, right? You don't want your kitchen to look like a robot had been ravaging around there when it's done. You want your kitchen to look nice, just like it did before the robot went there, even though the robot failed a few times.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the, the challenge is you don't have the luxury of, of hallucinations long term. Like if the robot is unloading the dishwasher and puts a bunch of knives in, in the wrong cupboard, you know, that, that's like, that's not safe, right?

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  You have, you know, kids at home and, you know, so it's like the, the bar for acceptable is, is very high.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  I want to ask about the supply chain. Dylan Patel was on the show saying that no matter what happens with humanoid robotics, all the parts are going to be made in China. Um, I, there were some actuator startups in the comments saying like, that's not true. We're going to build it here. Uh, we're going to fix the supply chain. What's your view on the short, medium and long term of the robotic supply chain?

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  And you know how to ask the hard questions. Um, let's, uh, let's start by saying, um, to us.

• 1:08:56Speaker 04

  This has been all about how you don't like over constrain the system too early, right? So human or robots don't exist at scale yet.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  So like if we were making a car, if my new startup was a car, I would clearly utilize the existing supply chain.

• 1:09:11John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  What we've done is we've made everything ourselves. I know I say literally here like, I mean, we're undergoing some patenting process for a new type of die casting of aluminium. At the same time that we're launching AI models. So we're like definition of vertical integrator, including all the manufacturing technology.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  That puts us in a position where we can actually kind of manufacture anywhere. It just depends on access to raw materials, power and general like RFs and everything else. Um, we are actually building a factory in the US right now. Um, there are challenges because like sourcing, simple things in quotes like copper, aluminium, steel, these kind of things. In the US, for example, it's a lot more expensive than in China. Logistically, it's also kind of like a nightmare because you don't have kind of like the economic zones with like basically your metal refineries, it's next to your forge. Um, and there are, so there's like pros and cons. But I think there's a path. I think what's the most important here to realize is that when people talk about like things need to be built in China.

• 1:10:10Speaker 04

  We're not necessarily talking only about this. We're talking about actual access to knowledge about how to do manufacturing. And I think that that is the thing that takes the longest to kind of onshore, right? So, uh, sure, there are things that need to happen with rare earths, there's things that need to happen with all these things, but I think the main thing to really work on also is just making sure that people understand how incredibly exciting manufacturing is. And make sure that our new generation actually really wants to work on the hard problems in manufacturing.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we talked to the, the, the author of Apple in China and He really reframed the conversation about Apple's impact in China, not just as being a buyer, but actually being an educator in China and, and, and sending over massive teams of manufacturing designers to, to create, to create a supply chain that didn't even exist, but was enabled by the scale of the population and the economic zones and everything you, uh, everything you articulated. So, uh, yeah, I'm optimistic that in a new boom, you could potentially set up trade deals such that, you know, if your business is scaling, you would have the choice to, to create a new generation of, of manufacturing

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  engineers in America or anywhere else that might be advantageous. Um, but this has been fantastic. We, we, I'd love to have you back and go way deeper.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congratulations on all the new launches this week. Uh, excited to follow you and, and the whole team's work. It's, it's been awesome to see.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  Amazing. It was great talking to you guys and stay tuned. There's actually more coming.

• 1:11:45John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:11:46Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:11:47Speaker 04

  There's more coming in a few couple of days.

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  And we'll, uh, we'll, we'll pull up another chair for Neo whenever you're ready. Yeah. We'll, we'll happy, happy to.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  Happy to adopt one.

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Bring us another energy drink. Uh, thank you so much for joining. We'll talk to you.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Brent.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 1:12:00Speaker 04

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Next up, we have John Doyle from Cape coming in the studio, talking to us about wireless networking cellular technology. Very excited to talk to him, especially with the backdrop of what happened in Ukraine two weeks ago. Uh, anyway, welcome to the studio, John. Good to have you here. How are you doing?

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  Hey guys. Happy to be here. I'm doing great.

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of introduction of yourself and the company, maybe to get us started?

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, you bet. I, um, I'm John Doyle, founder and CEO of Cape. It is America's privacy first mobile network. Uh, two sentences on my background, cause it explains how I came to start this company. I started my career in Army Special Forces. I was a communications sergeant on a special forces group. Went to Palantir, I was there for nine years and at Palantir, I started in technical roles. I wound up running the national security business for five years. And that's where I learned about this whole, you know, PhD field of study worth of vulnerabilities that exist on the global cellular network. Really passionate about solving them. And so I started CAPE in 2022 to get after that problem.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  What is the biggest like concrete risk to the cellular network? Is it, is it like?

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, I would just start at a higher level. Is it how unsecure is the average cellular network?

• 1:13:23Speaker 05

  Completely. And you know, we saw, if you remember during the last campaign, the story came out about J D Vance's phone calls being listened to.

• 1:13:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:33Speaker 05

  Right. And, and it, that kind of came and went as, as these stories do. But it, it snowballed into the story about salt typhoon, which the headline of that story is, China has just explicitly and completely infiltrated all the major telcos in the United States.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:13:49Speaker 05

  Which is pretty bad. But even before you get there, there are all these, there are really features that are baked into the protocols that run the network. They're there for good reason, but in the hands of malicious actors, some really bad effects can be drawn out of them. And so, you know, we can get deep in the technical weeds if you want to, but basically the whole thing is blown. And it's problematic because we are entirely reliant and kind of fundamentally reliant on the cellular network.

• 1:14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what's a bigger risk right now espionage or sabotage?

• 1:14:21Speaker 05

  That's a really good question. Um, I'm going to say espionage. Because it has been like, it's absolutely happening right now. The, the Vance story is a perfect example of that, right?

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Speaker 05

  And just listening to the future vice president's phone calls. Although the sabotage question is interesting. I know you guys want to talk about, or have been talking about spider web a bunch and the, and the drone attacks. One of the really interesting features of that story, of course, from our perspective, is the fact that the drones were piloted on, using cellular, commercial cellular connection.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:14:52Speaker 05

  Uh, which is really interesting to us now in a bunch of ways. But importantly, and it came out a bunch in the reporting. When people start to think about countermeasures and you know, how would we, how would we guard against these attacks in the future? One option that gets taken off the, the table almost immediately is turning off the cellular network.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:10Speaker 05

  Right? It has like disastrous consequences, right?

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, because what if someone needs to call 911 and they can't? Something like that, you're, you're going to wind up hurting people.

• 1:15:17Speaker 05

  Impacts.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:15:18Speaker 05

  When there's an AT&T outage.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, stuff grinds, right?

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, we saw it yesterday with just like a cloudflare outage and it was very disruptive. Talk to me about how you actually go about building a new network. Are you able to solve the problems that you're trying to solve just by piggybacking on the existing physical hardware? Or is this a crazy capex problem that you're, we're going to see you raising a trillion dollars in debt and stuff? You could probably do that based on your background, but I'm always interested to know where you think like the right problem to solve is.

• 1:15:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a great question and we didn't know the answer to it when we started the company. Thankfully, it turns out you don't need to build the towers. You don't need to own the antennas or the spectrum.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:16:05Speaker 05

  Our approach is we own all the software that runs the network. So we control application billing, call routing messaging, have all of the important stuff. And we've done pretty extensive red teaming and testing, especially with government partners. And proven out that if you own all the software, you can actually make a lot of progress against the problem.

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  Very cool. So when I see one of those cell phone towers, that might not be a Verizon tower specifically. That might be owned by a different company that then is like leasing or running software for Verizon and AT&T within the same kind of like, you could think of that almost like a multi-tenant data center. Is that the right mental model when I see a cell phone tower?

• 1:16:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that's a great, it's a really good observation and it turns out to be true.

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:47Speaker 05

  The carriers, you know, the carriers, what the carriers own is spectrum, right? What Verizon owns is an amazing amount of spectrum that's super expensive and they administer it. They don't, you're right, they don't even own the towers most of the time. I'm like, American Tower or some other company builds the tower, oftentimes puts the radio on there or the carriers will sign an agreement with Nokia or Ericsson to put the antennas up there. Oftentimes the carriers don't actually run the radios, they outsource that to Nokia and Ericsson. And so it has, they, they have sort of assumed this system integrator role and. I think my personal opinion is that that has serious security implications has led to some of the the problem that we find ourselves in.

• 1:17:24John Coogan?

  Sure. Can you get me up to speed on 5G? I remember the drama around Huawei and they had built 5G towers that we were not going to buy. I also heard someone mention offhand that America doesn't really have 5G. We have like fake 5G or something. Is there like? Is it all marketing? Is yeah, is it marketing? Because oh, you're like, don't talk about it.

• 1:17:46Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah. Okay. So there's two things there. First, you're like, you're, you're teeing up one of my favorite history lessons, which is 20 20 years or so ago, 23 years ago, China made the strategic decision to capture as much footprint on the global side of the network as possible. And the way that they achieved that was by pumping billions of dollars of subsidy into Huawei. So Huawei could run around the world and sell antennas and also core software, the software that runs the network. At a, you know, a half or less of the price of any of their competitors. And so it became really attractive and everyone went out and bought Huawei gear. And the result was that China now owns still, not in the US so much anymore, but around the world, you know, a huge percentage of the footprint on the network.

• 1:18:30Speaker 05

  At almost exactly the same time, the US and it's not, um, obviously the different kind of government. So it wasn't like a centrally made decision. But US telecom started outsourcing and offshoring all of the technical aspects of running the business. So, you know, the core software now is built by Nokia or Ericsson, which are in Europe. Um, and very little of that capacity exists within the United States. So while China's making all these really deep and recurring investments in the infrastructure, the US is really kind of divesting and just becoming these system integrator, uh, spectrum managers. Um, and that's how we find ourselves in this imbalance now. And that when people talk about the race for 5G and how is the US positioned with respect to China? I think it's a little bit of a misnomer to say it's 5G because they're not talking about.

• 1:19:15Speaker 05

  Um, when, when five G first started to, to get buzzy, the use cases were always like a heart surgeon in Boston is going to be doing surgery in Africa, right? Because of the low latency protocols and that stuff is cool, but that's not like how we're behind China. How we're really behind China is just in how much footprint do we own, how much access, how much control do we have over the network? And that's actually agnostic of which generation, um, or it's independent of what generation we're on. The other, so, and then are we really on five G is such a good question. There's like.

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  I think about it mostly from a bandwidth perspective, like I, I be, I became able to stream HD video at like retina resolution. And I really don't have a daily use case that goes beyond that in terms of bandwidth needs, right? And so as long as, but, but every once in a while I notice if I'm about to take off on a plane and I know I want to download a movie right before. The difference between fast for downloading like a full gig in two minutes and, and 20 minutes is material. Uh, and so that's where I would think five G would help, but I've also heard about like streaming video games, obviously 4K stuff. But I, I, I, I don't feel the pain that much that I'm not, you know, I'm not a single issue voter on the topic, but I am, I am curious.

• 1:20:28Speaker 05

  You're like, I mean, that observation is a threat to the entire like. Like, like three G to four G was way better, right?

• 1:20:35John Coogan?

  Oh, totally. It was, it was night and day. Yeah.

• 1:20:37Speaker 05

  They're better, more scary. And four G to five G was arguably better, although not entirely because like. Five G connection drains the battery on your phone a lot faster.

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:20:45Speaker 05

  There are some trade offs there where LTE times that four G is actually like a better option in some, in some. But beyond that, like the hurry up and download a movie use case, there's kind of nothing left. And so there's a big, you know, shrug in the industry. People are kind of waving their hands at AI like. Well, we were going to do AI and that'll, you know, that'll change everything, but I, I don't know that, that, that, um. That comes into it.

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  Everything's an S curve. It's all sigmoid. We saw band, mobile bandwidth growing exponentially. Everyone was like, you're going to be able to download 10 x of bytes in two seconds. And in fact, it was a sigmoid function like it always is.

• 1:21:20Speaker 05

  I think, and you're like, I think you've nailed the case. It's like, as long as I can stream Netflix at maximum resolution, I'm done.

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  I'm done.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Who is the, um, who is the, the core customer that you're going after? Is it people in important positions, you know, politicians, CEOs, et cetera?

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  It's just JD Vance.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Just JD Vance.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Just one massive client.

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  One billion dollar contract. One day, you should be able to get a one billion dollar ARR contract. No, but I think, but when I, when I think about the broad consumer market, people say they want privacy, but in.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  A lot of people just want $20 instead of $30, right?

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, both of those, both of those consumers exist in the market. There are a lot of people. Mint Mobile perfected the like, how cheap can you offer a cell plan, right? And like, and they nailed this $20, $20 one turns out to be the, the answer.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Ryan Reynolds, undefeated. I love the.

• 1:22:10Speaker 05

  When you have unlimited free marketing for Ryan Reynolds, winner of the game.

• 1:22:16Speaker 05

  So, okay. So, yeah. So who are like, who are we trying to solve problems for? I mean, I like my background in special operations. I am deeply passionate about the fact that cellular phones have been a part of the battlefield for as long as we've had cellular phones. And they are increasingly not decreasingly so over time. We saw this in Ukraine, like everyone, the entire Ukraine wars fought on the mobile network. Uh, and like communications aspects of it. Um, and I'm deeply passionate about building technology that keeps people doing that work safe. Right? I think that's like a really important mission and I love it. Um, and that is where we started when we're thinking about the product and starting to like build early versions and build early features. That was the market, but we always had in mind, and I, in, in my early life, I was a special operations soldier.

• 1:23:00Speaker 05

  In my later life, I'm a parent and like, and I, even in my sort of relatively mundane parental, you know, mid forties existence. I I have worries about how reliant I am on my cell phone and the trade offs I'm making. And things like SIM swaps, if you know what SIM swaps are.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:16Speaker 05

  And you need, you have to build technical solutions to problems like that. And I have also like a general sense of indignation that if I want to be a subscriber to any traditional telco, I give away all of my personal information and then they booze it like clockwork four to five times a year.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  They really do.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  They're giving it away.

• 1:23:35Speaker 05

  Internet, like it doesn't have to be that way and it shouldn't be that way.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for your service, both in the military and as a father. It's very important. Um, we got to get you Ryan Gosling. I think, I think you know, Ryan Reynolds, women in mobile, we get you Ryan Gosling.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  There's something there. There's something there. Well, now you're, you're, you're a chief mobile correspondent now.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, do you have anything else or should we let him go?

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  No, this was great.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think there's going to be, I'm sure there'll be more stories this year.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we'd love you back on.

• 1:24:09Jordi Hays?

  Some, some deeper insight.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  But we'll let you get back to it.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Important work.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, John.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Uh, let's quickly tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning. Twenty-four seven, yeah, so good, there we go.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Top-tier cleaning, twenty-four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Yesterday I got a little spicy on the timeline. Said vacation, I said traveling is overrated. I wasn't talking about vacations.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  What are you running from?

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  I love staycations. I love getting to wander in my hometown in something I can drive to. Load up the entire family, load up the dogs, drive out to a wander. Hit, hit Joshua Tree, hit Malibu.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Marijuana and travel.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  There's no reason you need to go outside the country to enjoy a beautiful wander. Although if traveling is your ticket, go and go.

• 1:25:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the beauty of Wander.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  It is. Let's, let's check in with our intern Tyler Cosgrove.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, how we doing?

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  Well, I, I'm, I'm very close.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  But this has been kind of a disappointment. I'm extremely slow right now. I mean, I thought I would have been done thirty minutes ago.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Are your hands aching? Are your fingers breaking?

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  I'm sweating.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  Oh, sweating, okay. Well, you're. You're an hour and a half in.

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Running out of time, but if you're sweating a lot, you should try these Apple Dex apple flavored course electrolytes.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  I didn't tell.

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's get him a, let's get him a, let's get him a cup at least.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  Let's get him a cup, uh, get him some electrolytes, make sure he's hydrated. I didn't tell Tyler this, but I took a picture of the Lego kit and I asked chat GPT, how long will this take? It said between two and four hours. And then he was like, I can do in 30. And I was like, okay, good luck. Anyway, we have our next guest in the studio, Emily Sundberg, the writer of the fantastic Feed Me.

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  The daily newsletter about the spirit of enterprise.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  Isn't that incredible line? That feels like a line we would use.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  That's incredible. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Emily?

• 1:25:53Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:25:54Emily Sundberg?

  What's up everyone? I'm happy to be here. Everyone, all two of you.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes, all of us.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  We have our intern Tyler over there.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  We have our intern here working on a Lego set. You know, uh, Emily being a guest, I've gotten more random texts about it. People being like, oh, you should ask her this. Oh, you should ask her that. People, people have, uh, are paying attention.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Hot, hot commodity. Is that a Google shirt?

• 1:26:13Emily Sundberg?

  Exciting. That's scary.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, what, what is your shirt? Let, let, let me see. Did you stand up?

• 1:26:18Emily Sundberg?

  Oh, I was at, I was at Apple. I was at WWDC on, um, on Monday.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. You were, you were reporting on what the really old folks are thinking about Apple, right? Is that, is that what they said?

• 1:26:30Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  I saw the backlash.

• 1:26:31Emily Sundberg?

  The, uh, the people over at Puck said that, um, that Apple should have invited younger people to cover it.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:26:39Emily Sundberg?

  I'm thirty. I'm a little, little too old.

• 1:26:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Before we go to, is it true that Tim Cook begged for a selfie?

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, we saw that.

• 1:26:46Emily Sundberg?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. No, that was, that was really fun. That was cool. I didn't expect that to happen.

• 1:26:51Jordi Hays?

  What was your reaction? It feels like a lot of the liquid glass hate has blown over by now. People like most.

• 1:26:58Emily Sundberg?

  You know, yeah, I think like sitting there in real time, reading Twitter and seeing people's reactions, uh, it seems like people weren't excited and wanted more Apple intelligence updates. But that night I went to, have you guys ever been to WWDC?

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  No, no, never.

• 1:27:14Emily Sundberg?

  I went to one of those like ancillary, um, engineer and developer barbecues like an hour away. In an Airbnb with like thirty guys who who build apps and they were all really excited. So I think they're the people who it's for and they're the people who are going to ultimately be using these updates and they seemed thrilled about it.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was a developer conference and they actually announced a lot of exciting things around developers.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Yep, and it also seemed like they seeded some territory in the AI world that could potentially enable more AI apps to be owned by independent developers, which is a huge, huge boon for the ecosystem.

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Did you get to press Tim Cook on the Photos app at all? Are you a Photos app enjoyer?

• 1:27:53Emily Sundberg?

  I had about fourteen seconds with him and Will Walsh was before me, so it was like.

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Not a lot of time.

• 1:28:01Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Next year, next year.

• 1:28:02Emily Sundberg?

  Next year.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  Next year.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, I have a bunch of other random, random questions to go through.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  Please, Jordan, hit it.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  What, I want to ask about the state of Substack, but before we get into that, what is the state of the New York City election, this mayor? We've been kind of covering it, our corner of the internet is not super excited about the potential of a socialist mayor. What's actually happening on the ground?

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, our friends in LA.

• 1:28:32Emily Sundberg?

  What do you think about that Photoshop beard job?

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  That felt more just like, like a printing error, honestly, to me. It didn't seem like they did a ton of pre-processing.

• 1:28:41Emily Sundberg?

  Ink dripping down longer?

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  I didn't see it as longer. I saw it more as just like when you reduce the resolution so much, like, like the, the, the, the gaps between the hairs kind of blur altogether and it makes the beard look thicker. I wasn't, I wasn't fully like someone went in there and photoshopped.

• 1:28:58Emily Sundberg?

  I'm a little superstitious with the mayor stuff.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Okay, explain that.

• 1:29:01Emily Sundberg?

  Oh, I don't, I don't want to talk.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:29:04Emily Sundberg?

  I'm scared.

• 1:29:04John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:29:06Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to jinx it. Oh, yeah, yeah, your, your single endorsement could actually shift.

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  The election.

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  Decide it and then you would get.

• 1:29:14Emily Sundberg?

  I interviewed for them, I interviewed Cuomo, I interviewed Zoran, Lander and Stringer. Um, for the newsletter last week, it was really fun.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  Cool, well, we'll see how it evolves. I want to talk about Substack, how you're seeing it evolve. It feels like it just continues to have a moment. You're dominating the platform, at least that's what it looks like. We're not super active there, but what, what is the state of things?

• 1:29:41Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I've been on, I've been writing on Substack for, for five years now. So I definitely had a, I think I had a little bit of first mover advantage there. Like I, I know the platform so well. And I think even just understanding the tools and like what works well. The heat map of my own audience has been super helpful for me. And for anybody listening to this who doesn't know, like I write a newsletter every single day. So the opportunities for people to, to discover me are, are a lot higher.

• 1:30:11Emily Sundberg?

  But I think that's something that's interesting about Substack is that just because you have a large following somewhere else, doesn't mean it's necessarily going to carry over to a newsletter. Like the inbox seems like such precious real estate to people and who they, who subscribers allow into that feels a little bit more intentional. So it's not like you're gonna just follow a thousand people like you do on Instagram. So you have to be really fucking good to make it. And then you have to, sorry, can I curse on this?

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  We don't curse, but you're welcome.

• 1:30:40Emily Sundberg?

  I'm gonna not.

• 1:30:41Jordi Hays?

  If you, yeah.

• 1:30:42Emily Sundberg?

  You have to be really excellent at, at content and something that I do.

• 1:30:49Emily Sundberg?

  I have one of the more active chats on Substack, like across the whole platform. And I'm in conversation with my readers constantly, daily. And that's a lot of work as well. So the state of things on Substack, I would say it's getting pretty competitive. You're seeing a lot of people jump over there and maybe try to make it, but aren't necessarily making money yet. They also don't have an advertising integration like Beehive or even Twitter or YouTube do. So if you're gonna sell ads, you're, you're on your own for that, or you have to get an agency.

• 1:31:27Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah. What specifically do you want to know?

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I'm curious, I'm curious, like specifically, specifically like how much some of the new social features are driving growth? Is that like a primary driver at this point? Or, or would you, do you still think you'd be?

• 1:31:40Emily Sundberg?

  Audio and video?

• 1:31:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, like all of the new social features, you know, I just see like.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  It's seemingly a lot of people are growing based on like recommendations in, like basically like cross promotions or collabs. So.

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So for me, like.

• 1:31:52Emily Sundberg?

  So, yeah, I was on. I was in DC a few months ago and I met with somebody who who's invests in this space and he was asking me like, "Why don't you consider like doing your own thing off platform and and building away from them?" And there's a few, I used to think about that a lot more and I used to do that math a lot more and I showed him my analytics on my dashboard because you can see how many people are discovering you from um within the app and within their ecosystem. And he was like, "They have you." Like, "You can't leave. You're stuck there." And it's not a bad gig. Like, they take 10% of what I make, which I think is totally fair considering how

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  They probably drive more than 10% of growth, right?

• 1:32:33Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're probably driving consistently 10% growth and so that's totally, the math's out just fine.

• 1:32:39Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I, when I, when I think about Substack, I think of peak Substack for me was like pre 2020, like that, that era, when I think about when I was like reading multiple Substacks a day.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  And now Feed Me is the actually only newsletter that breaks into the important tab of my Gmail. And then, you know, there's a bunch of other Substacks that are just kind of lost in the mix. Have just been trying to get a, a read on it. But if you are going to be dependent on a social platform or any type of media platform, Substack is a great one.

• 1:33:13John Coogan?

  Friendlyst one. Take your newsletter, take your, take your Stripe account if you ever need to.

• 1:33:17Emily Sundberg?

  It's great. I mean, I own my subscriber list. I get to sell my own ads, which is going quite well. And when things break, they fix them, so.

• 1:33:26Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Um, talk about, uh, you had a fairly viral post, "The tech guy in a hoodie stereotype is dead."

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  You were at WWDC and seeing a bunch of different, uh, uh, different, uh, labels and brands being worn. Does that surprise you? Does it not surprise you? What was your reaction broadly? There's right

• 1:33:49Emily Sundberg?

  Men's Wear as a whole, well, Will Welch was there. So clearly there's something. Will Welch is the editor of GQ. There's something happening, you know, just with his spirit in the, in the air at the.

• 1:34:01Jordi Hays?

  People always think of iOS developers as being, you know, at the foremost of fashion. So you should always be there if you're running.

• 1:34:08Emily Sundberg?

  Well, yeah, I think I assumed more of them to look like the guys who work at the Apple Store at my mall on Long Island or something. Um, and it was impressive. I mean, like, guys looked good. I wouldn't say capital S suiting, but like fits. Um, there were a lot of cool sneakers. I think that a few years ago would have been more New Balance. I think that like the Steve worshippers are sort of aging out a little bit. Now there's these younger guys who probably are seeing that moment as like one of their big trips of the year and probably wanted to break out some fun outfits. Saw a lot of good sneakers, saw a lot of big watches, saw like a Nautilus on a guy.

• 1:34:49John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:34:49Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Was he, did he have an Apple Watch on the other wrist?

• 1:34:52Emily Sundberg?

  No.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  Or was that just fully committed?

• 1:34:54Emily Sundberg?

  A lot of Apple Watches also, but a lot of nice watches. Um, which like, I don't know, a lot of people don't wear nice watches in their cities anymore. So.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, you can't in New York because it will be taken from you very quickly.

• 1:35:07Emily Sundberg?

  Right. Exactly. But it's safe space on the Apple campus.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, at the, at the donut.

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Um, do you ever get tempted to angel invest? I'm sure you get asked constantly.

• 1:35:18Emily Sundberg?

  Do I get tempted to angel invest? I get asked, but that's not something that tempts me. No.

• 1:35:22Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. Why not?

• 1:35:25Emily Sundberg?

  My business is kind of my main focus right now.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  That's good. That's good.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  Are we, are we post-peak celeb brand?

• 1:35:35Emily Sundberg?

  Are we post-peak celeb brand?

• 1:35:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, are we on the down slope?

• 1:35:39Emily Sundberg?

  I think, I think, I think so. Yeah, I think so.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Jordi Hays?

  So brands.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  Like, what do you think the interaction between celebrities and

• 1:35:50Emily Sundberg?

  I think everybody knows the formula too well now, which is that the celebrity isn't actually going into the office every day. And like that illusion has broken, right? So you can wear the suit on the stage at the conference and do the Forbes thing. But people are sort of understanding that they're not the operators and they're just sort of like a paid person to have their name on a brand, right?

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:12Emily Sundberg?

  Um, and I think the other thing happens all the time where like the founder becomes a celebrity after they start the company.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:20Emily Sundberg?

  Um, which is more interesting to me than like a famous person hiring a bunch of people to do their work for them and, and getting paid for it.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think we move back to, so I, I, I think of the celeb corporation collaboration eras is like, you used to just pay a celebrity to appear in your Superbowl ad and it would be like a million dollars in cash. Then we got to the point all the way on the other side of the spectrum where celebrities were commanding thirty, forty, fifty percent equity grants in businesses that were built entirely around their brands. To your point, people are catching on that that means that, yeah, they have a huge economic stakes. They're going to be talking about it all the time, but they're not really driving the product forward in any meaningful way. We could go back to just pay for a celebrity appearance in an ad, or we could move forward into something like

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  what I've seen Saquon Barkley doing where he is essentially just angel investing in these companies. And yes, he'll appear in the ads, but he's not saying he's building the company. Yeah. He's very transparent about that. He will partner with them, but he's equity aligned, but just like any other investor. And so I'm wondering if there will be a boom in that, in that kind of paradigm or that model? Or if we'll just go back to, um, you know, companies and startups just being more comfortable writing a $400,000 check for a celebrity to appear in an ad. It's cash and you know what it is.

• 1:37:50Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't see the latter like being, becoming a big thing. I, I just feel like it's such a specific kind of company that has that's kind of marketing budget and it's also really risky to invest in celebrities and influencers now because people are so volatile. Um, I've definitely seen more of the angel investor in, in like hot girl Instagram bios, like

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:38:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a status symbol.

• 1:38:13Emily Sundberg?

  Angel investor.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:15Emily Sundberg?

  And I think it's like a flex, you know, it's like, I'm, I'm, I'm also a businesswoman. Um, so I think that's already happening. Like there's like a soft boom of that of, of people getting the opportunity to do that and basically only having one canned cocktail in their, in their house and not because they're necessarily getting paid, but because they quietly invested or not so quietly invested and they're able to sort of flex a portfolio of investing and that's like something they do besides whatever other things they do. Um, but there was that, um, Alex Earl Poppy deal last year where she was, she was drinking it a lot and I guess her dad, who sounds like a pretty savvy business guy,

• 1:38:57Emily Sundberg?

  uh, negotiated for her to get equity in the brand. So that's sort of like a prime example of that where she wasn't talking around, talking, going around saying that she was an angel investor, but I guess she was.

• 1:39:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and Poppy had, had a stacked cap table of various personalities, celebrities, athletes, et cetera.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Mostly private equity firms, growth equity firms, but yes.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  Um, where, uh, give us a temp check on wellness right now. Are we, did we, are we past peak wellness? In, in many ways, people are doing more wellness-y things, but at the same time, being unwell feels popular.

• 1:39:32Emily Sundberg?

  I did, um, I did like a, a chat with my readers the other day about alcohol consumption. And people are all over the map with that. There are people who are like, I'm thirty five. I haven't had a drink in ten years. I'm perfectly happy. Life is great. Um, and then there's definitely a decent cohort of, oh, somebody said, um, that people are, who have been sober for years are kind of like strategically or strategically drinking now, which was interesting to me.

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  We strategically drink.

• 1:40:03Emily Sundberg?

  I think the king of wellness right now is GLP-1s. Like that's sort of the most exciting thing happening.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Is that getting wrapped in different brands right now to appeal to different cohorts?

• 1:40:14Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I just think it's changing people's chemical composition and changing the way that they think and work out and eat and socialize. And that's very interesting to me with that, what happens.

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that brands, yeah, do you think that brands are already being, you know, the, the initial concern was that, you know, fast food brands were cooked because people just were going to eat less. But then there's a downstream effect if, if New York girlies are microdosing GLP-1s. And then maybe they're like, I'm not going to go to Pilates today because, you know, I'm already, you know, happy with what I look, you know, whatever. Uh, are you hearing any, about any kind of like downstream business impact?

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Winners and losers post GLP-1.

• 1:40:55Emily Sundberg?

  Um, I don't think the Pilates industrial complex is affected. They're sort of the new weed store to me. They're everywhere, the Pilates studios. It's like people are buying these sheet made in China reformer machines, setting them up and just like running crazy Pilates businesses. So I don't think that's going to be affected anytime soon. Um, because even if you get really thin, you still want to be shredded.

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Dredded, gotta be shredded.

• 1:41:21Emily Sundberg?

  But also with like fast food, I'm pretty sure people on GLP-1s are still eating it. They're just not eating a lot of it, like they're getting full fast and throwing it away.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  Who was the celebrity that said the other day that he was just eating, eating through it? He was just basically.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  Powering through it?

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  He was powering through it.

• 1:41:37Emily Sundberg?

  I think that would be me. I'm like convinced that my hunger would overpower it, but.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Um, what, what about other downstream effects from GLP-1s? I was talking to somebody who was like, they wanted to start a protein water company because they felt like with the GLP-1 boom, people would be eating less, they needed to supplement. Uh, aside from the brands that have just wrapped GLP-1 in different landing pages, are there other kind of winners from the GLP-1 boom that you've seen? Adjacent.

• 1:42:07Emily Sundberg?

  Somebody told me the other day that, um, like, uh, all these protein foods are not healing foods. And it, it changed the way that I think about people eating all this protein. Um, any other trickle down things?

• 1:42:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:22Emily Sundberg?

  I'm sure there will be some sort of like therapy blowback, like people needing more therapy, people, women being anxious.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  What's the state of Maha right now? Are people building new businesses around that? Or they're mostly just old line businesses that are beneficiaries of Maha?

• 1:42:38Emily Sundberg?

  You guys follow Ballerina Farm?

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:41Jordi Hays?

  I have.

• 1:42:41Emily Sundberg?

  She just opened a little store wherever she lives in the Midwest. Um.

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  She feels very Maha aligned.

• 1:42:48Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, they like raw milk. They like farm stuff. Uh, she's an interesting business person, though.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  Is any of that breaking through in New York? It feels like a lot of the, a lot of the actual products that are Maha aligned feel very New York aligned. And yet the politics of the products are, could not be more disparate.

• 1:43:08Emily Sundberg?

  You're right. It's so political. It's like, there was a store in New York that was selling raw milk out of one fridge. It was like one of these.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  And it probably wasn't a right wing store, right?

• 1:43:18Emily Sundberg?

  Hmm, I mean, I, I, how, I don't know, but.

• 1:43:21John Coogan?

  But like, but he didn't present as like, oh, yes.

• 1:43:23Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't an American flag.

• 1:43:24Emily Sundberg?

  Presented as like rich women who buy twenty dollar smoothies.

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:43:30Emily Sundberg?

  Fall all over the place on the spectrum, honestly. Um, but I don't think they sell it anymore because that's like bad for business if enough people call you out on it.

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:43:41Emily Sundberg?

  Even like, there's this guy at the farmer's market, this Amish guy who used to sell raw milk and he's not there anymore. And I don't know where he went.

• 1:43:50Jordi Hays?

  Big, Big Milk took him out.

• 1:43:51Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, someone did.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 1:43:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, where, where do you get, uh, what, what's the, the, the most significant part of your scoop machine? Is it, is it readers giving you tips? Is it walking around New York? Is it, is it a combination? One of your readers, uh, uh, asked me to ask you that.

• 1:44:09Emily Sundberg?

  Hmm. I'm sure people, of course, they want to know where that is. I have some really good readers.

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  That's the IP. That's the IP.

• 1:44:16Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I, I have some really good readers who are super loyal with sending me scoops. And they could send them to New York Magazine or the New York Times or, or Puck or Semaphore or whatever. And they send them to me and I'm super grateful for that. And, um, we have a good thing going. I also have an anonymous tip line, which is, oh, I think people get a little confused about what falls on.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  What qualifies?

• 1:44:40Emily Sundberg?

  What I write about.

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  Just hear PR pitches, insane gossip.

• 1:44:44Emily Sundberg?

  PR pitches aren't the bad, the bad stuff is like, um. A politician walking out of a 3pm screening of Baby Girl alone. Like, I don't, that's like, let them rock.

• 1:44:55Jordi Hays?

  That's not news.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's pretty funny, though.

• 1:44:58Emily Sundberg?

  And then I go out a lot. Like, I go out four, five times a week. I go to parties, I go to dinners, I meet people, I meet readers. Um, yeah, so it's like my life, I feel sort of like a machine right now, but it's working really well, so I can't, um, get too frustrated about it.

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  Keep oiling the machine, then. Well, congratulations on building a fantastic machine.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Last question, do, uh, do copycats bother you? I'm sure you've had hundreds of people by now be like, I'm gonna make Feed Me for XYZ, or Feed Me for that, or just like blatant, do they, do they get under your skin?

• 1:45:32Emily Sundberg?

  Uh, they used to, but data is a very calming force in my life right now, and especially in my business, and the numbers calm, calm me down.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Numbers don't lie.

• 1:45:43Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:45:43Jordi Hays?

  There we go, we're hitting the size gong.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on everything, and thanks for stopping by.

• 1:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on, you're always welcome.

• 1:45:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to have you back and talk more.

• 1:45:50Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Uh, up next, we have Leonard Heim, uh, calling in from the Rand Corporation. We're gonna talk about, uh, AI models. We're talking about sovereign AI.

• 1:46:00Jordi Hays?

  We got crazy, crazy range today.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Crazy range today. It's a, it's a whirlwind tour. Uh, wait, let's check on Tyler. How's he doing?

• 1:46:05Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, how you doing?

• 1:46:06Speaker 03

  I'm done.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  He's done. The fury has been assembled.

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  I think my final time was somewhere around hour fifteen, so double hour nineteen.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  Hour nineteen.

• 1:46:16Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I mean, pretty shameful performance.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  I think it looks good.

• 1:46:20Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, send, send the electrolytes my way.

• 1:46:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  I'll start channeling down.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  I think Dylan grabbed a cup and some water. If, uh, if you guys wanna grab it, let's get some electrolytes going up in here.

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  Very beautiful model.

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  It looks great, yeah. I love it. Very cool. I'm glad we have that in the studio now. Uh, well, enjoy your horse electrolytes. Uh, hope you have a rest, a good rest of the stream. Uh, we will hop on with our next guest now.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  We'll check back in with, for a, for a taste, uh, taste review.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but when we finish this next interview. Uh, anyway, welcome to the studio, Leonard. How are you doing today? Let's bring in Leonard and chat about artificial intelligence and geopolitics. How are you doing?

• 1:46:58Speaker 07

  Hey, good to see you. I'm doing great. How are you guys?

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Uh, we're great. Uh, would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and what you do day to day?

• 1:47:06Speaker 07

  Sure. Yeah, Leonard Time calling in from Washington DC. Um, I'm a, what do I call myself? Researcher, working on AI policy, governance, back on the electric engineering. I think part of my mission is to bridge the technical world and the policy world, and that's what I've been doing. Before, before AI was cool, the last four or five years, actually. Yeah. And now AI is cool. And since then, I've been ever busy.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  It is extremely cool. It's driving the news cycle every single day. Yeah, pretty much the coolest technology. Uh, do a little level setting for us. What is the dominant story? How is the race between the US and China shaping up? Uh, on the AI front, um, what are the interesting threads to pull on? What are the most important companies to be tracking right now?

• 1:47:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, that's a tough question. Where to start? I think it's like still the deep sea trauma. It's like still, still there, still dominant, right? I think that was like this initial story, the US is like so far ahead. There is no Chinese model being close. And then Deepsea came out and definitely had a big impact in DC, but I guess also in the broader world as we saw in the stock market. And I think it's pretty dominant here still in DC, you know, like in DC, you always talk about things which Silicon Valley did half a year ago, even a year ago.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Speaker 07

  So that's still part of the dominant discussion. And then export controls, I guess, is also a big topic right now, right? You've got the US-China trade talks going on right now, where they're negotiating beyond export controls, which impact AI, but export controls famously had an impact, big impact on AI in China.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's talk about DeepSeek. Uh, one of the narratives that came out of the DeepSeek story was, uh, all the American labs are completely cooked. Uh, and then we got Jevon's Paradox and Nvidia pop back up and, and, and all the labs seem to be making tons of money. OpenAI crossed $10 billion in revenue run rate, uh, and things do seem to be going well. But what, what are the wrong lessons from DeepSeek? What are people getting wrong about the DeepSeek story? How relevant is DeepSeek? We're still hearing about it as being important geopolitically in some of these jump ball nations that aren't quite allies, aren't quite

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  uh, rivals. Um, and they might be interested in building a, an open source stack on top of Huawei Ascend, uh, DeepSeek, Manus, that type of, uh, stack. Uh, what, what are the, the wrong lessons that people are learning from the DeepSeek story?

• 1:49:23Speaker 07

  I think DeepSeek made such a big noise because we're just lacking a good reference class. They just came out, pretty impressive model, it was openly available, and we had a paper attached to it, right?

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:32Speaker 07

  And then it came out also saying it cost us six million.

• 1:49:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:35Speaker 07

  Does any one of us know how much it costs OpenAI or like Anthropic or any of these other companies what to do? We don't, right?

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Speaker 07

  And I think this just really made headline news. We like sometimes get like Sam Altman going on stage saying, I think at some point he said it costed them a hundred million to do GPT-4.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:49Speaker 07

  But a hundred million, what? Just a training compute? Is it, is it just like buying the hardware? Probably not. Is it paying the staff engineers?

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  Definitely not.

• 1:49:57Speaker 07

  So like the reference class is like pretty important here.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:59Speaker 07

  Well, then it costed them a hundred million, what? Like this not two years ago, even more.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:03Speaker 07

  And now DeepSeek six million. So I think people just like, we're lacking, it's like, wow, this sounds impressive, but like they had just no reference class of what's actually going on within the companies.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:12Speaker 07

  And I think a couple of weeks later, Anthropic CEO Daria put out a blog post saying like, actually, we can train to the same efficiency. And I think this was like for people monitoring the market, not surprising. We just like know the trend lines. I mean, now it gets like vastly cheaper every single goddamn day to train such a system. So to that, it's somewhat surprising, but like you look at this, you don't have a reference class, and then it just looks really impressive, right?

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I think a lot of the, a lot of the more technical analysts in the AI world were excited to see the open source results, excited to hear about FP8 training, for example. I talked to Dylan Patel, he was telling us, oh, well, OpenAI was doing FP8 training years ago. They just didn't tell anyone because it was kind of like their edge, I guess, but all the labs had kind of figured that stuff out. They just hadn't told everyone exactly how they did. DeepSeek came out there and told everyone and it sounded like they really had jumped ahead. Instead, it seemed like they just jumped to the frontier, had not fully advanced beyond the frontier necessarily, but then done in an open source way. What was the read on the strategy to open source? It felt like

• 1:51:16John Coogan?

  there was a very deliberate, like that launch, if it had been closed source, twenty dollars a month, you know, very difficult to access, rate limited, lots of safety harness around it, that we would have been telling a very different story about DeepSeek if they had said, oh, this is, this cost a trillion dollars, it took us forever. Instead, it seemed like there were like a number of superlative and viral hooks that really captured the American news.

• 1:51:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:51:43John Coogan?

  Media and drove a big cycle. How much of that was intentional versus how much of that was just like a, like a random byproduct?

• 1:51:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think as you're saying, there were just like so many checkboxes that ticked.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:57Speaker 07

  It was during the first week of time.

• 1:51:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:59Speaker 07

  It was an open release model eight, right? It was surprisingly so cheap. It's coming out of China.

• 1:52:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:05Speaker 07

  Oh, and it was like the first public reasoning model.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:08Speaker 07

  Right? So it was like all of the things happening at the same time. So like, wherever you're coming from, DC excited because it's out of China. But we thought we fixed it, we did export controls, right?

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:17Speaker 07

  Silicon Valley, oh, it's an open source model, right? And everybody looking at like, actually, how does this reasoning work?

• 1:52:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:22Speaker 07

  Because openly I did it before, but it didn't tell us. Right? So again, just ticking all of these boxes. How much of this was deliberate? Um, I don't think this is like a state coordinated effort that they said like, this is how we're gonna do it. I think DeepSeek had like a pretty open commitment to like releasing models publicly before. Right? Um, so they would just been following that. Um, it just, it was just like to some degree, if there's a marketing strategy behind it, they did it right. I just expect most of the things are just like how the tech works, right? And they were early on a reasoning. They were like one of the first companies doing it publicly.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:54Speaker 07

  And then it just made a ton of noise.

• 1:52:56John Coogan?

  And even though ChatGPT had a reasoning model available, it was only available at a premium tier. And so for a lot of AI consumers, I think their first interaction with a reasoning model was DeepSeek or the DeepSeek app, uh, which was just a very interesting kind of, uh, like go to market strategy essentially.

• 1:53:16Speaker 07

  And also seeing the chain of thought, right?

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:19Speaker 07

  Like the reasoning, which we didn't see before, right?

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  And even the cost thing.

• 1:53:22Speaker 07

  This changed the time.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, even a cost thing, a lot of, a lot of financial, uh, folks. You, I mean, you mentioned that Silicon Valley was excited about open source. Uh, Washington was, you know, interested in the story because of the China angle, but also the financiers. The Nvidia investors were interested in the financial impact of this. Uh, so, yeah, it was.

• 1:53:39Speaker 07

  But I got it wrong, right?

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:53:41Speaker 07

  That's my take.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  Uh, how much of the existence of DeepSeek do you ascribe to China's positioning around high frequency trading?

• 1:53:52Speaker 07

  Oh, that's an interesting one. I mean, like DeepSeek sits in the hedge fund, right?

• 1:53:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:57Speaker 07

  And they were initially buying 10,000 A100s or 5,000 A100s in 2022, I think, before the expo controls.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:04Speaker 07

  And tons of GPUs always still go to hedge funds because they, well, we don't exactly know what they're doing, but they definitely like accelerated computing.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:54:11Speaker 07

  And partially machine, yeah, machine learning, a bunch of other stuff. Are they all training like language models? Probably not.

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  Nope.

• 1:54:15Speaker 07

  And I think then one theory I've heard, I'm not sure how true that is, that was like the, like the crackdown in China on the tech sector, right? Including high frequency trading, hedge funds and more. This made them pivot to AI. I was like, well, if we can't trade on the market anymore, what should we do with all of these GPUs or turns to AI as this new hardcore thing? Um, and then I think the other thing which is important here, when you have these hedge funds, they do like really low level optimizations, like writing your own kernels, they just, they don't do like just high level PyTorch, they go down there and try to get like every single point of utilization out of the models, uh, out of the hardware. And this helped them, right? We know like DeepSeek has pretty correct engineers. I think this was like pretty obvious. Once we saw like the code, um, and this then helped them to then train a pretty, pretty decent good model.

• 1:54:59John Coogan?

  Let's talk about Llama. The Llama 4 launch was a little rocky. Obviously there was allegations of some benchmark, just over optimization. It seems like a lot of the, the big frontier labs or the independent labs kind of just don't even care about benchmarks anymore. It's all about big model smell and, and just, uh, the actual performance of the products. Um, at the same time, I've been really interested in this narrative of Llama as a very important American export as a counter to the Huawei Ascend, DeepSeek Manus stack that other, uh, other countries might be comping. Because yes, they might be interested in doing a deal with Stargate and building some, and buying a whole bunch of Nvidia chips.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  But what are they going to put on top of it? Are they going to, maybe they don't want to go all the way with OpenAI or Anthropic. Llama seems like an interesting, uh, wedge there. How important is that? What, what is your reaction to the, the Meta Llama strategy and how they're being perceived in Washington right now?

• 1:55:58Speaker 07

  I would be curious on your guys' takes on this. I'm like still unsure how I feel about this. I mean, let's just start with DeepSeek. I think it's an interesting moment in time when all of the leading US models are just behind closed doors and the best open models coming out of China. I'm worried about it because this model is partially biased and it lies about the CCP. It has some Chinese propaganda in it, right? Or is this bad? Imagine you're like some developer in another country. You want to build a new education app. You're using this model and then, you know, you teach your kids Chinese propaganda. I think that's great, right? I think it's even worse if you think about sleeper agents. People know about this paper from Anthropic, right? You can basically have like sleeper agents sitting in this model. When you talk about a certain topic,

• 1:56:39Speaker 07

  it starts giving you code with vulnerabilities, but this can apply to anything else. And it's like really hard to look for it because you don't know what to look for. Right? So it is worrying. I don't think that's the case with DeepSeek right now, but going forward in the future, the case is just like if you use an open model, you don't really know what's in there, what's hiding in there, right? This goes for all companies, but I think we got more reason to mistrust certain other companies than for example Meta.

• 1:57:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it kind of makes me think that, uh, it kind of makes me think that Anthropic might have a real business on their hands with AI safety. Obviously, they branded it all around, you know, oh, like, you know, we want to prevent AGI doom and fast takeoffs. But if you just think about like, hey, we're going to launch this model in our organization and we want to make sure that the code that it writes doesn't have random vulnerabilities. That feels like a very important like AI safety product almost to evaluate these models, test them and essentially root out sleeper agents. And so I've all of a sudden flipped to like very excited about the work that Anthropic's doing on that front. Jordy, do you have any questions?

• 1:57:42Speaker 07

  I think this could be like a real benefit to them, right? And that's like, that's kind of how it started. Reinforcement learning from human feedback gave Chichi the rise. It was like some people trying to make the models more useful, but also less harmful. And turns out the turnout to be a bunch more useful. And I guess like we will see more about this going forward, particularly for code or even if government wants to adopt these models, right? You just better be goddamn sure.

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  My question was around news from the last 24 hours, basically. And specifically, people talk about the application of AI in warfare, but it's always at the sort of like very generalized high level of like, oh, using AI and I can easily imagine, you know.

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Simulation scenarios, data collection, processing, all that stuff, like kind of going up to the point of a conflict and then autonomous drones and things like that. But what are the ways in which you've understood AI to be used in an actual like conflict scenario?

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:42Speaker 07

  I mean, I mean, look, I don't do narrow AI or drones. To some extent, I expect us like a bunch of just like computer vision applications and more. But if you look at like frontier, like if you look at large language models, I think one big application is just intelligence, right? Literally, my job on a day to day basis is like own source intelligence. I want to know what's going on around the world. Nobody's telling me, well, except DeepSeek that sometimes publishes a paper, but like, I don't know what the US companies are doing. I don't know what's going on in China and the semiconductor industry. So just a bunch of data I feed into my LLMs and ask them what's going on, right? And for intelligence operations, it's the same. We saw in the last 24 hours, pretty targeted attacks. Israel is famously now for pretty good intelligence operations. And I think they exactly knew who they were hitting based on these types of operations, right?

• 1:59:25Speaker 07

  And if you just have like a nice backdoor on a smartphone and you just like feed all of the chat transcript in an LLM, can make sense out of this, right? And you can do it at a larger, way bigger scale to identify the targets, also identify patterns, which again, might be harder for humans to do, but at least you can like augment humans.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they used to do that with like keyword search. Okay, like let's, we have a ton of data. Who's talking about bombs? Who's talking about attacks? And people would use code words and LLMs are really good at deciphering that type of stuff. Fascinating. Give us a state of the union on export controls for AI chips. What is, what's expected on the horizon? How has the landscape changed over the last, you know, couple of months at least?

• 2:00:10Speaker 07

  Right. I mean, when Biden left the office, there was like two, two big rules coming out. The one rule was, I think many people are tracking the found duty diligence rule. It was a big hiccup where Huawei produced a bunch of chips over TSMC in Taiwan, which we're not supposed to. They did it via shell company. Three million chips, that's quite a lot. That's way more than they produce. That's what they cut their hands on. And government reacted with a new rule, basically telling TSMC like, goddamn, you gotta be, do better to diligence and like check who your customers and make sure they don't end up with Huawei. Because they broke two rules. No chips for Huawei at all. And please, no big AI chips for any entity in China, right? So this was a big move. That's still the case. I applaud that. I think this was a pretty sensible move.

• 2:00:54Speaker 07

  Um. To just make sure they can't again get their access to that many chips. And the other one was the diffusion framework, which I guess you probably discussed at some point before, right?

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:03Speaker 07

  Like broader controls to some of all of the world deciding to some degree dealing with the Gulf states, dealing with a bunch of in-between countries. Um. Where people were worried about chip smuggling, but also data centers being built there. Malaysia is being such a country where a bunch of data centers being built there. Really interesting reporting today where I think the Wall Street Journal reported people were like going back and forth on an airplane with hard drives to train models over Malaysia.

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  I saw that. We were gonna read that.

• 2:01:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. Wow. Which again speaks to the efforts they're going to to get access to AI chips and how creative they get. And also from my point of view, I'm just getting surprised every single time of um how creative they get to get access to AI chips. Anyway, that's what they did.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:44Speaker 07

  But this one is not being enforced right now. It's not officially revoked yet. We're still waiting for it officially to be gone. But at least Commerce, Latnick and Kessler put out a statement saying they're not enforcing a double comma replacement rule. And this replacement rule then needs to deal with, well, yeah, basically all the countries except the clearly competitors, China, Russia, North Korea, they're all controlled, they will continue being controlled. But what about all the other countries like the Gulf states, like countries with a bunch of smuggling going on? And yeah, me as somebody from outside the government is waiting to see um more moves there.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh. I have one last question. Good, Jordy.

• 2:02:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Um. Uh. Today, a bunch of technologists joined the Army Reserve and the newly formed Detachment 201 Executive Innovation Corp. Can you tell me a little bit about how you're seeing technologists and the tech community plug in in DC? Um. What is needed there? What do you want to see on the horizon? This seems like a step in the right direction, but it feels like a job's not finished moment.

• 2:02:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that's the right audience, like a call to all the techies to come to DC.

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:48Speaker 07

  Um, the pay is not better here. It's also pretty damn hard. We're living on a swamp here. But I think there's a strong case for impact.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:02:55Speaker 07

  So as a techie, I think like when I talk to like young undergrads, like, oh, in DC, like, I just did like a bachelor's in machine learning. What do I know? It's like, it's plausible. You're the smartest person in the room and many times in DC, which is way harder than in San Francisco. People don't know policy, but sometimes can be a benefit to be like a bit ignorant about like how the game is being played. Just like, look, here's just the math.

• 2:03:17Jordi Hays?

  It's just fresh eyes.

• 2:03:19Speaker 07

  Right? Yeah. So like, I love techies coming to government, just like crunching numbers. I think they should sometimes be less opinionated, just like, look, here are the numbers, we crunch them, could suggest this, could suggest that, but just like grounding it like in analysis and like an objective things. When I think about China and AI chips, I can crunch the numbers and how fast the chips are, how many they're producing. And in contrast, how fast American chips are and how many we're producing, right? And this is just a good analysis to be run. How this then impacts the broader scheme of the AI ecosystem and who's winning the AI race and what? It's a different question, but we can then take it from there, right? So if I see stuff like this, be it in, again, in the military, but also just generally in government, particularly anything around export controls,

• 2:04:02Speaker 07

  anything around just understanding of what the hell is going on, just like having somebody explain like, hey, DeepSeek is a reasoning model.

• 2:04:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Speaker 07

  What is, everybody talked about distillation, like, really just explaining the basics is like, yeah, things people should do. And I think people with a CS, like an undergrad degree in computer science, they can do it. And I would love to have them there. Um, I'm hiring, by the way. So if anybody's listening, please join me, apply.

• 2:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Yeah. In general, I think it's good that we don't just have, you know, these sort of high-profile technologists only joining Doge. Like, there's other things that are important in the government besides just, you know, taking a sledgehammer or scalpel to different, different parts of the government. So.

• 2:04:41Speaker 07

  I also discovered getting stuff wrong. I think the most famous example is. The initial export controls 2022 were trying to control AI chips.

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:48Speaker 07

  And they used two parameters, technical parameters, which probably 99% of DC won't understand.

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:53Speaker 07

  Total processing performance, how many flops it got.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:56Speaker 07

  And then also the interconnect band before faster can talk to our chips.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Speaker 07

  And they messed something up there. Then Nvidia could basically design a new chip sitting right at the threshold, but still having high flops.

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:05Speaker 07

  Which is basically as good as the other chips. And that's what DeepSeek used. And then it took them a damn year to fix it.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:10Speaker 07

  And I can confidently say that a new month later, they should do better there. And that's just the thing where like techies and you didn't need to be the smartest person. I've never trained a really big model. You can just tell by the specs, like guys, something, something is off here. And

• 2:05:22John Coogan?

  Or even just asking, even just asking, like, you know, one of the foundation model labs, like OpenAI, I'm sure they could tell you like, hey, like, do not restrict these three parameters. And, and it just seems like there was not enough back and forth there.

• 2:05:35Speaker 07

  Nvidia doesn't answer these questions, but I think maybe.

• 2:05:37John Coogan?

  Nvidia wouldn't, but I mean, you could imagine that plenty of the labs that will compete with Chinese labs would love to answer that question.

• 2:05:44Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  Because they have a huge incentive not to be outcompeted by DeepSeek, right?

• 2:05:48Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 2:05:48John Coogan?

  Um, and so you gotta, but maybe they'd be talking their own book too much. Yeah, there's always dynamics, but at least having a technologist in the room would be beneficial. Anyway, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for hopping on. We'd love to have you back. We'll do more news. We will talk to you soon.

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  Enjoy the rest of your Friday.

• 2:06:01John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend.

• 2:06:02Speaker 07

  Cheers.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  You too, guys. Talk to you soon. If, closing out the news for the week.

• 2:06:06Speaker 03

  We have, let's take it over to Tyler.

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  Let's take it over to Tyler.

• 2:06:09Speaker 03

  How are the horse electrolytes?

• 2:06:13Speaker 03

  Scoop, I think. Uh, so it says a scoop. One scoop is for light exercise.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  So for, I think probably a medium sized horse, I assume.

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:22Speaker 03

  So, uh, it's, I'm looking at the ingredients. It's, there's an incredible amount. It's like all salt.

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  It's all salt.

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  Of course, of course.

• 2:06:29John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, yeah, you have to at least chat GPT that you're not like taking a deadly dose of salt right now.

• 2:06:35Speaker 03

  I think it's probably fine.

• 2:06:38John Coogan?

  Probably fine. We'll go with probably fine. That's the horse mentality.

• 2:06:41Speaker 03

  It smells? It smells good.

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  Does it have like a lemon lime taste to it? Is it apple?

• 2:06:46Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:06:47John Coogan?

  Strong.

• 2:06:48Speaker 03

  It's like I'm drinking salt water.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. I think you might have to water.

• 2:06:51Speaker 03

  Lemon.

• 2:06:52John Coogan?

  There's lemon in there.

• 2:06:52Speaker 03

  There's some, there's definitely some flavor. I mean, it says apple flavor. I'm not really getting any apple notes.

• 2:06:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Okay, well, congratulations. You did it in under an hour and a half.

• 2:07:03Jordi Hays?

  You did it. Well, you have a whole summer to finish the whole bucket.

• 2:07:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What was the final time? An hour and 15 minutes?

• 2:07:08Speaker 03

  I think hour 19.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  Hour 19. That's still way faster than ChatGPT clocked it. I, I took a picture of that, of that androlego set build time. I said, how long do you think it will take to put together this pretty simple 619 piece Lego set? Said a beginner would take three to four hours, an intermediate builder, two to three hours, and an experienced Lego fan, 1.5 to two hours. You did it better than they did. So I think you were only wrong in your own, you overestimated yourself.

• 2:07:38Jordi Hays?

  But you should always do.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  The average Lego builder. So congrats for that.

• 2:07:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  And enjoy the horse electrolytes.

• 2:07:43Speaker 03

  I'm sweating a lot. I think this will help me, you know, bring me back to.

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You're, you're sweating out the electrolytes. You need to refresh. This makes a lot of sense. This is great.

• 2:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Everybody in tech is always talking about going to the horse doctor, but never talking about, uh, getting horse electrolytes over the counter.

• 2:08:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. The horse electrolytes are key.

• 2:08:02Jordi Hays?

  That's what you want to be taking.

• 2:08:04John Coogan?

  Uh, well, the scale, the scale deal has officially closed. Meta is paying 14.3 billion to buy 49% of scale, the industry's leading data dealer. Alex Wang wrote, wrote a note to scale employees. He said, when I founded scale in 2016, it was amidst some of the early AI breakthroughs. DeepMind had just released AlphaGo and Google had just released TensorFlow. It was, it was still incredibly early. It was clear even then that data was the lifeblood of AI systems, and that was the inspiration behind starting scale. Since then, the journey has been extraordinary. We've grown to over 1500 people, become a trusted partner for model builders, enterprises and governments, building and deploying the smartest AI tools and applications. Scale is now one of the most impactful companies in the world.

• 2:08:47John Coogan?

  He closes by saying, today's investment also allows us to give back in recognition of your hard work and dedication to scale over the past several years. The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders, invested equity holders, while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in our future growth as ongoing equity holders. The exceptional team here has been key to our success, so I'm thrilled to be able to return the favor with this meaningful liquidity distribution. So congratulations to everyone.

• 2:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up. Hit the gong for liquidity events, John. Lee Marie, Eric Torenberg.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Lots of winners, lots of winners, lots of friends of the show. Ben Thompson broke it down in a piece talking about Meta and Scale AI. The most obvious explanation for the structure is that Meta wants to avoid the sort of antitrust scrutiny that would attend to an acquisition. This explanation applies broadly. Big tech generally and Meta specifically are under massive scrutiny in terms of acquisitions, including Meta going to trial for acquisitions made over a decade ago. And narrowly, Scale AI is a supplier for not just Meta, but also Meta's competitors. The problem is that it's, is that just Meta isn't acquiring Scale AI doesn't mean the deal can't be scrutinized. Indeed, Section 7 of the Clayton Act is explicit about covering only partial acquisitions.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  So the FTC can still review this, but it'll probably be a little bit easier, and so that's what they're gunning for. These guidelines were reaffirmed by the Trump administration earlier this year, so a lot of people were expecting it to be complete game on, anyone can acquire anything. That hasn't been the case. We heard about this on the campaign trail. A lot of folks in the Trump administration were signaling that Lena Kahn made some good points, and they were not going to completely reverse course, even if they were going to replace her. Even beyond that, says Ben Thompson, however, and perhaps this makes the regulators' point, it seems likely that this will kill Scale AI's business with the big labs in particular, who would be concerned about their data ending up in the hands of Meta, which is to say that this is a deal that would destroy the enterprise value that Meta is theoretically

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  investing in, and so that will be something that will be debated in these merger. Guidelines when the FTC ultimately reviews it, but it's looking pretty good because they closed pretty quickly. As it is, many of the labs, particularly OpenAI, have been bringing in more of their data work in-house, which helped contribute to Scale AI missing revenue targets last year from the information they reported this. I mean, they still put up amazing numbers. And so, obviously, a lot of stuff was working, but you could imagine that some of the labs were starting to bring these, if they really are believers in, hey, we got to own our data collection and data processing forever, let's build that function in-house. And I think they started to do that, or at least partner with other competitors in the space. And so, Ben Thompson

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  continues to write about Meta's reset. In fact, the more pertinent angle to discuss this deal is probably Llama. Llama 4 was widely viewed as a disappointing model, and a big portion of the original Llama team has since left Meta. And Ben Thompson thought that Mark Zuckerberg's media tour about AI seemed a bit forced and unfocused, and had heard through the grapevine that Zuckerberg was considering a wholesale reset of the company's AI efforts, with the biggest priority being the search for a new AI chief to take firmer control over the company effort. In that, that in the end may be the Occam's razor explanation for the deal. This is a very expensive aqua hire, Alexander Wang, Scale AI's co-founder and CEO, with the price softened a bit by virtue of paying Scale AI for work that Meta was going to have the company do anyway.

• 2:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:12:17John Coogan?

  Wang isn't a researcher, but he's an executive and leader who is familiar with the space, and Meta needs leadership in addition to talent.

• 2:12:24Jordi Hays?

  He's a deals guy.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  He's a deal guy.

• 2:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Going to Meta and continue to be deal-making, which will be, I think, a great asset to Meta.

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  Yep. And so, Ben Thompson closes with a little bit on sustaining versus disruptive innovation. The other reason to believe Meta versus Google comes down to the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovations. The late Professor Clayton Christensen described the difference, and we're familiar with that. So, the question of whether generative AI is sustaining or disruptive innovation for Google remains uncertain, two years after Ben Thompson raised the question. Obviously, Google has tremendous AI capabilities, both in terms of infrastructure and research, and generative AI is a sustaining innovation for its display advertising business and its cloud business. At the same time, the long-term questions around search monetization remain as pertinent as ever. And this is the question I want to debate with Ben when he comes on the show.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  There is this, there's this idea. So it came out earlier that Sundar Pichai had not read The Innovator's Dilemma, and people were saying, oh, like, he should have, because this is the, this is the classic example of Google being disrupted by a new technology, generative AI. Ben Thompson said, it doesn't matter. The whole point of disruptive innovation is that it's structural, and therefore, it doesn't matter if you've read the book, there's nothing you can do about it. That's kind of the point of disruptive innovation, you're being disrupted. But my question is, what if Google had chatbots before ChatGPT? What if they had launched the Gemini app first, and been the first to market, and gained all of that, like, memetic attention?

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  Well, the disruptive innovation framework would say that Google would be in a tough spot, because they wouldn't be able to monetize Gemini as quickly as they were losing volume in search. And so, search revenues would decline faster than they could make it back up on the new model. And so, what we're seeing right now is ChatGPT is growing, they're 10 billion in revenue. But I don't think we're seeing a falloff in search, it seems additive. And so, the weirdest thing is that, is that if you ran back the simulation, and you did put Google in a position, like, let's just say Google owned 100% of ChatGPT. Like, the, the combined enterprise value would not be, the stock would not be in the trash as they disrupted themselves. And so, there's this interesting question of like,

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  there's this fear that your earnings will drop as you pivot away from search-based display advertising, search advertising, to a subscription chatbot model. But I don't know if that's actually playing out, because the overall market, the combined revenues of Google and OpenAI seem to be not declining. Like, we're not in this nadir, we're not in this, in this trough of, like, disruption necessarily.

• 2:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Meta and Facebook had the luxury of, you know, acquiring Instagram, starting to monetize Instagram, still being able to grow Facebook at that time.

• 2:15:10John Coogan?

  I mean, maybe there's a little bit in deceleration. I remember when when when Meta was was like in the process of somewhat being disrupted by TikTok. They launched Reels and there was questions about Reels monetization because if people spend more time on Reels than than the normal Instagram feed. And there aren't as many ads in Reels as there are in the feed. Well, then, even though the user time might be going up, your revenue might be going down. And so that was a fear. That was something that was weighing on the stock. Ultimately, it was not borne out. But I don't, I I'm just not seeing the data, but I want to dig into it more. I want to talk to Ben about it because there's clearly, I I I think I'm wrong, but for different, for reasons I'm unaware of. And so I'm I've been digging into that. So Ben goes on to write, Meta, however, does not have a search business to potentially disrupt.

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  And a whole host of ways to leverage generative AI across this business. This is what I was talking about with Joe Weisenthal, talking about. Even if Meta doesn't get like a banger AI first consumer product out into the market. They just have so many AI, generative AI workloads, whether that's sorting ads, generating ads, internal profanity filtering. You know, all all their different content moderation.

• 2:16:18Jordi Hays?

  I think also, I think it's easy to see how Meta will benefit from more more in in 10 years from now, more content will be produced, which means better. The more good content will be produced, even if it looks like AI slop right now. And when you think about the business holistically and Meta as effectively, you know, an entertainment company. Will people can want more and more entertainment?

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is what Ben Thompson was writing about. He said, Meta's strategy is to commoditize your complements. You you you a generative AI is a complement to Meta's platforms. And so, yes, if people are using generative AI to generate slop, that's still fine as long as people are enjoying it. But ultimately, people will use it as a different tool for video editing and sound generation and drop out the background noise and replace my background with a with a cinematic. You know, Vista or something like that. So.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  So for Zuckerberg and company, Ben Thompson thinks AI is absolutely a sustaining technology, which is why it ultimately makes sense to spend whatever is necessary to get the company moving in the right direction. It's also worth noting that Meta doesn't really have any alternatives other than continuing to invest. Google is a competitor for advertising, the most financially compelling use case today. OpenAI is a competitor for consumer attention. Meta's most important scarce resource. I suppose Anthropic would be a potential partner, but per the point above, that seems like the ultimate culture clash. If anything, the most compatible partners for Meta would be Microsoft and Apple, but the former is obviously tied up with OpenAI. And the latter, well, never say never forever, but definitely never for now. Great ending to Ben Thompson's update.

• 2:17:59Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Well, we have a video that we can pull up that was, that hit the timeline earlier this morning.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  Please, let's review it.

• 2:18:07Jordi Hays?

  I was able to confront PT.

• 2:18:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:18:12Jordi Hays?

  And I think we should play it.

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  You saw him on the street, let's play it.

• 2:18:14Jordi Hays?

  Saw him on the street.

• 2:18:15Speaker 08

  Mr. Teal, is it true that competition is for losers? Sir, is it true that you encourage young people to drop out of university?

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  The background is really close.

• 2:18:26Speaker 08

  Mr. Teal, is it true that your funds have double-digit GP commits? Sir, how can you say you're contrarian when everyone is contrarian? Mr. Teal, is it possible for there to be too much venture capital?

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  Never.

• 2:18:42Speaker 08

  Mr. Teal, have you been a victim of other VCs gaming the Midas list?

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:18:48Speaker 08

  Sir, why do you refuse to pick a favorite Renez Girard book? Mr. Teal, what do you have to say to people that think they're a lottery ticket? Mr. Teal, must all venture returns be power law distributed? Sir, why do you think why questions are over determined?

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, man, well, really asking the pressing important questions, the questions that, you know, he clearly doesn't want to answer.

• 2:19:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:19Jordi Hays?

  But I'm sure over time, you know, we'll have him on the show and we'll try to, we'll try to pull some of those answers out.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  Lots of fun. I mean, the last story we should cover before we drop off, Chinese AI companies dodge US chip curbs by flying suitcases of hard drives abroad. Leonard on the show mentioned this. Engineers are carrying data to countries where Nvidia chips are available, frustrating Washington's aims. No one really anticipated this, but apparently Chinese engineers are transporting hard drives with AI training data to Malaysia. So they, they, they, they take all their training data, they load it onto a bunch of hard drives, throw those in suitcases, fly to Malaysia, and then do the training run there and then take the weights back. And so that's like, the chips aren't even moving. Like, the whole idea of, of exporting chips is, is now irrelevant if you can do the run locally in a different country. So

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  this, this AI diffusion story is going to become so much more complex. Like, it's just going to be so complicated forever because there's going to be shell companies and if people are willing to do this, anything's on the table. The next deep sea run is going to be, it's going to be a movie. It's going to be a movie. Anyway, we will be following it here. We hope you have a fantastic weekend and we will see you on Monday.

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait, John.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  Cannot wait for Monday.

• 2:20:33Jordi Hays?

  Be back at this table.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  Two more sleeps.

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Two more sleeps.

• 2:20:37John Coogan?

  Two more sleeves. Or is it three? We're not going live on Sunday.

• 2:20:42Jordi Hays?

  We might, we might.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  We might. If there's, if there's an emergency, we might go live. You never know. But until then.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in, folks.

• 2:20:49John Coogan?

  The rest of your weekend.

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Have a great rest of your Friday and we'll see you Monday.

• 2:20:53John Coogan?

  We'll see you Monday.